Thing 15 - Online Games and Libraries

I'm a really big nerd. Thought I should lead with that. I love MMORPGs. I've played Everquest and EVE and I'm completely addicted to World of Warcraft. I'd never played Puzzle Pirates or SecondLife before, but I'd heard a lot about SecondLife. I signed up, created my avatar, wandered around a bit, visited Info Island and got really bored. Really fast. The reason that I play online games is to beat levels, or go on missions. SecondLife was too much like the Sims for my liking. It also seemed a bit creepy. People are living more on SecondLife than they are in Real Life. They end up spending all their time and money on this fake world that they've created for themselves. It just seems wrong. Maybe I would have liked Puzzle Pirates better.

My favorite part of these games is creating the characters. My character on WoW is awesome. He's this big viking-looking guy with tons of cool weapons. Total BAMF. On EVE, it is a completely different story. No matter what I do, or try to change she always just seems to turn out looking like a Transvestite Hooker. Can't change it. Don't know why.

Games are fine in libraries. I know that there are a lot of people who get mad at the people playing these games when there's a shortage of computers, but that's an equipment problem rather than a content problem. We can't judge people based on what they're using the computers for. Even though I didn't like SecondLife, I think it's cool that libraries do have a presence there.

Thing 14 - LibraryThing

I love LibraryThing. I've been using it for about seven months and have really enjoyed it. I needed a way to keep all the books that I own straight. That way if I ever move or rearrange, I'll know where they all were and hopefully it will make it a little easier to put back in order. Or if we get an earthquake. That probably won't happen in this part of the country, but it's good to be safe. It was really easy to add my books into the computer. The first time, it did take a little dedication to get all the way through, but now I just add the book as soon as I bring it home from the store and it's taken care of. What I've recently started doing was adding reviews to a few of my books. It's been hard for me to really say anything valuable in the reviews other than yay or boo, but I spose that will come with practice.

There are still so many things on the site that I haven't gotten involved with yet. I joined the group Librarians who LibraryThing, but haven't really contributed anything. It makes me feel guilty for being in the group. Maybe that's why I haven't joined any others. Oh and I try to get early-reviewer books, but haven't been lucky yet. Cross your fingers.

I added a widget to my blog awhile ago after seeing one of the other girls here do it. I copied. So sue me. But in case that's too time consuming you can also go here to look at my books.

I think it would be useful for the library to have a place where people could look at recently added books or see what the librarians are reading, but it would take waaaaaaaay to much time and effort to enter all of our books, even with a scanner.

Thing 13 - Online Productivity Tools

The sites that we looked at in this Thing seemed like they would be more useful than others we've seen during this process, but there was kind of an information overload. There were so many different sites to look at, I felt overwhelmed. It might be good for me to look at one different site a day so I can actually comprehend the differences.

Since I already had a Google account set up to use Blogger (and have a hatred of all things Yahoo!) I chose to set up a Google start page. There were some things that seemed to be useful - I liked having my weather right there! But some others seemed extraneous. One thing I really like about Google's original homepage is that it was so simple. You could go to Google and find what you were looking for without any distractions. I'm very very very easily distracted, so I think I'll probably not ever sign into that homepage again.

One tool that was talked about on one of the links was TinyURL. I've used that a few times. Sometimes the addresses for sites get so incredibly long that there's no way to remember them, no way to write them down, and no way to copy/paste them into anything. When you use Tiny URL to shorten the address it saves a lot of time and brain power.

I won't use an online calender - I'm too afraid that I'll forget my password or forget where I put it. I use a paper calendar and that is what works best for me. However, at the library we do use a Google calendar to set up the meeting room schedule. We used to use a paper schedule and then it would be constantly erased and changed and things were moved around all the time. Now we have a Google account just for meeting rooms that everyone has a password to - it saves a lot of time and effort.

Thing 12 - Do you Digg?

For this Thing, I browsed around all four sites to see what struck me. These are my first impressions. Digg - too much pop culture. Reddit - strictly sensationalism. Newsvine - actually reliable? a tad more intelligent, maybe. Mixx - combination of the others, I liked how it was divided into categories. While I think it's good for librarians to stay on top of what's going on in the news, I feel like these sites will actually detract from that. There is so much junk to sift through that it will take more time to find the important stories. And there's the fact that these sites that are Digged (dug?) could be anything; they could be some crazy guy from the backwoods ranting about aliens. There isn't a filter to keep the important/relevant stuff in and everything else out. That's why respectable sources have editors. I think I could spend hours wasting time on these sites at home, but not in the workplace.

Since starting on the Things, I've become addicted to my Bloglines account. I have news feeds there that automatically update and since they're from CNN, the BBC and the NY Times - I know that I can (cross your fingers) trust the information that's on there.

I went to the NY Times and found the article about Sarah Jane Olson being let out of prison and then being put back (She was released because of a clerical error). I have shared articles on Facebook before, but never through any of these sites. I chose to use Mixx mainly because I really didn't want to use Reddit or Digg, but it was really simple. It let me share things without signing up for a full membership, but the site seemed friendly (if that's possible for a web site to do) and I almost considered creating an account. But I didn't.......for now.

Thing 11 - Tagging and del.icio.us

I've been tagging all of my posts as I've been going along, so that was pretty easy. I've also used tags for some other sites (such as LibraryThing). That was actually my favorite part of del.icio.us. I don't think I'll use the site for reference, since there're only a few sites that we use consistantly and those are already bookmarked on Mozilla, but hoo boy! it was funny to see the connections for between me and random other people who look at the same websites as I do. The tagging of my LibraryThing is pretty standard (I used subject headings) so that it would help me recognize Dewey numbers better since I'm still new at this whole library business. For my blog posts, I've been incredibly random. I've found that the randomness isn't quite as useful, but is a lot of fun. And as long as you have a few serious tags, what difference does it make?

BTW, did anyone else have a hard time getting the dots right in del.icio.us

Thing 10 - Wikis

YAY Wikis!! I've never edited a wiki before, so that was kind of fun. The only experience I'd had with wikis before this thing was Wikipedia (which I am in love with). I know it's not "scholarly", but when I need to look up random pop-culture information - nothing can beat it. I've also used Wikipedia to aid my research a few times. On some of the more standard encyclopediaish articles, they have resources cited at the bottom of the page and also places to go for more information. It's helpful.
Before watching the CommonCraft video, it hadn't even occurred to me all the different ways wikis could be used. I think it would be awesome to have a wiki at the library with book reviews or something for patrons. But I fear that someone would have to be monitoring it almost constantly (we have some little stinkers in the library that may decide that the entire wiki must consist of Runescape cheats) Can you even cheat at Runescape? I have no idea, I may have to go to a source. Anyway, I love the idea of wikis and all the things that we can do with them.

oh and I edited the 23 things on a stick wiki.

Thing 9 - Online Collaboration Tools

In this Thing we were to follow links and edit the Declaration of Independence. I found both programs pretty easy to use, but if I had to choose - it would be Google docs, but that could just be because I am more familiar with the way that Google sets their sites up. The one thing I had an issue with was the fact that you had to get permission to edit a document. I guess if you were using it for your own personal use that wouldn't be a problem, but it seems just as easy to have a flash- drive on your keys.

Thing 8 - Sharing Creations

I just realized that there's less than a month left and I still have 15 things left. YIKES!! I've been extremely over-lackadaisical about this whole thing. I need to get my butt in gear. Alright, thing 8...I tried using Zoho to make a little slide-show. It was really simple, which is good. I could see that being used in our library for presentations and/or classes. It takes a lot less time than trying to figure out Powerpoint. I'm not going to upload my presentation to my blog because it was really sad and little, but it served its purpose.

I also liked eFolio. It would be really useful during a job hunt, and not just for employers - I could see myself using it not to send to people but to keep track of information myself (awards, special projects, &c) so that when I was building a resume I would have all the information in one spot where I could pick and choose what to use. Was that a sentence? Probably not, but oh well. I looked at a few different resumes and the biggest problem I could see myself having with the site was keeping it interesting, but also professional. I could easily see it turning into a MySpace page.

Thing 7 - Web Communication Tools

I have a feeling this post may get really long, so I apologize in advance.

I grew up in a world with the internet, so most of the web communication tools in this thing were already at least a little familiar to me. I have used e-mail since middle school and was a bit confused by the comment in the "thing" explanation about e-mail existing before the internet. Not really sure how that would've worked, but anyway..... In our library we do have computer classes showing people how to set up an e-mail address and how to do the basics (writing messages, opening messages, forwarding, replying and attachments if the class can handle it) We also have all our overdue notices going out through e-mail. This is not a perfect system because the people w/o e-mail never get notified, but it's something we're working on. We also have an "Ask a Librarian" feature on our webpage.

I used to use IM a lot. I still use it, but not quite as much as I used to. It's helpful to keep in touch with people I went to college with, but who now live far away. I can see good and bad things about using IM for reference. We are not sitting at the reference desk all of the time (we wander and help people on the book floor) so if someone IMs us, we may not notice the message is there until it's too late and they've signed off. Another thing I think we'd have a problem with is the language. Although I use IM quite a bit, I don't use the Instant Message language (I'm really weird and have been known to use semi-colons [and I'm not talking about emoticons]) I couldn't understand half of what was said in the video!! I fear that we would need to have a dictionary sitting by our computers at all times in order to communicate.

Texting is a communication tool that I don't use very often. Again, it may be because I'm too long-winded and don't use or want to use the abbreviations for things. To me, it seems to take more time than IM or e-mail, but if someone used it all the time that wouldn't be so. One thing that is good about Text is the convenience of always having it with you. I saw that future versions of Millennium will have text capabilities built in to notify people of their holds. That would be really cool!!!

Whenever I think about web conferencing I'm reminded of the episode of "The Office" where the boss thinks he's going to a cool party in New York, but it's actually a party at their office connected to other offices by webcams. I have taken part in a couple classes that were taught by a person via the web, but that's as close as I've come. I learned in this thing that I have a really hard time absorbing the information in podcasts. There are too many outside distractions, especially if I'm trying to listen to them at work. I think they would be convenient to set up meetings between people in different locations, but it probably wouldn't be my first choice in how to learn information.

Alright, that got really long. Again - I'm sorry.