Paul's Blog

Thing 15 - Read a few perspectives on Web 2.0, Library 2.0 & the future of libraries

2007-08-16T11:28:00.000-07:00

There was a book that passed through CCPL headquarters a week or two that dealt with the other side of the coin for this question, and it raised a good point in my opinion. It asked the question, what would happen if our society got TOO user driven, and its answer would be that we would lose the ability to find good, authoritative sources of information in an era where anyone could comment and rank information using tools like blogs, Technorati, and del.icio.us. We would go from the Library 1.0 era, where information was localized, not well organized and hard to categorize, to the Library 2.0 era, where anyone can find and post information about anything, with no authoritative controls over what got put where.

I'm not saying that the things in the Web 2.0 program are bad, and we do need to be exposed to them, which I guess is the whole driving force behind doing the program. But a lot of these technologies have bad sides as well as good. They make it much easier to find information, but what tells you what information is authoritative and not plagarized, for instance?

Thing 14 - Explore Technorati and learn how tags work with blog posts.

2007-08-16T10:52:00.000-07:00

I wasn't too surprised by the topics that were popular here, all sorts of pop culture topics headed the list...

Thing 13 - Learn about tagging and discover a Del.icio.us

2007-08-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

I don't really know if I like something like this... You see, I still am in college, and the one thing both my professors and the librarians at McDaniel College stress is being able to find authoritative sources. The links here are okay, but there's no way for me to tell whether the sources are authoritive or not, if I'm trying to research something for a research paper. Plus there is also the concern about plagarism that might come from a site like this that is peer driven. How can you tell that what is linked isn't something copied from somewhere else?

Also, if the subject you are trying to research isn't very well researched, you're still as out of luck on the del.icio.us site as you are in a conventional library.

It's a nice way of organizing material on the internet, which I admit is huge and can never be properly indexed, but how good is the information that is found by the tool?

Thing 12 - Roll your own search tool with Rollyo

2007-08-16T07:56:00.001-07:00

hmm, now this could definitely be useful for a reference librarian, in particular...

This appears to be a very useful way of grouping relevant information together on a particular subject. With a bit of tweaking it can be made to give you the information you want without having to search through pages of non relevant stuff.

Thing 11 - Take a look at LibraryThing and catalog some of your favorite books.

2007-08-14T12:22:00.000-07:00

I have to say, that's a pretty neat site. It's a great way to see what people like to read, and possibly come up with new ideas of books to read that you might be interested in as well. I wonder if it works for CDs also....

The start of my library is:

I would add more, but I'm somewhat behind on these 23 things and need to catch up, so can't add every single book to it that I like... :)

Thing 9 - Explore MERLIN and then locate a few other useful library-related blogs and/or news feeds

2007-08-14T11:56:00.000-07:00

I seemed to like Syndic8 the best for the newsfeed search engines. I only like certain topics, so I was able to narrow down the search the easiest on this engine to find what I really was interested in.

Thing 6 - Flickr Mash-ups & Third Party Sites

2007-08-14T11:25:00.000-07:00

I used Findr, which is found at http://www.forestandthetrees.com/findr/findr.html, which helps narrow down the search results on Flickr for tags. This helps a bunch when trying to find photos that are related to one another. It also displays a thumbnail directly to the photos, so if you find one that you like, you can go right to it.

Thing 5: Explore Flickr and learn about this popular image hosting site.

2007-08-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

Oops... Just realized I had to do a post for each thing, instead of one per week.

Flickr was interesting... I'm used to image hosting as I used to work on the web team at a former library, so this was somewhat familiar to me.

The picture I chose is one that looks pretty similar to my dog that passed away several years ago. She lived until she was 16, so she was fairly old.

Thing 10 - Play around with an online image generator

2007-08-07T13:14:00.000-07:00

Okay... Some of those generators are just...wrong... Some are funny, but where do people get these ideas?

Anyway, the generator I played around with the most was the Mandelbrot Fractal Generator - http://mandelbrot.collettivamente.com/, because these images have always fascinated me. If you don't know, a fractal image can be zoomed in forever, and there are always new details in them to see. There's also some fairly complex mathematics used in the creation of a fractal image.

Thing 8 - Make Life Really Simple with RSS and a News Reader

2007-08-07T12:48:00.001-07:00

Oy, this one was really a pain to figure out... I think I did it though. Finding feeds wasn't too difficult, but figuring out how to get stuff visible publicly was... I hope it's done correctly, heh... My bloglines newsfeeds are visible at http://www.bloglines.com/public/pnorko/

I think that libraries can use the newsfeed and RSS technology to share upcoming events and news related to the library. I know McDaniel College's Hoover Library is starting up a newsfeed on its revamped site which details news and information about the library.

Thing 7 - Technology related stuff

2007-06-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

I can't really think of much technologically related stuff to talk about, to be honest... I don't really use the internet much beyond sites related to my hobbies. However, even these sites are starting to use new features like the stuff we've talked about in Maryland 23, so it's probably good to explore them.

7 and 1/2 lifelong learning habits

2007-06-07T13:54:00.000-07:00

Easiest - learning about new technology. I like technology and have a good background in that field.
Hardest - creating a toolbox. I'm never really good at following structured learning methods like that

Week 1, Thing 1: About This Program

2007-06-07T13:52:00.000-07:00

Done it... Is this right?