Thing #23 - Summarize thoughts about 23 Things

Woohoo! The last Thing! 23 Things has been an interesting journey for me. I've tried lots of things that I've either avoided or never heard of, and have found quite a few that will be particularly useful to me either at work or at home. Flickr and Goodreads are my favorites, and they are purely fun and social things. As for the more useful Things, I think blogs and wikis have a lot of potential for projects that I'm currently working on at my library, and this program has helped me get more familiar with what they can do and got me thinking about the different ways the library can put them to use.

Thing #21 - Podcasts

Podcasts have long been part of the group of techo-gadgets that I wanted no part of. As a rule I don't like recordings of people talking, as I discussed back in the audiobook Things. However, I made a good faith effort with this Thing, and was rewarded with a compromise that I think I'll be happy with. I've been trying to make myself listen to NPR, as coworkers are always telling me about interesting things they've heard. Using Yahoo Podcasts I found NPR's Book Tour Podcast, which I added to my bloglines feeds. This way, I'll have notification of things that I might want to listen to without having to pay attention to the times for the radio. I'm still not sure how often I'll actually listen, but at least I'll be aware of what I'm missing :) I did listen to Dinaw Mengestu's reading of 'The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,' which I enjoyed more than I expected, and look forward to reading.

Thing #17 - Add an entry to the Sandbox Wiki

I had fun playing with the Maryland Libraries Sandbox wiki. Lots of interesting, if random, posts and blogs. Librarians make me smile :) Anyway, I added my blog to the sandbox, and it was even easier than I remember wikis being. I stand by my thoughts from last week that wikis can be incredibly useful for libraries, though with completely open access, there will always be room for problems and chaos. I liked this exercise - good to have a format for how and what to do the first time you try something like adding to a wiki.

Thing #20 - YouTube

I tried to explore YouTube today, but found it very difficult to get into. I can see why it's useful, but I'm not much of a video person, and I don't have the patience to dig around just to find something that may or may not be worth watching. The only exception I can see for myself is using it for music videos. I did find a couple of travel-y videos when I did a Cambodia travel search, and they were mildly amusing, but this really isn't a tool that I see myself using on a regular basis.

Thing #16 - Wikis

Wikis are neat. I haven't had much experience with them before, with the exception of Wikipedia and a wiki that I had to add to for a final project in college. I spent some time going through the Library Success wiki and some of the reader's advisory sites like Princeton Public Library's Book Lovers Wiki. I think that these are great uses for wikis, and I have a feeling this is one of the Things that will really prove even more useful in the library community as it catches on more. My library's Interlibrary Loan Coordinator created an ILL wiki for staff that is very helpful for us with FAQs about ILLs, and I'm sure we could put this idea to use in many other areas.

Thing #12 - Rollyo

In theory, I really like Rollyo. I can think of a lot of instances where it could come in handy, particularly when providing reference assistance. In practice for personal use, however, it's not quite as perfect as I'd hoped. To create my search roll, I went into my del.icio.us account and used links that I had tagged with 'travel' and created an 'Icy Travel' search roll for sites that have both general travel info and specific arctic and antarctic travel info. When I was creating my search roll, I kept thinking that since the websites I was adding are ones that I'm already familiar with, it makes more sense to just go to the site that I know will have the best information. Rollyo seems to just create an extra step. I think, though, with lots of time and thought, reference librarians could come up with search rolls for particular areas where not all staff have the same level of expertise. A business or legal search roll would be excellent if put together by staff who are familiar with sites that they know to be reliable, and then staff who are unsure of these areas could use the search roll to answer questions more confidently.

Thing #14 - Technorati and Tags

Oops - I guess I got ahead of myself with Thing #9 and did some of this stuff already! I did go back into Technorati and tried keyword searching "Learning 2.0" in posts, tags, the Blog directory, and photos too. I was a bit surprised how different the results were. I dug around a little bit in the top blogs and top searches, but I'm still just not that into blogs. No more blog Things please!