Photo Editing

Okay, I don't post photos to Engaged Patrons, so I am not sure if the size is correct. Once I find out, I will re-post if necessary.

Challenge #7

this challenge taught me about some very cool features in Outlook, and reminded me of others that I stopped using for a while, and have started using again.

1. Since our branch is making the move to Outlook 2007, I took a short course on managing an overflowing mailbox. this is a perpetual struggle. I will definitely use the Mailbox Cleanup feature a lot! I will also use the Find Large Messages tip.

2. I also sent an email using voting buttons. My question was "What is the biggest selling item manufactured by the Hershey Corporation?" The top vote getter was Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, just like they told us when I visited Hershey earlier this year!

Google Follow Up

I know you wanted us to share heartwarming google tales, but I just gotta say, it's not all wine and roses.
In "Elsewhere, USA" a non-fiction book about changes in American society in the last 50 years, writer Dalton Conley talks about his visit to Google headquarters. This excerpt from an article in Smithsonian Magazine from an interview with Conley captures the flavor of the place:
"What did your field trip to the Google headquarters teach you?
They were really ahead of the curve in terms of making their work environment very homey. They provide everything a 1950s housewife would have provided. Do your laundry. Give you a massage. Great food for free. At first glance it seems like a very expensive strategy, but I think it’s brilliant. People don’t want to go home. There’s a volleyball court and board games around. It feels like a college campus. And Google gets more out of each worker.
You mentioned the urinals at Google.
In English or Irish pubs they pin the sports pages over men’s urinals so you can read while relieving yourself. At Google they put up coding advice. It felt a little 1984."

A New York Times July 5, 2008 front page story describes how Google doubled the cost of on site day care at their headquarters:
"Parents who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs rise to nearly $2,500 -- well above the market rate. For parents with toddlers and preschoolers, who were charged less, the price increases were equally eye-popping. Under the new plan, parents with two kids in Google day care would most likely see their annual day care bill grow to more than $57,000 from around $33,000."

"Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of ''Googlers'' who felt entitled to perks like ''bottled water and M&Ms,'' according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.) On Monday, Google began the first phase of its new day care plan, letting go of the outside day care firm it had been using."
Google is a company, out to make money. They would like to replace libraries with fee based access to information. We would do well to spend some of our time learning about ways to search for information that do not leave us completely dependent on one monopolistic search engine.

Challenge #5 - Newspapers Online

1. I searched for "West Creek". An "all text" search gave me 7,388 hits. Many hits were from Tennessee, colorado, and New Jersey. The oldest hits go back to the mid-1980's. Limiting to lead paragraph cut my results down to over 1,000, but I still got a lot of hits from outside New Jersey. "Headline" got me down to 200 hits, 1/2 from NJ and 1/2 from Tennessee, for the most part.



2. I searched for the name "Roden Lightbody". It's a pretty unique name, so all but one of my results are from New Jersey. Next I tried "William Polhemus" and got 163 hits, with the lion's share in NJ. I guess some people in Ocean county have very unique names! Searching for "Elaine McConnell" got me 666 hits, with most from the District of Columbia. Adding the word Ocean cut out almost all of the DC results.



3. I searched for one of my favorite authors, Richard Russo. there were man, many hits becasue this is a common name, so I limited the search to the state of Maine and got much better results.

4. I got an error message when I tried this search. Perhaps this is a problem that cropped up since the Polaris migration?

5. Okay, I was able to find and send an article.

6. Most of the searches that come to mind are rather sad - obituaries are most frequently requested. Next, I would have to say is car accidents and third, crimes.

Challenge #4 - Google

From NYT article, I didn't know about flu Trends and Google Sets.


1. Everyday Essentials - I searched for weather in Cooperstown, NY, since I am going there next week. I got a 10 day forecast.
Local Search - tried the real estate listings, results depend on size of community I searched. My home town just sent me to realtor web sites. A search of "Chicago" got me the "Go" button described in the instructions, but there were too many hits to process. Fortunately, they give you several ways to refine and narrow the search.
Reference Tools - I tried earthquakes since there was a recent quake in Italy. the US Geological Survey did have some information.
Query Refinements - I tried Fill in the Blank - Tiger woods won* and got a nice listing of all the major tournaments he has won.Search by Number - I tried the area code search.
Choosing Keywords - I tried the dictionary definitions search
Trip Planning - I used the map search



2. I searched "breast cancer"- over 48 million hits. First results were news headlines, two ads with .org and .edu extensions.

:gov - 49,000 hits. First hit was rather random - a press release about some initiative started by Gov Blagojevich! Maybe because I put the phrase in quotes? Tried without quotes - over 8 million hits, and they look more like what I would expect.

:edu, without quotes - 136,000,000 hits - got results all over the map - .org, news headlines, .gov

3. The search of the NJ website timed out on me, while the Google search displayed results immediately.


4. It looks to me like the web search yields more information that focuses on Oona, while the book search focuses more on Eugene.

5. I added the Google blog feed to my page.

6. I found this interesting post that shows that you can now limit image searches by color.

Challenge #3 GVRL

Part 1. I was curious, so I looked at the oldest title in the GVRL collection - The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences from 1968. On the public catalog, I found I could actually drill down to an actual encyclopedia entry - very cool! I looked at the entry for "Aesthetics". I tried a General Keyword Search for the word "Aesthetics" and the Gale Reference did not come up. I wonder if this only works for Tables of contents, not encyclopedic formats. It's too bad that the Print and download links are visible on the public catalogs inside the library. These are misleading. Customers do not understand why they can do things on some computers and not on others. IMHO, they should be able to do everything on every computer, with the exception of scanning. I know I am probably in the minority on this, but there you go!

When I browsed the title list from the website, I found that there is indeed a new edition of The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences that was just published in 2008. I wonder why they haven't deleted, (or "weeded" if you will) the older edition. I guess some challenges never really go away!

Part 2. I sent the email and printed the confirmation if it is needed. That is a nice feature!

Part 3. Citation in MLA format was sent via email.

Part 4. This did not work for the 1968 edition, but did for the 2008 edition. Nice feature!

Part 5. I looked at the review for the movie "inside Moves" and both are identical as far as I can tell.

I hope this fulfills the requirement for this challenge.

Challenge #2: digital Projector & Laptop Presentation

I presented a Powerpoint slide show to my branch staff at a monthly meeting. The presentation was created as part of a practicum for the Certified Public Manager class I am taking. The topic was the culture of the staff at my branch. The set up and presentation went smoothly. The only glitch really was that I projected the presentation on a screen. Our Friends donated a beautiful plasma screen television, but the connector that was installed does not match the cables for our laptop or digital projector. The Technology Department is working with me to find an adapter that will make evrything sync up.

I also used Google Documents to create my presentation, which is something I learned about when I did the previous WebThings Challenge. Woo hoo!

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!!

Thing #23: That's a Wrap!

My overall impression is that the Web 2.0 Challenge was a really good motivator for me to try some things I had previously been hesitant to approach. I also enjoyed the sheer variety of blogs created by OCL staff and I hope people keep on bloggin'.

The favorite thing I learned about is probable wikis. They had seemed so intimidating to me before. Now I really want to use one for something in the near future. (More on that below!)

What I liked least was Technorati, because I am not immersed in blogging culture and not so invested in blogging either. It's not a meaningful tool for me.

What areas of 2.o should the library get more involved in? I propose that OceanNet become a wiki! If more staff could update the information it would be kept more up to date. Just imagine, each branch having their own page to share photos of recent programs, instead of having to see the same old links from Ripple Effect every day because Technology staff are stretched to the limit.

I would love it if we could offer feeds of new acquisitions in different subjects to library customers. Wouldn't it be cool to get an email once a month with the newly acquired Italian cookbooks listed for me?

I also expect that more and more webapps will be used by systemwide committees as well.

I have not shared much with my family. They seem to still be comfortable with email. It's the most exciting thing for them. We also use a site that has been around for a long time, called MyFamily, which actually started doing what MySpace does a long time ago!

All in all, this was a cool exercise. I have one more suggestion. I have not been able to figure out who's who among staff bloggers. How about a lunchtime meet and greet of willing bloggers at staff Development Day? We could wear nametags with the names of our blogs on them!

Thank you to the hardworking committee who put this challenge together. I know it was a lot of work, and a lot of e-mail. you did a stellar job!

Thing #22: Listen NJ

I have an ipod, but so far I don't think it's usable on Listen NJ (although I read somewhere that that might change soon. Of course, now I can't find the article!!!) . I burned "On the Road" to a CD. I didn't like the fact that there were no tracks. It was hard to pick up where I left off. Also, I don't understand why you cannot return something before its "due date". This makes items unavailable for longer than they need to be. The overall look and feel of the site is very clean and user-friendly.

Thing #21: Podcasts

I played around with podcast.com and found a series of lectures on autism from the UC Davis MIND (Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders) Institute. I think this is just a great tool for researchers who can't afford to go to conferences. I hope that more colleges do this kind of thing. It could enhance education and expose people to lots of ideas.

Frustrating note: I had no problem viewing a lecture from my office computer. But now, as I sit at the Reference Desk, I am running into all sorts of difficulties downloading and viewing. So I went to the UC Davis MIND Institute website to find the podcasts. You can find the lecture series I viewed here.



The one I watched is called:

Tony Charman, Ph.D. - "Looking for Subgroups Amongst Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders"

Thing 20: YouTube

I keep tripping over my expectation that the Internet has all the information known to humans. It simply does not. I am currently reading Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad... It's a hybrid biography/oral history of Bella Abzug and her role in the feminist movement in the early 1970's. I have dim memories of Bella - she wore hats all the time and she spoke with a pronounced New York accent. I thought it would be cool to see Bella in action in her prime. So I trotted over to YouTube and found: next to nothing. There's a snippet of her in a documentary about breast cancer, but it's very brief and she looked very old and tired. It was not exactly the inspiring clip I was looking for. I did find the following clip of Rosie O'Donnell giving the Bella book to a girl at some conference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDtjgLg-9JM

At least SHE remembers Bella.

I trotted over to digital overlords Google Video and found this clip:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1858775945321622894&q=%22Bella+Abzug%22&ei=ae4lSL65BpLw-gHntujmCQ

But could not get it to load.

So this is what YouTube, and the Internet, is not so good at - anything that happened prior to 1990. Are events that occurred prior to the Internet age going to be lost to the masses, like the contents of the Alexandria Library? Sometimes I wonder if this might be true.

PS- I tried to embed the video but cannot figure out how to paste the entire piece of code into my post. If anyone could help me with that, I would sure appreciate it.

Thing #19: Web 2.0 Awards

I checked out several award winners. I think I could use and enjoy Yelp (Best in City Guides & Reviews). It seems like a good place to get insider information on different locations - where to eat, where to shop, where to catch the best live music. Unfortunately, it will only work for major cities. And it is subject to shills disguised as regular users (I know there is a cool term for this but I can't remember it). Again, if enough people commit to it, the wisdom of the crowd will prevail. But there are lots of services out there like this one - what makes this the one that will stand the test of time?

Honorable Mention: I loved Guess the Google! That is too much fun. So random and addictive.

Thing #18: Web Apps

I have used these before in a very limited way. Web apps would be helpful when you need to collect information from people spread out over a distance. For example, the Teen Librarians have used it to order different types of fliers and brochures for a summer program. A collaborative spreadsheet made it easy for the person gathering the information to collect it from 20 different people. Instead of waiting for a response from each person and copying and pasting the information into a spreadsheet, each responder enters the information. This has the added benefit of helping the collector know who has not responded yet. It is much more efficient!

Thing #17: Playing in the Sandbox

I added a few songs to the favorite CDs request, and also added my blog to the sandbox. I found the experience to be easier than I expected. I could see this as being very useful for collaborative efforts, like committee work. Or it could be used to revise a policy manual. I was just on a committee revising a communication plan, and it would have been interesting to have used a wiki instead of endlessly exchanging emails. I wonder if there is any way to track accountability. I assume that there is a way for administrators to track who made what change. That could be necessary to know who to ask for clarification (or, sad to say, in the case of Wikipedia, who to block from making any more edits.)

Thing #16: Wading Into Wikis

My first thought on wikis is that there has to be some "tipping point" of participation that will guarantee fact checking and accuracy. If too few people participate, the wiki is subject to opinion and paranoia. If enough people commit to the wiki, it can work. But they are mostly volunteers. What about the long haul?


So, I watched the Common Craft video and can see how wikis are more than a reference source. Their utility as a communication and collaboration tool is really exciting. Just today I found myself on a merry-go-round of email messages about something at work. A wiki would have made the process flow much more efficiently.

I was a little disappointed by the Library Best Practicies wiki. I am currently taking the Certified Public Manager Levels IV, V, and VI course, so I gravitated toward the management subject areas and did not find much content. It felt like false advertising. The wiki seemed to be saying "Look here for some great information" but when I clicked on the topics, it was more of a "If we build it, they will come" scenario. What if nobody shows up? There is no guarantee that anyone is looking out for comprehensiveness.

A cool wiki I have seen:

Flu wiki - This one started up back when the possibility of a global flu pandemic became big news. I see it has not been updated in 3 months. That's slightly alarming.

Thing 15: The 2.0 Thing

The things about 2.0 that I like:
*User driven content
*Customizing ability
*Interactive
*Social

It's exciting and fun. Really!

Challenges:
*Infrastructure - that cool Google map mashup loses its effectiveness if your Internet connection is so slow that it takes 5 minutes to load
*Digital Divide - users who do not have computers at home do not have hours to spend on the Internet playing with the latest 2.0 widget - they need what they need now, not for fun, but for survival. They do not have the luxury of play. Many of the customization and convenience aspects of 2.0 mean nothing to them. All they know is that they have to use the Internet to apply for a job. The trip to the store where they want to work now involves an additional trip to the library to use technology unfamiliar to them.
*Literacy - all of this 2.0 stuff is useless to the person who cannot read.
*Perpetual beta is not a working environment compatible with government bureaucracy

Please stop telling me my profession is close to disaster if I do not pay heed to 2.0. I am trying to learn. My head is not stuck in the sand. I am living and working in a real place with actual living breathing customers who need help right now. Thank you!

Thing #14 is Technorati

My first reaction is that it seems like a whole lot of noise being made by just a handful of people. The top result for the Learning 2.0 search in the Blogs section has 102 fans. The second top blog has 12 fans. Hardly a large slice of the blogosphere. It strikes me as a cliquey club that those "in the know" probably obsess over. I thought at first that this site might use some kind of popularity indicator like Google uses PageRank. But it looks like you only get considered on Technorati if you add their html code to EACH POST. Is it me, or does that seem like a lot of bother just to stroke my own ego? Or maybe it leads to more readers. I don't know. I guess I will have to try it on my own blogs. At least delicious seems to be more democratic and a more accurate reflection of what people are reading and caring about on the blogosphere.

Thing #13 Del.icio.us is Add.dict.ive

Jill got me into delicious about 5 months ago. My links are at:

http://del.icio.us/chrodas

At first I did not see the practical use for it, but now I find it to be addictive. I am one of those people who loves to save newspaper and magazine clippings of interesting articles on all kinds of topics. Now I can do this virtually, conveniently, and in an orderly fashion with del.icio.us. So far, I am using it for quick and easy access to the ALA Great Stories Club page, which is hard to find on their web site. I am also using it for lots of library related topics. And since I am currently crazy about soup, I have bookmarked all kinds of soup recipe sites. I love how del.icio.us is portable and can be accessed anywhere I go. I am just getting into the social aspect. I used to browse a site called Blogdex, which was run by somebody at MIT. It employed some sort of algorithm to determine the most popular blog posts on the Internet. Now I can see what the current zeitgeist is by checking out the most popular sites - which means the most frequently tagged sites - on del.icio.us. It's fascinating. I also stumbled on a feminist's bookmarks, and have learned a lot about current women's issues from trolling her faves. It's also a great way to keep up with co-workers and colleagues who I do not see every day. And it's so exciting when someone sends me a link. It means they were thinking of me and knew what interested me. So so cool!

My one concern is for the potential ephemerousness (is that even a word?ephemeralness?) of the Internet. I love saving and tagging interesting news articles, but I do not think they will last too long. They get pulled by Yahoo and other news services in a relatively short amount of time. I guess time will tell if tagging and social bookmarking affect the actions of these news wires.