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!