Number 10

I am on assignment number 10; the end is in sight.

This assignment seemed to have clumped together a wide array of things, some of which we had touched on earlier. I did, however, use our library as the jumping off point for visiting and revisiting the various sites. I needed an excuse to re-watch that absolutely hilarious video of our staff attempting to sing a tribute song about the Indianapolis Colts. [Aside: Ana deserved a raise for getting that group to the point of almost carrying a tune.] And it was a little scary to discover that all of those cable TV blurbs we agree to do under pressure on the occasional Thursday morning live on forever on the Internet.

The online ask-a-librarian-your-question was an interesting experience. I spent a lot of time waiting, not knowing if I was still connected to the librarian or not, since there were long, long gaps with no "chat" occurring. As it turned out, my question was a real one (it relates to a project I am working on at the library) and the librarian unfortunately didn't find anything additional for me. I was hoping for the proverbial killing of two birds with one stone (a rather grisly saying, if you think about it), since I could in theory fulfill my assignment and get info for my project, but alas and alack, my hopes were in vain.

I will continue to think about what we should be doing at the library with all these cool new tools.

More Books

I'm a Luddite, and I admit it. For the Social Media blah-blah thing, I really just did things about books. I like Goodreads, and even joined a group (I can get the messages as a digest, for which I am eternally grateful). My reading list is short: http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1405950?shelf=%23ALL%23
I suppose it would be longer if I weren't turning into a couch potato because of, ironically enough, the Olympics.

The Goodreads site seems to have more functionality than the Visual Bookshelf, which I joined through Facebook, and the discussion groups are cool. I was disappointed that the assignment wasn't for LibraryThing, which intrigues me, but c'est la vie. I do like it that the group I'm in is made up of parents and teachers, as far as I can tell. It's a different forum in which to discuss kids' books. In terms of a library application for this, Goodreads certainly offers more than functionality than Innovative reading history does. Maybe we should have it pop up as an option for our users, linked to their account somehow. Fortunately, I don't work in IT and don't have to figure out how this could happen.

Welcome to Wikis

The world of wikis is larger than I expected. I visited a bunch of them, but my favorite was http://childrensbookreview.pbwiki.com. Having retained my previous lessons, I of course bookmarked this site on my del.icio.us page. I also saw a cool children's literature wiki out of the University of Calgary, and the ChildLit wiki, which has a "what do I read next" type feature.

I also made an entry in the Tapestry of Freedom Wiki and found it to be surprisingly easy. The features that allowed me to underline, etc., were very windows-y and intuitive.

I'm not sure I see this as being as useful a tool for our library as some of the others we've learned about, but if we do use it then the Tapestry project, as a community event, was a good application. In terms of trying something new and exploring the virtual world, I'm still glad we had this assignment.