It's alive!! It's Ah Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiivvvvvvvvvve!

Not to get all mushy and inspired, but sometimes you just remember why you wanted to be here in the first place.

A young patron comes in and asked if we had Dr. Dre-the Biography. I said we did have the book, but it was checked out.

"It's checked in elsewhere in the system. I can put it on hold and it should be here for you in three to five days."

"Okay. Sure. Do you have any other biographies like that?"

"I've got 46 in the county. Did you want just what's here, what's in?"

"Yeah, just what's in the building."

"Okay. I've got thirteen here."

"Wow. Could I see that? I didn't think you have those kind of books. [about Rap performers] Where are they?"Then I showed him where they were. Whoooooo hooooooooo!!! Seriously, that sent a jolt like a triple espresso in a brewed cup of coffee right through my veins.

(And even though I have no personal desire to read ANY of those books, it's just an emotional rush to have them here and be able to surprise a patron who wanted one. [No doubt for a school assignment, but even that doesn't matter. We had the books!])

What are you reading over and over?

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users(as of 10/2/07). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Underline those on your to-read list. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
*Crime and Punishment
*Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
*Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
The Odyssey
*Pride and Prejudice
*Jane Eyre
*A Tale of Two Cities
*The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
*Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
*Great Expectations
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein--I've tried reading this more than once, but I couldn't finish it any of the times.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
*The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
*Sense and Sensibility
*The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
*The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
*Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
*Slaughterhouse-Five
*The Scarlet Letter
*Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
*Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
*Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
*The Hobbit
White Teeth
*Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

#26 Reflections of a Chocolate Bunny & 27--One more Thing

3169_ChocBunny "I'm thinking, '27 Things, but
at least no one bit off my ears!'"
Originally uploaded by YorickWell.

Ah, I remember that Learning 2.0 project, 27 things to learn and play. In terms of affecting my lifelong learning goals, I couldn't say that it has, because I'm always looking to learn new and amazing technologies--at the level of playing.

As in, "What do you play?"

"Oh, I play the cassette player; I play the MP3 player; I play the CD player." (I actually play the guitar as well, but that's a litter deeper than I would say I can do with technologies. I also play the word processor, but I don't play assembly language, C, C+, C++, nor any of the other current computer languages. I do dabble in HTML, of course.)

Having said that, L2.0 has assisted my lifelong learning goals in that I have now done several things I hadn't done before even if I had known about them or not. I had never put any photos online--although having gotten a digital camera in late December, it is likely I would have posted soon, but this program provided the impetus (not to be confused with the Pompitus [of Love] which is a mysterious phrase in a song lyric that is not clearly defined, even at this moment! Oops: This just in.
http://www.algebra.com/algebra/about/history/Pompitus.wikipedia is an article about what the word means and where it probably came from. Amazing). I'm also easily distracted at times, and the multiple lessons and exercises assisted me in the sense that I had no time to get bored by anything. (I hope the readers take longer than I deserve to become bored with my blog entries.)

I've been captured by this blogging thing. And the ability to start posts off with a picture, somewhat like an allusion to illuminated manuscripts or to stick a picture in the middle of a post to illustrate some point or just to relieve the readers' eyes from all this text has been great fun for me. I think the combination of Flickr and Blogspot is much better than either of them by themselves. I'm also pretty addicted to LibraryThing, although I must say my cataloging much more resembles copy-cataloging than original cataloging. (When I see a book in someone else's LibraryThing that I've read or own, there's a button that allows a signed in user to just add the book to her own library catalog! Whoooo hooooo!!!)

I've been surprised at how easy some of these Web things are; I've been surprised that some sites (like Myspace) strike me as less useful than I had hoped.

Moving to the next landing of this controlled wandering, I can say that I had enough help when I needed it, but I didn't necessarily feel that I was approached as much for help as I had imagined I might be. Most of my colleagues either had a different schedule from me or else didn't need much help (or possibly found me less than approachable, but people I've asked have said that's not the case.) I have had a few people ask questions, just not as many as I expected.

Improving the format or the concept:

I think I would have appreciated a written transcript of the podcasts (although, someone would have had to have transcribed them and that would have been a drag!). I don't quite know how to justify that feeling--I listen to audiobooks all the time, I listen to other mp3 files on my Palm. I guess that it has to do with perceptions of time pressures: I felt I needed to keep moving to the next activity, to the next lesson, and the information at the speed of sound (podcasts), was slower for me than information at the speed of sight (text, duh!). Also, the one time I had to use dial-up access, even the loading of the website and the loading of the links was slower than I could endure. I used dial-up for longer than many people, but now that I'm on faster connections at home and in libraries, it is a stress to operate at the speed of dial up. (Although one thing libraries should keep in mind is trying to have alternative services for those with slow Internet. The text-only version of the catalog is one of those dial up compensations that I think is still a good idea.)

One other format improvement would have been if the progress logs had had room for more than one URL, given that several weeks actually comprised two or three of the 27 Things each. The current progress log required that these two and three things be in one post in order to list the response in just that one URL.

I thought the concept of Learning 2.0 itself was sound, albeit somewhat second-round trendy. But I'm more of a second- or third- stoner* myself in relation to technology, so the drifting close to "me too!" nature of this program was probably just right. (*allusion to the proverb/quotation "[L]et ... him cast the first stone.")

I would like to see similar training opportunities when some new library-relevant technologies emerge, but I think we should try to come up with some steps or protocols for determining which things should be explored and taught, and which things are likely to be analogous to 8-track tape technologies. Libraries that had vinyl disc collections, that had (and have) cassette collections, and that have CD collections turned out to have guessed/bet right for the most part. Any libraries that had 8-track tape collections, I think probably had them go obsolete sooner than it was worth to have them. It's easy to say, but we should avoid adopting 8-track tape technologies.

In closing this ever-so-long post, I'd like to thank my parents, without whom I wouldn't even be here. And if I could go back in time and tell me stuff, I'd freak out. Er, no, that wasn't the question.

If I could go back in time and tell me to either participate in this program or skip it, I'd still tell me to participate. I'd also tell me to be careful of typos in naming my blog's URL so that I wouldn't lose all my readers when I fixed the typo of the URL and then no one could find where I had "gone."

#27. One more Thing.

At first I couldn't think of "one more thing." I re-read the wiki article on Web 2.0. Still nothing else. Then I gazed at the comments on the KCLSU #27 blog entry, and someone mentioned Second Life. An excellent example of how this collaborative can work: other people working together can help give ideas that we recognize as great but we might not have thought of on our own. (I'm thinking of a Venn Diagram here with overlapping and discrete areas of coverage.) So, anyway, my one more thing would be training and collaborative activities in SecondLife (which I had briefly looked at earlier in the program but didn't proceed on my own yet, because of so many other choices to look, learn, and play with.

Ooooooooooooooooooooohhh! Shiny!

What would William Do?

27 Thing #20, 21, and 22.

libworkspace
Originally uploaded by YorickWell.

#20

This is fun. Amusing and yet at the same time causing one to be mindful.

This is my favorite font. (Comic Sans MS. In case the actual posting changes the font, [posting did change the font, but I put it back by editing the post here at Blogger] the first two text lines were in Verdana--a completely uninspired font as far as I can tell. Okay, Verdana does get some good marks for unassuming readability, but it strikes me as just a step or two away from complete invisibility. It's certainly not carrying any emotional weight.)

I was going to post solely from GoogleDocs because it has an obvious connection with blogger, but Zoho has a button to publish to one's blog as well, so I'll have to publish from both to see what happens. And which ever one gets published 2nd, I'll change to draft so that I can finish items 21 and 22 on the one post.

Concerning what I think: I think I'll have a too-strong coffee and some 2% milk. No. Ummm, I think that the collaboration and the take it anywhere features are great. I'm very pleased to have alternatives to offer patrons who might want to do word processing or might want baseball box scores in a spread sheet and yet don't have MicroSoft applications available at home. (And with MS whining, suing, and wheeling and dealing in the (tech) news about Open Source software violating their patents, I'm even more glad to show people these alternatives.)

I also think that I don't have a favorite between Zoho and Google Doc yet. I'll have to try doing more with each before I can settle on which one is really better. Although in terms of an Integrated experience, Google, Gmail, Blogger, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets are all there together. Zoho is a whole other account and log in.

#21
Google Labs test drive.

What worked: Music Trends seemed to work. It could be useful to know songs and artists in the top 20 (among GoogleTalk users. Of course it is an unidentified demographic beyond what assumptions one might make about GoogleTalk users--generally younger, techologically connected). But at this point it is merely another pulse check on pop culture rather than an authoritative information source. Google Trends worked, but if one's search terms are not popular enough to get a graph, it doesn't tell a person a lot about how many if any were searching on those term(s). It works, but I don't at this time see as much use for it as even Music Trends. Google Page Creator works, but I'm not entirely sure just what would make it better than a Wiki or a Blog--Wiki if one wants to constantly, regularly update bulletin board on Newsletter type information, Blog if one wants to update with continuous narrative as we're doing here. In someways, a Page Creator strikes me as very Web 1.something rather than Web 2.0 or higher.
Google Voice Local Search and Google Accessible Search which seem self-evidently useful for those with abilities related accessibility issues are the exception; the other choices didn't pique my interest enough to even look to see if they worked. It's also possibly a failure in Marketing....

I've already mentioned above which ones I found potentially useful.

#22
Web 2.0 Awards. Before I move on to the actual award winners, let me note that Technorati took 1st and Bloglines took 2nd in the Blog Guide category. In a cursory glance, it seems that the user interface made the difference between 1 and 2. In my own experience, I've been a little disappointed in Technorati because I've claimed my blog, allowed as I think Technorati to have access, and yet, when I search for words in my own blog that I know are in the post(s), it comes back with nothing found. Technorati has also been slow or unknowing about when I update my blog, even though I send it a separate ping from time to time.

I did change the spelling of my blog's web address, and I had to delete my original claim and re-claim the new spelling. So I wonder if that has caused connect problems between the blog and Technorati. But when I had to do an analogous procedure on Bloglines, it found me (back) right away. (In a note of sadness, I should have announced it before I did it, because I had been "watched" by 15 subcriptions on Bloglines before the address change, and now I'm being watched by only me. :-( )

The awards I looked at were the top 3 in the Books category. I can understand why Lulu.com got 1st--it's a place to self-publish on the web and sell one's "intellectual property." As the cut quote from the SEOmoz interview says, "“The ultimate goal for Lulu was to become a digital marketplace, like a mix of eBay and Amazon.com, a place for people to monetize their intellectual property instead of stuff.” ( Read our interview with Lauren Parker, PR Manager, Lulu --link to their interview) (While we're at it, I think "monetize" is needlessly jargonistic. The PR Manager is trying to impress people with the stuffy word instead of a more direct word. Points off for stuffy diction, as far as I'm concerned.)

I know Biblio.com is very cool for finding books you didn't know you could find again. But I'm not sure why it beat Alibris which does essentially the same thing. (I used Alibris to find the very first chapter book that I remember reading myself. It was $25 plus shipping, but it was worth it.) I read the paragraph at zeitgeist#award-selection page of the Awards site, but it didn't really give me a clear understanding of "what were they thinking?!" I suppose one thing is that some of their expert web site judges this time included marketers, so naturally they'd have an impact in award choice.

For my ranking of the three in books, I'd switch LibraryThing which I find completely addictive like Flickr with Biblio.

That's my experience; that's what I think.

This is fun

27 things, #20

This is fun

This is my favorite font.

At first I was going to post from GoogleDocs because it had an easy and obvious connection with Blogger , but as I was looking around in Zoho , it does too, under the Publish tab.

Nevertheless, this post will be the also ran, the B-team .

I will mention (so that you perhaps don't feel it was a complete waste of your eye muscles to look here)
that in the staff breakroom, sometimes people leave food on the table(s) as an offering for others. And sometimes, people step away from their food intending to come right back.

Since it is embarrassing, as well as not my intent, to nab someone else's munchies, lunches, or snack, I always examine the item's distance from the center of the table. If it's in the center or very nearly in the center, it is obviously free game. If it's nearer the edge, it's much more likely someone's food not looking for a foster home. Even in the case of center-placed food, not every offering is best suited for every staffer. Whatever its level of attachment to others, (even mildly) burnt popcorn is safe from me.

At long last, Trading Card from flckrtoys

I was finally able to make a trading card on the flickr toys thingy. It seems that way back before when I was having the trouble--I couldn't get the flickrtoys to see my Flickr account and load an image--it was because my computer/browser wasn't accepting cookies from the flickrtoys site. It didn't know that I had signed in and given it permission to see and use my photos.

But I solved that problem by telling the browser I trust flickrtoys. This has transferrable concept skills, because when a patron is having trouble using the licensed databases from home, or having trouble downloading audiobooks, one problem may be their level of security protection/sheilding. It could be their browser isn't accepting cookies from the library webpage or from the licensed content provider.

Some problems are harder than others to guess and solve over the phone.

Week 6: Three true things--12, 13, and 14.

Learn about tagging and discover Del.icio.us.
12
1. Done. Looked around and made an account. also used the 27things account.
2. Saved some sites that had been saved by other people. Save a site that wasn't save by anyone else yet. (Ummmmm, you don't get to see that account.)
3. I can see creating book marks organized by topic (tag)--job hunting, global warming, Soupy Sails--but given the changing nature of Web info, I wonder if a web search at the time of need wouldn't be more helpful. I do like the idea of accessing my bookmarks from anywhere, but I think I'd want to use the account option that allows me not to share my saved book marks with other casual, spying users.

13. Technorati.
1. Claimed my blog.
2. Did exercise one, two, and three. That was easy as promised, although the claiming was a little bit less easy than the just looking around.

14. Library Thing.
1. Looked around, created an account. I didn't have one before.
2. Added five books. Took more time than I thought it should (my slow fault).
3. My library thing is here: http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=library-of-origin&shelf=shelf
I feel happier about my book that has fewer other people already listing it than some of the other books that have thousands of listings.

We interrupt this drivel for the following 27Things assignment posting.

I read the articles about Myspace, Facebook, and Infoblog. I understand the need to push a presense on Myspace because that's where the kids-teens-scary adults hang out, but clevering up a Myspace page in not the work of a coffee break; probably not even a long lunch.

I also understand we're not responsible personally nor professionally for the ads, but they creep me out a little, and I'm not happy about the spammy message(s) I've gotten to my Myspace account from (allegedly attractive women) saying that they haven't paid to have an account so they're using their friend's account so please respond to this other email address. Icky and sad.