LibWorm - just in the nick of time

Wow, Libworm is really interesting and i had never played with it before. Pretty neat. I searched children's lit stuff and found some interesting things. I also searched my library's name as a word and a whole phrase. I came up with some pf the same things, including when Stephen Abrams visited our library and he posted it on his site.
I got more info on the word search, including a posting a few years back for our assistant director position...
This is a nice research tool. I look forward to using it in the future.

23

I had a lot of fun doing the 23 things and I am glad to have the chance to complete this program. I think the most fun thing was playing with flickr. I just making the pics. I doubt I will use it professionally, but who knows!
I have some great resources to share with patrons now too. I especially think the video about blog readers was great and could be shown to patrons wanting to use that.
Thanks so much to everyone who worked on this - it was a great thing for north texas librarians to work on together!

Thing 22

Several staff members have been pushing to have this program at our library for years and we were all very happy that NTLP offered it this summer. I would love to adapt it to children's librarians in our system. We could offer things that are are needed to work with kids or interesting things that should be shared with kids. for example, my boss shared with us a software called scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/ that many libraries are starting to teach classes on in the library. This would be one fun thing to share with children's librarians in my library. Another might be navigating the kid geared databases our library offers.

21 Podcasts

I am a huge nerd and am always downloading interesting things to listen to in my car - I love fascinating stories that i can find online and I think libraries sometimes have interesting topics that can be shared: maybe a speaker who came to a library can be recorded or maybe a librarian can talk about his or her experiences will a certain project for a more professional development theme. I think patrons would be interested in author visits, librarians can talk about system wide exhibits or programs that are coming up. We have a lot of genealogy programs here and I wonder if patrons might be interested in hearing those.

Thing 20 You Tube

I have watched a lot of children's lit stuff on youtube. A lot of the teen authors I enjoy post things often. Our library posted a video promoting one of our new library branches which is a neat way to showcase something new and exciting. Since anyone can make and post videos obviously quality will vary greatly. There are some great videos out there as well as some not great vidoes. I think academic libraraies sometimes have more interesting videos - they seem to have a quirky humor that maybe public libraries to not want to convey, but I find them so much more interesting.

19 - Google Docs

Google docs is great - especially if you have a computer that does not have microsoft programs on it! Everything is really easy to use and by reading the blog i have discovered there are all sorts of ways to use the docs - like using it to organize goods to sell with the check out feature. Wow.

Google docs are great for libraries and colleagues that are not in the same location. It is a lot less mess to simply use a doc instead of emailing revisions back and forth, etc. It is also great when you use many google features together - like perhaps a google calendar with summer reading programs, along with a spreadsheet doc keeping track of all the programs.

18 Wikis

I am a pretty big fan of wikis. I have used them alot with work and have enjoyed it. Our library has a wiki and a lot of people think it is a mess and do not use it. I think this is incredibly lazy that they do not like a collection of useful info that is something that can be manipulated by everyone.
As for wikipedia, I would never suggest anyone use this as a real source - but it is a great jumping off point. I have the Harry potter entry bookmarked my delicious account because I think it is a good reference for all series titles. I can never remember the order! I searched moebius syndrome which is a rare neurological condition. This did not have any discussions listed but it did note that a certain medical group had deemed it reliable? Who knows.

Thing 17 - LibWorm

I can not see this site on my lovely city network so I will try to remember to check it out tonight at home! This study has definitely confirmed my suspicions that I need to buy a laptop to take to and from to work as I am missing out on lots of good stuff.

Thing 16 - LibraryThing

I have to say a lot of the cataloging stuff is over my head. I do not do this at all in my job, so I do not know what would or would not be useful to libraries. I did think the isbn tool was neat though. I often do book reviews for newspapers and journals and the isbn can sometimes be tricky when dormatting your work to a certain style.

I have used librarything before to find books. Earlier this year I was looking for children's fiction books with math concepts and I found lots of talk about that topic: here is one that was helpful: http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=17364

I have found that this collection of people who discuss different and obscure topics of books is much more useful.