Week 9: Item 23

I was later than most in starting this project and obviously, since it is November 23rd, one of the last to finish. Thanks for the extension of this project because it gave me the impetus to push through my reluctance and frustrations and ultimately finish and feel very proud that I did.

Clearly this is not an ending but a beginning. I've only touched the surface of these many web tools and yet I know that I've absorbed a great deal. Last week when I was talking to a friend who does not work in libraries, I was telling her about some of my discoveries. She was unaware of them yet she uses the Internet. It gave me great satisfaction to realize how far I'd come.

My blog may not be quite as cool as others', but it's my very first. As I progressed I was able to do more and more on my own. I don't know the final count of BCPL staff who participated in this project, but it should be high. Having worked my way through the exercises, I better understand their value. Maryland 23 Things should be mandatory for all full-time staff, most certainly librarians.

Thanks to Pawan for his help (you were very patient with me). Kudos to Ellen and Jim for all their hard work in monitoring this project and encouraging us to continue!

Week 9: Item 22

I read about and listed to the tutorials regarding Overdrive and NetLibrary. The Overdrive tutorial was much clearer to understand and a much more professional learning tool. NetLibrary needs to jazz theirs up a bit; I found myself losing interest in what the speaker was saying. While Project Gutenberg didn't have a tutorial, it was easy to navigate. I was particularly interested in the variety of books available in other languages, and I found a citation for a title in Mayan, edited by a French man--cool! Overdrive and Project Gutenberg are complementary sites as the former carries more contemporary, popular materials and the latter more literary and esoteric books.

Week 9: Item 21

These are two podcasts that I found on PodcastAlley.com about scuba diving. I haven't opened them yet because I am at home where my computers works faster and I can work without interruption. I'll have to check these out at work tomorrow.

http://nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/blog/?feed=podcast
http://www.scubadventureslcpodcast.com/ScubAdventuresPodcast/Podcasts/rss.xml

I like PodcastAlley.com. It's easy to search for specific information. I like it better than PodCast and Yahoo.

Regarding the MERLIN podcasting link, BCPL has its own zines podcast thanks to LVN. It's very good!

"How to Podcast" is very clear and makes one want to to try to create a podcast. Well, maybe others...

Week 9: Item 20

First I looked at the links that show the many sites that allow users to upload and share videos. I had no idea there were so many, because YouTube, MySpace and a few others are so frequently mentioned.

I looked at YouTube, MySpace and Yahoo Video because, from what I read, they are among the top sites that are visited. YouTube had a wonderful underwater video of divers diving with 15 dolphins in Hurghada, Egypt. It was very easy to find on You Tube a second time by doing a keyword search using the following terms: 15 dolphins, scuba diving, Egypt. While many of the scuba videos I viewed were of poor quality (due partly to the difficulty of filming underwater), this one was just lovely. The graceful dolphins were swimming around and around the divers.

I did not find that I could as easily and quickly assess diving videos that I wanted to view in MySpace. Rather, MySpace was good for true information on sports, especially referrals to businesses related to scuba diving. For example, I immediately was referred to a local business to get diving lessons and another for gear. There was also a very attractive site for renting homes and rooms at resorts on Bonaire.

Yahoo videos were immediate when I looked for scuba diving on Bonaire. I was not impressed with the videos though. They were short and of poor visual quality.

Week 8: Item 19

Among the Web 20.0 awards that I found relevant to my diving them are the ones, naturally, listed under travel. I was particularly intrigued with kayak.com, a site with which I was unfamiliar. There are great airline prices and it was fascinating to be able to watch the site scan for this information really fast. I looked for the best airline prices to Minneapolis for the PLA conference.

Week 8: Item 18

The concept of online world processing and spreadsheets is a highly useful one. I wish I'd done this exercise sooner, because I could have experimented with this concept on a real life task. That is, I was preparing a budget request and needed the input from managers at another branch. It would have been much easier to complete the task more quickly and efficiently with an online product. This exercise will be very, very useful to me.

I created a document on Zoho Writer. I tried using all the icons on the toolbar; it was pretty intuitive.

Week 7: Item 17

I posted an entry to the Learning 2.0 Sandbox wiki. The site is: http://greatplacestodive.pbwiki.com. Regrettably I've gotten the user name and password mixed up somehow, and I'm unable to get into this site to add to it. I've emailed pbwiki.com for help but still haven't figured out my mistake. I'll keep working on it because I want to add information to it, but I may have to ultimately delete that site and create a new one with a similar name. Nevertheless, I understand the concept.

Update: I was able to figure out the problem with my user name and password myself and have added information to my wiki. I haven't yet figured out how to edit the name of the page, but I'll keep working on it.

Week 7: Item 16

My knowledge of wikis was limited to the Wikipedia, so this exercise was very eye-opening. I love the idea of wikis for library conferences. They would really enhance the experience for conference goers, particularly when visiting an unfamiliar city. It doesn't look as though there are wikis for the Maryland Library Association or even for the Public Library Association annual conference in 2008. I hope they get one going, as I see there's talk on the PLA blog about it.

This category offers many ideas for enhancing libraries. I particularly liked Princeton Public Library's Booklover's Wiki. It was attractive and easy to navigate, and it was a nice combination of staff and customer comments. Library Success wiki is a wonderful site for best practices. I looked at the teen programming since it's especially relevant to my work.

Week 6: Item 15

This section on Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 was one of my favorites. The video by Wesch, "The Machines is Us/ing Us" was very fast-paced and jazzy. I read all the various perspectives on 2.0 and was intrigued by the changes that are here already and those that are just around the corner.

Examples of topics that particularly interested me were: the decline of our traditional print collections, my need to read "OCLC Pattern Recongnition and User Perception" which is sitting in my office, tagging and e-journals for WorldCat, people who are talking about 3.0 and 4.0 and I'm still learning 2.0 (!), the phenominal school library in Michigan with many e-books, TVs, computers, etc. and which has a budget of only $100,000, the capability of checking nearby libraries for materials yours doesn't have (Santa Monica Public Library), OCLC PICA, and the growth of OCLC from its inception, when I knew it, into a mega-database with over 64 million records representing 111 countries and territories. It's all very daunting and exciting.

Week 6: Item 14

Technorati is another useful tool for scuba divers because it's organized by format. Divers like to see videos and photos of sites, besides narrative. It really helps to get a better understanding of what a dive site is really like. Of course there's the usual extraneous and downright silly, useless stuff too. Example: A man posted his video of his cat, Hawkeye, scuba diving. That's right, a cat went scuba diving in his owner's swimming pool. The man created scuba equipment for the cat and and the cat went diving in the pool with the man for over an hour. Crazy...
There is valid and interesting information too, though. I read on Technorati that the world free diving (NO scuba equipment, just using lung capacity) championships were held last week in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, a world class dive site. The winning man has free dived to 112 meters--phenomenal.

Week 6: Item 13

I've learned about Del.icio.us and can see that it would be very useful to use it when I'm on a scuba diving trip and have access to the Internet. There's so much travel information one has to carry in paper form. It's cumbersome and annoying to carry books and printouts. If I use Del.icio.us I could reduce the weight in my suitcase and organize my travel information in a much better format. Good idea!

The explanation about tagging was very good and convincing since, I admit, I was a skeptic at first. I found a site called divesitedirectory that I hadn't seen before. It had very useful information.

Week 5: Item 12

Hah! Things are picking up! I created my own "Red Sea Diving" search engine with Rollyo. I had no idea it was so easy. What a great way to find very relevant sites and group them together. The only trouble is...now I REALLY want to go diving in the Red Sea (sigh).

Week 5: Item 11

I'm fascinated with the whole concept of Library Thing. I went through the site but did not want to sign up for it. I have yet to catalog some books. I think I'll check some participants' sites first to see what they did. More later...

Now that I've had a chance to look at Library Things on other participants' blogs, I decided to sign up and create my own list of scuba books, in keeping with my diving theme. It's great fun! Check out my (albeit short) list at www.librarything.com/catalog/m-ann.

Week 5: Item 10

With some help from a colleague, I created a specialized ticket for diving in Saba. I used ticketgenerator.com because it didn't require a user name or password.

I had looked through the online generator sites and really preferred to created a little scuba avatar. However, I'm somewhat reluctant to do so because of the need to download Java or other software and to sign up via user name and password on specific sites.