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.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
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.
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.
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!
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!
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