Um, oops?

Is anyone else having trouble getting to the Staff Forums from the links in the 23 Things blog? It keeps telling me it can't find the site.

Library 2.0: Thing 15

What I see from the whole Library 2.0 thing is a major shift in attitude for libraries. The old attitude seemed to be one of exclusion. Yes, we have these wonderful things here, but we really don't want you to get your grubby little hands on them. And before you walk out the door with one of our precious items, you must prove your identity, give a vial of blood, and promise your first born child. The obvious reason for this attitude is the fact that so many people have taken advantage of library resources and made off with our books or cds or whatever. If the future of libraries is that every thing is available online, there won't be anything to make off with. Therefore, we can loosen our grip a little and welcome folks on in, as it were.

I'm pretty excited about Open Worldcat. My husband and I use it a bunch.

I think the Tulsa library system is really making progress at the library 2.0 thing. The myspace page, the blog, etc. I think we could make our online catalog a little more user friendly. Especially at the My Account level and the Reserving of books. For example, when a patron looks at her account and sees that a book she's requested is Available (meaning it is on a shelf at it's owning location) and the pickup location of Broken Arrow, she thinks that it is available at the Broken Arrow library and drives over to find it. Then she is upset because it isn't there. The website is a bit confusing on this point.

Technorati - Thing 14

Okay, so I played around with Technorati a bit. When I clicked on the books link, it took me to the Last 30 Books Linked From Amazon. BORING! Mostly scrapbooking and crafting titles.

I looked at the most popular lists. Nothing really surprising. Mostly political and geek stuff. Nothing wrong with that, but I pretty much already have the ones lined up that I'm interested in. I didn't see anything earth shattering.

Delicious: Thing 13

I had heard of delicious before, but I didn't really know what it was. Now I know. I have occasionally wished my bookmarks list from my browser was online so I could access it at home. I don't have all those website URLs memorized. Now I know how to do it.

I had some fun exploring other people's tags. It's interesting to see what sites have been tagged as book review sites, since that's what I'm into.

I see this more useful on the personal front than as something I could use for work, unless I get tapped to do something completely different from my current job. It's almost like another search engine, sort of. You go to Delicious and search tags that match what you're looking for and go to town.

Rollyo: Thing 12

So I created a search engine to look for book reviews from various sites I would visit if I were looking for reviews of a particular book.

Here is my searchroll: http://rollyo.com/okcruegirl/my_book_reviews/

This would be most hopeful in a readers advisory capacity. People frequently want to know what is said of various books. Most of the time, I haven't read the books. This is a quick way to see what the critics thought of a book without making it up on the fly.

It took me awhile (like a week) to figure out what this thing was or how I would use it. Once I did, it wasn't too hard to work out. I hope I did, anyway. When I searched on a book, it seemed to work.

Now, I think I'll have to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

LibraryThing

For thing #11, I created a LibraryThing account.

http://www.librarything.com/home/okcruegirl

Considering that I already have accounts at Shelfari and Goodreads, I don't really think I need ANOTHER place to catalog my books. And Goodreads is so much prettier to look at, really. I don't think I'll be changing everything to LT any time soon.

I did mess around with it. I looked at the forums. I looked at other people's libraries. I'm just not that impressed.

Thing 10.

The hardest part about this whole thing was thinking up something to put in the generators. Here's what I came up with:

ДDЯIЗИЙЭ TЗДGЦЭ

Thing #9

Technorati was definitely the easiest and most helpful. Syndic8 was confusing. I couldn't even tell what I was looking at. I'm sure my husband, the IT nerd (that's a compliment), could have seen exactly what was going on, but it looked like it wasn't even in English to me. Blah.

Bloglines

Well, it only took me forever to read through all the feeds on my bloglines. And I must be a little slow because I couldn't figure out how to get the TCCL feeds to add to my bloglines. Duh. Finally figured it out.

I already use Google Reader, so now, I've got two RSS readers to pay attention to.

Technology post

So, okay. I got a new cell phone. After a week of research, I finally decided on a Nokia 5310 MusicExpress phone. I didn't buy it because I need a music phone. I bought it because it got really good reviews for things I actually use my phone for, like texting and talking.

There are some good things and bad things about getting a new cell phone. One good thing is that I can now organize my contacts in groups, so if I want to send the same message to all the girls in my dance group, I can just click one button instead of trying to pick them all out of a list.

One bad thing is I had the worst time trying to load pictures from my phone to my computer. Of course, it worked brilliantly for my husband, who then thought I was a ditz for not figuring it out immediately. Gr.

I'm sure I will eventually learn all the ins and outs of my new phone, but the learning process is frustrating.

Items 1-6 are done!

I have come to the conclusion that I am very, very bad at the "where in the world" game on Picasa.

It's fun, though!

Hit a roadblock.

I managed to carve out 5 minutes to register on the staff forum, but I didn't have time to log my progress. We are seriously busy this week!

Anyway, I tried to do it today, but Outlook was down the whole time.

Mostly, I try to do all this at home, but this one has to be done at the library.

Le sigh.