10 Things a la Helene Blowers

1. My favorite foods are guacamole, cashews, and mashed potatoes.
2. In middle school I excelled at softball, cheerleading, and track but by sophomore year of high school I dropped sports to hang out with the artsy crowd.
3. As a pre-teen I had crushes on Ralph Macchio, Kirk Cameron and The Coreys (oh, how I miss those pre-MTV, bad reality show days)... This also dates me.
4. I also enjoy concerts. I hate concert prices. The best concert I have ever attended is Rage Against the Machine and my first concert ever was Kris Kross. Again, dating myself.
5. I have had the same CatKey (the cool, metal kind) attached to my keychain for 5 years. Prior to that my mom had it attached to her keychain for about 20 years. I feel like I've lost my keys a million times but I somehow still have the catkey.
6. I can't think of any pet peeves right now but I'm sure I have quite a few
7. Hmmm... things you are good at that are trivial. I would have to say being an awesome thrift store scout.
8. My boyfriend and I plan to spend late summer 2009 camping our way out to the Pacific Northwest to visit my sister .
9. I had major brushes with fame while visiting LA for spring break in college. If you count Keenan Ivory Wayans and Ian Ziering (yes! Steve Sanders from 90210 - again, dating myself) as famous. There was some other guy, too, but I can't remember his name.
10. I have one dog, a boxer named Hank, and two cats, Dexter and Linus. Linus is not named after the Peanuts character but rather Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux (who was named after Linus Pauling - god, how I love wikipedia!)

Final Thoughts...

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Helene Blowers! I've been with the library for a little over two years, and this is the most exciting thing that I've seen us do. Yeah, Vocera was a little exciting (until we actually started using it) and floating collection was awesome (though it went so well that the excitement died down fast) but I've seen more communication, collaboration and excitement over this program than anything else (except maybe SRC).

I have passed along the blog to many outsiders hoping they might partake or at least browse through and find something new to try out. The greatest thing about this whole process was "Learning and Playing". I think it helped me retain most of the information and I've actually been putting it to good use. If the information was distributed at an 8 hour seminar, I would have retained very little of it.

Programs like this put the library at the forefront of the information age. This is where we should be! We shouldn't be playing catch up, we should be leading the change.

MOLDI

Yay! MOLDI is now compatible with ipod! I never really bothered with it because I have an ipod. The layout makes me angry and the directions make me angrier. I just want to see an icon with an ipod where I click and download and browse from that link. It seems a little easier to browse than it used to but the selection for ipod is slim. I can't wait to dive into the classics because that's about it, unless I want self-help titles. I need to finish off my 23 things so I will attempt to download tonight onto my ipod and give an update as to how well this was accomplished.

#10 Image Generators

Again, I skipped over picture related things hoping that I would upload my own photos and play around. So here is a picture of my kitty cats made on http://www.bighugelabs.com/flickr/ .

#6 Flickr

I'm really not sure why I never finished #6 - Flickr mashups and 3rd party sites. I've played a few times on http://www.bighugelabs.com/flickr/ and some others and I guess I just never blogged about it. I also created a Flickr Badge but posted it under #5. ANYWAY, Flickr is still a little elusive to me just because there is so much to do with it. I also have been confused by it more than once while posting my own photos. I've decided my 2009 New Year's Resolution is going to be to post all my photos on Flickr.

Anything Technology Related

http://www.delicious-monster.com/

I skipped over this post before because I hadn't found anything that really blew my mind until I saw this website a week or so ago. Unbelievable! So for $40 you can catalog your whole life collection of junk that you bought before it was available online! I wonder if this site will be around in 20 years. Obviously, people are buying this and using it. It just really gives you an idea of the difference between the pre-web 2.0 days and the post-web 2.0 days.

Podcasts

I received my first ipod last year for Christmas. I pretty much stick to all my NPR programs that I miss during the work day and on weekends. I love This American Life and Speaking of Faith. I also subscribe to NPR's podcast about Books. Booktalk podcasts or videos linked to CML's website are a great idea. Customers would have an immediate personal connection and they could subscribe to the feeds, too.

YouTube

Those poor librarians! YouTube is already a staple in my life. I played around a little more with the searching aspect. But my favorite part of this excerise was embedding the video on my blog.

Web 2.0 Awards

I found the Web 2.0 awards websites pretty interesting . My favorite site that I hadn't used before was Reddit. I still would like to use some of the photo editing sights but I have yet to load my pictures on flickr. Maybe someday...

Wiki Sandbox

It was fun to read other people's favorites. Wikis would have come in handy for me in college. But I'm not going back just to have a reason to use a wiki. So CML had better think of a good group project for this one.

Google Docs

Now I have a reason to go out and buy a Mac and not worry about it. And Common Craft is right in stating that we have to change our way of thinking about how this new kind of collaboration can be done. The beauty is that this kind of collaboration has the ability to be very open, transparent and, ultimately, very democratic. And how can you go wrong with that?

Library Power Tools

I really love the library tool bar and use it all the time. The only time that it annoys me is when I accidentally search in it thinking it's Google. And I would love a ticker and to add a widget on my facebook.

Library Wiki

First, let me say I love wikipedia. It is ingrained in my every day life. I also use wiktionary and wikiquote. And I will continue to explore wikis.

My immediate reaction to the library wikis listed on Learn & Play was, "Harumph!?!?!" Everything looked so disorganized and unappealing. Why would I use Book Lovers wiki when I can use amazon, good reads or library thing? I then ventured through some of the links provided by the LibrarySuccess wiki (liked this one) and I really liked the wikis from Loudon County and Stephens County. These were more community based and I could see the city of Columbus or CML doing something like this.

An internal wiki could be really useful for CML. It would make sense to have information on cmlsi posted in wiki format. We would actually be able to search for information in an orderly and more productive format!

Web 2.0, Library 2.0

This topic is so far reaching that it is hard for me to be coherent. For the library, I think the biggest challenge with changing technology is still the tech divide. It's great to know that some people spend 40 hours a week on secondlife. But when we still have a 30 minute wait for a computer, it really puts it all in perspective. The bare essentials, paying bills online, checking email and googling, are still out of reach for many people.

The possibilities of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 are immense. And I'm excited that libraries and library customers have a reason to be excited. For too long I think it has felt like libraries lost their purpose. And now it finally feels like we know what direction we should be headed.

More RSS Feeds

So I checked out Topix, Syndi8, and Technorati and so far I am not that impressed. I added Technorati to my Bloglines account to see if I would take a look at it later. I liked that Topix had local links. I like RSS feeds from my usual favs like Mother Jones, The Nation, etc. but I would rather just read what competent journalists have to say rather than a bunch of raving lunatics. I need to venture outside of my normal reading of politics and news. But ,with a little over a month left until the election, it is hard.

D.e.l.i.c.i.o.u.s.

It is nice to access bookmarks from any location. What I think is the neatest thing about delicious is using the tags similar to flickr. Avid readers can tag different websites and, hopefully, be able to access information at a later time. I don't know how many times in my life I have read something and wish I could remember when or where I read it. I'll have to play with this feature and see how helpful it is in that sense. Also, once again, I feel like my favorite feature is being able to see what other people have suggested and noted. Ahhh... the joys of web 2.0.

Library Thang

About a year ago, I signed up for Librarything and never really went back to it. I really like the recommendation area and just perusing around to see what is popular. I think I originally took it a little too literally as I way of cataloging what I already own. Now I realize that it might be nice to just to keep track of what I have read and also add books that I would even like to read in the future (beats thousands of post-it notes and pieces of paper hanging out around the house). However, I also joined Great Reads (never use it) and have an application on my Facebook account (rarely use it).

Okay, I lied.

Twitter is about as addicting as my facebook account. I'm just pondering the article I read the other day about the "changing brain" once it starts multi-tasking on social network sites.

I need to COMPLETE my discovery excercises

Since I am weeks behind, I have jumped around a little. I found Twitter quite fun. But I am worried it may start to annoy me just like my facebook page. Why should I care what anyone ate for lunch today? Why should anyone care what I ate for lunch today? TMI!!! I gripe but I will still partake in all the nonsense (and probably enjoy it just a little). I guess it will be more fun when I find something real to tweet about. I can see how it would be useful to stay up-to-date with happenings in the library but it's also full of complete nonsense.

https://twitter.com/csoehnlen

RSS Feeds

I fumbled a bit through this one. I set-up my bloglines and then sort of blanked. What internet sites do I usually go to? I feel like a spend a lot of time online but I think I tend to peruse through links. I added a few general news sites but, overall, I really don't read blogs. And the only one I do read doesn't have an RSS feed (or at least it does not appear to have one). However, if I can find blogs that I like and link them to my bloglines, maybe I will become a blog reader. Overall, I like the idea of my bloglines account but the format feels sort of antiquated. I'm going to keep playing around and see how much I use it in the coming weeks.

My Head is About to Explode

After 45 minutes with Flickr, I am starting to feel like a dinosaur. I mean really! I am only 28 years old. I was born in 1980! I am on the cusp between Generation X and Generation Y (though I've always been partial to Gen-X) :) Does the smiley go before or after the parenthesis? I just keep reminding myself that it's only been 10 years since email was "so cool" and that this was my freshman year of college...

So I have created a Flickr "badge" which contains tags of libraries. The photos on my Flickr are, so far, not work appropriate. So I'll be working on that next. But so far, I just want to keep digging deeper into this stuff. It really is amazing to me how far things have come in so little time.

My First Post!

Yay! I finally have a blog. This is a great learning experience and it feels great to participate. It feels even better to be doing it and getting paid for it! However, I can't seem to get over the initial shyness of writing for all to see. I'm sure it gets easier with time... doesn't everything?