Thing 16: E-Books

Love e-books! At my previous job, e-books made up the bulk of the collection. New material could be made accessible quicker than having to handle a hard copy. Searching was easier, multiple users, all that good stuff. I think it has a place in any good vibrant collection.

That being said--I am not a fan of APA books. It's a very busy search screen and somethings that should be there are not. Does anyone see how you limit your search to full text? Some may call that feature "lazy" but I prefer "efficient". And the "Narrow Result" column? Wow! To me, this database seems overdesigned. I suppose I will get used to it but right now it's a chore.

E-books are growing in popularity especially as the catalog lists and links to these books. It's nice that they are not sequestered off some place.

I do not own a dedicated e-book reader and I do not wish to. The footprint of a Kindle is too large. I just have no interest in such a device. Every time I see that ad showing two people relaxing on a beach with their readers, I think "You better not drop those suckers in the sand or the water!"

Thing 15: Creative Commons

Is this 10 years too late? Wasn't this the entire idea behind the web? I love the idea that there is an easy way for people to identify things they can use in projects or in artwork. But that's assuming the symbols are understandable. After staring at them and viewing all the you tube videos, I'm not sure I could identify or define the symbol. Would I put my stuff up on Creative Commons like photos? Probably not.

Thing Eight Screencasting

Because of security settings, I can not download Jing or Screencast-o-matic. I plan to do a casting at home. Not sure about my topic but maybe I'll do one on using Ask a Librarian. Or maybe on setting up a NetLibrary account. On the positive side, I love bitly! I use it quite often now. Next step is to get used to using Google Docs!

Update: I did get Jing and practiced a bit with it. Quite easy to use! I've not recorded any audio yet mostly because I don't have a script. My first "official" video will be using the e-journal finder.

Week 13--Online Surveys

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PDTQ2NP

I wonder if this will work. My previous job used Survey Monkey all the time to collect statistics. It seemed pretty easy to open and close the survey and collect the statistics.


Click here to take survey

Will this work? I had trouble following the instructions on posting a Google Doc to the blog.

Week 11--shortening a url

I see this working when you need to push pages to a person via e-mail. If the url is too long, it may not get copied correctly. Is it one step too many? There are some things I find myself willing to do but others that seem like too much bother.

Week 12: Document sharing

Although it wasn't necessary to post a blog on cloud computing, I have some thoughts...I love it. It's a great tool to allow small businesses flexibility, even allowing individuals who travel access to information without lugging around files, computers-heck even flash drives can get lost! I use delicious to keep track of all my "favorite" websites so no matter where I go and what computer I use, I will have all my links.

Docuemnt sharing--I love Dropbox and the Google docs as well.

Here's what I envision--librarians as Johnny Appleseeds, but instead of planting fruit trees, we plant information literacy skills. Imagine if ALA sponsered a kind of "peace corp" project where librarians traveled around the US to offer help and teach info literacy classes. It may not require a great deal of travel, perhaps just to another part of a state or into a different neighborhood. All a librarian would need is a room, a computer, internet access and a projector. A bit push effort to show the world how important we really are.

Week 11 Tweeting

I did create a twitter account and I don't really post to it. There may be a mental block with this because I really do not like Tweety Bird and the twitter jargon reminds me of him. Still!! I will swallow my animated character discrimination and wallow forth and when I mean wallow...WOW! Finding something on Twitter to follow ain't easy. I went outside of twitter to find something. When I went back in and tried to find what I wanted--error message. A few more tries and I was successful. Now I need to figure out how to read all these posts.