Listen NJ

Aargh! this task was much more challenging than I anticipated. First, ListenNJ was difficult to find from the Library home page. I had to go to the alphabetical list of databases on the Research & Information page to find it. I did not see any link to it on the home page, nor was it one of the "Quick Links". How are people going to find out about this? And then find it? Sure, it's great once you know about it. Anyone can make Listen NJ a Favorite on their home computer. But it feels like a service that is only for those "in the know".

Then, I had to find a title that looked interesting to me. This took a while. As a user, I was confused by the array of downloadable formats available. I was not sure which was the one I needed! Consulting the Sansa Clip box helped. I thought I would browse the Teen Fiction titles, hoping to find some recent fiction, but most of the available titles were classics. This could be a turnoff to teens looking for contemporary fiction.

So, I finally settled on a title. When I tried to download it, I got error messages saying the security on the computer prevented this action. (Yes, I was on a PC Plus machine.) I had to reboot the machine and start over again.

So I got to where I needed to be and then had to download the OverDrive software. That took a few minutes, but it was not too bad. Okay - ready to download, right? No, I still could not download an OverDrive WMA file. Security message again. So I selected an MP3 title. Success!

Alas, it took 1 hour just to download the entire audio book to the OverDrive program.

Total time spent on this task - 2 hours! I consider myself fairly competent, technology-wise. And I had played around with ListenNJ before.

So I am not sure where things went wrong. I think the security settings on our branch PC Plus machine need to be tweaked before this is offered as a viable option for customers to use for downloading audio books.

New Challenges

It looks like I will be using this blog to track my progress on a new set of Web 2.0 challenges. Some will be a review, but others will be new to me. I can't wait to get started!!