Missed Things: Thing 8: Screencasting and Thing 9.5: Image Generators

Oops! In my haste to finish, I skipped over a couple! So here I'm tacking on the two areas I overlooked:

Screencasting: Earlier this year I used Camtasia and Jing to create several screencasted help videos for students in our transition to Blackboard 9. Here is one I created: http://teach.reynolds.edu/BB9/Videos/BB9SSendingEmail/BB9SSendingEmail.htm

I used Camtasia because a) that's what the school has to use and b) it really is easy to use and useful for creating screencasts. One of our other librarians has been creating little videos on how to use the databases and such for our own library.

Image Generators
I can't say I'd ever really played with one of these before. I am fairly competent with Photoshop, so I usually do any image manipulation on my own. I had fun playing around with these though... I tried to make one with a picture of my cats but the website kept causing an error, so instead I'll make a flickr words thing in honor of Banned Books Month:

Thing 23: The End!

Wow. I'm finished!

Since I did almost half of it in the span of a few days, most of it is pretty fresh in my mind. I wish I had paced myself a little better throughout the project, unfortunately I had to push this to the backburner for other projects and deadlines.

I was familiar with all of the technologies, but it is great to be able to look at each one as to how it might fit in to use in our library, and it's even better to be able to go through all of the other participant's blogs and see how they are using the same technologies.

To everyone who has participated! Congratulations! I look forward to discussing your discoveries with you at Peer Group!

Thing 22: Podcasts

I love podcasts - when I make the 10 hour drive home, I stock up on them. My favorites are This American Life and Car Talk since I fail to remember to listen to either program when it actually airs. I subscribe to them via iTunes, so to get new podcasts I can just plug in my iPod (or iPhone) to my computer and it automatically updates.

I've also been fairly impressed with iTunesU, which allows you to download lectures from colleges and universities across the country and take education into your own hands.

Thing 21: Mashups

I was going to make a trading card, but apparently the website is blocked by our filters. Darn!

I love the idea of mashups because, ostensibly, they combine two (or more) services to fill a niche need.

The only mashups I've really used involve improving Craigslist, with housing maps and such, but I'm loving InfiniteComic, which takes flickr photos and mashes them with tweets to make comic strips. Here are a few I made:

Thing 20: Tagging and Social Bookmarking

I LOVE delicious.

I stopped using traditional bookmarks years ago -- working on multiple computers in grad school necessitated that I have something available via the cloud, and with the plug-ins for Firefox, all of my bookmarks are readily available. Because of tagging and categories, they're also easier to find.

JSRCC has a delicious account which we use to tag websites we find that might be useful to our students. Because delicious allows for easy creation of RSS feeds based on tags, we are able to import a customized, easily updated list of websites into our libguides.

Thing 19: Multimedia

I was going to post a youtube video, but somebody just sent me this spoof commercial which I thought was very funny, so I'll post that instead:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Thing 18: Audiobooks

I thought Beth Farrell's article, The Lowdown on Audio Downloads (Library Journal, 05/15/2010) was a very good overview of Audiobooks in the context of libraries.

I have had trouble with formats in the past; I own an iPod, and for a long time, most audiobook providers did not work with the apple products. I have downloaded audiobooks from the apple store, and I particularly like listening to them on long road trips.

I think I need to remember that I can download them from the library - I always forget, which, I'm guessing, is a majority of the public's problem with audiobooks too.

Thing 17: Social Cataloging

I use GoodReads to keep track of the books I've read, but more importantly, to keep a list of books I'd like to read. (Feel free to add me here: http://www.goodreads.com/friend/i?i=LTM2MDQxNzM3ODA6MzYz)

I like GoodReads because so many of my library friends use it - I can see the books they recommend, and since my friends all have excellent tastes, get ideas for books to read myself.

I also really like LibraryThing, but not for my own personal use. I'm working with trying to migrate our New Books list to LibraryThing (I need Aleph to run a report that gives me ISBNs...). I have a friend who works for LibraryThing, and I've always been impressed with the way some libraries are able to integrate LibraryThing into their catalog to enhance the user's experience.

Thing 16: E-Books

I'm going to be perfectly honest here - I'm not crazy about e-books.

I love the idea of e-books* - being able to have a massive digital library at the click of a button is amazing. With sites like Project Gutenberg and the ability to borrow e-books from libraries, this is brilliant. I also love the ability to perform a full-text search on a book - I find this particularly useful in the Safari books because when I access them it is to solve a particular problem, not sit down and get cozy with my favorite characters.

I am, however, not sold on the application of e-books. Part of the problem is that I do not own a device for reading them, be it kindle, nook or iPad. I have an iPhone, but the screen is too small to be any use for reading. I am not impressed with most of the ownership/copyright issues associated with e-books - I really like the fact that when I purchase a hard copy of a book, it is my book.

I also really love the experience of reading - the tactile experience, the smell. Curled up with a book on a rainy day just wouldn't be the same with a kindle.

I think the technology is close - I would imagine that in five years I will find a reader that suits my needs/wants, and I will convert. I do not think that e-books will ever wholly replace books - I do think that we will see fewer printed textbooks and technical books - anything that would greatly benefit from full-text searching and cheap mass distribution will move to the e-book format.

*I would have really liked the e-book format during my last move.

Thing 15: Creative Commons

I have all of my photos on Flickr licensed under a creative commons attribution license. I like the idea of being able to share with the world.

My favorite use of limiting the search on flickr to just creative commons photos is that it enables me to find good photos to use in my libguides, such as in the career development guide here.

I am not sure it is worthwhile to include in every-day library instruction - we already cover more information than most students are able to process, but it would be interesting to offer a workshop on it!

Thing 14: Forms

We have a library assessment form that is currently in beta - using google docs. I put together this brief form to illustrate how easy it is!

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dE5nenU4a3UwWXgtbWhzN292cDlvY3c6MQ

Thing 13: Document Sharing

I am teaching an ITE-115 class this Fall, and I encouraged all of my students to use Dropbox, Google Docs or SkyDrive in addition to  or in lieu of a flash drive. I personally store my class documents in my dropbox, which has been incredibly useful. I was able to make start files for homework available to my students via a link through dropbox.

I use google docs regularly as well - I keep notes from lectures there as well as budgets. I also always put any presentations I might give in google docs, so that people might follow along (and it gives me a backup in an emergency!)

Thing 12: Cloud Computing

I added an Eddie Izzard quote to our collaborative presentation in Google Docs.  I'm a huge fan of storing documents in the cloud, especially when collaboration is necessary.

I think Google Docs is the best for collaboration work, but I've been very impressed with Microsoft's SkyDrive, which gives users 25 GB of free storage plus the ability to create word, excel and powerpoint documents online, in the cloud. They are not as robust as the actual software, but it is a great option for students who might not be able to afford the software or are working from a computer that is not their own.

Thing 11: URL Shorteners

I am a big fan of bit.ly to shorten URLS.

One of my favorite tricks is to take the bitly url and add a + to the end to show statistics. So, the example bit.ly from Tara's post would become http://bit.ly/cRKibm+

You can now see when the link was clicked the most, where the people were located, and if the link was placed on twitter, etc. 

Thing 10: Twitter

Sooo... I let this little project fall the backburner. Then it fell in the fire. BUT! I've pulled it out and will desperately attempt to finish before Peer Group.

Twitter - I've been on Twitter since November of 2008. In that time, I've used twitter to network at conferences, ask local Richmond residents recommendations for restaurants and butchers, find out about events, weather and traffic in Richmond, kept up with old friends and made new friends. I've attended "tweet-ups" where people who met on twitter meet in real life. It is a great medium to keep track of your favorite celebrities and authors... for example, my favorite tweet is when I asked my favorite author, Neil Gaiman, if seeing Coraline in 3D was worth it. And he replied!


At the time of this posting, with my personal account I have tweeted 3,274 times, am following 372 people and 334 are following me. And most of them are not spam bots!

For the library account I created, we mostly use it as a way to quick publish news and upcoming  events to our website homepage. I have our blog posts automatically fed to be published in twitter as well.

Follow me @bobanda or follow JSRCC Library at @jsrcclibrary

Thing 9: Photo Sharing

I cannot begin to express how much I love Flickr, from my personal account to the great things Library of Congress is doing. I love the ability to geotag photos, make comments, and generally share photos.


Image: New "Camera"! , a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from smanography's photostream

One of my favorite uses of Flickr is to search for photos licensed under Creative Commons - when I use photos in my LibGuides, I always use ones licenced this way.

To find CC licensed photos, start with the Flickr Advanced Search. Select the box by "Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content" and if you're using it commercially, select that box too. Then search! Always double check, but in most cases, you just need to provide attribution whenever you use the image. I try and provide a link to the end result on the person's flickr account as well, because people like to see their photos in action. 

If you find yourself needing attribution often, I suggest grabbing this attribution bookmarket. All you do is click and hold the link that says "show flickr attribution" and drag it to your Firefox toolbar. Then whenever you're on a flickr page, click the bookmarklet button and it will generate a popup window with all the attribution information you need! Very handy!

Thing Seven: Sharing Slide Presentations

I made this presentation for JSRCC's Technology Summit this past spring. I really like the ability to embed powerpoint into websites - it provides a great place for backup and for promoting discussion after presentations.

Facebook for Education

View more presentations from srharta.

Thing 6: Chat

While we participate in LRC Live, we do not have a localized chat service here at JSRCC. As much as we would like one, the reality of the matter is that we just do not have the staff to really commit the time. One of my projects this summer is to play around with LRC Live's qwidget and hopefully get that up and running.

If we did have the staff resources, I would go with Library H3lp. Unlike some of the free standalone services, this allows multiple librarians to be logged-in and allows the ability to pass questions to another user, as well as a fine-tuned librarian interface. I haven't kept up with the project recently, but I believe they now have a way of accepting text messages to the chat interface as well.

I believe that, if at all possible, libraries should offer a basic chat service that would ideally accept IMs from multiple platforms, including text messaging and Facebook. Increasingly, students prefer not make voice calls or even use email - they want the instant gratification that comes with a text or a chat.

While I was a graduate assistant in the History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library at UIUC, we rolled out a chat reference with limited hours. It wasn't terribly popular (but then, our library patrons were generally graduate students and more willing to just come into the library). Most of the questions we got were "what are your hours?" and "do you have this book?" The few actual reference questions we received we encouraged the patron to come into the library so we could discuss this further. In most cases, those patrons would not have initiated contact at all, so the chat started off as a question in a space they felt comfortable, and we were able to bring them over to where we as librarians felt comfortable.

Thing 5: Wikis

Wikis are very useful tools for libraries. Most places I've worked/interned have used at least a basic wiki as a means of internal communication. By their nature, anybody can be made an editor, and the information stays consistent and in one place (unlike, say, a chain of emails).

When I redesigned the RALC website, I chose to include a wiki so that all RALC members could participate as editors on internal communication. Though I still function as the main website administrator, any RALC member can add minutes of their meetings and update contact information on the fly.

Social Networks - expanded

I promised before a longer post on social networking.

The JSRCC library currently has a facebook account, twitter, a blog and delicious. I personally am fairly active in the Richmond Twitter community, and have a Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, delicious, etc etc.

Social networking is a very interesting aspect of the past few years. Websites like Facebook and Myspace have allowed people to keep in touch with others in new exciting ways, and I know from personal experience Twitter has been a great tool for finding out more about Richmond as well as meeting people with similar interests.

I am keenly interested in how libraries and educators can utilize social media (both in the classroom and beyond). I think when you break it down, you're dealing with a means of communication, which in and of itself is not new. Taking into consideration the fast-paced world in which we live, where information (nevermind how accurate it is) is available at the push of a button, it's no wonder why students often feel overwhelmed and tune out more traditional (and slower) methods of communication. Employing a chat or texting program might encourage student participation in everything from office hours to reference questions.

We live in a time of rapid technological development. Some of these current companies are likely to be fads... but what will be their lasting impact on the way we communicate (and learn)?

I have personally been active, in some form of social networking, since I was in high school. Facebook opened up to my college when I was a senior, and I've been a member ever since then. 

Playing Catch-up

So, as life is wont to happen, I got busy and this project got pushed to the backburner. I'll be playing catch-up a bit today, but breaking it up into multiple posts.

I'm headed to DC for ALA tomorrow, then I'm taking some vacation time, but I promise I'll do better about keeping this up. :)

The first three weeks

Week 1: Blogging

Obviously, you're reading this, so I've accomplished week 1! I also have a personal blog that only my friends can access and I contribute to JSRCC's library blog.

Week 2: RSS feeds

I'm an avid Google Reader user... which has helped contribute to my 'millennial' habit of skimming lots of information, reading little.

A few recommended feeds:

• JSRCC Specific:
  
  • Library Blog
  • JSRCC new books list (updated infrequently)
    
• Librarian in Black - Sarah Houghton-Jan, Digital Futures Manager for the San José Public Library
• A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette - tongue-in-cheek humor for librarians and those who love them

Week 3: Social Networks

I'll have a longer post about this later, but I wanted to point out that JSRCC's library Facebook is linked on the right side of my blog, with an embeddable 'fan box'.

23 Things

I've been familiar with the 23 Things project since graduate school. I think it's a great idea for librarians who want to do just a little more than they're already doing, without a whole lot of time and effort. Broken down into small, 'bite-sized' exercises, 23 Things helps librarians get their head around this whole 'web 2.0 thing'.

I'm looking forward to participating in this adventure with everyone else, and if I can ever be of assistance, please let me know!