Friday, April 25, 2008

New Initiatives

We had a good SELCO board meeting Wednesday night. I received my "23 things on a stick" flash drive, and my name was drawn out of the hat for a DVD player. That was a cool surprise! There was good discussion about the new Strategic Plan for the consortium. I'm particularly excited about the Teen programming component. We also decided to go ahead and take a serious look at creating a new catalog utilizing Endeca.

Endeca is a great product used by a lot of large e-commerce companies. I'm glad everyone seems excited about it, but I think we still need to take a look at the alternatives as well. Solr is a similar open source project that is used by a lot of large e-commerce companies as well. It's not as slick as Endeca, but I think it is worth a look as well. Here are some links if anyone is curious.

Here is a list of sites using it for their guided navigation/search.
http://wiki.apache.org/solr/PublicServers

There are some pretty big sites in that list.
http://reviews.cnet.com/
http://shopper.cnet.com/
http://www.netflix.com/
http://www.archive.org/

I do see some libraries in the list as well.
http://deweybrowser.oclc.org/ddcbrowser2/
http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/index.html
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/resndev/blacklight.html
http://siris-collections.si.edu/search/results.jsp

I also think we should be looking at AquaBrowser as well. They are a more library specific company. They've built a lot of the social aspects into their product. They do things like import LibraryThing tags and reviews, and allow patrons to do tagging, reviewing, and networking. Definitely worth a serious look. Plenty of libraries in their list of customers.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Thing 23. Final Thoughts

This was a good experience. It was a lot more time consuming than I was expecting. I definitely can tell I spent more time on the early things. I did learn quite a bit, especially about the more library specific sites. I definitely plan to play more with LibraryThing.

Thing 22. What Did I Learn Today?

I'm constantly learning new things about technology, that's the nature of having a tech job. What I don't generally do, is ask myself how the library might use whatever I'm looking at. I think about what it can do for the business I work for. So my resolution is to make a conscious effort to start thinking more about how the things I run across could have an application in the library setting.

Thing 21. Beyond MySpace: Other Social Networks

There are a lot of social networking sites out there. I use meetup.com to keep in touch with the MN MySQL User Group. I use Linked-in to keep track of my former co-workers and colleagues, here is my profile. I notice from my Linked-in connections that a couple of my former co-workers are now in charge of operations at Ning. They are definitely smart people, no wonder Ning has such a great architecture.

Thing 20. Libraries and Social Networks

Facebook and MySpace, I can understand the attraction. They combine a lot of things you used to have to get ala carte. Web space, blog, BBS, IM, its all there. You used to have to get each one of those things individually. MySpace has been used a lot for marketing, especially in the music business. Here is an example. I don't see why you couldn't do the same sort of thing to market your library.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Thing 19. Podcasts

I regularly listen to podcasts. I pull a lot of them down from public radio. Two of my favorites are Wait Wait Don't Tell Me from NPR, and Musicheads from MPR's new music station, The Current. I use Juice to download my podcasts automatically.

One way podcasts could be used in the library would be setting up a podcasting booth. I think that would be a great way to engage teens by enabling them to create content at the library. It wouldn't have to be anything too fancy. A PC with a microphone, audacity, and an internet connection. A booth to put it in that has decent acoustics, preferably something that could be setup and taken down easily.

Thing 18. YouTube & Other Online Video

Zombies in Plain English

I really got a kick out this movie. It is both entertaining and informative. I think it really displays how YouTube can be used as a reference in the library. I could also see libraries using YouTube to upload video of various events that happen at the library, or to promote upcoming events.

Thing 17. ELM Productivity Tools

I must admit I haven't used ELM much, so this was a good introduction for me. I really like the NetLibrary, but the books appear to be a bit out of date, at least the tech books are. I didn't know you could do so much with EBSCO. I will definitely be revisiting these resources.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Thing 16. Student 2.0 Tools

The two tools in this Thing seem useful. I especially like how the University of Minnesota Assignment Calculator brought together resources from many other colleges. I would have found this quite useful in college for keeping me on track. I was always the procrastinator who ended up cramming most of an assignment in the night before it was due.

Thing 14. LibraryThing

I thought Library Thing was pretty fun. I just might put my whole collection there. I did have a couple issues though. I had some time-outs when adding books. It is also buggy under Firefox.

I could see libraries using this as a place to put lists of new books. It would then be easy to add the feed to their website. Similar to the widget I added to this blog.

My library is here.

Friday, April 4, 2008

Thing 15. Online Games and Libraries

I decided to skip ahead to Thing 15 because its relevant to what I am doing tonight. I am blogging from the Plainview Public Library as I help chaperone one of their GameFest nights. There are 28 kids ages 12-18 here tonight. Some are playing the Magic: The Gathering card game. Some are on the computers playing Runescape or armorgames.com. There is also a PS3 hooked up to a projector that they are playing Rock Band on. There are 2 other TV's set up with gaming consoles. Lots of fun is being had.

Plainview has had a very successful gaming program. Along with the GameFest nights, they have had various video game tournaments and are about to do another Dungeons & Dragons class. Alice went to the TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium last year and came back with a lot of new ideas, especially for family gaming and intergenerational gaming. The rumor is that its going to be in Chicago again this year, but November instead of July. We'll have to keep an eye on the website to confirm that.

So, on to the actual assignment. I did Puzzle Pirates, pretty fun but I'm still more of a Runescape person.

Thing 13. Online Productivity Tools

I have setup iGoogle. I don't login to it very often. Mostly just if I'm somewhere and don't have a laptop with me, or am on my ultra-portable PC. It gives a decent starting/aggregation point for the resources I use the most. I can see at as good resource for someone that doesn't have a PC at home and uses mainly library computers.

This is a bit of a re-hash of previous blog posts, but I think the Google calendar app is awesome. You can read Thing 9 to find out how I use it. Plainview Public Library uses it within their website as their events calendar. I think that is one of the great applications for a library. I do have a Remember The Milk login, but I rarely use it. The Google calendar does SMS to/from my cell phone, so I don't really need the other one any more.

I also subscribe to the Lifehacker RSS feed. They are constantly reviewing GTD apps and posting productivity hints. They are a great resource for that sort of thing.

Thing 12. Do You Digg?

Nope, I don't. I don't have anything against it, I just don't use these services. The amount of information I get from the Internet already feels like drinking from a fire hose. Also, these sites can be to much of a time waster for me. I was looking at reddit and pulled me into a 20 minute tangent reading Dilbert, and about movie sequels that were so bad they damaged the original. Not sure about the library application, but definitely can be cheap entertainment.