WEb Challenge Thing #11 - Facebook

I've been on Facebook for a while. I joined in order to complete the CJRLC Web Challenge last year and have used it to keep in touch with friends and family all over the United States. I was "friended " by my children and some of their friends and really enjoyed seeing their pictures and activities. I also use Facebook to keep up with what some of my peers are doing personally and professionally. I noticed that some of my colleagues distinguish between personal friends and "professional" friends by having more than one presence on Facebook. I think that's a good idea but a lot of work. I agree that there may need to be some boundaries between "public" and "private" life but Facebook and other social networking sites seem to blur that distinction in new and interesting ways.

Web Challenge Thing # 10 - Netlibrary

I found it very easy to create a Netlibrary account. I've used Bartleby and Project Gutenberg before - they are great! I have also explained Netlibrary to college students at Brookdale before and tried to encourage them to use it along with Bartleby and Project Gutenberg both for information and entertainment. I personally do not like to read fiction on the computer. I prefer the feel of a book in my hands and I tend to read at stop lights or other situations in which I find myself waiting. Can't do that with an ebook!

Web Challenge thing #9 - WorldCat

You know, I wonder why we don't use WorldCat more often in filling out our ILL forms? I suppose one reason is that when we are being trained, we are often told that it is best just to tell folks that it will take a minimum of three weeks to get their books but that it usually takes much longer (what seems like an attempt to discourage customers from asking us to ILL something for them). Another reason is that we have customers who insist on filling out the forms themselves - they know what books they want and they may even be able to get the ISBN correct but they may or may not understand the ILL process. I would also venture a guess that most libraries have one person who is the "ILL person" and that person does all the initial quality control work on the ILL forms. Since most of the work of ILL goes on in a centrally located department, I don't think many of us give it much thought - maybe we should!

It was interesting to search WorldCat for one of my older books: Reflections on the Gift of a Watemelon Pickle - a book of poems that some how became very popular at my high school. I think nearly everyone of the girls in my class had a copy - maybe it was being taught in the poetry section of lit. that year? Anyway, it was interesting to see which libraries near my zip code owned it (very few, I think Princeton was the closest).

I also searched for Marjorie Morningstar and was pleased to see that the movie popped up as well as the book, although the book covers didn't seem like the ones I remember from my childhood when MM was considered pretty wild reading.

I don't think I got much out of searching for the Ocean County history but it was interesting to see what libraries owned it.

OCL Tech Challenge Thing #8 LibraryThing

I used to use Librarything but I found it so irritating that I quit. I much prefer GoodReads but I can't really put my finger on why. Having just opened a new membership in LibraryThing, I still prefer Goodreads. Since I already have over 100 books on Goodreads, I'm not going any farther with LibraryThing. I don't want to catalog my books at home. I made a card catalog for my books and my sister's books the summer I was 12 and I don't want to do that kind of thing again. That summer, I read 61 books and wrote reviews of each of them. Maybe that's what Librarything reminds me of.

OCL Tech Challenge Thing #7

First of all, I am not so good at math but I loved experimental design and statistics as taught in the Rutgers Psychology dept. to graduate students. It was a great series of classes and I'd do it again today in a heart beat. When I saw Wolfram-Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com), I was in love, especially when I played with all the non-mathematical things you can do with it - like entering a date and finding out who was born on that date (who knew that Joss Whedon, Alan Turing and Clarence Thomas all had the same birthday?) as well as the information that the dat, June 23, 1988 was 7797 days ago or that the daylight information for my current location (actually Brick but identified as Toms River, NJ) was 15 hours and 1 minute of daylight. You get all of this from just entering the date into the input box! If you enter two stocks, you can compare their P/E ratio, latest trades, market capitalization, revenue, employees, volatility compared to the volatility of the market. I love this! Oh, and you can also use it for statistical analysis, etc. the user interface does take a little getting used to and there are way too many different ways of using the statistical packages to discuss here but I think Wolfram/Alpha is better than sliced bread!

I was somewhat less impressed with Carrot2 which splits the screen when it displays search results so that you see the results in what appears to be some kind of order (but it is hard to tell what kind) on one side and a "vizualization" of the results as a tree structure on the other side. The tree structure shows how many hits are in each of several categories. I searched for my younger sister who owns a book store in Durango, CO and writes for newspapers on the Left Coast and I also searched for algae farms, the future of biofuel! It is nice that you can search different tabs (sources) such as PubMed or Yahoo or MSN to get news and other sources.

I liked Worio a lot better than Carrot2. I'm not sure I understand exactly how the results are ordered but I did like searching for algae farms and finding links to the home pages of companies who are in the algae farming business. That saved another search or two!

OCL Tech Challenge Thing #6

I tried using the Power Search features. I've just finished putting together a PowerPoint for Beginners class for use at the Brick Branch of the Ocean County Library System and I'm working on the final touches for an Excel for Beginners class. I wanted to see what I could find on Excel in ppt. I found a presentation with great content about Excel but which broke all of the rules for use of color and background that I had emphasized in my PPT presentation! How ironic. But the Excel presentation is worth knowing about as an example I can show to folks in the PowerPoint class of how badly selecting a busy background and colors that are not visible to color-blind folks and which are only too visible to everybody else can be. (Whew - need to edit that sentence! But you know what I mean.)

It seems to me that Power Search is so simple, I'm surprised everyone doesn't know how to use it. I think librarians would find it to be particularly effective if they were teaching a Google class to middle school or high school students - that's the audience I think would find this most valuable!

Tech Challenge Thing #5 - Read article by Pogue and try new Google applications

I sort of got off track while doing this. First, I read the article and I liked it so much, I decided to share it on Facebook. Then I went to Google Labs but on the way there, I stopped to change the number of folks I could see on the Chat list because I thought I'd want to see more people since I thought I would use SMS text messaging in Google Chat with my two sons who are texters not talkers. As long as I was going down the list of Google Aps, I decided to fix it so that next time I go on vacation, my away message will have a start date and an end date that I set before I even go so that I don't have to in and turn the away message off. It really puzzled people that I said I was away from my desk for a while because my desk is in my family room. I do a lot of work there but not much of it is related to my job(s) which actually are in fixed physical locations outside of my house. But I'm Old School and my away message reflects that, I guess. So then I thought I'd enter some things in Google Calendar. I entered everything for next week and a couple of things for the following week. I enabled pictures in Chat by I noticed that there are only two people on my Chat list who actually have pictures that they've enabled. No matter, the rest of the world will either do that or they won't. I also wanted to be able to have Google Search immediately handy while I'm reading my email and I wanted to be able to see YouTube previews in email. I haven't gotten to Google Sketchup which I really wanted to try. I have had the experience of using Google voice - I called my older son on my cell phone at his Google Voice number. I don't know if it was my phone or his computer, but I could hear my voice coming out of the microphone on his MAC and it seemed harder to carry on a conversation when I could hear myself with a little delay. I also didn't get to Google.org/flutrends which I was interested in because I saw on the news at noon that a lot of the nation's school districts are practically shut down with the flu. At any rate, everything I tried worked great. I'm not sure I'll keep up with Google Calendar because I have a paper calendar at home and one in my purse and it is hard enough to keep them in sync without adding a third :)