Monday, March 26, 2007

Thing #23! At Last!!!

Yay, that laptop is mine!

1. What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
My favorite discovery is that most of this stuff was not as hard as I thought. There was so much of it, and I'd heard about a lot of these things for so long, I was afraid my aging brain would explode trying to wrap itself around all of it. Actually, the web has come a long way in ease of use; ditto most of these services/programs/thingies. For the most part they were pretty intuitive. Gotta say I had a lot of fun--way too much, actually--with the image generators and YouTube. It's that visual thing.

2. How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
It's given me a lot more ideas about how to spend my retirement, and confirmed that I have to get broadband as soon as that happy day arrives. I'm definitely going to use LibraryThing to catalog my personal library. It's convinced me I need to get an M3 player. It's given me a lot of good info to share with friends and family. Since I'll be continuing my involvement with a Mythopoeic Society, it's given me some tools that might be useful for group projects in that context or any other small nonprofits I might become involved in. As someone with a visually disabled family member I really appreciate knowing more about audiobooks & podcasting, and will continue to educate myself about those possibilities.

3. Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
See #1 & #2--the fact that these were not as hard as I expected, and more things to amuse myself with in retirement--YouTube junkie coming! It was also surprising to see all the attention we got from people outside the library. Adding the ClustrMap was a great idea and a real revelation!


4. What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
This program was perfect for me, because this is the way I learn best--give me a little guidance and leave me alone, then let me write about what I learned. Not everybody learns best that way--it was probably good that you added those drop-in sessions for people who learn more effectively in more of a group setting.

And last but not least…If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you choose to participate?
You betcha. Especially if I don't win that laptop!

Major kudos to all who worked so hard to make this happen and keep it going!

Thing #22: Ebooks and Audiobooks

Due to my current interim Collection Development position, I am more involved with library ebooks than I want to be. It seems to me that ebooks are in a position that databases were when they first became relatively common (about 5 years ago? more? it begins to blur...). In other words, each vendor was more concerned with trumpeting their particular format and how superior it was, and very little concerned about what a disservice they did to libraries and patrons by the incompatibility of formats, the fact that they didn't talk to each other, and the complexity of getting access. Now almost every database is accessed by IP address and a proxy server, we (at SJSU anyway) use Get Text (SFX, Open URL) to link most of them together, and access to all these varied databases is much more seamless to the patron and usually requires nothing more than a mouse click and/or entering a name/ID/PIN. I can only hope that in another 5 years (or less!) ebooks will look that way. Right now they give me a headache--I can only imagine how the poor patrons feel.

Kudos to Brian for his redesign of the ebooks pages, which has really helped make our variety appear less confusing--and being able to search all the ebook collections at once is a great boon to University users especially. Ebooks are a great idea, even if the practice has a long way to go. For a commuter school that also has a lot of distance learners, they're a great timesaver. They're also a great way to deal with the theft problem. I remember when we used to buy things like computer manuals they never even had a chance to collect dust before they were stolen--and if they weren't stolen they went out of date and cluttered up the shelves. Ebooks are a great solution for that. I still can't imagine curling up with a cat, a cup of tea, and a mystery ebook--but that will someday change when somebody develops a really good reader with long battery life and print-equivalent resolution. Although I'm nearsighted, I'm much more so in one eye than the other, so as I get tireder I tend to close my farsighted eye to read. As my dear mother (just about everybody's mother, actually) used to say--"Your face will freeze like that!" A decent ebook reader would just let me make the print bigger as I got tireder!

I'm looking forward to exploring both our library's audiobooks and others after I (a) retire and (b) get broadband. Having a partner with a visual disability makes me sensitive to the advantages of audiobooks. I really want to research what's out there so I can get some for her. Another thing I may break down and do next year is (c) get an MP3 player for audiobooks on the go. As I told Rob & Peggy last Friday during a hallway discussion, it's not that I'm a Luddite, it just takes so much time to research what to buy and then go find it. One sad fact about getting--shall we say, less young?--is that it just takes you longer to do stuff. So you end up never having enough time to do all the stuff you want to do in a given amount of time. Just you wait until I don't have work getting in the way!

The more variety in how you make information available the better. I like words on a page, preferably in a format I can easily carry around. Like I said in my last post, I'm very visual in how I learn ang get information. Other people like to hear it; other people learn more by doing. The thing to remember when all these formats threaten to drive us crazy, is what a good thing it is for the variety of learners out there.

Friday, March 23, 2007

Thing #21: Podcasting

Something I already knew about myself was reinforced during this exercise: I'm so much more video than audio. I could waste hours on YouTube, but listening to people I don't know blather on is excrutiatingly boring. I did listen to one from http://www.podcast.net/ :
"Jenn Graham Likes Tagging; Thursday, November 16, 2006 ... This is another lunchcast from Byblos Restaurant in Getzville, New York."
[librarians at the University of Buffalo talking about a trip to a local ACRL meeting at the time of the Great October Blizzard...nostalgia for me. I got my BA at UB. I remember blizzards. Not fondly.]

From
http://podcastalley.com/
Couldn't stand to listen to another podcast, but noticed an interesting difference in these 2 sites. Top 10 podcasts in the latter include 2 about Harry Potter and one called "Blast the Right." The former lists top 10 tags (not podcasts) but 2 of the 10 are "christian" and "jesus." Something tells me each one has different audience.

Tried "libraries" as a keyword in all 3 and got different results. More overlap in the 1st two than either had with
http://podcasts.yahoo.com/.

Did manage to add a podcast to my Blogroll--sure hope it works. I'm hoping something called "Crystal Clear Tolkien" won't bore me stiff.

I'm not dissing podcasts, just making it clear that different things work for different people. I think a podcast is best used as an adjunct to something else--narration for something visual; (like a PowerPoint or library art tour). Otherwise I suggest shorter is better, and that one should think long and hard about whether a purely audio medium is the best way to convey what one wishes to convey.

Thing #18: Online Tools

OK, this is weird--our Learning 2.0 keepers point out I skipped #18. Thing is, I distinctly remember writing it...but it's clearly not there. Maybe I wrote it and hit the wrong key somewhere and deleted it. The other possibility is that I was writing it in my head but never actually typed it. (I write in my head a lot, especially in the car or the shower, and only hope I can remember half of it when I finally get my hands on a recording implement.)

I now have to attempt to reconstruct what I did many weeks ago. I tried both Zoho and Google docs. Found the first very clean and intuitive interface-wise, but I found some things I could do better in Google docs. No, I no longer have the faintest idea what. Details have gone bye-bye.

I remember thinking two basic things about this exercise. One, how great this was for our have-not patrons without computers at home. It lets them not just come to the library to use something like a word processing program, but also gives them a place to store it--all for free (at least so far). The second thing was how this might work nicely for a small group trying to put together a document. One could create a group password and anyone could add or edit as needed. Especially nice for those who want something simpler than a wiki.

Sigh. I'm sure there were more brilliant insights the first time I composed this but they're gone with the wind...

Friday, March 9, 2007

Thing #15: Future of Libraries, 2.0 & Beyond

Our eagle-eyed Learning 2.0 team has pointed out me that I have gone from #14 to #16 without a stop at #15. Math has never been this old bird's strong point, but she does want that laptop, so...

Apparently the future of libraries is 80% male. Does anyone else think it odd than is a discussion of the future of a profession that's still at least 80% female, only 1/5 of those OCLC articles we were asked to read were written by someone with 2 X chromosomes? The Old Crowe, unapologetic and cranky Boomer feminist that she is, notices things like that. Perhaps I digress. Perhaps not.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Wendy Schultz came up with the concept I like best--Library 4.0, Experience, "knowldge spa." Yeah.

If I could predict the future, I would have bought stock in certain companies many years ago--not to mention California real estate--and we would not now be having this conversation because I would have long since left the working world to live off interest and dividends. I like Dr. Schultz's notion that Library 4.0 will not replace Libraries 1.0-3.0, but incorporate all its predecessors. After all, despite many predictions to the contrary, paper has not gone away as things have gone digital. Formats seem to have exploded rather than contracted. In some ways we've gone back in time a couple of millennia--a web page is more like a scroll than a codex, after all.

I think Book as Object will be around for many years to come, even as it migrates, perhaps, in the direction of Book as Art Object. It's becoming increasingly effective to combine word and image digitally, but not yet the tactile aspects of a book. Books are going in two directions at once--content migrating off on one end and dissolving into the digital; and morphing on the other end into an art medium that sometimes deconstructs the concept of book almost as completely; and sometimes looks at just what constitutes the essential bookness of a book.

Egad, she's getting all arty on us. Go see something like
http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/artistsbook/index.htm or http://content.otis.edu/collections/artistsbooks.htm...or look in our own OPAC under artists books as SUBJECT (especially the ones in Special Collections).

Anyway, the Library as Place better not disappear anytime soon. I'm looking forward to my post-retirement appreciation of my local public library, longtime feeder of my mystery book habit. Soon I'll have time to hang out in their very attractive periodicals room by the fireplace, spend lots of time browsing the stacks instead of just running in and out, research lots of non-academic and non-work things like how best to apply ceramic tiles to the side of a stucco house. Until everybody has equal access to the net, equal comfort levels with technology (or at least a certain baseline comfort level) and one learning style, some aspects of Library 1.0-3.0 will hang around--including librarians to help people navigate and discover.


Check with me after I've been retired as long as I've been a librarian, and we'll see. You might need a medium. You might not.

Oops, some good carrion over there. Gotta go.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Thing #20: YouTube

When people ask me, "what are you going to do with yourself when you retire?" one of my stock answers will be: "Haven't you seen YouTube?" This is seriously addictive and a major argument for broadband access. The idea that I am actually required to "Explore YouTube" on work time almost makes me feel guilty. I'll try to do that embedding thing for the first one but just in case that doesn't work, take a look at:
LOTR: Saturday Night's Alright

I love this sort of thing. I know a lot of people who did these amateur music videos even before digital video editing software was available.
Matthew Gray Gubler: The Unauthorized Documentary
If you're saying to yourself, "Who the [expletive deleted] is Matthew Gray Gubler?" you haven't seen Criminal Minds. You don't have to have done so to appreciate these vids, however.

In case you're not sure, both of these are not serious.

What I like: tons of bizarre content. What I don't like: takes a little work to separate the good bizarre content from the stupid/crappy bizarre content. Library uses: might be useful to post teasers for programs or snippets of past programs to interest people in future ones. Might be tricky to deal with rights issues if a famous person gives the program. There's also the bandwidth issue--don't want to interfere with use and enjoyment of our site by those with slow connections.

Thing #19: Library Thing

Egad, it's been a long while since the Old Crowe has been able to lift her beak from the carrion pile and return to Learning 2.0. See, now you know why she was working ahead--not because she's a hotshot (though she is) or a brown-nose (which she's not) but because she knew in February she'd be too busy to eat lunch, let alone find time for her lessons. At last, things have calmed down a tiny bit and she can jump through those last few hoops between her and that laptop.

This is an easy one, because I had an account on Library Thing before Learning 2.0 ever started! (I've only had time to add 9 books, but it's the principle of the thing.) I can't even remember where I first heard about Library Thing--several people told me about it last year and/or I read about it. I've wanted to catalog my home library for a long time, and figured once I retired I'd finally have time. I thought I'd actually have to learn a database program but voila! Library Thing saved me the trouble. I've been using LC copy and am happy as a clam. A friend of mine, an experienced cataloger, turns up his nose at it. However, for those of us whose grade in Advanced Cataloging torpedoed our 4.0 in library school, Library Thing is a godsend.

I'm a little dubious about that search widget, though. I did try to do that, and it's on my blog--but it doesn't seem to search just my personal library, but the whole Library Thing database. I think. Anyhoo, I wonder how long before I hit that 200-item limit and have to pay them. It'll be worth it.

Monday, February 5, 2007

Thing #17: Adding Favorites

OK, I actually did this last week but this is the first chance I've had to blog about it. Added my favorite TV show (currently Bones), my favorite book (The Lord of the Rings, of course--read it 20x before anybody ever heard of that Jackson guy), and got the Crowe's Nest to show up on the "Favorite Blogs" list. Hooray.

How I might I use a wiki in my work at the library? I think I pretty much answered that in the last post.

However, it might have some interesting applications otherwise. Last Saturday the Council of Stewards (= Executive Board) of the Mythopoeic Society had one of our quarterly meetings, which we do by conference call most of the time. We agreed we all need to document our procedures since we serve 3-year terms (no term limits, though). On occasion people have had to leave without a lot of notice...somehow it's hard to get people to work for nothing. A passworded wiki would be a great way to do a manual in bits and pieces for a small nonprofit Board with jobs and real lives and such. Hmm, I may have to go back and read that stuff about free wikis--or dump the job on our Webmaster.

The Old Crowe is feeling very tired and stressed out right now. Sometimes she just wants to go back to her nest and take a nap; sometimes she wishes she could find some carrion to rip apart just for the hell of it. To cheer herself up she will remind herself that most of her relatives are freezing their butts off right now.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Thing #16: Wiki Widi Winci

Egad--it's been awhile. I've been discovering yet another corollary of Murphy's Law, library division, to wit: "The classes that need the most prep are the ones the teacher wants to schedule the earliest." Being up to my ears in the infolit prep thing right now, and viewing all these wikis, it's not surprising that the first thing that suggests itself to me is their potential as a tool for instruction/reference. (The line between the two is becoming increasingly hard to draw these days.) Wide-open wikis make me nervous. Like a yummy bag of cookies you might find on a park bench--you don't know what might be in them or who might have had their grubby hands on them. Not a good idea to eat out of that bag. The kind of wikis that are created by a group, but a limited group, are more promising. Since we've been talking a lot about moving more towards subject teams, having wiki-style subject pages created by the Science Team or the Humanities & Arts Team might make a lot of sense--or even open to all the subject librarians. Many of us have wide-ranging interests that don't necessarily match the subjects we're assigned to at the time, but any of us might run across content that might be of interest to someone else. If I do this now I have to send X an email saying, "Hey, look at this cool resource; you might want to add it." With a wiki I could just add it myself. If X looked at it later and thought it sucked, X could always remove it. There weren't a lot of academic library subject pages in the examples, and the ones I saw didn't look that attractive visually--but the idea is a good one. Wikipedia itself has a very attractive and user-friendly design, so it can be done.

I was intrigued by Albany County PL's idea for a wiki of procedures. That's another good library application. Unlike policies, which ought to be relatively stable over time, procedures change all the time, and the best people to write or edit them are the people actually doing the procedure in question. As long as you have some guidelines about structure and what needs to be included, having the folks actually doing the tasks able to edit procedures is eminently sensible. That way, you could easily adapt to new software, hardware and/or wetware without having to go through a rewrite & approval process every time something changed. There should some kind of PP guru/editor who took a look now and then to make sure things didn't get way off track, but otherwise a great idea.

The biggest problem even with limited-group wikis--as with any group effort--is the "let George do it phenomenon." To put it another way, if everybody's responsible, no one's responsible. Same reason some students (usually the better ones) don't like group projects--a small group of competent and conscientious schmucks do most of the work. So again, any team or group should have a wiki-master (does that word exist? it does now...) or some such person, to make sure everyone is contributing, keep an eye out for redundancies and inaccurate or outdated info.

The "event wiki" is another good application--a conference one is good. Also, a class is like an event--it goes on for a limited time period. It would be cool to collaborate with a discipline faculty member on a class wiki. I wish wikis had been around back in 1998 when I co-taught an art history class. It would have been a lot easier than WebCT was back then!

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Thing #14: Tagging in General

I actually had an epiphany about tagging when I was updating (yet again) my lecture for ART 100W. One of my standard learning objectives is the attempt to explain the difference between keywords and controlled-vocabulary subject headings. I realized that tags fit right in between, and I've actually incorporated them into my presentation--on the assumption that many of the students are probably more familiar with tags than with subject headings. Here's the continuum:

Keywords
–not consistent, not neccesarily a desciption of what it's about
Tags (Flickr, Del.icio.us)
–not consistent, but does describe what it's about, since creator assigns it
Subject Headings
–consistent & does describe what it's about

It'll be interesting to see if this helps anybody "get it." Another thing that occured to me as I've rooting around all these sites that have to do with tagging--it's a good background for students to have when you try to teach the above. If they've done tagging themselves, or search these kinds of sites, they'll understand the challenge of calling something what it is, and how different people may describe the same thing using very different words. If "learning by doing" is a good technique--and it is--they might understand some elements of information literacy better than anyone who hasn't done this DIY version of classification.

Thing #14: Technorati

Ah, so that's what it is. You know, back in the days of my youth--I'm talking about 40 years ago, here, folks--I would have been crazy about blogging, as would my best friends. Hard as it is for most of the students to whom I attempt to introduce to the joys of information literacy to believe, we used to write for fun. Pages and pages of the stuff--fiction, nonfiction, self-consciously clever letters, plays...we used to challenge each other to diagram long sentences for the hell of it, just to show we could. (I think the record was a 47-word sentence.) Being able to share that writing with the world at large, and have total strangers respond to it, would have been a heady experience.

Curmudgeonly old incident of flatulence that I am now, I care less about what the world at large thinks. I still write for fun but nowhere near as much--just don't have the time. Some of my best creative writing gets done at work...but I digress.

Did I get different results searching "Learning 2.0" in blogs vs, tags vs. directory? Well, duh. Like a lot of these sites that allow only keyword seaching, phrase searching is a problem. I tried using “Learning 2.0” (including the quotes). It took forever and I still got some dubious results. Then I discovered the "Advanced Search" which lets you look for "exact phrase" and specify only "in blogs about" X. I used "libraries" and got much better results. Either way it takes a lot longer than the basic search.

Looking at the "most popular" was depressing--Brack Obama #13 but Paris Hilton #3. Egad.

Thing #13: De.licio.us

Well, I tried to look at the tutorial--four times. The first three I got a message that the image couldn't display. The fourth time it actually showed up and I assumed you could just click on the image to start it. Nothing happened. I was nervous about clicking "download," what with our IT paranoia (although it isn't really paranoia if they are out to get you). I finally clicked, which seemed to work. It started fine, but kept stopping for no apparent reason, then eventually starting again--multiple times. I got tired of listening to dead air so I gave up. The other tutorials were fine. I took a look at the San Mateo PL site, since they're in my neighborhood, sorta. I liked their idea to organize their tags by the Dewey Decimal system--clever.

I'd be the first to agree that the bookmarking features of Internet Explorer suck hugely. I have a lot of bookmarks on my office computer, and if I wasn't paying attention to the title when I added one I find I often have no clue what it is when I look at it later. Being able to add tags at that point would be nice. The advantages of the status quo are (1) the ability to organize in a hierarchy--that's not a bad thing; (2) speed of access. If I'm answering a question on the phone in my office--from a patron or colleague--in most cases I could put my virtual hands on a bookmark faster without going to a web site where I had to sign in first.

On the other hand, I can really see the value of it when you have a lot of different people adding and wanting access to the same set of bookmarks. One application that immediately leaps to mind is the desktop computers at the Reference Desk. I'm always finding that several different people have made links to the exact same page, but each has put it in a different place. You end up with a mess. With something like De.licio.us everybody could call it whatever they wanted and all could find it under what made sense to them. (This is assuming that De.licio.us either doesn't let you make duplicate links or makes it easy to spot and eliminate them.)

The other big deal is being able to access all your bookmarks from one place, no matter what computer (or mobile device) you were using. I'm not a big traveler, and generally I prefer not to think about this place during my precious time at home. But there have been occasions when I've been home and wanted to access a site that I knew I had bookmarked at work--but couldn't.

Overall, tough call for me whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I might explore this further after I retire. Which, 11 months from today, I will have already done. Excuse me, I need to go meditate upon the wonderfulness of that phrase.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Thing #12: Rollyo

OK, now this started as one of those "where have you been all my life?" moments. What a great idea--I can see immediately a great application for any subject specialist. As a matter of fact I was so jazzed I added my first searchroll (http://rollyo.com/ecrowe/islamic_art/) to my art history web page. Go to the section on "Middle East & Islamic"--I used that because it had a decent number of sites listed, and a lot of art students take classes in this topic.

The biggest downside is those [expletive deleted] "sponsored links." That kind of trashes the whole concept of "trusted links," doesn't it? I tried a search on Hagia Sophia and what shows up as the very first link? A site called 1MillionPapers.com that offers to sell you a term paper on Hagia Sophia! I hope the students do the plagiarism tutorial first. Might be useful as a way to discuss evaluation & ethical use of information, however.

If not for that very serious downside, this would be a perfect service. I'm so irritated at them I might write a letter...

Thing #11: Web 2.0 Sites

"Collecting material for a bibliography is something which appeared to require an amazing amount of drudgery."
Richard Cameron, creator of CiteULike

This exercise was harder than I thought it would be--I really didn't want to register for yet another web site, and a lot of the categories didn't seem of interest to me. Then I discoverd CiteULike--which looked vaguely familiar. I think I've stumbled across it in the past while surfing.

What did you like about the tool?
What were the site’s useful features?

It's a service to help academics to share, store, and organise articles & papers found on the web. "When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser...you can export your library to either BibTeX or Endnote to build it in to your bibliography...links to the papers...papers themselves stay in archives like CiteSeer or PubMed."

"CiteULike is a free service, and will remain that way. You will always be able to manage your own personal library, and view other libraries on the site at no charge. The central database is backed up every fifteen minutes, and the information in your library is safe and secure."

Looks like tagging is going on--not sure how much is official descriptors imported from the original source and how much the user can add on his/her own. Cool feature--on the right is a list of "most active tags" with relative importance indicated by size & weight of type.

The downside:
"At the moment the database is dominated by biological and medical papers, but there is no reason why, say, history or philosophy bibliographies should not be equally prevalent." The other downside--it's a labor of love by one person. If he gets hit by a bus, you're screwed. Also, there are some problems linking to full text content not on the free web, but there's a discussion on the lengthy FAQ page (from which the material above is quoted) of possible ways to get it to work if one's institution uses a proxy server.

Could you see any applications for its use in a library setting?
Certainly might be something individual librarians and others might use, and something to tell our students and faculty about. I confess I haven't had time to test it out in detail (nor will I) but it looks promising.

Thing #10: Image Generators


Oooo, fun! I hope one of your learning objectives wasn't "improve productivity," cause this is gonna have the opposite effect! I had way too much fun with this, to wit: At http://www.imagegenerator.org/ I tried the 1st 3--
Dummies Book Cover Maker (easiest)
Comic Strip Generators (couldn't find what I wanted in a quick search--their keyword searching doesn't work very well--chose amine and got a lot of pix of animals. Excuse me?)
Tarot Card Name Generator (mostly easy, except adjusting placement of the text took many tries).

Want to see what I did? One is included in this post; the other is on my office door.

Thing #9: Library Feeds

Look over to the left there--I found a few. Unshelved is the most important to my mental health at work (which is hanging by a thread). If I have a moment to spare I may look for more but hold not thy breath.

Friday, January 19, 2007

Thing #8: She Has Bloglines!

Not only have I figured out the URL to my public bloglines account (to wit, http://www.bloglines.com/public/oldcrowe) but I figured out how to add the list to my blog. It involves generating then cutting & pasting some HTML, but it's all pretty automatic, although it took some rooting around in Help files to figure it out. Plus ye olde "trial & error" method.

Didn't think a lot of Feedster--keyword searching is not too effective for finding anything useful in these sites unless you have a lot more time to wander around than I'm willing to spend. Topix.net was better. Too tired to look at the other two. Besides, the Vitual Learning Team already pointed me to the really important one, Unshelved! It took me three tries to sign up for that one, using slightly different methods--but I perservered. Humor is essential. The others were fairly easy. Still 1 feed short of the 10 required, but I'm sure I'll be able to find one. Next week; my brain is fried now.

Thing #8: RSS Feeds--the Beginning

A little nervous about this, but here goes:

1. Cnet video was a washout--I tried 3x and it kept stopping for apparent reason. Screw it.
2. "Feed Me" tutorial from PALINET was nice--simple but effective.

3. SUCCESS! I have actually registered and been validated! And besides, I just cleared a misfeed in the big copier my own self. Is this a red-letter day, or what?
4. Subscribed to some feeds the easy way, via Bloglines Directory. That's enough fot now--time to go off to a meeting.

Thing #6 Redux: Librarian Trading Cards


Thing #7: Digital Images

Being an art librarian and all--and that (among other things) for most of my lengthy career--I'm truly amazed at the impact of digital imagery on both the study of art history and the practice of art and design. I could go on for days about this (fear not, I won't) but just to hit some of the high points:

1. Studying art history. When I was an art history major, I had to walk six miles in the snow...OK, I lie. It was more than six miles but I drove; I only had to walk around campus. But it was SUNY at Buffalo, so you can bet that sometimes it was in the snow. Studying for those frequent and infamous "slide identification" tests meant coming to the reserves collection of the library and spending hours studying the pictures (usually in books) that were likely to be on the test. Nowadays students do it on their computers--no driving, no snow. Wearing their jammies, cat on their lap. Young whippersnappers!

2. Photography as documentation. For years the photograph was viewed as a record of something real--a place or event. It's certainly possible to mess with pre-digital photography, either to hoax (such as the famous fairy photographs that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle) or for artistic purposes (see the work of Jerry Uelsmann, for example). But digital imagery makes it so easy--not to mention scarily convincing if done well. Think about the progress of CGI in movies, or the journalists who've gotten into hot water (or the unemployment office) for doctoring suposedly "documentary" photographs.

3. Images in libraries. When I was a baby art librarian, color images were very expensive. It meant buying a book that cost hundreds of dollars (stop laughing, you STM people) because of the cost of high-quality color printing . Then I started to see inexpensive books coming with a CD (or just a CD by itself) with hundreds of color images--making large collections of images available to a wide audience--images that would have been impossibly expensive to disseminate in printed books. Now there's a vast amount of digital imagery on the web. Some of it is still expensive, because it's in a subscription database, but a lot is free to look at--many museums and galleries throughout the world have stunning collections available to anyone with an internet connection. (The Fine Arts Musuems of San Francisco's "ImageBase" being one of the best--see (http://www.famsf.org/). I'm not even getting into the impact of historical and scientific/medical imagery. I'm just getting amazed all over again as I look at the vast change just over the last 30-40 years. Maybe not as spectacular a change as during my grandmother's life...she was born before the Wright Brothers flew and was with me when we watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. But cool nonetheless.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Thing #5 -- Blogger Photo Upload


Oops, getting carried away and not doing all the bits of the exercise as stated...do I get extra credit for doing stuff that wasn't part of the exercise?


Let's try including a pic in the post (not related to a pig in a poke). How about a wolf on a desk? Wish this could be cropped after the fact...
Note to self: learn Photoshop once retired. Hey--is that lifelong learning or what? I don't need no stinking contract...


Thing #5-6: Flickr Rocks!

Oooooo, a person shouldn't be allowed to have so much fun at work! What I've done so far:

1. Created a Flickr account (easy since I already had a Yahoo account)
2. Uploaded some pictures of myself I had on my computer
3. Created a "buddy icon"
4. Used one of those 3rd party sites to create a badge for Captain Bullshit. [Problem--I was supposed to be able to save it on my computer but couldn't--some of these exercises might be problematic due to our high level of security.] Tried emailing it to myself but nothing's shown up yet.
5. Searched for cat pictures (of which there are bazillions); pictures of SJSU and King Library (people seem fascinated by the staircase); pictures of art students available w/Creative Commons license. (Great idea, BTW--you can find these on advanced search & know they're OK to use w/attribution.) I might use some in my PowerPoint for Art 100W.
6. Created a Flickr URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oldcrowe [but nothing shows up...is that because I didn't mark the photos public, but only for "friends"?] Back to the FAQ, I think...
7. Invited Pam Jackson to be a contact/friend. I think we finally have this worked out. She already had a Flickr account (I knew she would) but of course these were both different email addresses than the ones we have at work.

I gotta get a digital camera now!

Learning Contract

I gotta tell ya, I have my doubts about this. I can see the logic behind it--writing stuff down often helps when it's something you don't really want to do or have trouble accomplishing successfully. Example: writing down everything you eat often helps you stick to a diet. With me, it's just another irritating obstacle (see previous post for how well I do with those). My philosophy of lifelong learning is the same as those Nike folks--"Just Do It!" I see some people getting so wrapped up in doing the contract they never get around to beginning the learning...using the thing as a mechanism for avoidance. Maybe it's because most of the things I've had to learn--especially for work--have been things I needed to figure out in a hurry. I wouldn't have time for a contact even if I wanted to do one.

Those 7 1/2 Habits

Which of those "7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners" is easiest for me and which is hardest? Habit #4 is probably the easiest (Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner). After 2 Master's degrees and almost 36 years in a field that forces you to learn new things all the time, if I weren't "a competent, effective learner" I'd have gone down in flames by now.

Of course, there's that problem of my constitutional inability to learn how to knit. A couple of truly excellent needlewomen tried to teach me and threw up their hands. It's like my depressing career as an art student--no matter how good a learner you are, and how hard you work, for some things you just need talent or ability (like physical coordination) that no amount of learning can make up for. That's why I'm an art librarian with a degree in art history today, instead of an artist.

What skill is hardest? Hnads down, "View problems as challenges." (#3) At this stage of my life it's hard to view problems as anything but a pain in the kiester and an irritation. (Speaking of learning, I'm studying to be a curmudgeon when I grow up.)

Tuesday, January 9, 2007

First Blog Post

My first blog post ever. Someday this will be in the Smithsonian. This year I may answer the burning question--what can a blog do that plain old email can't--and is it anything I want to do? Stay tuned.

Your friendly neighborhood librarian, learning about all this stuff in her very last year of being a librarian (last of 36, can you believe it?).