Norton Comes Around

It has been a month since Koko arrived and Norton has finally decided to be friends! The two are playing like they've been BFFs all along: joint galloping, play fighting, paw batting, and there was even a little bit of washing each other.

Meanwhile, I have been working in the garden instead of doing much Library 2.0 stuff. I greatly expanded my garden this year and need to fill it with new things: lots of new iris, several new Asiatic and day lilies, and my first-ever yarrow and coneflower.

I have been doing some Library 2.0 stuff at work. Besides the Researchers Notebook blog, we are working on starting a new general library & archives blog. The designer and I are tinkering with the images that should be used. But I did finally get the general library & archives e-newsletter launched the last day of June. The big thing there was getting a new webpage to feature some of the latest book aquisitions, which takes advantage of the new books I enter in LibraryThing because that's where I pull the images from. (See the MHS Library New Books widget at the bottom on the left-hand side of this blog, after my personal library widget.) The State Archives acquisitions page already existed, but I would like to get a manuscripts acquisitions page started, too.

Come to think of it, I've done more Library 2.0 things than I realized. I have also created a new Minnesota facts and symbols webpage to replace our old handout. We decided to let the handout run out and go with just the webpage. Because of the link from the State Photograph to Eric Enstrom in the MN150 wiki–the entry had been just the nomination and nothing else–I had to research and write up something on Mr. Enstrom. That meant creating an account and learning how to use that wiki (they're all just a wee bit different!). It still needs a little bit of work, but at least there is now something substantive there.

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.