Tagging

So here we are, at the final L2 lesson. I'm surprised to feel that I learned more than I thought I would--as a fairly tech-savvy 20-something, I was pretty well acquainted with most of these technologies already, but I had never thought to apply most of them to libraries. By thinking about how Web 2.0 is also Library 2.0, I think I was able to better understand some of the technologies that I already knew about, and learn some new things on the way.

But, on to tagging and del.icio.us. I can definitely see how del.icio.us would be useful to me on a personal level. I use four computers regularly, including my laptop, my husband's laptop, our desktop, and my work computer, so sometimes, finding a website that I know that I looked at on one of those four computers can be difficult. It would be a lot easier to simply have a del.icio.us account. Of course, this would mean that I would have to actually remember to save a link, but that's another issue entirely. I suspect that I would only be slightly more organized with a del.icio.us account than I am without one. But the possibility would be there! (Considering that I am a shelver in a library, a job that requires A LOT of attention to detail and one that I am pretty good at, I am surprisingly disorganized in my personal life.)

Tagging is, in itself, interesting. I hadn't thought to use it as a reference tool. It seems that some of the uses that libraries have found for tagging are almost like an alternative to a wiki, in that librarians can tag websites that are of use to patrons, rather than having a wiki full of links.

I think that all of these lessons would be useful to BPL in our move to become more L2. I am very interested to see how things will change in the future, and which of these L2 technologies we will use!

Library Thing

I've just set up my account at Library Thing. I had a pretty difficult time trying to remember all of my favorite books and the books that I've read recently to add to my catalog. As Paul Constant of the Elliott Bay Book Company (a Seattle bookstore) says in one of my favorite quotes ever, "Does anyone over the age of 16 even have a favorite book? Claiming a favorite is only indicative of the fact that you haven't read enough: Out of the thousands of books that I've read, with the enormous palette of ideas and emotions they've represented, how could I choose only, say, five? Why not ask for a favorite orgasm, or laugh, or grain of sand?"

That being said, here is a sampling of some of my favorite books:

Downloadable Audio

I have seen Overdrive advertised around the library, but I have never really explored it. It's pretty exciting that there is a program that allows patrons to "check out" audio books, but then the files expire so that there are no issues with copyright infringement. Unfortunately, I find it highly unlikely that I will ever use Overdrive since all my home computers are Macs and I have an iPod, not one of the supported devices. Such is my life as a Mac user. But I am glad to know that the program exists, and I do hope that I will be able to use it in the future if Apple and Microsoft come to an agreement, because I am certainly not planning on switching away from Apple anytime soon.

Google docs

Google docs is great! I can definitely see how this would be useful to someone working with a group of other people on a project. It would also be useful to use if you need to work on a project away from your computer, or if you want to work on the same document both at work and at home. When I was in college, I would often begin a paper at the library computer lab and then work on it again at home and then maybe finish it the next day at a different computer in the lab. In order to do this, I had to keep on e-mailing the draft to myself. And if I forgot to e-mail it to myself when I was done working on it, I would lose all the work that I had done during that sitting. It got complicated because I would have multiple drafts floating around in my inbox, and I had to make sure that the draft I was working on was the current draft, and that the draft that I printed out to turn in was the final draft. If I had only known about Google docs at the time, things would have been so much simpler!

Web Video

As a shelver, I just had to embed the video of the 2007 ALA Book Cart Drill Team Championships:



I like YouTube. I have never posted a video on the site, but many of my friends have, and I often use the site to check out their stop-action animations and other goofy movies. One friend of mine spent a year living in Nicaragua teaching a pre-school class, and although she often sent us pictures of the kids, it wasn't until she posted a video of the kids on YouTube that the rest of us were really able to understand the personalities of these kids and why she loved them so much. And although that's certainly one cool thing about YouTube, I also like how there are now some professional videos on the site too, like the presidential candidates who post campaign materials.

I'm not really sure how web videos could be useful in libraries--maybe we could film instructional videos about how to use certain features of the website, building, etc. I'm sure that there are other uses for web videos in libraries, it'll just take some time to think about them all!

Podcasts

I subscribe to a number of podcasts. In fact, I rarely have time to listen to all of the podcasts that I subscribe to. I particularly like podcasts that are a lecture series--since I only graduated from college a few years ago, I find that I still miss learning through lectures and not just reading. So, through iTunes, I found a podcast of lectures in medieval history from Oxford University. I also like podcasts in French. I am fluent in French but don't really know anyone else who is, so although I often read French books, I enjoy being able to at least listen to other French speakers through a podcast, even if I can't converse with them.


It was interesting to find other places to search for podcasts--I was really only familiar with iTunes, and it was great to find out that there are many more podcasts out there that I never knew about. I found a podcast called the Booklounge, which I added to my bloglines account. It is a Canadian podcast that interviews authors and reviews books (often Canadian, sometimes not). I had heard of the Booklounge before from friends of mine who work in publishing, but it had never occurred to me to subscribe to the podcast until I was browsing through one of the podcast search tools and stumbled across it accidentally. And now I have even more podcasts that I'll have to find time to listen to.

RSS

I was actually not familiar with RSS before starting these L2 lessons. I had seen the little orange icon on several of the webpages that I frequently use, but I never knew what it meant. So this meant that every morning, part of my routine was to check my e-mail, navigate to a different website to check the news, navigate to a different website to check the weather, and then navigate to several other websites to check various blogs. (I have several friends who are doing very interesting things all across the world. Many of them don't have regular access to the internet or phones or even a reliable postal service, so the only way that I can keep track of what they're doing is through their blogs. This also means that they don't update their blogs regularly, so even though I check them every day so that I don't miss anything, more often than not, nothing has been posted.) Now that I have my bloglines account set up, it'll take much less time to do all this. I'm not sure yet what I'll do with the extra time--maybe actually read the entire news articles instead of just the headlines.

As thrilled as I am with streamlining my morning routine, I'm not really sure yet how RSS fits in with L2. Oberlin College Library, the library that I worked for while I was in college, has a blog, and I used my bloglines account to link to that blog so that I know what's going on there (mostly notifications about when books are due and new library furniture, etc.). But it seems that in order for RSS to be helpful to us at BPL on a patron rather than personal (i.e., librarian) level, we need to first have a BPL blog and then let patrons know about it and teach them how to use something like bloglines to keep track of the blog. I understand how RSS is Web 2.0, but it seems like we have a few steps before we can use it at BPL2. But I'm certainly pleased with my own new use of RSS!

Wiki Thoughts

Like most people, I am mainly familiar with the concept of wikis from Wikipedia. I do enjoy Wikipedia, but I use it more as a toy than as a research tool. When I was in college, some of my friends and I played a game called Five Clicks to Jesus. To play, you go to Wikipedia's main page and click on Random Article. You then click on a link within that article to get to a new article. The idea is to get to the Wikipedia article on Jesus from your original random article in only five clicks. It's fun, and you get to learn a lot of interesting things along the way. But although I will occasionally go to Wikipedia first to get a brief overview of a subject before starting more serious research, I would never use Wikipedia or any other wiki as an authoritative source. I think this is something that makes many people nervous about ever using wikis, as can be seen in the comments on the PLCMC webpage that talks about wikis. But a wiki like Wikipedia that allows anyone to add or edit information is not intended to be an authoritative source to be quoted in a research paper, it's simply a place where a user can get general information about a subject. And it's certainly useful for a subject where the information changes frequently, such as an article about a television series. Although really, a wiki is more reliable than a static webpage. If something is wrong in a wiki, someone who knows better can just fix it, but if someone has created a static webpage with incorrect information, no one can do anything about that. The safest bet for research is probably going to a book (and wouldn't a librarian say that!), but wikis shouldn't be maligned quite as much as they often are.

I thought some of the wikis about libraries were really interesting. I was most interested in seeing what could be edited and by whom. It really seemed to depend on what the purpose of the wiki was. The SJCPL subject guides can only be edited by the librarians, and that's because the purpose of using a wiki instead of a website is so that the links can be updated frequently and by whomever has access. But because this is a wiki that is to be used for reference by patrons, the SJCPL librarians don't want patrons to be able to change things, and so they've restricted access to editing the wiki. Patrons are still allowed to make comments on the wiki, but they can't edit the links. On the other hand, the Princeton library's reading group's wiki allows anyone to post a book review, as long as they're registered users. This wiki allows patrons as well as librarians to post reviews, and also allows the posters to decide whether they want to remain anonymous or not. Looking through the posts briefly, I did notice that some of the reviewers posted more than one review. But it also seemed that a lot of different people took advantage of the opportunity to write a review, including librarians, named patrons, and anonymous posters. It looks like this is something that a lot of people enjoyed doing.

I really love the idea of creating some sort of place where people can post book reviews. Just today, I was shelving new books and a patron asked me if I had anything good on my truck. I hadn't read any of the books I was shelving, and so I told her that I didn't know. She browsed through the shelves, and I continued shelving. She found some books to check out, and as she was leaving, pointed out a book that she had read, and told me that it was very good. I recognized the name of the author, and thanked her for pointing it out to me. Perhaps this patron wouldn't have been interested in reading a blog or a wiki where various patrons and librarians posted reviews of their favorite (and not-so-favorite) books, but it is certainly something that I would be interested in reading and contributing to. In our move toward L2, I hope this is something that BPL considers.

Introduction to Web 2.0

For the first part of my assignment, I read Tim O'Reilly's definition of what Web 2.0 is. Although I was familiar with the concept, this was the first time that I had read a concise definition of Web 2.0. O'Reilly's definition was interesting, but I think even more interesting were the comments made by other readers. I think that many of them expressed the same misconceptions that I had had about Web 2.0, most notably the two posters who said that Web 1.0 was about computers connecting to other computers, while Web 2.0 is about people connecting to other people. O'Reilly's response to that was very interesting to me, in that he said that 2.0 is really the opposite of what these posters had said. Although Web 2.0 is certainly about keeping the user in mind, it's really about allowing computer-generated webpages to replace hand-generated, static webpages. Web 2.0 is about user convenience, but it's also about allowing computer programs to do some of the work.

But what does this have to do with libraries? To answer that question, I read many of the articles about Library 2.0. The most interesting of these to me was the list by the Other Librarian of the ten things libraries can do to become L2. I think it was really helpful to have a list of practical things that libraries can and should do. And I agreed that most of the things were simple and "no-brainers," such as installing Firefox on the public computers. Personally, I really dislike Internet Explorer as a browser and don't use it on my home computer (although, as a Mac user, I'm a Safari fan!), so I'm all for a more user-friendly browser at work. As the Other Librarian noted, though, some of the other suggestions were a little more problematic, such as allowing gaming and instant messaging on public computers. What do librarians do if this kind of use begins to disturb other patrons? The Other Librarian's suggestion was to keep copies of the library's appropriate use policy on hand, but does this mean we are going to have to be constantly scolding patrons and settling disagreements? I don't think that fosters the kind of L2 environment that we want.

There is clearly a lot of work ahead of us if we want our library to go L2, and I'm sure that eventually, we'll get all of these issues worked out. It might take awhile, but I'm certainly behind the project 100%.

First post

Well, here it is. The first cbroadwe 2.0 blog post. I'm really excited to apply Web 2.0 to libraries--here we go!