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.

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 It might be interesting to do a link like this for students to take a shot at editing our historical documents!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!

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.

A Librarian Reading!?!

Inquisitive Norton wanted to know more about this Library 2.0 stuff, so he and I have been reading ... and reading and reading! There's a lot out there, published traditionally, on websites, and on blogs.

The most important things I have picked up about Library 2.0, either from reading or from seminars and webinars are:

• Is it relevant to your library/archives and your patrons? Do you have a good reason to do a particular 2.0 thing or are you pursuing it just because it's trendy?
• Keep a human "face" to it.
• Learn from what others are doing, but also think outside that box. Because we're a special library, we won't be doing gaming nights; it doesn't fit our mission. But are there other things we could do instead for target audiences?

What I'm not seeing in the literature is much about Library 2.0 and either special libraries or archives; it seems to be from a primarily public library perspective with occasionally academic libraries thrown in. I will be curious as we go through the 23 Things to see if there is a reason for that.

Who Is Norton and What Does He Know?

Norton is my four-year-old male cat, all black except for the white spots caused by his allergy to vaccinations. He came with the name Norton and it stuck because he quickly became known by everyone I work with as "Naughty Norton."

Norton knows everything worth knowing: sleeping, eating, chasing Chocolate (the other cat, although chasing chocolate is one of my favorite pastimes too), and guarding the house against those birds and squirrels that might want to break in. Actually he didn't do very well with the one squirrel who did "break in" via the chimney. That chink in the house's armor is now fixed.

What does Norton have to do with Library 2.0? Not much, except as an excuse to blog and an image to use.