Librarian Tech Guru Goddess

LC's Read.gov Site

2009-10-04T14:42:00.000-07:00

The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress has a new site Read.gov with a cool interface for reading rare classic books online. It's almost as if you're turning the pages in real life. For example, here's the link to a public domain version of "The Story of the Three Little Pigs", published in 1904 by Frederick Warne & Co. with drawings by L. Leslie Brooke.

Picture Clips from Google's Public Domain Books

2009-10-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

From A Book of Cheerful Cats and Other Animated Animals (1903), showing a "Study of Hedgehog Stealing Apple".

Using Google Books' "Advanced Book Search", search with "Public domain only" and "Books" selected to narrow to whatever topic you want. Click on the search result to load the book into Google's reader. Scroll to the picture you want to copy and use the tool to create a box around the picture. After loading, a "Share a clip" dialogue box will appear. Copy the URL in the image field. When you post to Blogger.com, paste this URL into the "Or add an image from the Web" field to upload your clipped picture.

I always add the title with a link back to the book on Google to give credit where credit is due.

Sony Reader Touch Edition

2009-09-03T10:13:00.000-07:00

You are going to love this, a walk through of the new Sony Reader Touch Edition PRS-600. Talk about technolust. All that and support for local library books! You can read more, as well as see some still images, on Matthew Miller's blog on ZDNet at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/mobile-gadgeteer/?p=1949&tag=nl.e589

Meek Librarian Becomes MegaBeth Roller Babe

2009-08-31T13:59:00.000-07:00

Amazon's 1984 e-Book Bungle

2009-08-20T11:51:00.000-07:00

Read more about it at The Know Something Project page at:
http://www.knowsomethingproject.com/home.html

Ooo, just when the e-book market was just taking off! Although this was an inauspicious move by Amazon that hopefully made everyone mindful of the fact that buying an e-book on Kindle (or some other proprietary format on someone else's special hardware) is very different from purchasing a physical book. You don't own it. You've signed away your rights to owning it in the electronic format. You've only paid for the privilege of having it reside on your e-reader until Amazon decides to zap it into oblivion wirelessly.

I love the fact that it was Orwell's book. That's so ironic. Big Brother is watching. Amazon as Big Brother. Next he'll let the government know what books you're buying...what thoughts you're entertaining...whether you're being a bad/naughty/rebellious citizen. Or he'll sell your buying habits to other companies and they'll start marketing to you based on what books you're buying. Yow.

Thing #23: Reflection

2009-08-14T16:39:00.000-07:00

I feel like Timothy Leary, this has been a definitely mind-altering experience. My most favorite Thing of the NT23 is the Google Reader. It has made my life so much easier. I was frantically trying to keep up with professional reading from so many different resources and the Reader just pulls it all into the same window. My second most favorite Thing is delicious; it frees me from my local browser and let's me still have the benefits of storing favorite bookmarks.

The most challenging for me was getting over my hesitation and actually trying out all of these "new fangled" sites. I'm not a trendy person, but extremely practical, so I need to see how something will make my life easier or my work more efficient before I'm willing to expend the time to investigate. NT23 gave me a legitimate reason to play with social networking 2.0 tools and discover some real gems.

As far as new technologies that we will use in my library, since I work at a university, we already use most (if not all) of these tools in some capacity or other. Mainly because of my job being in tech services, I haven't had reason to explore these Things. I'm just about to embark on a volunteer effort that will make all of what I've learned very relevant, since the site is to be very edgy and trendy in order to draw in college-age students.

Thanks so much NT23 team, you've been most helpful.

Thing #22: Developing your own 23 Things for your library

2009-08-01T12:57:00.000-07:00

NT23 has been a great way to experience a bunch of social networking tools that I would not have otherwise tried. I've challenged myself to come up with a list of 23 Things for my library, though I haven't decided yet whether to gear it toward students and faculty, or my fellow librarians and staff.

Thing #21: Podcasts

2009-08-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

Podcasting in Academic Libraries

I listened to several academic library podcasts and the audio quality was just fine. I thought I'd miss the visual component since we'd just covered videos in Thing #20, but the podcasts I sampled didn't really need that element. Here are a few of the university podcast resource sites I explored:
• UNC at Greensboro Jackson Library Podcasts
• UC Santa Cruz Library Podcast Resources
• Ohio University Libraries Podcasts from Alden Library
• Cornell University Library LibeCast

I love that you can download a free software called Audacity (cute double entendre) and that it has a plugin called LAME. How un-lame is that?

Podcasting seems to be a great way for academic libraries to promote their new acquisitions, services, upcoming events, for sending out book reviews, and for resource instruction. It would help a lot for the numerous (and increasing) distance education students, who can learn about library resources without having to come to campus, but still have access to electronic resources via the library's site. I can see that it would be a great tool for directing students—on or off campus—to nuggets of information in electronic resources and then instructing them in how to access similar information. I'm excited, this will be a fun new project!

Thing #20: YouTube

2009-07-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

Totally tubular, man! I searched on "academic library" and then followed my nose around with the suggested videos, after watching the first video from the results on YouTube. Some of those were:
• TexShare Databases - 2 (Academic Libs)
"So keep those pajamas on and uncover those riches—from the comfort of home!"
• Scholarly vs. Popular?
• Evaluating Web Sources with the Library Fairy
• Researching Online for College Students: Five Easy Steps
"CAPOW! Currency, Authority, Purpose, Objectivity, and Writing style"

Even though the Library Fairy and the last one were on the same topic, the former used humor that I liked, but the latter seemed more informative.

Some of these YouTube "instructional" library videos are just plain scary:
• What the Heck is Boolean Searching?
Woo-hoo, that accent! ‹and wow, those blue fingernails!› Those poor pieces of bread didn't stand a chance, yikes. I'm not sure I listened to her explanation of Boolean searching, I was too worried about the peanut butter slathering and those 2 forlorn bananas sitting on the table ("Symbolized here by 2 powerful bananas!"). Although it's important to use humor, you need to dial back the tone and not be quite so strident in the delivery of your message. It felt like a conk on the head with this video. The following one is less preachy and actually seems more informative:
• Boolean Operators

Thing #19: Google Docs

2009-07-24T10:20:00.000-07:00

Google Docs Rocks, Man! It is so easy to work with, very similar to pretty much any Microsoft application as far as functionality, etc. I went to http://docs.google.com, watched the video (loved the little strings to move the e-mail messages around!), and created a document which now resides out in "The Cloud". I also shared it with another NT23 colleague, so I'll check it out later to see if any edits have been done to it.

For even more functionality and efficiency, be sure to check out the Google Docs keyboard shortcuts list.

I also read some of the entries in the official Google Docs blog at
http://googledocs.blogspot.com.

Thing #18: Wikis

2009-07-19T20:36:00.000-07:00

I've worked with Wikis before, but WetPaint has some quirky problems, as you can read about on my Wiki pages here: http://dfw23things.wetpaint.com/page/Librarian+Tech+Guru+Goddess. Thanks to the NT23 team who helped move my page back to where it belonged under "Home", instead of buried under someone else's page. WetPaint has weird hierarchy when you're only an Anonymous contributor.

Thing #17: LibWorm

2009-07-13T13:18:00.000-07:00

I searched for "e-textbooks" on LibWorm and it gave me highly relevant hits, 954 of them. Most I'd read already, since I'd already set up "Inside Higher Ed", "LISNews", and "The Kept-Up Academic Librarian" in my Google Reader subscriptions. When I narrowed the search using "exact phrase", that dropped to 65 records returned. Not as good but, of course, that's to be expected since there's no standardized way to refer to "electronic textbooks" yet. I favor the hyphen, since just putting the "e" in front of textbooks looks like a typo. Ditto for e-books, e-mail, etc., but it's all over the place out there in the media.

I checked out the subject "Ebooks", since there wasn't one specifically on e-textbooks. Absolute ton of hits, 333 pages of them. There's also a Feed Category of "Academic Libraries" with some interesting articles. Funny though how there are a bunch of foreign-language articles and I don't see a quick way to narrow to English-language only.

The LibWorm Tag Cloud is a fun visual way to shuffle through the deck, but again e-textbooks aren't listed, though textbooks are in the Big Cloud. The topic is peripheral to libraries per se, but still one that academic librarians need to be aware of, especially with the tough economic times and its impact on state funding for university libraries. (I'm thinking about the recent announcement "Schwarzenegger's Push for Digital Textbooks" that's for K-12, but you know this will affect the higher ed level eventually, especially with the impact on textbook publishers.) I like the Storm Cloud version of the tags—looks kind of like the fat cumulus clouds that are floating through Texas this weekend.

Interesting tool, good quality hits, I'll add it to my del.icio.us links.

Thing #16: LibraryThing

2009-07-03T12:09:00.000-07:00

Zombie Letters from e-zombie.com

This is so exciting. I have been curious about LibraryThing for some time, but had not taken the time to investigate it yet. I signed up for a free account and added a few books from my home library, as well as tagged them.
http://www.librarything.com/home/LibTechGuruGoddess

We've got a "coals to Newcastle" problem in our house, since I'm a librarian and my husband is a librarian. We both love books and reading. I often joke that we'll need to re-enforce the floors because of all the weight from the books—and we don't have a basement. One day I'll arrive home from work and the house will have disappeared into a sinkhole.

I'll need to add more books to my LibraryThing library, and will then explore more about adding a LibraryThing widget to put my library on my blog, as well as adding a Search widget that lets readers look through my LibraryThing library directly from my blog.

That's not surprising—the Librarians Who LibraryThing group is the one with the most members (6,366).

As a related item, Google provides a similar service with their "My Library" feature, with some nifty bells-&-whistles. There's a good YouTube video on their blogspot site on how to easily upload your titles, using a barcode scanner and the ISBN barcode on the book. I like the fact that you can then search the full text of the books in your own Google library.

Thing #15: Digg

2009-07-02T17:41:00.000-07:00

Hey, man, like psychedelic, I really dug Digg. Well, at least, the concept. The idea that you can bury an article that's a duplicate or a Digger's comments that are rude is cool. If you were able to develop a library-related group of Diggers and see only their postings, this site would work great. Sadly, you get the opinion of the masses and you get stupid stuff like "Five Naked Photos of My Mum" as a top hit in the Offbeat section. Ugh. Great idea, ruined by crude people.

Thing #14: Delicious

2009-07-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

Mmmmm, yum-yum. Lots of good-tasting bookmarks. That was fun, although it took me 3 times to register because of their cryptic letters/numbers—even a human couldn't read them. Here's the link to my 3 saved Delicious "social bookmarks":
http://delicious.com/LibTechGuruGoddess

I love the People feature where you can see who else has bookmarked the site you saved and the tags they use to describe the site. These humans, they are so clever. Most ingenious!

A site on the most popular list drew me to it: Newsweek's "What to Read Now. And Why" (June 27, 2009). Check it out (double entendre there).

Thing #13: Tagging

2009-06-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

Aren't librarians all about helping to find relevant content for their readers? I think tagging is a great free-form way to augment the formal cataloging that goes on in libraries. People (some of them librarians) often complain that subject headings grow stale and that catalogs aren't able to keep up with how a heading evolves over time.

"Should we encourage or discourage the practice?" Participation in libraries should be rewarded, promoted, given top priority by librarians. And any tools that allow you to easily let patrons participate is a boon. Why would you want to discourage interested folks from adding to the collective consciousness? Patrons who participate will feel ownership and will help defend you from vicious and pernicious politicians when they try to take away your budget. By all means, encourage!

There's a certain fascination on my part with tag clouds that can be generated from tagging. In my mind's eye I get an image of a cloud of gnats buzzing around a book or an article with all the words associated with that item zooming in-&-out of focus or importance as readers add their thoughts to share with everyone. As Spock would say, "Fascinating!"

Thing #12: Twitter, Smitter

2009-06-29T09:07:00.001-07:00

What is Twitter? This feels like a cartoon version of my life. The problem is no one is reading this cartoon. So I'll probably get cancelled since my syndication is only one. (Oh, what a harsh economy we're living in!) Why does this feel like babbling?

I mean do I really want to stay hyper-connected to my friends and always know what they're doing? And, of course, the reverse of that, do I want my friends to always know what I'm doing? Yeah, right. Pardon me, while I go to the bathroom. People are not sites, we don't need to connect ourselves to the electronic umbilical cord and get our sustenance from the wired teat. (Boy, that sounds painful.)

At this point, I think some choice words are in order. Bulbous, bouffant, mukluks, galoshes, gazebo. Okay, Dr. Demento fans, what song is that from? The first one to comment gets a silver star, figuratively, of course.

Thing #11: Instant Messaging

2009-06-26T10:29:00.000-07:00

This is old stuff, not new. In the corporate environment (which is where I came from prior to my latest job in the academic world), we used IM all the time. It works best for quick questions that don't really merit an e-mail, like "Are you at your desk? Do you have a few minutes? Can I call you? Are you going to reply to my e-mail message?"

My limitations are that I just don't like using acronyms or abbreviations when I text, especially those long drawn-out ones like NALOPKT ("Not a lot of people know that"). I'm a fast typer, so no problemo for me, except when people use them in their replies to me.

Here's my Meebo account: http://meebo.com/add/LibrarianTechGuruGoddess.

Thing #10: Ning

2009-06-26T09:36:00.000-07:00

Although I didn't open a Ning account, I searched for the word "librarians" and came across some interesting related social networks:
Library 2.0
Savvy Librarian
Book Place

Watched the intro video; definite audio problems. I like that, the profile page is "all about you". Isn't all of this social networking "all about you"?!

♫ "Scrolling, scrolling along! I love to watch the world go by..." ♫

Thing #9: More Facebook

2009-06-26T07:52:00.000-07:00

Okay, "Never mind" as Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say after her rant...

I opened a Facebook account. It was easy and I can keep everything private. What a hoot—I discovered my 20-something nephews are on there. I've also made a friend and posted a few silly messages on my wall, as well as on his.

Not being of the Millennial generation, I'm still sort of stumped as to why everyone thinks that anyone else is so interested in what they're posting. I've been reading a lot about the phenomenon, but it's still very much a quandary to me.

A recent article gave some insightful information on this, entitled "Generation Y: We're just not that into Twitter" on cnet News (June 23, 2009).

If you're like me and looking for a way to better understand Generation Y, read this article. I'm tempted to pick up the book by the 2 Ph.D. authors that's mentioned in there, "The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement" by Twenge and Campbell.

I joined 3 groups: 1) In the Library With the Lead Pipe; 2) Libraries and Librarians; and 3) Digital Libraries. I need to cogitate some more about the fan portion...

Thing #8: Facebook

2009-06-23T13:14:00.000-07:00

Oh, dear, this is the one thing I've been dreading. Privacy is important to me. Facebook owns any content you upload. You can pick up stalkers. Although I enjoy reading about my librarian colleagues, some of the posts I've read make my eyes bug out because they just let it all hang out.

At one of my first professional positions, I used to argue the privacy issue with one of the engineers there over and over again. He would say, "What are they going to do to you if such-&-such information becomes public?" (This was pre-Internet, ha!) I'd say, "Fire you." He'd say, "They can't do that, you could sue them for wrongful discharge." Yeah, right. An example would be disclosing you have some sort of degenerative disease. (Which I don't, but that's my concern, not anyone else's. That's the point!) Corporate management (especially in Texas) is fairly unscrupulous and they'd make up some excuse to get you off the payroll.

If only there were a benevolent moderator out there who would hide items that were too descriptive of who you are and where you work or live—it's just sad how someone can cash in on having that knowledge. I know I sound paranoid. I can't help it.

Doing thing #8 will have to wait for this weekend, when I can set up my Facebook site at home.

Thing #7: RSS Feeds

2009-06-23T12:41:00.000-07:00

NT23 things are beginning to blur together. I played with "adding a subscription" (again) in Google Reader and also using the RSS subscribe link. Both easy and intuitive—my kind of tools! The problem with RSS integrated into Outlook is that all the feeds go directly into my RSS folders and I often forget to go read the messages. This totally defeats the purpose. Having the reader in the browser with a side window you can scroll is much, much better.

Thing #6: Blog Readers

2009-06-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

Fantastic! This is a great way to easily manage and keep up with my subscribed blogs. The scrolling blue box and keeping track of what I've already read are such useful features of Google Reader. Using bookmarks in my browser was just not an efficient way to keep up.

This brings to mind the Dilbert cartoon where Dogbert says, "Information is gushing toward your brain like a firehose aimed at a teacup". Peter Morville had a slide with the cartoon in the "Ambient Findability" presentation he gave at one of the Vision Sessions at NASIG's annual conference this year.

Water, water everywhere...information, information everywhere...

"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."
—Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate Economist

Thing #5: Image Generators

2009-06-17T12:38:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a very helpful group workshop for NT23 Things #3 through #5. I've generated a cartoon image:

I also tried Image Chef and it's oh so easy to use! One of my loosing campaigns here out at the Annex:

Thing #4: More Flickr

2009-06-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

I tried "Spell with Flickr" and that was trés amusant!

Thing #3: Flickr

2009-06-02T08:14:00.000-07:00

It sure feels redundant opening yet another e-mail account, this time on Yahoo! Did it anyway, and opened the Flickr account as well, but I don't have a camera here at work, so I've uploaded the image of an open book. This is ironic, since I'm being extremely private about this whole North Texas 23 things effort and am specifically not posting any information that is indicative of my job, life, and particulars, beyond commonalities.

Obviously, I don't get the whole social networking thing. I'm just a troglodyte.

Hey, has anyone tried the new search from MSN, called Bing? There's a gorgeous photo of a desert with colorful hot-air balloons on the homepage and you can roll your mouse over the landscape to get little pop-up windows with interesting trivia, here and there all around. I particularly like the image search. Try "librarian" and you get some primo quality images, plus as you scroll down the page you get more-&-more hits, rather than having to keep hitting "page forward". Lots of nice, thoughtful features. Pretty cool.

I know thing #3 is about Flickr, but I figure blogging is a great way to share new stuff and this is an image source!

Thing #2: Learning About 2.0

2009-05-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

Oh, bad girl! I told myself I would do this North Texas 23 things and here I am already behind.

The hoopla around Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 is somewhat disquieting for me. I like the fact that the World Wide Web is getting back to its roots and people are doing what the Web was initially intended for, but calling it 2.0 is hype. Granted, maybe it's necessary hype. You have to understand that I've always used the Web to share and communicate. My problem has been that I was often all alone in posting content.

As a Webmaster for a non-profit association in the mid-90s, I was constantly pleading with my constituents for content and feedback. My effort often felt like an empty bowl—not of much use without something in it. I'd take Word documents, PDFs, e-mail messages, whatever I could get my hands on to create pages of informative content. Blasphemy, I'd even take printed brochures and type them into the computer to get useful materials—ugh.

This always reminds me of the Star Trek episode where the Enterprise visits a penal colony and discover that they are using a new device to put socially acceptable thoughts into the minds of the inmates. Toward the end of the episode, the "bad guy" gets left in the chair and there's no one talking to him, so he turns into a drooling idiot with an empty mind. Please, please won't someone give me content, something to think about, ideas to cogitate, material to turn into informative pages?!

I'm so glad that people are realizing how much more powerful electronic text is and are collaborating, uploading, sharing. To my mind, that's the whole point of the Web!

Thing #1: Setting Up My Blog

2009-05-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

I'm blogging for the "North Texas 23 Things". Hello, fellow North Texas librarians and welcome to my blog.

"Librarian Tech Guru Goddess" is a bit much, but it's kind of a conglomeration of titles I've picked up along the way. As librarians we wear many hats and the folks we help are often grateful. In my case, when I was a systems operator for a private CompuServe forum in the early '90s, my members called me the "SysOp Guru Goddess". Since we're now in the age of mashups, I decided to mash a few of my titles together. Ta-da!