Tuesday, July 31, 2007

A Photo from the Rutgers Gardens

very small pink flowers

I don't know what kind of flowers these are. I cropped and edited the photo with Picnik.com .

We're learning in our Social Software Literacy Class about many great free web tools. Our theme this week was "images".

Check out more of my photos on Flickr.com .

Monday, July 30, 2007

A Matter of Taste

After some review, I've decided that choosing between Shelfari and LibraryThing is a personal choice that depends on what the user wants to do with the site. Both will record the books you read, books you own, and or books you intend to read. Both allow for joining or forming social groups around your reading tastes, and allow easy communication among friends or groups.

If you are a librarian, and want to catalog your personal collection like you do at work, Librarything seems more equipped to carefully catalog books using Library of Congress classifications. Your collection records can resemble like real library records. I would even think that it could work for small business or organization libraries, and Shelfari does not seem equipped to handle those tasks.

On the other hand, for the casual user, Shelfari feels easier to use and the display is less cluttered. I like the way the books look on the shelf, like real books rather than cover pictures. Yes, its a cheap trick of taking the cover shot and adding a set image to make it look like a book, but I like it. The discussion also doesn't take the standard discussion list display format.
I did find it difficult to search for a group that showed up once when I clicked groups. It was there as recently updated, and then when I tried to search for it, the search wouldn't search for anything but the entire group name-School library media specialists had to be the entire name. That was a pain. I found it and joined by browsing the list alphabetically, but bad search Shelfari. They could probably do better with a Google search this site feature.

I'm going to continue to play with both sites, I joined Shelfari last night as Bamboo- with the thought of using it for discussing books popular in my school library.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Reading The Social Life of Information chapter 8

I just finished reading another chapter of John Seely Brown's The Social Life of Information and I've recorded a few of my thoughts. Doing a little more reading about Brown, since the book is pretty old, I was wondering if I could find out what are his thoughts on all this in 2007. After hours of berry picking, hunting for one thing, but finding lots of other interesting "berries", I've learned about another new web phenomenon. Ning. Create your own social network. It could be very useful for us in our application of our knowledge on the job.

What the heck is crowdsourcing?

I've found some more out about crowdsourcing, and I experienced it in person. It is an example of using the social Web in innovative ways. How did I learn the answer? Wikipedia.

Crowdsourcing means that a person or organization tries to get a solution to a problem by publicizing the question and asking the public for help. In the past, they would hire someone to do the job, fix the problem, find a solution. By crowdsourcing, this now usually takes place on the Internet, and sometimes includes large prizes for the answers. Netflix has an offer of $1,000,000 for a better movie rating system, Proctor & Gamble have thousands of scientists working out problems on a website Innocentive.com.

Brian Lehrer interviewed Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine, who has been writing a series of articles on the subject, and they have publicized a project first to count and report the cars and SUV's on your block. Since they started that, now they've issued a further challenge to compile the information on an interactive Google map.

At the Liberty Science Center's new communication exhibit, there are survey questions on computer touch screens asking about how the viewer gets his or her news, communicates with friends, etc. The history of the results are instantly updated and displayed in a visual graph.
The new communications exhibit will be great, right up library and information students alley, when they get all the bugs worked out. Some displays are still under construction. On the positive side, they let us in free precisely because of that fact.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Group 5 Wiki

Group 5, Daniel, Tina and I, have set up a wiki on pbwiki with instructions on how to find the paintings you seek on the National Gallery of Art (London) picture library website.
You can see our wiki if you click here or paste http://scils598group5.pbwiki.com in your browser.
the wiki is still a work in progress, if you don't see the search guide now, you will be 6 pm tonight!

Language of Social Software Literacy Hits the Air

This morning the talk on Brian Lehrer's show on WNYC used the language of Web 2.0 a few times. I was sleeping with the radio on, but woke up to the tail end of a discussion of "crowdsourcing" with Jeff Howe from Wired Magazine . It sounded a lot like twittering with a group of professionals.

Later, a letter read on the air explained why some listeners would have more trouble adjusting to the new technology because they were digital immigrants, not digital natives, like younger people.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Learning in theory and practice

Click the arrow to listen to a short statement of my thoughts about knowledge vs. information.


  • the difference between the two
  • how business practices misapply and underestimate knowledge
  • how people really learn knowledge

Thursday, July 19, 2007

My first podcast

Listen to this!

Digital Immigrants need TSL (Tech as a second language) classes

I was struck by something I read in Hala's Blog:

Some people are ready for the overload of information and have a clear vision of the influence of the Net; and some conservative people, who are not used to changes, are not ready for the amount of information available, which is growing gradually. Those people might suffer if we do not get them the right kind of training and that is the job of libraries.


This comment seems to relate directly to something I have witnessed in my town. Our local public library patrons have the ability to listen to downloaded audio books, and yet, only about four patrons a month are taking advantage of this service. Besides advertising the service on the website and handing out bookmarks, what can libraries do to increase the number of patrons borrowing audiobooks?

  1. Hold classes to teach how to use the service.
  2. Advertise these classes on the municipal TV channel.
  3. Make sure that high school summer reading titles are always available.
Not all patrons are used to using new technologies, and their use will gradually increase with time; but libraries can speed the process along if we offer the training that users need.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

The blog Pop Goes the Library has a young, hip attitude that I enjoy. I enjoy knowing what teens will be into, (even though I work with the younger "Dora the Explorer" crowd) and this blog has that feel.
As a whole, teens don't trust librarians, so, having librarians that teens will think are hip may just save us with the next generation.

In my first semester of library school I took a course "Human Information Behavior". My fellow RUSSL classmates can all remember that one. We had to get up and talk about the information seeking habits of some group or other, and I chose urban teenagers. The best research I could find was from a study by two Drexel Library Profs, Denise Agosto and Sandra Hughes-Hassell:

People, places, and questions: An investigation of the everyday life information-seeking behaviors of urban young adults
Library & Information Science Research, Volume 27, Issue 2, Spring 2005, Pages 141-163
Denise E. Agosto and Sandra Hughes-Hassell

They met with about 30 teens, had them keep track of where they met their everyday questions for a period of time, then sat with the teens in smaller groups to compare and rank results. With teens who were even teen leader homework help library volunteers, they overwhelmingly did not look to librarians to get information. Its a point to consider. We have to go a long way to meet teens halfway, and to gain their trust. Learning about reaching out via new technologies is cool in my book, maybe the teens will think so, too.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

How does the information boom affect libraries?

This weekend our home was to read the first chapter of the book
Brown, J. S. & Duguid, P. The Social Life of Information. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. (2002) available here.

Brown and Duguid argue that the modern glut of information will not break down society and its longstanding institutions because the support structure that keeps organizations intact are still strong and functioning. They point to examples like Walmart and Fed Ex, where centralization of control has increased the effectiveness of the business, and the large corporate mergers like MCI/Worldcom, AT&T/ everything( although I think AT&T is pretty weak, at least in stock prices) are just making the largest corporations larger.
You see, the theory was that if the individual could get all the info he needed on his own, there would be no need for institutions, and they would all break down. So far, this hasn't happened.
But it is what some people predict will happen to libraries; that libraries will not be necessary because everyone will know how to use Google.
Libraries, like those large corporations are learning that there is power in being larger. By combining resources, libraries can provide more and better services to their clients. Regional cooperatives and interlibrary loans can ensure that patrons have access to the resources of all libraries by combining their catalogs electronically. Library membership in ListenNJ.com
allows readers the ability to listen to their books on their computers.

Friday, July 13, 2007

Multi-tasking

I just listened to the podcast homework from the sirsi dynix institute ( I'll fix the name later) while shucking corn, and cooking enough different kinds of foods to please the varied palates of my extended family.
I'm not a "digital native", the term the speaker, Lee Raines, used for the under 25 crowd who grew up with the Internet and in some regards Web 2.0 technology, but I'm catching on.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Social Software Literacy

I've just created this blog for my summer class.
Feel free to follow along as 19 students and our brave teacher dive into the web tools that will help us all connect to library users in new and exciting ways.
Our class wiki