Overdrive - (Where's Bachman-Turner?)

Alas, I am blogging my last "thing"! I'm going to miss TLC 2.0 :( So about Overdrive. . . I would say that from my personal experience, its fairly easy to use. There are a couple of things that I would change such as the ability to return things early so that you can check out more and of course the ipod compatibilty issue. My experience with Overdrive as a librarian has been some what more challenging. Teaching/explaining Overdrive is not too difficult (just time consuming) when customers have their laptops with them and you can download the software and take them through the process. But trying to explain the steps without their computer present in the hopes that they will remember and duplicate the process when they get home is another things all together. Let's just say - Its a great resource for the computer literate, but lets not stop buying those books on CD too soon!

Facebook

I'm doing this before the "thing" actually became available because I am leaving on vacation and want to get this done before December 29th. I messed around a bit with facebook and I didn't find it that different from Myspace (which I have had an account for a couple years). In fact, Myspace seems to be a little more democratic. . .less exclusivity with the networks and such. From a personal point of view, social networking sites are fun/entertaining, but I could definitely live without them. Professionally, its useful tool to locate and network with fellow librarians(But to be honest I use it more for fun.) Of course, in the pursuit of library 2.0 some libraries have jumped on the social networking bandwagon. However, I think that they could do a really bad job with this. I wonder if students/users might find the library's presence on these sites to be a bit intrusive. Even if that's not a problem, a poorly done site could just look pathetic. If there isn't an attempt to socialize (ie. actually ask for feedback) with them then what's the point? People ages 12-25 aren't going to think your library is cool just because its on Facebook or Myspace. They certainly can tell a fake from the real thing!

Podcasts

I had a little bit of a problem figuring this "thing" out :( I thought that digg.com was by far the easiest podcast directory to use. It was the only one that let me listen to podcasts. (wait- I will amend that, I hear talking coming from my head phones. I must have figured out Podcast alley!) Podcast alley isn't very clear. I kept clicking on "Get Podcast" and it would tell me that I needed a Podcast aggregator. I have no idea what that is and I was getting aggravated with the aggregator. Finally I clicked on details and there was a button that said "Download Podcast". Of course that worked perfectly. It just took me forever! I will say one good thing about Podcast Alley- the feed was very easy to locate and it was accurate. Digg.com and Podcast.net were not so apparent and bloglines said it could locate no such feed. I was probably looking at the wrong thing. I never did figure out Podcast.net. It told me that it was downloading the podcast, but I never heard anything. Oh well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad! I've been babbling on enough about the process, instead of tellin y'all what I found. I found a very interesting series of podcast called "Uncontrolled Vocabulary" about various library issues. There was also a podcast called "Library News". Sometimes it feels like I don't have enough time to read the professional literature, but i think that it could be really useful to listen to these podcasts while I am doing other tasks/activities.

YouTube

I picked this video because I love cats (I have 3 of them!) I tried several times to embed the html in my post,(following the seemingly simple Blogger directions) but it didn't work. I then noticed on the dashboard that you could create an account with YouTube and post videos to your blog directly from YouTube. It was very easy and more importantly it worked! I can see using YouTube as a library application. You could create library tutorials and library tours. I have even found some very good instructional videos that I think my customers would benefit from. Some times customers come in and ask for a book on how to do something. We are a small library and many times we simply don't have the resources. It may not be a bad idea to check out YouTube and see if there is something available to help them.

Goowy

I decided to take a look at Goowy - an online desktop. This seems kind of like what I heard referred to as a Portal (kind of a one stop shopping experience). Creating the account was a snap and it seemed fairly easy to use. Goowy enables you to access most of your web 2.0 applications, email, IM, etc. from one website. I also was impressed that it had 1 GB of free storage. I could see libraries doing something similar. Right now you can access your account to see what you have checked out or on hold, but in the future these accounts could be personalized. Customers could create accounts that not only accessed their library records, but updated them on new movies or books based on their preferences. It could have a calendar where they could record the library programs they want to go to and it would then alert them to the upcoming event. Customers could save their favorite websites. . . Heck, they could even have the free virtual storage! How many people still come to the library unprepared to save the documents that they are creating. "But I saved it on the computer!!!!"

Zoho Writer

It's funny that the first time I tried to use Zoho there was something wrong with the site and I was denied access. Not a very good first impression, but it demonstrated very effectively the potential hang ups of web-based anything. I think web-based applications should have a place in an office because they make information so much more accessible. But I was also wondering how secure documents are in something like Zoho compared to being stored in your computer. However, as a public reference librarian, I wouldn't mind if more people used applications like Zoho just so I wouldn't have to deal with issues of converting Microsoft Works to Microsoft Word. After I was finally granted access, I played around with Zoho writer a little bit. I didn't find the interface to be particularly intuitive. When I would click on "export" the screen would automatically scroll to the left; thus I suppose hiding the "export" options. It would also do this with the email option. You could just see enough of the dialogue box to figure out what you were doing. I realize that it has more bells and whistles than Google Docs, but I find Docs to be much more user friendly, and I will continue to use it. I went back and tried to post my document to my blog, but it said my blog was unavailable- whatever that means. The "export" bug seemed to have worked itself out- just another web-based application glitch!

PBWiki Sandbox

Urrrrgh.... I've found that most of the things on this tutorial have been very easy, but adding my blog to the NSULibs Wiki sucked! It took me about 7 minutes to figure it out! Yeah, once you know what you're doing its really easy- but I would not say its intuitive. Of course, signing in to the bcltlc wiki was a snap once I had edited the NSULibs Wiki.