My Dog is Licking My Laptop!

Seriously...I had to wrestle for a space to see the screen. I think she was also getting lost in adding restaurant and market links to my del.icio.us account. Here's a sloganizer for you faithful readers,

Del.icio.us has gone to the dogs

Reflecting on the semester, my latest questions are thus:

1. What is the correct format for editing and changing blog posts? Is it okay for one to simply edit and republish? Or is one supposed to use a strikethrough for edited areas and add in new info in italics or something of the sort? Is there some sort of blogiquette I should be aware of?

2. How does a semester 1 participant register for Project Play semester 2? Or are we automatically registered simply by finishing? Will there be a registration limitation and thus I should be noting the start time and date on my google calendar?

3. How many diet cokes did you enjoy during our first semester? I lost count!

Here a Wiki, There a Wiki

I've put off posting about the Project Play, Week 9 theme, wikis, for some reason I cannot pinpoint exactly. Perhaps it is that I am a bit sad our semester is coming to an end. I loved being in school, especially grad school at SLIS, and would always find myself somewhat melancholy as a semester drew to a close and I handed in that last paper. But, I cannot put off posting about these last assignments forever as I want to actually be recorded as completing the first semester of Project Play!

I've dabbled in contributing to a few wikis and even started and used one for the Adult Services staff at my library to complete a departmental assessment project at the request of our Director. It was handy to use a wiki for this purpose rather than a shared word document - more organized layout with different pages and links between them and less email and revised document copies floating around between staff. If I recall correctly, I was able to set up the wiki so that only invited staff could view and modify it - so it was a shared creating and editing project but only shared by selected people and not the entire world. It was over a year ago that we finished up the assessment project and I'm sure that wiki is floating out there in cyberspace feeling quite neglected. (Note to self: find address of wiki and purge if possible).

I've also been contributing to the SCLS programming wiki but not as much or as often as I would like to. I think it will be a great resource for library staff as it evolves and more information is added. It is so easy to use and add to ... the difficulty is finding time to work on it, or making time to work on it, with all of the other pressing responsibilities, deadlines, new tasks suggested, and majority of time spent assisting patrons at the reference desk. I wonder how many libraries/library staff creating and working on wikis have that work as part of their routine position responsibilities and workload? Does your library have a dedicated web/internet services staff person and/or do you assign designated focus time for staff to work on web/internet projects?

Following the instructions for this lesson, I visited wikipedia and noticed that my library is already listed. I wonder who added it?!

A Del.icio.us Time of Year

What a wonderful time of year to be exploring del.icio.us as our assignment for Project Play,Week 8. As my pies were baking in the oven and rosette irons anxiously awaiting their dip into the hot oil (ahem...lard), I was able to create a handly little list of delectable diners, elegant eateries, and mouthwatering markets that I would like to someday visit.

I found del.icio.us quite easy to use for adding my links; however, compared to the other tools we have been assigned to try this term I think it is a bit lacking in aesthetics. Blue, black, mostly text, minimal to absent graphics...perhaps simple is the key with this one. I really don't think I'd use del.icio.us as one big storehouse for all of the links I use, although I do see use for it in my life for specific subject links I would like to share. I have different "favorites" links on the two library PCs and two personal PCs that I use. These are tied to the type of work I am doing on each PC, at each desk or at home, and there really isn't a whole lot of crossover. I don't want to have to login to another site to get to those links when clicking on the "favorites" button works just fine (and bah humbug, too!) On the other hand I can definitely see using del.icio.us for things like my restaurant list, a craft supply list, birthday wish list, etc. Basically for lists of web links that I would like to be able to easily share with others. Obviously, this use would also be great for a library to share web resources/pathfinders with patrons as is being done by the Menasha Public Library.

Now on to the "tags and tagging" portion of this post. I love tags. Love the idea of tags and people using regular, day-to-day language to organize and share information. I wonder how many people go back and add to or change their tag terms as time goes on. I especially love tag clouds. I think they are pretty, and fun, and an intriguing way to visually show what users of any given site are most interested in/posting about. The problem I have found with tags and tagging is that, depending on my mood/frame of mind/amount of caffeine, I may easily tag the same item in different ways. Then when reviewing my list of book titles, links, or blog posts later, I think of altogether different tags. Or notice I have added some fitting tags to some of my items that would also describe other of my items. Or I start looking at the way other people have tagged a book or photo and want to use some of their tags. Then I have to go back and add in more tags and also try to remember those tags when I add future posts so I can include them. I do think the tagging feature on some of the sites we are exploring this semester have progressed since I first used the sites...or perhaps I am becoming more comfortable with using the sites and notice things I did not at first explore. For example, I don't remember seeing the "show all" link next to "Labels for this post" (tags) in Blogger but I now find it handy each time I am posting to click on this and refresh my memory about tags I've used in the past.

My Week 8 Questions:
Why do some sites call tags "tags" while others call them "labels" or something else?
My guess - this would be the folksonomy of the site creator.
Why do some sites require you to use commas between tag terms while others only require spaces?
My guess - another example of the site creator's thought pattern.
Is there a general rule of thumb for multi-word tags? For example, should the tag "project play" be two words separated with a space, or one word with no space, or capitalized, or some other format, or all of these?

Overdue and Drooling

...but not for long. My apologies, fellow Project Players, for falling behind in our weekly assignments. I must admit that I became distracted when reading Service Included and have recently been caught up in imagining the world of French Laundry while pouring over Chef Thomas Keller's cookbooks. Oh and what a world I imagine it to be! In the interest of not drooling all over the reference desk, I will pull myself out of the world of French~American culinary fantasyland and back to the reality of, well, this very grey November day.

I have, however, thoroughly enjoyed reading your posts about tagging, del.icio.us, and wikis. Not to fear, my thoughts on lessons 8 and 9 will soon appear! As an aside, I did familiarize myself with using the LINKCat Scrubber for this meager post so all is not lost. I highly recommend it to any staff or libraries that are blogging about titles and authors. Using the scrubber and making your references to titles hotlinks to LINKCat is the perfect way for your readers to head straight from your blog to LINKCat to place requests for the items of which you write. I'm guessing most of you already know this but for me it was a great ahh-haa moment.

Now, I best tag this entry "overdue".

LibraryThing, Take Two

I'm guessing my last post, errrr...poem, will not truly suffice for finishing my Project Play Week 7 assignment so here goes - a second stab at LibraryThing. I'm fairly certain the first I heard of LibraryThing was at either a WLA or WAPL conference a few years back and I was instantly intrigued. Then again, I could have just dreamed of a conference session and really LibraryThing insinuated itself into my subcontious via something I ingested or some mysterious futuristic surgery-type-thing. Somehow, I think option #2 may have been the dream due to my finishing Extras late, late last night. No matter the origin of LibraryThing catching my attention, I have found it useful both personally and at the reference desk.

I began adding titles read to my librarything library in January of 2007. My goal has been to add any books I enjoyed during the year so I have a complete list (or rather link to an online list) to send out for family and friends along with my winter solstice cards. In previous years, I tried to keep a journal style list of titles only to find soggy, inky fibrous blobs mixed in with my just-washed skirts as I transfer them to the dryer. All-in-all I am having better luck with adding to my LibraryThing list but it still requires me remembering to login and add the titles...so I am certain there are some that I've left out. Especially while on vacation and far, far, far away from a computer. Which is where I wish I were right now...but, I diverge.

I've recommended LibraryThing to a few patrons as a way to keep track of their reading and was "friended" by a YA patron who took me up on the suggestion. (Note to self: consider doing something related to LibraryThing as part of an upcoming Teen SLP.) I've also used librarything a couple of times when working with a well-read patron on readers advisory suggestions and when compiling suggestion lists for BookAlikes. Overall, I can see using LibraryThing sort of like using Wikipedia - as a jumping off point of ideas for Readers Advisory in combination with print RA lists and guides, Novelist, and my own little grey cells - but not as an end-all resource.

LibraryThing, how I love thee...

Let me count the ways...

you are so easy to use
i add books in a snap
no more pen and paper
jotting titles on scraps
i can send out my list
at the end of the year
of books i enjoyed
to those i hold dear

(ok, ok, I've never claimed to be a poet!)

Week 5 Inquiry

For the last week I have gone along, happy as a clam, thinking I had kept up with all of my Project Play assignments when, suddenly, I took a look at my actual blog today only to discover NO POST from week 5. That's right folks, until just a few moments ago the post you may read below did not exist here. In fact that post was living on my personal blog, confusing family and friend alike! Thankfully I was able to move it over here but what happened? My troubleshooting process was this:

1. Verify that my flickr account is set up to post to this blog. Check
2. Try another post from flickr to this blog. Check
3. Return to this blog and see the new post from flickr. Nope!
4. Visit my personal blog again to check for new post from flickr. Check
5. Repeat steps 1-4, triple checking that I am selecting this blog to post to and not my other, personal blog Check, and still no flickr post here.

For some wacky reason, any blog post I try to make from flickr is going onto my personal blog, despite the fact that I have added this ProjectPlay blog to my flickr account's blog list and am choosing it to blog to. If anyone out there knows what might be going on, please do fill me in.

I think its time to move on to Project Play Week 7.

Snow in October

Bet that title caught your attention! This is a photo of the library taken quite a while ago, in about January of 2006 I believe. I thought it a fitting one to share in this episode of my Project Play blog.

I have been using flickr for a couple years as a way to share the abundance of photos I take of my pets with family and friends near and far; however, until this assignment I hadn't really thought about flickr as a tool that could be used by the library. I could see a flickr badge on a library's website as a great way to show site visitors all of the different materials, displays, programs, etc. available at the library. The challenge would probably be, as usual, designating a staff person or finding a volunteer to make time to keep the pictures fresh, up-to-date, and interesting. If my library creates a public blog, I think a flickr account would fit hand-in-hand, allowing staff bloggers to attach images to their posts. My least favorite thing about flickr is that if one uses the blog entry tool from within flickr (as I am doing now), you loose the ability to do creative formatting of your post such as embedding links to other blogs & sites and changing your font color and size.

If you havn't tried this already, two fun searches to try in flickr are your library's name (to see what kind of photos of your library people are posting) and you or your pet's first names (to see who else in the world has the same name). On a search of my library's name, I found a great close up shot of the fish tank in our children's room!

Week 4 Inquiry

When checking out other Project Play-ers sites to comment, is anyone else having an issue with a pop-up that says "Allow subframes to navigate across..." that just keeps popping up whether you click no or yes? This doesn't happen on all of the blogs I've looked at but on a few and it is annoying!

I'm all for moderation...

...of comments on this blog, that is. Following the handy-dandy instructions on the Project Play Week 4 assignment made this quite simple. I find Blogger fairly easy to maneuver through; however, someday I'd like to learn more about html so I could change the look of my page without using the "easy buttons".

So, fellow Project Play-ers, comment away! Here are some questions for you or you can click here to take the survey monkey version:

1. Is your library currently doing or considering a blog for the public?
2. If so, what staff positions will be responsible for maintenance of the blog?
3. What staff will be responsible for posting information to the blog?
4. Will your staff be blogging while staffing a public service desk or will they be given "off desk" time to complete blog-work?

The Hunt for RSS Feeds

My original goal to post weekly about my Project Play experience has already gone by the wayside since it is definately not Tuesday anymore. I feel like I've already broken one of the main objectives (or should I say directives? rules? does blogging have rules?) of blogging that we learned last week - that they are updated very regularly to keep relevant and current. What can I say - RSS threw me for a bit of a loop. And I already had a Bloglines account with many feeds that I set up long before this lesson!

I decided to begin with the account I had for the Adult Services Staff at my library. I worked on sorting out the feeds into different folders and arranging the folders. Did anyone else find it a bit clunky to work in "edit" mode? I had some problems when I had many folders open and wanted to move a feed from one folder at the top of my list to somewhere near the bottom. Eventually I figured out that I should close all the folders that I wasn't currently using to make organization go more smoothly (or, truly, to go at all!). I also had some initial confusion with changing the sorting from "manual" to "a-z". Really, what librarian is going to sort her feeds any old which way...bring on order I say! I finally figured out that you should click on the title of your folder, then change the sort option up at the top, then click on submit. But enough about sorting.

I then created a new account just for me and began adding feeds from those suggested at Project Play Week 3. I wonder if anyone else has noticed that some of the feed links can be difficult to find? For example, the feed from the New York Times Articles about Libraries and Librarians took me forever to find. (Hint - scroll almost to the end of the page and then scroll over to the right side...could this need to scroll to the right be due to how my browser window is set up?! I really don't know.)

Next I moved over here to my blog and decided to test out the differences between adding types of Page Elements like "Link List" or "Feed" in the Layout section of Blogger versus a Blogroll from Bloglines as HTML or JavaScript. Would these look and work the same? A resounding no. The Feed option allows you to add just one RSS feed to your blog at a time, with each one a unique "page element" while the Link List can include both websites and blogs and will display in a list format (doh, probably why they call it "link list"). I decided NOT to go with either of these options and instead just added two blogrolls instead - one of fun feeds and one of library related feeds.

Overall I think week 3 was very informative and I'm glad I had an incentive to more deeply explore RSS and readers. Now I just have to work on not feeling guilty about clicking the "mark all read" feature more often than I probably should.

Thank Goodness for the Diet Coke!

Phew! Thanks for the great tip of grabbing a Diet Coke before beginning lesson #2 of Project Play so I was good and caffinated as I read through all of the links. Similar to another Project Play participant Pinky, I am not completely new to blogging. I have a rarely updated personal blog and I am a participant in an internal library staff blog; however, reading the article Why and How to Use Blogs to Promote Your Library's Services has got me thinking about if and when my library might want to begin an external library blog. After reading David Lee King's article about the Library 2.0 Ripples, I would place my library at about a 3.5-4. That tells me that my library might be ready sooner than later to take the public blog challenge. I'm looking forward to discussing ideas about our target audience and blog content with other Project Play-ers and staff at my library. I can really see potential in a blog for the young adult crowd - promoting library programs, services, and the SLP. Madison Public Library's Teen Topix blog is a great inspiration and I learned a lot from blogging this summer at the SCLS Teen Read Blog.

Now, I think I might just be ready for a second Diet Coke.