Thing #15: Online Games in Libraries

I have to admit, this is NEW territory for me!! I looked at the Second Life Video tour. The concept is similar to the SIMS games that my kids play. But the virtual classroom idea is interesting to me.

We have started offering gaming nights for teens here at the library. A couple of our fun, techno-savvy librarians have organized and hosted two very successful Guitar Hero nights here at the library. This is a great way to bring teens into the library.

Thing #14: Library Thing

I actually have worked with Library Thing before. I actually created an account months ago (pre-23 things) to access a co-worker's Library Thing storytime books page. This is a tool that can be VERY useful to librarians, as we are constantly creating and looking for booklists to help our patrons.

One of the features I love about Library Thing is that you can actually have a picture of the book cover on the screen- very helpful when you are trying to remember a storytime title (I often remember the cover and/or illustrations more than I remember the actual titles!) And a helpful tool for getting storytime theme ideas and/or remebering titles you've read before.

Thing #13: Online Productivity Tools

I set up an IGoogle start page. This could be very useful to have everything in one place- news headlines, weather, sports updates on my favorite baseball team, and gadgets such as the countdown clock could be helpful too (as I'm scrambling to get through my 23 things!)

I also set up an account with "Remember the Milk." This seems useful to me as well! The thing is, there are SO MANY of these tools out there! It's a bit overwhelming! I guess it's just a matter of finding out which ones work best for you and which ones are easiest for you to work with and actually make your life/work better.

Thing #12: Do You Digg?

As I look over the various social media sites, I'm starting to understand how these might be useful to librarians- it's a way to find out, quickly, what the "buzz" is on various topics- so that we might be better prepared to know the latest issues/news stories that our patrons are interested in. This is helpful because the amount of news and info available online is overwhelming. I often want to know what people are talking about/ interested in NOW- and these social media sites are a way to see what people are interested in NOW.

I set up a Digg account and shared a New York Times article about Federer winning the U.S. Open. It was very easy to do.

Thing #11: Tagging and Del.icio.us

After setting up an account with Del.icio.us, I can see the potential usefulness of using tools like this- instead of the bookmarking on my browser. The use of tags makes this VERY useful- especially for us librarians!So far, I have added a few sites with book discussion guides (for when we do book club kit selection each year). But I though of another way to use Del.icio.us that would be useful: the other day, I was helping a patron find consumer information on central air conditioners. I remember doing this same search for other patrons, and then for myself also when I was faced with selecting an air conditioner and furnace for my home. I remember NOT finding much consumer info/ ratings in magazine articles. But I did find several websites were helpful- and I wish now that I had written these down! Now I can simply tag these sites and refer to del.icio.us when this comes up again. One of many potential applications.

Thing #10: Collaboration: Wikis

I recently did a bit of research on wikis and presented a brief introduction to wikis at one of our monthly reference workshops, so I've been learning about and exploring wikis over the summer.

At first, I had NO idea what a wiki was! I viewed the Common Craft video "Wikis in Plain English" on Youtube and found that very helpful in getting a grasp of what wikis are. I explored several wikis, such as ALA's Every Child Ready to Read wiki, Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki, and Megalibrarian (I found several good storytime and craft ideas in this wiki).

Finally, I actually CREATED my own simple wiki on Wikispaces.com, so that I could actually show the other librarians I was presenting to- how to create, edit or add to a wiki. I thought it might be useful to make a wiki where the librarians doing storytime at our branch could collaborate on/ get ideas about various themes and titles to read. I thought a wiki would be more practical than all of us e-mailing and copying eachother on e-mail, etc. I created a simple wiki using a table format with theme at the top and then title ideas for that theme in the lines below.

Thing #9: Collaboration: Zoho vs. Google Docs

I tried Zoho out- editing the Declaration of Independence document. (I haven't been able to successfully get into Google Docs). I honestly don't really know how we would ever use this here at the library. To me, it just seems easier to send e-mail attachments. But then, it may just be the nature of our work- in other professions, such as book editing or advertising, these collaboration tools might be very useful.