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Monday, September 24, 2007

#23 Reflect

Woo Hoo! I feel like I crossed the finished line, or at least crossed something off of my to-do list. Either way its a very good feeling. This was a great experience, not only taking part in the group who made it come alive but also in going through the process of exploring along with everyone else. I learned a lot of great stuff and the way I work has changed, I feel more connected in some ways. The trouble will be to keep up with it all, like before some things that I am using will drop-off and I will be left with what is truly useful to me. What I want to do is continue exploring, finding new tools and how they could be useful.

#22. Explore Web 2.0 Award Winners

Taking a look at the list it was great to recognize some of the names that we have learned through this program. I am kind of interested in Flock but I'm going to have to see what if will do differently for me than my iGoogle page. I've truly gone to the dark side, I have iGoogle as my homepage on my work computer. They have all these great little widgets, calendar's, to-do lists, access to my Facebook account, and even access to my Google docs. I even have tabs, a general one with my daily to-do list and the second tab has all the links and everything I use for Collection Development. I have it set on my IE and Firefox still has the library home page, sigh the best of both worlds. I'm going to check out Flock later though because I don't want to become Google dependent.

#21 Audio eBooks

I have to be honest, I have never been a big fan of Audio Books of any kind. I tend to be old fashioned about my books and I want them in print. Honestly I only own 2 audio books and only those because I got so tired of listening to music on my way to visit my parents (9 hours through some really boring areas all by myself). So I while I have listened to Audio Books I have never actually listened to an Audio eBook and well I really don't have much desire to do so either. I can see how other's would and why they do, plus why it would be great for the library to have them for the user's who prefer them.


I did learn about Audio eBooks while writing this lesson so I'm happy to know about them but I'll stick to my paper books. Of course the whole thing could be that when I worked at a bookstore I really disliked shelving the darn things :-).

#20. Podcasts

I've listened to a number of podcasts in the past but have sort of gotten out of the habit. Though when I go into iTunes I see them all there waiting for me to catch up. I especially love knitting podcast, there is one by a knitter in England, she just cracks me up. What I know about RSS and podcasts is because of Ann, she was really great about sharing the info she found out while she was researching the topic. In the library we have the Synergy podcasts which are great if you can't make it to the talks but still want to hear all about it. I'll have to make a note to catch up on my podcasts in the future.

Friday, September 21, 2007

#19 YouTube (Week 11)

Okay I feel really bad for not having finished yet, so my goal is to do one Thing a day until I am done. Today is YouTube which I have experience with. Have been sent numerous funny YouTube video's by friends to giggle over and over course I have been checking out the Machinima work of one of our UC colleagues at Davis. She does excellent videos, here is a list of videos by her. Library wise I have seen a number of library tour sort of videos which I think is an interesting application. I think I read somewhere that a library was going to even post there YouTube video to their Facebook page

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

#18. Firefox Add-ons and Extensions

It was very easy to add the Firefox extension for the library catalog and I ended up adding A9 as well. A9 searches Amazon, one of the many sites I look at when doing collection development. So being able to search these two sites easily will be very useful. I already have LibX and I think I will explore Zotero very very soon. I have been using Endnote web in WoS but would love another option that is much easier to get to.

#17. Online Applications & Tools

As much as I would like to try out Zoho I am already firmly sucked into the world that is Google. I have my iGoole page where I can access all of my google stuff, such as Google Docs, Google Talk, gmail, Google Calendar. I use Google Docs for work at UCSC but at also for my virtual volunteer work. I find it so useful not to have to transcribe the comments and edits that we used to do through email. Plus I can access my documents from any computer and I don't have to remember to grab my memory stick.