Finish Line

It's been long, and sometimes grueling, and Norton is ready for a nap!

But it's always been informative, and that's what a learning program is suppose to be. I found the format very user-friendly and liked that I could work at my own pace. I've learned that I need to improve on my dial-up connection at home, because it's so slow. The Things I could do at work went so much faster, and easier because of that. I have really appreciated the newsletters; good idea.

I was surprised how many of the Things I already knew about. What was great about the program was that 1) it forced me to finally take the time to investigate some of these things, and 2) in having to write about them I had to think about them more carefully -- and how I might apply them at work -- than I might have otherwise.

Would I do a similar program in the future? Definitely!

Final thought: I really like the suggestion at the end of the Thing 23 post that the concept is adapable to almost anything. I'm going to think about how I might employ a 23 Things program.

Just Do It!

A definite help in continued Library 2.0 learning will be the wonderful MINITEX webinars. I've already learned much from them and am sure to continue.

Also the wonderful websites and blogs that I've learned about via 23 Things will be a great help. I particularly like ALA TechSource, LibrarianInBlack, LibraryBytes, and the Web 2.0 Directory.

I was glad to see in the 23 Things on a Stick e-newsletter that the home blog will continue indefinitely and we will be able to go back to revisit and rework through any of the things. I know I will be back to review. Although I saved many of the links on my blog, there are many others that I didn't and for that reason, if no other, being able to go back will be helpful.

From Wired Magazine's Geekapedia (People, Places, Ideas, and Trends You Need to Know Now): Picnic - Problem in chair not in computer!

Gather All Your Nings and Meet at the Junction

View my page on 23 Things on a Stick

I signed up for Ning back at the beginning because I erroneously thought it was one of the blog possibilities. Now I know better! Although I could have had a blog on Ning, it's so much more. I now have my own Ning page, which I think I will be much more likely to keep up than either of the MySpace or Facebook pages that I started. I have even contemplated moving my 23 Things posts over there and continuing this blog with a slightly different focus.

I also looked at Gather and WebJunctionMinnesota. I think WebJunction has real potential for helping me keep up with information/technology overload.

I thought the TechSoup article, "What Can Social Networking Do for Your Organization? Tips and Tools to Help Your Nonprofit Get the Most out of Online Networks," by Brian Satterfield (May 5, 2006) put it nicely as to why libraries -- not just librarians -- would want to participate on social networking sites: "Social networking platforms give nonprofits a forum for meeting like-minded organizations and potential supporters, and provide a medium for spreading their messages beyond the immediate community, says Alan Rosenblatt, Executive Director of the Internet Advocacy Center."

One of the 2.0 messages that I've run into over and over is that we need to be out there on the web where our users -- and our potential users -- are. Social networking sites are definitely where many of them are, at least for the time being.

MySpace and Facebook

I agree with Meredith Farkas, who wrote in her blog, "I hate the idea of implementing new things at libraries because they’re 'cool' and not to serve a specific purpose." (Information Wants to Be Free, 10 May 2006.) I had never looked at either MySpace or Facebook before this and really wondered, when I set off on this "Thing," how libraries would use them.

I joined Facebook, created my profile (sure is nice having that avatar to use!), joined 5 groups, posted to 2 walls, and sent a message to another 23 Thinger (Thingbrarian?). I was surprised that the 23 Things on a Stick group had so few members and so few wall posts!

I joined the 23 Things on a Stick group, Libraries Using Facebook Pages (something else I think we should do), and found 3 archives groups to join: Archivists on Facebook, the Midwest Archives Conference, and the Society of American Archivists. I picked the Libraries Using Facebook Pages because the librarians posting on it gave the URLs for the library pages they had created and I found it quite useful to see what they had done. There were a lot of college and university libraries on Facebook, more akin to the MHS Library than most public libraries.

I also created a MySpace page (why not!). I could tell from looking at the libraries' pages on MySpace that it was aimed more at teenagers, whereas Facebook is more for college students. The MySpace library pages tended to be labeled "Teen" pages, and the Facebook libraries that I found were almost always college libraries. I found more things for me to do on Facebook than on MySpace, where I spent a lot of the time "decorating" my page.

Again quoting from Meredith Farkas: "When you decide to put up a library profile on MySpace or Facebook, what is your goal? If it’s to look cool or to make students more aware of the library, don’t bother. A profile that offers nothing but a picture of the library, a blog post or two and a cutesy thing about how we won’t shush you just looks cheesy. I think there is a big difference between 'being where our patrons are' and 'being USEFUL to our patrons where they are.' I think some of the libraries in MySpace and Facebook have put a profile up, but they have not tried to make it useful to their patrons at all. Just putting up a profile does not make the library seem cool, nor does it make the library more visible.

"I have seen two ways that libraries have used MySpace and Facebook effectively. The first is to get feedback from students. The second is to create a library portal within MySpace and/or Facebook (or whatever social networking software inevitably will come next). "

From the various library pages I looked at on the two sites, I totally agree with this. And I also agree with a librarian's posting on Facebook that you need to put a link from your library homepage to your Facebook or MySpace page rather than relying on the users of those sites to find you themselves. I really don't think many users are searching for libraries when they're using those sites, but when they are on your site they might very well be interested in checking out your MySpace or Facebook page.

Will I continue to be a member of Facebook and MySpace? Probably not, since there are the adult versions in Thing 21. I looked for people I might know on both Facebook and MySpace but found very few. Having a MHS Library presence might just be enough for me!

Casting for Pods

Technically a podcast is audio only and a video is a vodcast or vidcast, but nobody seems to know the second term; most everyone uses podcast for both. The term podcast, according to Wikipedia, is a portmanteau of the words "iPod" and "broadcast."

The Minnesota Historical Society Collections Department has a podcast and blog webpage called Collections Up Close. I tried to find it in the podcast directories.

I didn't have any luck on Podcasting News, Podcast.com, Podcast.net, Yahoo, or the Education Podcast Network. They all rely on the podcast creators to add their own podcasts and apparently the Collections folks haven't done that. Although I didn't find the Collections Up Close podcasts, I did find a series of MHS podcasts on the restoration of the Minnesota Capitol while searching on Yahoo.

I struck paydirt with Podcast Alley, however. The odd thing was, when I searched "Minnesota Historical Society," the Collections Up Close podcasts were the second thing listed; a Kansas Historical Society podcast was the first!

Am I inspired to do some podcasting myself? Perhaps. The Reference Department's Library 2.0 Committee has talked about it, but we've got so many other ideas on our plate that our somewhat shy librarians probably will leave the podcasts until last!

Bandwidth Hogs

I haven't really used YouTube or Google Video precisely because they are bandwidth hogs. At home, my poor dial-up connection hiccups through the videos -- a few seconds of video followed by a long pause, followed by a few seconds of video, followed by a long pause, etc.

Despite that, here is a cute video on Minnesota History Day:



And for those of you out there who have never seen it, the "cult classic" Conan the Librarian:



How would we use YouTube videos (or some other site) on the MHS Library website? Good question. That's one I'm going to have to ponder, and take to our Library 2.0 Committee to see if others have any thoughts on it. There are possibilities out there: a search of "Minnesota history" on YouTube turned up 370 videos, although quite a few of them seem to have copyright issues. I really hate to encourage that sort of thing by linking to those videos and thereby validating their questionable use of copyrighted material.

Climbing the ELM

ELM is the Electronic Library for Minnesota, which is available by direct link on the MHS Library's in-house homepage or via the ELM portal. (Isn't it nice that you don't need to use your library card number anymore?!)

I'm so glad this was one of the "things." We don't use ELM as much as a public library probably does, so I wasn't familiar with most of these tools. I can see great uses for me personally, for helping students (especially), and for MHS staffers in other departments. I already e-mailed an e-book citation that I found (while looking for the "101 Ways to Promote Your Web Site") to someone in HR.

I also set up an RSS feed for the search alert "Library 2.0" in EBSCO's Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts. I got a lot of feeds on that one!

I love NetLibrary! I hadn't used that before and I think it's really cool. I can see lots of uses both for NetLibrary itself and for its tools. It's great being able to leave yourself electronic notes about citations that you find, to share things with others, and even to collaborate with colleagues.

I'm also discovering how prevalent the tools are all over the web that give you bibliographic citations for sources formatted according to the various style manuals. That's a question we get constantly from students and I tend to be more familiar with Chicago and Turabian than I am with MLA or APA, so it's nice to have somewhere to look. Now if we could just get them to do citations for our manuscript and government archives records!

Norton's Licking His Chops It's So Del.icio.us

I've had a del.icio.us account for at least a year now.
I set one up shortly after taking a MINITEX webinar. Then I took another webinar this fall that talked about Furl; I checked out Furl and have an account there too! I even set up a Furl account for the monthly research meeting participants to use.

Personally I like Furl better. I find it easier to use and I love being able to rate the websites using stars. I also like the display better.

I think the MHS Library could really make use of this for the Minnesota History Topics, and some other things on the MHS website. It would be a great way to help students find us who might not otherwise.

Pagekeeper seems a little bit like the Educator's Portal on the MHS website. It doesn't allow teachers to add their own websites or tags, but it does allow them to search for MHS webpages based on grade level, subject matter (theme), or type of resource. Perhaps a companion page could be developed that would allow teachers to add their own pages and tags relating to Minnesota history.

Writers in the Sky

Ok, I've been doing these out of order again. This "thing" is why I already had a Zoho account when I did Thing 8, because I had signed up for ZohoWriter.

As I mentioned on the post about wikis, the Reference Department has a committee to update the policies and procedures manual. We're looking at using either a wiki or an online collaboration tool like ZohoWriter. I'm thinking this might be an easier way of working from home sometimes -- not have to e-mail documents to myself or take them home on a memory stick.

I tried out both ZohoWriter and GoogleDocs for the Declaration of Independence. When we put an image of a document on the Library portion of the MHS webpage, we usually include a transcription (example: Minnesota's constitutions). It might be interesting to do a link like this for students to take a shot at editing our historical documents! Could be fun and educational.

And I like being able to export/import all of these things right to my blog! (I did it with the Declaration, but it took up way too much space, so deleted it.)

Norton thinks that the Founding Fathers would have LOVED this. Look at all the crossing out they did!

MHS Library in 35 Slides

The tool I tried was sharing PowerPoint slides via Zoho, which I chose because I already had an account (so why create another one).

I love being able to relatively easily share a PowerPoint presentation that I've spent hours on. Post it for the world to see, post it for just the folks who paid to take your workshop, post it with a link in your blog or the actual slideshow in your blog -- the possibilities aren't endless, but there are several to chose from.

The two problems I did encounter were 1) my PPt as origintally created was way over the 10MB limit Zoho has, and 2) after I'd deleted some of the images to get it under the 10MB and "fixed up" some of the weirdnesses (hey, if interestingness can be a word!) that were left over, it did some rather odd things to some of the slides when they were uploaded. I need to go back and spend some time fixing those things, but now that I know such things can happen I'll be on guard in the future.

Assignment Calculator

Ahhh, another "thing" I've been aware of for about a year but have never taken the time to look at. Too bad because it looks to be quite useful.

We get a lot of students -- both college and K-12 -- in the MHS Library and Archives doing research for History Day or some other class project, or for college assignments. The Assignment Calculator and the Research Project Calculator are both excellent tools for walking students through all the processes of writing a paper or doing some type of project.

Students often come into the Library having already looked at our Minnesota History Topics webpage and I think it would be an excellent page to put links to the two calculators, so I did.

I also think we could develop some good handouts and more webpages specifically for students based on the information provided for both the teachers and the students in the two calculators.

Kitty Clock

Thanks to No Lutefisk on a Stick for the Kitty Clock widget. I was reading some of the 23 Things on a Stick Finishers' Blogs and couldn't resist a widget of a black cat!

I can't believe so many people are finished already. How do they find the time???

Now They've Got Me Playing Games!

Arrr! That's pirate-speak for those of you who haven't played Puzzle Pirates. According to the official Pirate Thesaurus it "can be used by a pirate in almost any context. It can be used to express a pirate's approval, as a verbal declaration of his or her anger, or sometimes as simply a way to ensure everybody around knows you are a vicious, bloodthirsty pirate."

I don't see the Minnesota Historical Society Library hosting gaming nights anytime soon -- unless someone comes up with a killer Minnesota history game! But it is useful to know what this is all about, so I joined up as a pirate. (My pirate name was Akako, should anyone want to know.) I knew it was hopeless to try Second Life with my slow dial-up connection at home and even at work I don't know if my computer has enough "oomph," so Puzzle Pirates it was. (Warning for anyone else trying to download the game with dial-up: It takes a very LONG time.)

This was fun, addictive, and could be really time-consuming. But I see why kids would like it.

Bookmarks on Steroids

That's how MyStickies describes itself. Thing 13 is about customized home pages, calendars, list-making applications, personal organizers, online sticky notes, and PDF converters--a LOT of "things" here!

At work I use the MHS in-house library page as my homepage, because I'm constantly checking something in the MnPALS catalog, in the death certificates index, in Minnesota Place Names, on Ancestry.com, etc. It is a customized homepage with many of the things I use most often! I wonder, though, if we could include some widgets on it that would make it more useful for those of us who use it as our work hompage?

At home I use Google as my homepage. About six months ago I had played with iGoogle and decided not to use it. Personally, I find those customized homepages more of a distraction than a help. But I tried iGoogle again, and also tried out MyYahoo. This time I tried to pick only work-related widgets attempting to make the page more useful (I admit, though, to including those eyes that follow your cursor around!). There were some things that I liked better about MyYahoo and some thing I liked better about iGoogle. For the time being, I've made my iGoogle page my homepage. We'll see how long it lasts!

Of the other "things," the most useful, for me, for work, would be the PDF converters. There have been so many times I wished I could turn a PDF into a Word document, but didn't know it was possible! And, we've just started using our photocopy machine to scan documents and turn them into PDFs. I can see the value of sometimes then turning those PDFs into Word documents. What a great find--thanks!

And thanks for the link to the Top 25 Web 2.0 Apps to Improve a Student's or Professor's Productivity. (I passed that one on to my niece.) Some interesting things there for those of us who work with students.

Can You Digg It?

Thing 12 is about social media sites, none of which I had used before. I can see where they would be really useful if you work in a public library, a college/university library, or even a special library with a contemporary focus. For an archives and historical library, however, it's work-related uses seem limited to me.

With more and more historical issues of newspapers going online, however, perhaps some day someone will invent a social media site for historical news! Now that would be useful for work!

I was a wee bit surprised that there are so many sites that do essentially the same thing (Digg, Mixx, Newsvine, Reddit, and StumbleUpon--I was surprised you didn't include Technorati, I had at least heard of that one). It would be interesting to know if they all have pretty much the same type of clientele, or if different age groups, or different interest groups tend to favor one over the other.

More useful for work is putting those bookmarklets on our webpages to make it easy for those who do use those sites to comment on our webpages and make our library known "out there." We currently have them only on the Collections Departments' blog and podcast page. I need to look into Reference Department pages that could benefit from having bookmarklets.

It's Fun to Have a Cloud of Your Own

LibraryThing is another "thing" I've known about for over a year but never took the time to actually check it out. It's another cool and fun thing! And I really enjoy having my own tag cloud!

I entered quite a few books. I wanted to get a variety of topics and was hoping for at least one that neither Amazon.com nor the Library of Congress had--and I had one. The Beginner's Guide to Germanic Genealogy, even though it has an ISBN number, did not show up. So I entered it manually and then discovered 4 other people who had it in their libraries, including one person I actually know!

It's really quick and easy to enter books. I love having the book covers there; I was really disappointed when there wasn't a cover image available!

My LibraryThing widget is the last item on the left because it takes up so much room! So scroll down to check it out. Some of the books are mine, some (The Cat Who ... books, obviously) are Norton's.

More Addicting Images

Wow -- what fun! Addicting and time-consuming all in one! Obviously I visited ImageChef, and BigHugeLabs.

I spent a LOT of time on BigHugeLabs making trading cards of Minnesota's governors, since we already have a webpage with their portraits and basic information to draw from. I also made one of the MHS Library with hours, e-mail, phone, address.

I did think about whether I should use the governors' portraits or not, but after I did the first one and saw how bad the resolution was, I figured nobody would want to steal that! Plus the image generator doesn't allow you to use the full image. If we acutally use the trading cards on our website, I would have to discuss it with the art curator and we would definitely have to talk about better images.

More Flickr-ing

I now have a Flickr Flash badge and "Norton Knows" in Flickr letters. Very cool, and fun. One could easily spend as much time looking for letters as one spent looking for avatar clothing!

I had an idea about using a Flickr badge on some of our Minnesota History Topics to show the images from our Photo and Art Database that relate to a specific topic. That brought up a discussion (which hasn't been decided yet) about whether we want our images out there in "unprotected" webspace. I think there ought to be a way to make it work, we just need to find it.

I also would like to see us doing something similar to St. John's/St. Ben's, going from a Flickr account showing covers of new books in the library directly into the MnPALS catalog record for the book. Now that ought to be real do-able.

Flickr

I've spent WAY too much time playing with Flickr! And Norton is bound to become a star now that his image is out there for the whole world to see. That's Norton checking out Flickr. --->

I set up an account (Norton the Cat) and uploaded a bunch of images, including two of the Minnesota History Center and two of the Minnesota Historical Society Library. Then I joined the 23 Things on a Stick Group and posted a comment there. And I invited a bunch of friends to come check out what I'd done.

I see now why Flickr is 3 of the "Things." There is so much to explore and so many possible uses.

Wikis

I am skipping around in the Things a bit because some are easier to do from home, where I have more time to work on them.

I am familiar with wikis from Wikipedia of course, where I have edited Minnesota-related articles; from the MN150 Wiki; and the Placeography Wiki, where I have created an entry from scratch. I also suggested to the Minnesota Genealogical Society that they use a wiki for their planning committee. They took me up on the suggestion, even though most of them had never used a wiki before, and they are loving it.

(If you don't know about Placeography yet, it is a wiki where you can share the history of and stories about a house, building, farmstead, public land, neighborhood, or any place to which you have a personal connection. Right now it only has Minnesota places, but places from anywhere are allowed.)

I also created a wiki on PBwiki for the MHS Reference Department to use for revising our Policies and Procedures Manual. Then I learned about the collaboration tools in Thing 9 and am trying out Zoho before we continue with the wiki. I am thinking, since our manual already exists and it's just a matter of revising it, that an editing tool might work better. Then someone suggested that the Zoho wiki was easier to use than PBwiki, so I set up another wiki. Now our group just needs to decide which of the three tools works the best for our purposes. Stayed tuned.

I must say that there certainly is a lot of information provided for Thing 10. I have been printing out many of the readings for the Reference Department staff so we can check them out and read them as we have time. I find it's often easier to carry a paper copy around and read it here and there, rather than having to be tied to a computer screen. Thing 10 has had more readings to copy than anything since Thing 2!

What I am most interested in pursuing is a subject guide wiki for our library. We already have various subject guides -- some on our website, some not -- and it would be nice to have one place for all of them. I very much like the SJCPL subject guide on Family History and think that is something we could emulate.