Thing 20

YouTube. I had heard about this, but hadn't really looked at it before. I spent a great of time. I looked up different kind of libraries. I found a very good video for the Columbus, Nebraska public library. It was a great intro to their services, but I have a feeling that the person who made it is a great graphic artist. Others were just a mish/mash of pictures. They were entertaining but it would be harder for someone not familiar with the library to get the information they needed. There were some good intro videos for academic libraries also. I think it would be great to have a video on YouTube for a library, maybe linked to the library's web page. I looked up some instructional vidoes. There were some on the Dewey Decimal System which would be useful for a school library. Now I am wondering about how this works with copyright, especially after I noticed a Sesame Street clip on the library. This could also be useful to place instructional videos for the library. Also videos of library activities could be placed on YouTube for participants to watch. I think there are lots of possibilities.
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More Thing 18

Today I worked on the second part of the Wiki assignment. It was easy to go to Wetpaint and create a new page. I had trouble adding pages until I read the comments section of the lesson and realized that I needed unique names for my subpages. After that it was a piece of cake. I couldn't add pictures from my laptop. I had a message that the pictures were too big. I can see how Wikis could be useful for libraries and classrooms.
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Thing 18

Wikis
The activity was very interesting for me. I worked a few hours a week with an 8th grade student last school with technology. And Wikipedia was a big battle. His teachers wanted him to use the library data bases for research but he, of course, wanted to use Wikipedia. In his defense, he uses the JAWS screen reader and it was easier for him to to directly to an article Wikipedia than wade through the schoolweb site to find what he needed. And I would find myself going to Wikipedia if we needed to find some bit of information quickly. I did try to explain to him that since anyone cancontribute to Wikipedia, the information may not be valid or as complete as other reference sources. I do not remember the discussion boards or history page. The article on time travel stated that this was a controversial topic that may be under dispute and that substantial changes should be posted on the discussion page with citations. It didn't occur to me that time travel would be be in that category. I looked up Margaret Sanger, who I expected to be controversial. The article itself said that it might contain misinterpreted or inappropriate citations which might not verify the text This was very interesting. It was intersting to see what was written in the discussions for the articles. It shows that the people contributing may have some very strange ideas. The article on braille, which isn't a very controversial topic, had some discussions on whether or not occult symbols were languages. Since braille is an alphabet, not a language that makes the discussion even more weird. I will have to work on creating a wiki tomorrow, Torchwood calls!
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Thing 17

LibWorm was also fun. It was an easy way to find blogs and other web based info. I searched for disabilities. The first lisiting was a guide to ADA, which would be very useful for libraries. Searching for braille produced "Graffati: Art, Vandalism, or Information". I didn't think that blog would actually have anything about braille. I was wrong. It had a video about a braille graffati project in Oregon. I didn't find anything on disabilities or braille when searching catagories. the categories were useful for broad topics like schools or medical libraries. The subjects were broader. I choose audiobooks. A blog on the Unconference at ALA had a comment that libaries will need to do a better job of providing digital media if they want to keep adolescent patrons, which is very true. I found the tags harder to use to find info on disabilities or accessible media. So I choose the tag on children. I found on a blog that Philip Pullman is objecting to having criminal background checks on visiting authors. Anthony Browne, however, feels that writers shouldn't object. However, he did object to the cost of 64 pounds. The tags in alphabetical order were easier to search even though there are lots of them. And that probably defeats the purpose of tags. The other arrangements made the most used tags the most prominant, which seems to fit the goal of tags more. I searched for braille, but none of the entries were in English.
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Thing 16

I love LibraryThing even though I had problems finding thingLang, MARCThing, and ISBNCheck. I finally found them in the Thing-ology Blog after I was sure I had already searched there. LibraryThing will be great for keeping track of my own personal books. I will use the reviews Major issues when I was an elementary school librarian were entering materials in the catalog. ISBN numbers were a problem and half my colection was not in English. So thingLang and ISBN CHeck would be really useful. MARCThing sounds very useful. And the fact that they are giving it to libraries is great. I signed up for the group "Librarians who Library Thing". They had great topics. The postings on strange requests from patrons had me laughing out loud. I entered 3 of my latest book purchases, it was super easy. I wondered how it would do with older books. I have a book from 1917 and it was entered just as quickly. I checked the statistics on the book and I seem to be the only member with a copy of it. The cover picture didn't appear, but I can live with that. I am going to buy one of their bar code readers. This was a fun site.

Thing 15

I checked out Digg. I didn't subscribe because I seemed to have subscibed to an awful lot of things at the moment. I had some topics I was interested in but they seemed to be soo obscure. I don't know if the trouble is with me or the site. I enjoyed exploring the general topics. "Ten Bizzare Things to do on Vacation" was funny as well as one on the business lessons to be learned from Monty Python. I also found some interesting websites 109.com and an online magazine called Seed. I also didn't find the number of digs useful. However, like tagging, this may have some value in that the most useful thing for the biggest number of people will rise to the surface. I was interested that the magazine sites I read used tagging.

Thing 14

So I signed up for Delicious and added it to my toolbar. I also used Delicious to find a website and I subscribed to it. I think that Delicious will be useful to help keep track of bookmarks. I haven't had a chance to try it on another computer, but I think this will be great. I think I'll use it to find othe websites people recommend on my favorite topics. However, when I searched for a topic I was interested in I did find websites on that topic. I also was directed to websites whose first words were apparently my topic but the rest of the title was "refinance your mortage". This website was listed multiple times. This is a disadvantage.
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Thing 13

I consulted with my daughter, the MLS student after reading Wikipedia, because I felt like I needed to get my money's worth from tuition payments. She felt that the advantange that tagging uses an uncontroled vocabulary and that is the way the world is heading. However, the disadvantage is that tagging uses an uncontrolled vocabulary. Since tags use natural language these are words people think of. People don't always know what words to use with controlled vocabulary. I can vouch for the fact that children had lots of problems with subject headings. However, I think tags would have been even more confusing for them. Our consensus wat that tagging does get the library users involved and accesible but a controlled vocabulary is also needed.
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Vacation

I've been away from my blog and 23 Things since we were on vacation. We visited friends in family in El Paso and had a great time. Sitting on my friends patio watching rainstorms in the distance and the fireworks on the 4th were great. And she has the world's cutest grandchild, who is fifteen months old and came to visit from Arizona. We even went to the old fashioned Fourth of July parade. Visiting my brother on the other side of town was also great. It was also a great time to think about technology. My nephew, the high school government teacher, has 2 TVs in his den. Not that television shows were ever watched. They were for games. I alwaysthought videogames were isolating. However, the visiting children, who were 2,3, 4, 6, 7, and 8, sat in a group in front of the games watching even though only a couple were actually playing at a time. Having grown children and no grandchildren I hadn't seen this before. Of course my nephew has a laptop and my husband and brother-in-law had his. However, they were always in use so I couldn't do 23 Things. Okay, they weren't in use when we were playing cards but I wasn't going to miss that. So now I need to get back to work on the things.
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