In what may be a shocker to those who know me, I’m voting republican this year…
And yes, the 360 degree comment was on purpose. Go Obama!!!
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Having fun…
via Wordle – my del.icio.us tags, all prettied up!
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Social Software Showcase – OpenID
I’ve finally put together my (very first) screencast on Slideshare for the Social Software Showcase site! It’s up and available now – feel free to check it out and find out the basics about OpenID and the issues surrounding this identity management tool. According to my son, it’s pretty good (though he may be a bit biased…) – he was asking me last night if he should get one of these OpenID things, after he’d heard me talk through the presentation (about 4 times – he should be pretty familiar with OpenID by now…).
There is a list of OpenID tutorials for the nuts-n-bolts “how to” information below the screencast of my rather theoretical discussion of OpenID, just in case you all decide it’s something you want to try out!
If you are going to be at ALA, stop by the Social Software Showcase at 1:30pm on Saturday the 28th at the Marriott Anaheim — Gold Key I-III to talk to me and the other talented folks who are contributing content to this “unconference” at the conference!
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A Video Chat
My first Skype video chat!! Thanks to Bobbi’s grant writing skills, we have fabulous new training laptops for our use. I was playing with one of them this week, trying to see if we could use it to send out with staff members going to various festivals around town so that they could sign folks up for library cards remotely (they can – I’ve got it set up now!) when I heard the call from Andrew Morton, of the University of Richmond, for a volunteer to do some video conferencing. I immediately thought of the new laptops – all decked out with an integrated webcam – and my Skype account and told him I would be available. He was leading a session on their new Library Learning 2.0 program and wanted someone to come and chat about the glories of Web 2.0 *stuff*. I got everything set up on my end, tested it with him, and at 12:40pm CST we started my very first Skype video chat. Andrew asked me to talk a little about our LL2.0 program, and I did, then he opened it up for questions. I got a question about how the staff has used the lessons learned in their work since the end of the program – and I told them all about our “2.0ified” homepage – the Flickr, Twitter and Blog feeds that make up the majority of our homepage are not all created/written/uploaded by Bobbi (though she coordinates it and does an awful lot herself)! The staff that went through the program and got comfortable with the tools are helping by writing blog posts, taking and occasionally uploading pictures and sending out the occasional tweet announcement as well. I got another question about the incentives we used, too. They are still in the process of deciding on incentives and were very interested to hear what we had used at MRRL!
It was great fun, and I hope I was of some help to the folks deciding whether or not to embark upon the LL2.0 journey at the University of Richmond – and I got to try out a bit of video conferencing to boot!
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5. YouTube
YouTube, as you may know, is a video sharing site that makes the sharing and social aspects of video really easy. Youtube gives it’s users the ability to upload video that can be commented upon, shared easily (via an embed code included with each video) and saved (via favorites) to be viewed again. All of this makes video a much more easily used medium for libraries to explore!
The Missouri River Regional Library has a YouTube account, but we haven’t been using it much – mostly due to a lack of recording equipment. Now that most digital cameras can take decent movies (and anything better than “decent” gets lost in YouTube’s compression anyway, it seems) we may start using it for more projects in the future. I did upload a short “safety” video, produced by the very talented, and just a wee bit odd, members of our children’s department a while back. More recently, Bobbi has used it to store the short videos made by our Automation Librarian to explain the use of our self-check machine (the hand model in those videos is our Circulation supervisor).
Other libraries, however, have made excellent use of YouTube. Denver Public Library used it to promote their summer reading program last year. The Metropolitan Library System (Oklahoma City) posted the first prize winner of their recent film content using YouTube as well. Other libraries have done other contests as well, using the teenager’s love of content creation to engage them in library activities via YouTube.
Other libraries post interesting little videos promoting everything from children’s activities to reference services – or just to have fun!
With the reduction in price for digital video cameras along with a serious increase in quality for even fairly cheap cameras, creating library videos is pretty cheap! David Lee King, a Library Journal “mover and shaker” is doing some really cool things with video in libraries – if you are looking for ideas to promote your services, engage your patrons and show the fun side of your library, his blog is an excellent place to start!
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Big Day @ The Library, Pt. 2
After all the excitement with Jim & Shannon Butcher, I attended the library softball team’s 4th game. WE WON!!! 11 to 7!!! We got 11 runs!!! This is a first for our library – we’ve lost the last 3 games, so we were definitely due for a win. Very exciting stuff. It started off with the husband of our Circ supervisor, Troy, getting a home run on the very first at bat for the Dewey Decimators. It continued with lots of great at-bats, excellent plays that stopped the other team (the Dozers, sponsored by Twehous Excavating) in their tracks and some good luck thrown in. Yeah!!!! It was an excellent end to a fabulous day at the Missouri River Regional Library!!
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Big Day @ The Library, Pt. 1
Today, we hosted an author visit by Jim and Shannon Butcher.
They were both wonderfully entertaining as they answered questions from the 70+ people who attended the event at the Main Library (they also did a Q&A at the Linn Library, but I didn’t attend that, and don’t know how many folks showed up for it).
There were a lot of great questions and some excellent answers about books both upcoming and already published. It was a LOT of fun.
After the event, the library took the couple out for ice cream at the famous-throughout-the-Mid-Missouri-area Central Dairy ice cream parlor. We sat and continued to chat with them as we all sucked down massive portions of seriously good ice cream.
Our last night in Jamaica, Michael, Mary and I went to an English Pub a bit down the road for a final dinner. We were joined by Loida Garcia-Febo, Tony Tallent, Carrie Gits (can’t find a blog for her – anyone else know where she can be found online?) and her husband. All were American presenters and we had fun discussing our experiences at the conference. I had the Nottingham Steak & Kidney Pie, since my boyfriend kept telling me to get it while I was in England and I never did. It was ok, but I’ve tried it, and I’ll not be ordering it again…
I got up at 4:30 the next morning and made it to the airport in plenty of time for my 7:25 flight – which, in true Island Time fashion – didn’t take off until 9:30. The rest of my travel home was on time and – mostly – worry free. We had to divert around to come into St. Louis from the west, because the southeast approach was closed due to weather and the descent was a bit rough, but I landed and got home safely!
The conference was great! One of the last sessions I attended was an informal meeting of the Academic SIG and there was a lot of discussion about Web 2.0 “stuff” as used in the Caribbean. The discussion about the differences in culture and in the way they do things, as opposed to the way us Americans do things, was eye-opening. They are starting to experiment with things like blogs and Learning 2.0, but the penetration of computers into the population is fairly low, so they aren’t focusing on those things like we do here in the states.
Overall, the people were friendly and welcoming to us American visitors – we all had a chance to really get to know some of the librarians who are working so hard in these countries to bring Internet access and books to their patrons. Between the conversations in the hallways (or outside in the coffee break area – that was where I hung out a lot!) and the videos from Eric & Jaap (you may have to be a Facebook user to see this video) giving us all a great view into the local libraries, there was a lot of learning going on, at least by me! I’ve always said that the best part of any conference is the “extra” networking that happens between sessions, and that held true for this one. It was a fabulous conference, with a bunch of great librarians who shared their cultures and their ideas with us!
Updated 6-13-08 Carrie left a comment with her blog address on it and I wanted to be sure that everyone knew that her name is now linked to her blog. The blog is at http://librarianandherblog.blogspot.com/ – go say hi to Carrie and give her some biblioblogsphere love!!
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More in Jamaica
Oh goodness, where did I leave off? Yesterday, before my planned trip to Rose Hall Main House, I went back out onto the beach, where I laid out with a trashy beach-read novel in one hand and a margarita in the other. This, my friends, is how we are *supposed* to be living! I enjoyed it for a bit too long, however, and I ended up burning the bejeesus out of my legs. Oh well, it was worth it!!
After that a big thunderstorm rolled in and the Rose Hall tour was out. So I came back to my hotel room and relaxed on the balcony (without closing the door behind me…) and watched the storm roll by. After that was a quick trip down to the bar for a before dinner drink, or two. I made the mistake of getting the “special” of the night, a lethal concoction called the “Bam Bam”. It lived up to it’s name (Just about knocked me flat) – and it was the first drink of the trip served with a paper umbrella, so I had to snap a picture.
After dinner, I went to the talent show, which was great fun! Us Americans won a prize for being the loudest national group there. We were so proud.
After that, I came upstairs, called Mom, talked to Alex and then called in to the Uncontrolled Vocabulary show. It’s usually on while I’m putting Alex to bed, so I’d never called in before, but since I had the opportunity here…
This morning, I got up and went into Montego Bay proper after breakfast. I spent *way* too much money at a little craft fair thing (but folks are getting great souvenirs this time!) and then came back to the hotel in time to catch Erik & Jaap talk about their previous gaming in libraries tour and their current Shanachie Tour. It was an excellent show!
Now I’m getting ready to go to my last “official” session of the conference. Cliff & I agreed to sit in on an Academic SIG meeting and field questions from the members. It should be fun. After that I’ll be joining Michael and Mary for the Rose Hall tour, then possibly on to an English Pub just a bit down the street.
I’ll catch you all up later!
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Creative Commons
I just got back from Michael Sauers’ presentation on Creative Commons and it was an eye opener. I know a bit about the subject, but Michael’s presentation was entertaining as well as informative – for both a newbie to the subject and for me! I use CC for all my flickr and slideshare content that I post, but I didn’t know about the MS Office add-on that allows you to embed CC licenses directly in files created by Office software. I don’t use Word very much any more (thank you, Google Docs!), but I do start nearly all my presentations in PowerPoint, so this will come in handy for that! He also discussed the Nebraska State Library’s efforts to catalog CC material and asked the librarians in the room to do the same at their institutions. It’s a worthy effort, and Michael’s a generous guy – if you need help finding the stuff they’ve done in OCLC, he’ll send you the numbers if you just drop him an email and ask!! Handy!
Now that my work for the day is done, I’m going to enjoy this utterly beautiful day…
and hit the beach, tour the Rose Hall main plantation house and enjoy the librarian’s talent show by the pool this evening! I’ll let you all know how that goes!!