The End--Not!

Well, our play2learn class is over--it was a great experience! I learned quite a bit about the latest trends and fashions in the tech world and all this knowledge will definitely be a benefit. Thank you Joy and Joan for leading us through this wonderful experience!

Oops not more than an hour after I posted this--Joy sent another assignment! But instead of deleting, what the heck, I THOUGHT I was done, I'll admit it! But I am glad there is more to enjoy!

Wiki Work

After much trial, error and embarrassment (thanks for your patience Joan!) I managed to log on to the Play2learn wiki and post some vacation spots and get my blog listed in the favorite blogs location, per our instructor's instruction :) I myself have to confess that I tend to use Wikipedia quite a bit, especially if I am pretty sure of a fact and just want quick corroboration. It is a very handy site indeed!

On a completely unrelated side-note, can I just say how much I love the spell-checker here on blogger.com?? It is very cool!

RSS Feeds revisited

In my first look at RSS feeds I was inclined towards using the IE built in aggregator. But now that I have been playing with them for a little while, I can see why Joan and Joy recommmend bloglines. So, I successfully exported my RSS feeds from IE and imported them into Bloglines. Very cool feature for anyone who has feeds in IE (or probably other browsers) and wants to have all your feeds on bloglines.

Library 2.0

Having read the assigned articles, I have to say that it is pretty clear that Library 2.0 means different things depending on what type of library you use or with which you are affiliated. Most of the libraries provide an academic perspective--be it university or k-12. Public libraries have a slightly different mission, as much as we would like to think that we are purveyors of information, the reality is that many of our clients view us as providers of Entertainment--be it written or audiovisual. Our challenge is in working with the users of Web 2.0 and providing good quality information and entertainment in an electronic environment, and yet still maintain a positive relationship with our clientele who have no need/use for the library as a provider of electronic services.

One separate observation. Although I found many thought provoking statements in all of the articles, one that struck me quite forcibly (and no doubt as a reaction to my years in academe, wherein I did "Bibliographic Instruction") Rick Anderson notes, "...if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons." And that is a very telling observation. Until recently, patrons have had to conform to our expectations of how to search and retrieve data. The Internet, Google, Web 2.0 have taught them otherwise and we as librarians need to adjust our thinking accordingly.

LibraryThing Redux

Well, as promised, I tried out the LibraryThing importing tool. It is pretty slick! I had a much harder time getting Excel2007 to format the data the way I needed it. In case you want to key a bunch of ISBNs into an Excel file for importation, be sure to format the cells in the column you are going to use as TEXT. This retains the leading 0s for the old 10-digit ISBNs. I saved my file as a txt file and LibraryThing easily recognized both my 10-digit and 13-digit ISBNs. It told me it would take 30-50 minutes to locate and load the items to my library and that there were 297 others in queu ahead of me. And lo and behold, in about 45 minutes when I checked back, all my books where in my library. All in all pretty impressive!

Of Bookmarking and information addiction

Just trying to catch up with the assignments I missed while I was at WDW last week. Del.icio.us was an interesting tool and I found Technorati very fascinating. As with a library catalog, how you search has an impact on what you retrieve. I find myself spiraling downward into information addiction however! For right now, I am not letting myself set up a Del.icio.us account for fear I would spend the next week adding to, updating and compulsively organizing the hundreds (and I DO mean hundreds) of bookmarks I have in IE right now. That will have to wait just a little while ;)

Cataloging Assistance

Our most recent assignment was to use the Rollyo site to create a personalized search tool. I can definitely see the usefulness of this application. I can see a parent or a teacher creating search boxes to direct children or students to the particular sites deemed appropriate.

I created a search tool to assist all of you in cataloging your personal libraries! Enjoy :D

Select Search Engine...Cataloging SitesSearch The Web

Powered by Rollyo

LibraryThing

I found this an interesting little social networking tool that allows you to find like minded readers! I was very excited to see the .cvs export tool, but alas, it truncates the leading zeros in the isbn, so it was not as useful as I had hoped! I haven't tried creating a list of isbns and importing them yet, but it says I can do that. I'll let the world know how that turns out. Meanwhile a fun little website--but it would take about a year for me to locate and tag and assign a star rating to all the books I have read :) Feel free to take a look at the ones I did add to my catalog. http://www.librarything.com/catalog/librarian1993

Fun with graphics!!

How could I possibly resist this image generator I found on Custom Sign Generator!! I was tempted to use the panhandler picture and put "will catalog for food" on the cardboard sign, but that was so 90's....












Go to http://www.customsigngenerator.com/ and have some fun with the image generators!

Bloglines feed

Here is the link to my bloglines feed : http://www.bloglines.com/blog/mlmazzanti

I do have one question: why would we be using blogger.com for our blogs, instead of just using bloglines for both our blogs and our RSS feeds?

RSS Feeds

Our play2learn instructors have had us playing around with RSS feeds. May I just say this is highly hazardous for an information addict such as myself! We looked at a couple of different news readers, including Bloglines and the built-in reader in IE7. I like using the IE7 one, even though it means I actually have different feeds on my home PCs vs my work PC. But that is probably a good thing, since I am sure reading my WoW feeds at work would not go over very well with upper management! :)

Playing with settings

Well, this is not part of our assignment, but I could not resist changing colors, fonts and layout on my blog. Note my cool picture of my main in WoW as she stands for the first time before the Dark Portal to the Outlands! Finally 58! --although actually she is now 66 :)

Using Flickr

Well, I have primarily used Google's Picasa to manage my pictures, but I found flickr very easy to use! Our assignment was to locate a picture on flickr and comment on it. I stumbled across this picture, created by european photographer florian.b. It was an interesting photo apparently inspired by something the young man read regarding banning of books in America--the idea seemed to horrify him! I found that very interesting.

Catching up!

I am working on catching up to the rest of my Play2Learn compatriots! I did watch the two you tube videos The Machine is Us/ing Us and Information R/evolution, both very interesting.