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.