Monday, April 2, 2007

I See Light at the End of the Tunnel ... uh oh - it's a train

This journey through SJLibrary Web 2.0 has been an informative, fun and occasionally frustrating experience. At times the light at the end of the tunnel seems like a potential train wreck, but ultimately the light turns out to be the light of understanding. Thank you SJLibrary Web 2.o team. You've done a great service.
#19 The LibraryThing - What a great Web site. I have quite a few books at home that need some organizational TLC that the LibraryThing can provide. I think I'm going to order one of their t-shirts. The description they give for the site is excellent: "LibraryThing is a full-powered cataloging application, searching the Library of Congress, all five national Amazon sites, and more than 60 world libraries. You can edit your information, search and sort it, "tag" books with your own subjects, or use the Library of Congress and Dewey systems to organize your collection." They also mention the social connectivity aspect of this site when they state: "If you want it, LibraryThing is also an amazing social space, often described as "MySpace for books" or "Facebook for books." You can check out other people's libraries, see who has the most similar library to yours, swap reading suggestions and so forth. LibraryThing also makes book recommendations based on the collective intelligence of the other libraries." I have cataloged several of my books on my account. My account information is http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=edkoetitz
#20 YouTube - Wow is this a wild site or what? I had quite a bit of fun getting to know YouTube. I'm not sure if all of the contributors to this site are playing with a full deck of cards but viewing their creations was certainly a blast! The site that I thought had some interesting library applications was creative production entitled: "Ray of Light" St. Joseph County Public Library Version. ! I could easily see how we could do something similar and put it our on main Web page to give our customers a sampling of what we do in a fun and entertaining manner. This type of “ice breaker” is definitely a cool tool that could inform and set a tone of welcome and fun especially for our younger cliental.
#21 - Podcasts - I checked the Wikipedia and they define podasts as: "a media file that is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds, for playback on portable media players and personal computers.[1] Like 'radio', it can mean both the content and the method of syndication." I went through the Yahoo podcast tutorial and found it helpful. An interesting library application of the podcast technology is: Deschutes Public Library Foundation - A Novel Idea 2007 Episode 1 - Introduction - Excerpt This is the first in a series of podcasts for the Deschutes Public Library Foundation's A Novel Idea...Read Together program. In this episode, author Kenny Moore reads an excerpt from the introduction ... Podcast Date: Nov 28, 2006. - It would be interesting if all of our book discussion groups system-wide could be videotaped and put on as podcast series. I believe this would be a way to vastly increase our book discussion groups’ visibility and some of our discussions are very insightful and thought-provoking. If our performers and special guest speakers were willing to be videotaped, it would be great to podcast some of our special programming (P&T Puppet Theatre, Phil Ackerly, magician, etc. While some of this is dreaming ... it never hurts to "think out of the box."
#22 Explore EBooks and Audio Ebooks - The one question I get a lot regarding our Ebooks is: Can I use my iPod? The short answer is no. The long answer is: "The library would be thrilled to offer audio content playable on personal Apple products, including iPods. However, Apple's business practice prevents this from happening." On the bottom of the Frequently Asked Questions is a listing of additional helps: Ebrary Academic Complete - see Ebrary Help & Support Page or Contact Ebrary Help & Support netLibrary - see netLibrary Help & FAQs: (SJPL users, SJSU users) or netLibrary Contact Us OverDrive Digital Library - see Overdrive Help Page or Contact Library eBook Support Pimsleur Language - see netLibrary Help & FAQs: (SJPL users, SJSU users) or netLibrary Contact Us Safari Tech - see Safari Tech Help Page or Contact Safari Customer Support Still Stumped? - Contact Library eBook Support. Our very helpful "e-book Support" team has a contact us tab at the bottom of the page. They can provide specific technical help for our customers.
I also explored the Project Gutenberg site. They describe their organization as: "the oldest producer of free ebooks on the Internet. Our collection was produced by thousands of volunteers." I found the 100 top downloaded titles to be an interesting list to review. I also poked around the World eBook Library, and viewed the World eBook Fair titles.
#23 Summarize your thoughts about this program - I want to go on the record: the SJLibrary Web 2.0 is a remarkable and valuable tool for helping some of us librarians to get up to speed with the rapidly changing landscape of the newer Web technologies and conceptually ground-breaking modes of communication. At the heart of our profession is “communication.” For a very long time the primary mode of that communication has been the printed page, but things are a changing. We must keep up with the rapid pace of technology or otherwise we are dust. My hat is off the great job our San Jose Public and San Jose State University team has accomplished in putting this remarkable tutorial together. I will be going back and reviewing and getting deeper into many of the programs that I was only able to get a taste of. Some of the technologies that I particularly enjoyed were the Rollyo, Flickr, YouTube and Zoho Writer sites.
Again, thank you for your encouragement and support through the process.

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