23rd Thing: Final Thought and Reflections

Having just graduated only a few years ago from UNT with my MLS, I noticed that many of the things covered in this program were things I had been exposed to during my UNT days.

Nonetheless, besides just being a refresher, I felt that I got a more in depth experience with these things. In particular, I found it rather thrilling to create my own Blog and the experience of doing it made it seem like a much more tangible entity that exists in the digital world.

While I already knew the basics about FlickR, mashups and RSS Feeds, I felt that these exercises made me much more familiar with them in a practical manner. I also felt I learned much more about Del.icio.ous and Rollyo through this program and how one could use them to tailor make one’s own “mini” search engine, especially in cases where you want to zero in on certain reliable sites and “filter” out others that might not have much relevancy. I also thought it was good to have experience doing tagging, and it was nice to discover that Goodreads had a user friendly process for doing so. Meanwhile, though I was already familiar with Wikis, it was nice to see more of what was available in the library realms.

GoogleDocs was a pleasant surprise for me. It was nice to know that a mechanism on the internet exists to allow for microsoft word processing in those cases that the software package is, for whatever reason, not accessible. It could also be useful if you wish to share a project with someone in which you want someone else to work on a document with you, and obviously this could be in regards to library related activities. Meanwhile, podcasting and YouTube I had already had exposure to, though I had never done podcasting through Google Reader, which was a new experience for me.

From UNT, I had already had a high degree of experience with Netlibrary, but I found watching the Overdrive instructional videos very useful since it is not everyday that you are necessarily exposed to the process directly.

Overall, I found the experience both helpful and beneficial.

Netlibrary and Overdrive

I’m actually very familiar with Netlibrary, but since the last I heard was that SAPL was intending to go more towards Overdrive, I spent more time looking at Overdrive. I watched all the online instructionals and, because it had visual demonstrations of the steps, I felt that it was very informative in giving me a better understanding of how Overdrive works. Just to practice, I checked out a dinosaur book on Overdrive. After browsing the materials, it seems to me that right now, the material available on Overdrive is somewhat limited. Every major title I looked for was not there. Like Netlibrary, the collections, at least as they stand in the present, seem to favor certain types of books and items. It will be interesting to see in the future how and if the collection on Overdrive will expand.

Podcasting

Just for the fun of it, I now have (through Google Reader) a subscription to NPR's "World's Global Hit" podcast. In the meantime, looking around at the various sites, I found that probably the best thing about Podcast400 was its "Directory of Directories" link which gives a nice list of podcast directory sites with very useful comments about the sites (such as appears to be a dead link, etc.). In terms of finding Library Podcasts, PodcastAlley.com was very easy to use and seemed to have one of the better search engines in pulling up library related podcasts. By simply putting "Library" in their search field, it brought up a list of library podcasts that seemd to have more relevant listings than some of the other podcast site search features that I looked at.

YouTube

I went to Youtube. One thing I don't like about it is that it doesn't distinguish between professional quality footage and amateur quality footage. Anyway, while I was here I felt compelled to see the SAPL cheerleaders from staff development day "do their stuff" again. Just in case you missed it is at the website:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PrS9K96neU

Cheers

2.0 Award Sites

One of the nice 2.0 award sites is Biblio.com. Often, people want to hunt down out of print books and it is convenient to have a site that makes this possible. One big advantage is the more expansive search designs--in particular, the keyword feature--that allows you to try to track the book down easier with only partial information (which is often the case). The browse books feature can also be most useful in hunting down books with only some information about the book. One thing I don't like about it is that when you put in an exact title, it can often also bring up near titles. This is, of course, useful when you are searching but very annoying when you know what you want. It would be nice if one had two fields, perhaps with the headings: exact title and flexible title. Of course, one obvious application for this site regarding a library setting is that it is a useful tool in helping a reference librarian track down an out of print book for a patron.

GoogleDocs

This is useful to even know it exists, particularly since I have had some patrons whose laptops, for one reason or another, do not have microsoft word. Anyway, I made an IRS information document on GoogleDocs (after creating an account) and, while I found that the share function wasn't too hard to operate, I didn't know anybody to "share" it with that were on this particular system. Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see a list of "shareable" people to choose from. I got the impression that you already had to know who already existed in their database to even use this function.