I can't believe I actually finished!!!

Seriously, I never though I'd actually finish. I did most of it on my long weekend working, many times between customers. But its done. Hurrah!

Here is what I've learned - I have learned that if you're really going to do this right, you need much more time. You could take a class on each topic. Like for instance - Zoho. I loved this - absolutely thought Zoho was the most brilliant thing I'd ever heard of - but I did not have hardly any time to really learn about it. I will try to go back and play around with it more and really learn enough so that I can feel comfortable offering it to customers, but right now I don't feel quite ready to do that.

There was just so much information packed all together- especially if you did it like I did - got way behind and then did like 4 weeks all at once when you finally finished all those "#%@*" performance management evaluations- that it will be hard to retain it all. I think it would be more effective to have an online training class about one or two specific things and you would set aside the actual training time so you don't feel rushed (as I always did).

It was very valuable information (and fun many times) but I definitely felt much more time was needed than one hour a week. But overall, I will come away knowing about Zoho and a whole lot more about photo manipulators and weird generators than I did before - and a lot of other stuff as well. It was worth it.

As far as life-long learning and how it has helped - It has made me more comfortable just playing around with all different types of technology - and has made me realize if I just click enough links I will eventually find the one that works to put the RSS feed into my blog. :-)

I'm glad I took the course, and yes, I would take others like it if they were offered in the future.

Overdrive

I have actually been using Overdrive for ages. Because I am in Popular at Main and we have the only 2 downloadable sites in the entire library system for Overdrive, I am very familiar with it. I've taken several training courses through Overdrive on troubleshooting for customers, etc. and I find it to be very very user-friendly. The one thing I don't like about Overdrive is they will not deal directly with customers, only with a library. So if a customer calls me with an issue, I then have to email Overdrive, get the answer, and email it back to the customer. I do not understand why they won't deal directly with customers. But whatever, its still great.

Books on the Nightstand - Podcasts

First - Podcast Alley - I found one about books that I liked the look of. http://feeds.feedburner.com/BOTNSPodcast is the link to this podcast. I don't really understand this one either. I couldn't get the thing I needed to download but then I wasn't sure if I even needed to and I hope just putting this link in is good enough.

Just in case it isn't, I went to Odeo and tried again. Here I found something that looked interesting to an armchair traveler - http://feeds.feedburner.com/AmateurTravelerPodcastItunesEnhanced - this time I was able to load it to my blog as an RSS feed - but could not attach it to this specific post. It is in my blog, however, the links don't seem to work. I am clearly not doing something right.

YouTube- Library Karaoke

I use Youtube all the time - I find it a very useful tool for .... what ? .... laughter I suppose. The video clip I used was actually taken at my house 2 years ago and has fellow librarians doing x-box karaoke. They had no idea of course, that their singing would end up on YouTube. I didn't either. That was the first time I even realized that you could just post little videos up for the entire world to see. Oh, we've come so far.
Here's the clip:

More digital photos

I actually chose Picasa from the list, which is a photo sharing, organizing, and manipulating site. The thing I like about Picasa is that you make it so that every picture you load to the computer goes directly to Picasa. I have a Flickr acct but I have to put everything first to my computer and then from there to Flickr. I don't know what the difference is, but every picture I load to my computer goes directly to Picasa, w/o any middle step. It displays photos so well - so much better than just the normal computer storage. Picasa has a lot of options for 'bettering' photos
like get rid of scratches, red-eye, cropping, etc. You can turn your photos into movies, collages, slideshows and other things. The photo sharing is so much easier and better than other accounts like Flickr, which you have to pay for beyond a certain number and the organization of the photos just can't be beat. In fact, I'm not sure why I even use Flickr when I consider Picasa so much better. I guess just b/c most people I know have Flickr and not Picasa.
So I guess my favorite part of this Web 2.0 thing was playing around with the pictures in different places. I did LOVE using all the photo generator stuff in Flickr so I guess that's better for that.

Zoho So Wonderful

Ok, I've finally discovered something that I will actually use and embrace and try to get customers to use. This is amazing. I had never heard that this even existed. If I understand correctly, there would be no use for floppy discs that the customers never have anyway. I just can't say enough about how thrilled I am to discover this and honestly I can't understand why anybody would ever do things the old way again. I am going to show all our customers working on resumes and everything else that this is the best way to go.

Sandbox Wiki

There is clearly something wrong with me. I am just not interested. I added my blog to the sandbox w/o many problems but I'm just not interested in reading everybody's else's favorites - or my own for that matter. I have come to the realization that all this stuff is too complicated for me. Is it really necessary to post your favorites everywhere? Does anybody really care?

Wikis

I feel like I'm just saying the same thing over and over but again, Idon't really get it. I LOVE Wikipedia-I use it all the time. However, I don't understand how these examples they gave us is really the same thing.
The first thing I did was go straight for the Book Lovers Wiki - but when I clicked on contemporary lit it just had one huge list in alphabetical order. I would have liked it if there was some order by year published as well b/c there were books that were published 10 years ago beside ones that were published yesterday. Then I went to the Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki and this makes a little more sense to me - I think it might be very helpful for programming ideas - IF enough libraries contribute. I can definitely see the benefit for coming up with programming ideas.

Icebergs ahead

The article that made the most impact on me was Rick Anderson's "Away from the icebergs". In fact, it sort of freaked me out. I can't help thinking that sooner or later there will just be too much and the web... the google internet machine.... something... will just crash. And I know thats crazy but it still seems like its eventually going to happen. Rick Anderson says this specifically "Crazy as this may sound, the time has come for us to look skeptically at the very idea of a library “collection.” He says that his library has had a 55% decrease in circulation over the past 12 years and that everybody expects everything to be available online now. He says that it "no longer makes sense to collect information products as if they were hard to get."

It drives me crazy now that when the computers go down for a day we tell stories about somebody actually 'using a book' to find the answer to a reference question as if its an urban legend or something. But that is apparently what things are coming to. Rick Anderson also says that we can no longer expect customers to come to us - we must come to them - whether virtually or otherwise. Ugh. I hate the idea of this. And its not that I want to go back to a time when we had to actually pull multiple reference books just to find a specific poem for a customer - but the satisfaction was definitely much much sweeter then just typing a line into google and having the answer pop up immediately. So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm wistful for the past way of doing things and wary of the future (but hopeful as well) when it comes to libraries.

Technorati

More and more with this, I feel like I'm doing the exact same thing - just going about it from a different angle. Technorati is useful for searching and categorizing blogs if you want to read blogs about certain subjects. It has easy search capabilites and yet when I would type in a particular topic, I kept getting all kinds of completely unrelated things as well. But if you have a desire to read a bunch of blogs on one particular topic, I suppose Technorati is your man.

Del.icio.us AND fat-free

I don't know - again, I don't really get it. It seemed like a lot of the links were outdated and/or dead. I do understand how it could be useful for the library in theory, but in reality I just don't think I will use it. However, I did enjoy very much seeing the photo show of the librarian action figure. That was v. entertaining.

Jaxcat gadget

Well, I added it. Not sure why I want it on my blog but whatever. I do see how it could be useful to us if other places, companies, etc had it on their website, but how do you convince everybody they need it on their website?

Snowglobe generator

This is one of those Urbismus oatmeal paste paintings on the side of a building. I used it b/c I thought it already looked as though the people were trekking through the snow.

This was fun. As always I love any of the image generators. Here is the link to the actual generator: http://www.glassgiant.com/snowglobes/

Library Thing

I have dutifully added Library Thing to my blog. However, I have no intention of using it as I've been using Shelfari now for awhile and I really like it. They seem pretty similar and since I already have Shelfari and have an established bunch of friends on that, I'll stick with that. Here's the link to my Library Thing page: http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=alishal

RSS Feeds - part 2

I'm not really sure what exactly I'm supposed to be doing different for the 2nd part than I did for the first - but I did find just using the seach box in bloglines as the most efficient search method for me.
I found a site I probably actually will use called The Planet Esme Plan: Best New Children's Books From Esme. I'm always looking for ways to find new books for my children and Esme is the Esme from the book Educating Esme, which I was have read and so was familiar with. Anyway so I added that to my feed.

RRS Feeds

Arrrgggghhhhhhh! This almost drove me insane. I hate things that ask for your username when you know full well you did not put in a username because all it asked for was your email address and a password. That one only took me half an hour to figure out.

I can see how this would be useful to people who go to the same news sites and read every single day. For someone like me, who 'remembers' to read the news like once a week, its really going to pile up and get annoying. Its one of those things where I can see the use for it, but I won't ever really use it myself. Anyway, here is the link to mine: http://www.bloglines.com/public/alishal

Technology or what I know of it...

I love technology. I love all the new things you can do with pictures online, I love having email and cell phones and IPODs. I love Shelfari - finally an alternative to dozens of little pieces of paper with book titles I want to read strewn all about. I love Tivo (or whatever its called now). I used to have to watch commercials- - the horror.
I guess what I love so much about technology and why I'm always willing to embrace the newest thing is that I can remember what it was like to not have it. I remember working a job w/o email and I remember when email was only internal like on some company server and it didn't go outside the company. I resisted the whole cell phone thing for ages. In August 1999, I was 7 months pregnant and I had a flat tire. Then I saw the reason for a cell phone! I can remember spending hours and hours making the perfect mixed tape for my car. Now its just click click click and there's the perfect playlist. Technology makes everything easier and it connects people faster. I find it fascinating. Do I understand it? Not really. But I also have never really understood how electricity works or what makes planes stay in the air and I certainly embrace that.
Here is my favorite thing though - maps online. I LOVE mapquest. Every time I travel from branch to branch, I do a mapquest just to see if there are any new roads open or whatever. I would say that I use mapquest at least 3 times a week, which is sort of weird - but its true. (And way more than that if I include using it for customers.) And I love mapmyrun.com to see how far a certain run route is. I love that. You used to have to get in your car and drive the route to see how far you were running. Now you just click on the route and it keeps totaling it up as you keep clicking. Brilliant!
A lot of things about technology are sort of vague and foggy to me though. Like how exactly does html work? I just don't get it. And why won't Outlook let us delete emails that we send? It has to ask permission to recall the email from the person you sent it to. Hello, the whole point is I don't want them to read it. Twitter makes no sense to me. Facebook is very confusing - its all jittery like myspace on redbull or something. And its very hard to keep up with all the new stuff but I guess as librarians, that's our job - and its usually fun -so that works.

Bead This Warholizer

I picked 'Bead This' to use and uploaded a pic of a clematis flower in my backyard. I love all the applications that turn things into drawing or sketch-looking things. It ended up looking a little dark which is surprising b/c the pic itself is v. bright.

I also used the Warholizer on a picture of my son. I really loved how this turned out as it is one of my favorite subjects to photograph and look at. :-)

Hearts in Nature

JPL2
Originally uploaded by grimaceshaped

This is a picture from the photography contest we did in Popular at Main. I had so much fun creating the photo categories, working on the contest, talking with the photographers, publicizing the event, judging the photos, and hosting the opening reception. The entire thing was such an enriching and educational experience.
This particular photo is of the winners from the 'Hearts in Nature' category, which was my favorite. It is amazing how many things form 'hearts' in nature and otherwise. I have found at least 5 perfect hearts in tar splashed on sidewalks and they are everywhere in leaves and flowers. Once you start noticing them, you realize they are everywhere.

7 1/2 Lifelong Learning Habits

'Play' will be the easiest for me b/c I feel that is what I am always doing. I try to be open to every new experience and I am always willing to explore. I have 2 small children and frequently we will spend an entire afternoon blowing bubbles or trying to catch bugs or making paper flowers, or doing any of the countless other things that fascinate children. Any new experience that presents itself, I am willing to try. (Every time we go to Disney the kids always get their faces painted so I decided to try it the last time and I loved it!)




'Teaching or mentoring' will be the hardest for me b/c I am just not a teacher. I have gotten better over the years just because I have children and must teach them things but I tend to always teach 'down', where I talk to the person like they're an idiot or I do the exact opposite and assume they know everything and just gloss over main points. I also do not have much patience so that makes teaching hard as well. This is something that I will have to continually work on.