awesome awesome awesome. it worked! I am amazing! awesome.

Thing 38: Screencasting

I didn't have any idea what screencasting was before starting this Thing. If we did online tutorials at our library - this would be perfect. Right now, we just offer regular computer classes, but we'll have to keep this option in our minds in the future. One small thing - if we were to have them, someone else would have to do it. I have a bad habit of highlighting whatever I'm reading on the screen. People can always tell when I was the last one on any of our staff computers because whole paragraphs will be blue. :)

I watched a few different tutorials. The screencast-o-matic seemed pretty simple, but I didn't like the red dot. Jing's tutorial was entertaining, but the product itself seemed harder. I couldn't watch more than a minute of the skitch tutorial. Wow - that was a lot of pink.

I decided to try screencast-o-matic and it was easy! I didn't know what to use as an example for my screencast, so I just signed into my blog and went into the Edit Post option. I think it worked. And I think I embedded it into my blog correctly. (crosses fingers)

Thing 37: Photo Tales

I think I signed up for a flickr account during the first round, but I don't own a camera and usually hide when other try to take pictures, so I didn't have anything to put up there. I went to flickr and searched through the Creative Commons pictures and found some that I could use to experiment with. I tried animoto and it seemed pretty easy to do. The only thing I had trouble with was adding music, but if I were using my computer at home with all my mp3s it would be a whole lot easier.

I can see us using this in the library to promote activites. We could have pictures of events and have them in a slide show. These sites would also work really well for montages at a wedding or graduation &c.

Thing 36: Comic Relief - Generate Some Fun

Wow! After Thing 35, this seems extra dumb and a complete waste of time. I'll look through these, but I don't see how I'd be able to use them in the library. And I'm not touching the Tartan link. Too many of our computers are down with viruses to screw up any more.

I managed to find 3 that were useful. Turning web pages or word documents into PDF files is by far the most useful generator on this page. Also I really liked the Son of Citation machine and EasyBib. Easybib was awesome because you could just put in the ISBN and it would automatically put it into the right format.

My random names are:
username: Mechanical Princess
Fairy name: Columbine Elfwitch
Vampire name: Demon of Wraiths

Megan Richardson's Dewey Decimal Section:

581 Specific topics in natural history

Megan Richardson = 357148938184954 = 357+148+938+184+954 = 2581


Class:
500 Science


Contains:
Math, astronomy, prehistoric life, plants and animals.



What it says about you:
You are fascinated by the world around you, and see it as a puzzle worth exploring. You try to understand how things work and how you can make them better. You might be a nerd.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

And because I got this song in my head working with all these generators:
The Holloways - Generator

Thing 35: Books 2.0

I warn you in advance. I really liked this Thing and looked at almost everything. This post is going to be long and rambling.

I haven't really seen a large change in our library regarding electronic books. We have e-audio books available for download through our library system, but no book books. I would be really excited to have a kindle for myself, but they're really expensive, so I don't see it happening anytime in the future. If anyone wants to buy me a present, I definitely wouldn't turn one down. I don't know of anyone who has a kindle, but a few of the people I follow on Twitter have them and really like them. They haven't caught on in this part of the country, but we're normally a little behind the times :)

I don't want to put anything on my phone. I have a cheapo phone without Internet capabilities. If I had an iPhone though...... too bad iPhones don't work in North Dakota. TwitterLit is a cool idea and you don't have to involve your phone. I signed up to follow them on Twitter, we'll have to wait and see if it pans out to anything fun.

The Reader's Advisory sites would be really useful in the library. We use the What's Next Database all the time when people can remember an author, but not the order of the books - or if they have 5 books checked out by they're all in different series. Our catalogue doesn't have an easy way to print out a list of the books in a certain series in order, either, so it helps. What should I read Next could be really helpful for Reader's Advisory as well, especially if it's a genre you personally don't read much. I also visited BookLamp. It's similar to Pandora (which I love and am listening to while typing this). I really hope it gets developed into something real.

For Online Book Communities, my favorite was Reader2. I read way too much and I'd like to have a record of it. I tried to register, but it was disabled because of spammers. I'm going to have to try to remember to go back and sign up at a later date.

I don't do much with Book Groups, but I liked the Reader Group Choices site. It would give your group a good jumping off point. The music aspect is interesting, this week it's for the book "The Soloist" which was a really good book even though the movie is horrible mis-cast, but I love Classical music and it had good suggestions to get you in the mood for the book. I wish they had an archive of searchable Music by the Book segments rather than just the feature of the month. It surprised me that they didn't, but if it was on the site anywhere, I couldn't find it.

Like I said earlier, our library does subscribe to Netlibrary for audiobooks. I personally don't like people reading to me, so unless it's Neil Gaiman - I don't listen to audio books (I can't help but listen to him) but I really liked the idea of Podiobooks. I hate that name. It's all free, which is good, and there was a wide range of books. It gives participants an opportunity to listen/read things that they otherwise may not see in the audio book collection in their library.

I had iRead on Facebook, but I had a hard time keeping it up to date. Plus I usually had too many books at once. Never mind, I just checked and I had the plain books application because I had looked at iRead and didn't like the setup. I like a little more anonymity with the books I read and with Facebook it would pop up on everyone's Newsfeed whenever I started a new book. I still think I'm going to try Reader2.

When I looked through the Book Review websites, the only one that seemed like it would be better than the reviews that pop up on Novelist was Book Browse. You have to subscribe to it, and it's not cheap which pretty much puts it out of my mind.

Thing 34: Is this our Competition?

I tried reading the article "Future of the Reference Desk", btu I couldn't understand most of what she was talking about. "Triage technologies"??? I also disagreed with her saying the Reference is a librarian's term. Our library got rid of "reference" librarians and reference desks years ago, but patrons still ask for it.

The Slam the Boards idea is awesome. It gives us know-it-alls a chance to use all of our useless knowledge. :) When I looked through some of the different answer sites, there was a wide range of question quality. I looked at Wikianswers first and really liked the way the site was set up. Some of the questions seemed really random, but that was only until I looked at the other sites. I'm not sure if the people who ask questions on Yahoo!Answers speak English. A lot of questions weren't even recognizable as questions. I really liked Mahalo and the fact that you could ask questions through Twitter. Plus, their pictures were all cute Hawaiian cartoon kids.

Thing 33: Travel 2.0

I don't travel much myself, so mainly I need to keep up with sites in order to help patrons. So far, we haven't had much demand for travel 2.0 sites; they stick to the booking sites.

Looking over the sites, the only one I was familiar with was TripAdvisor and I'm sorry to say, that's from an episode of "The Office". I looked at mykugelhopf.ch which was pretty cool to look at, I don't know if I would read it on a regular basis, but it's about food and based out of Switzerland, what's not to like?

I also looked at "The Cranky Flier" which I probably wouldn't use for travel, but so I could keep up to date with what's going on in the airline industry. I went to UND, so most of my friends are pilots, ATCs or TSA employees and sometimes I get left out of conversations.

My 3 favorite links in this thing were: Vcarious Wines and Times, and Greenroutes I could definitely see myself using them in the future.