Week 7 #16

I find it hard to see the point of a lot of these wikis. Wikipedia is a good example of what librarians are here to prevent – the dissemination of maybe wrong/maybe right or downright bad information. One of the things that we stress constantly in helping people use the computers is to find a TRUSTED source. The Wikis for information may or may not be trustworthy. And, the SJCPL seems to me to be totally useless. If you are computer literate enough to navigate through the wiki (for example to get to the tax forms) then you are computer literate enough to simply do a search using a search engine. Why go through more clicking? The Book Lovers Wiki from Princeton is another case in point. How do we know whether the person doing the review even read the book? Many of the reviews sound like cobblings from amazon.com. I think this goes back to what I said earlier; I don’t have time to read things my friends suggest, much less strangers.

I did like the Library Success wiki since it is a specific forum for a specific group to share ideas and we can always stand to look at new ideas. I think a system-wide wiki on ideas for bulletin boards, posters, reference, etc., would be nice except that (as has already been mentioned during the reference meetings) no one has the extra time that would be needed to setup and maintain it. And (as has also been said) each library is different in time, space and money restraints (although I think we all share the not enough of any of the three) as well as in patron demographics so what works at one may not work at another. I can see the point of specific group wikis to share information among a related group but I still don’t see the point of general wikis.

Week 6 #15

Library 2.0. I think that it means we change to meet the needs of the community. And the quote from our lesson, "libraries have always been 2.0: collaborative, customer friendly and welcoming" is definitely not true. I think that the public concept of libraries (and to a great extent, librarians) is more of a bank that holds the information as opposed to a store where they can come get information. Some libraries are customer friendly and welcoming, but there are still libraries that are not welcoming and there are still a lot of librarians who want to withhold information more than they want to disseminate it.

Of course, one of the problems (as noted by others) is that the library is different things to different people. One of the problems we have at ours is that to be more welcoming to teens and kids means that a lot of our adult customers feel estranged. People who want to use the library for a quiet refuge are out of luck because our library is more of a community center. We cannot be all things to all people. At our library we offer computer classes but because of space restraints they are out in the library proper - so although we are providing a service for those wanting to learn, we are not providing a service for patrons who want some peace. I think that patrons (as well as librarians) need to understand that there will always be time, money and space restraints. The successful library is the one that juggles these restraints successfully.

Week 6 #14

I think I might have to kick and scream a little.

This section is another one that I don't really get. For example, the first exercise (take a look at Technorati and try doing an advanced search by typing "Learning 2.0" as a keyword search in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?) - yes, the results are different but a lot of them are the same - NOT related to Learning 2.0! I think this goes back to the last post - we really, really need structure.

And one other thing I found, which is not surprising but definitely worth noting - is that so many of the people blogging (90% is a conservative estimate) having nothing to say and can't say it in an interesting way.

What did these people do before they were not communicating well via internet? Watch TV is my guess.

Week 6 #13

I'm not sure about this "delicious" thing. I can see that for an individual to make their own tag for their own use, it makes sense; but the problem comes with "tagging is completely unstructured and freeform, allowing users to create connections between data anyway they want" - we at HCPL have already experienced this "free form" type of thing when anyone was allowed to put items into the catalog and it became a nightmare. I don't know about the rest of the world, but Americans do not seem to do well with "unstructured." In fact, the beginning problems are talked about (changing cooking, cook, cooks to one word: cook) but the implications are ignored. I think the internet has already proven to us that more information needs stricter guidelines, not looser.

Week 5 #12

The reminder Elf is a great service - I think that most people check their emails regularly (as opposed to their library accounts) so they would see that they need to do something and it organizes everything so nicely. I particularly appreciate that I can add the cards for the entire family and see everything at once as opposed to having to go to three different accounts. Very nice!

Week 5 #11

I'm not back to kicking and screaming but this exercise made no sense to me until I read the part where you can access it on your cell phone and see if you own the book - this one thing makes it all worthwhile - I cannot tell you how many times I've seen a book on sale and could NOT remember if I had it. I do have to say that I see no value to it otherwise but I think this is a personality thing because I prefer to interact with live people in person as opposed to sharing thoughts with strangers that I don't know and will never meet.

See what I like to read:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/gbonefas

Week 5 #10

OK - I've decided to go into the 21st century with no kicking now that I've found an avatar to kick for me! This was the best yet. I love the avatars and would still be dressing mine if we didn't keep having to open the doors to the patrons. And the different text styles are SO COOL - my displays are going to go up a notch now, although I may never get another one done since I have several million fonts to choose from.

My avatar was generated at http://avatars.yahoo.com/

Week 4 #9

Well, I think I'm back to kicking and screaming. I explored Feedster, Topix, Syndic8 and Technorati and thought that all of them were equally confusing to use. Particularly on Technorati - first it defaults to "All" which gives you an array of information that is too general, then when you click "Entertainment" you get way too much information on Britney Spears, which frankly isn't entertaining. I bypassed "Technology" "Sports" and "Business" since I know nothing about any of them but I did take a peak at "Politics" which should probably be labeled "Entertainment" so that no one confuses it with real life.

I don't really see the point of these search tools - I would think that the easiest thing to do would be to go to a site (news or otherwise) that you like and RSS from there - or mention to friends that you are interested in certain topics and they can send you links.

Week 4 #8 RSS Feeds

Not being a big fan of reading on the computer, I never thought I'd be doing this, but now that I have I'm really glad. I love Aaron Elkins and he has a "whenever he feels like it" blog and I have wasted a lot of time going to see if he's posted anything new, but now I'll automatically get updates! Yea! I guess I'm going to be dragged into the 21st century kicking and screaming but maybe a little less loudly now.