Thing 5 - My picture on a Bubblegum Card

Online image generators, what fun! Aside from giving overzealous family-newletter writers a new means with which to stuff our inboxes, I can see a number of useful ways to utilize this tool for work purposes. The first that comes to mind is for promoting programs on our Teen Facebook page. We've got quite a constituency of collectible trading card players at our Game Nights, and I'm about to put up the Magic: The Gathering-style photo trading card I made up to anounce November's Game Night. OIGs could also be used to spice up PowerPoint presentations for school tours, create graphics for program posters - the possibilities are endless, and it's all so much simpler (and less expensive) than Photoshop or further overwealming our Graphics man with dozens of requests. When combind with Flickr and other creative commons-found graphics, these website make a pretty powerful instrument for visually creative additions to day-to-day work activities. Me like!

Thing 4 - Flickrman Blogs

So I've finally found my way into the wonderful world of Flickr. And much like the frog people from Redick's The Redwolf Conspiracy, it has kidnapped me off the street and conscripted me to a voyage around the world - on an ocean of photos! Part of me rebels at the haphazard nature of organization on Flickr - it takes some thought before uploading pictures at the beginning as to how one wants to organize things. I found it difficult to edit my tags once I'd uploaded the picture, and being prone to typos, this is no small consideration. But overall, I'll be spending way too much time with this tool, if only to look at some of the amazing photos friends and strangers have put up. I'll also be using it for work, possibly in conjunction with the Teen Facebook page, certainly as a means of storage for work-related photos - this way I can work on MCPL projects at home with easy access to pictures, and not have to worry about transferring photos from the Adult Services drive at work onto a flash drive before I leave for the day.

One word about Flickr's promotion of their service as an online backup for personal photos, and my response t0 all online storage issues - yeah, it's nice for now, but who knows in 5 or 10 years? Companies and sites get bought, sold, modified, and shut down regularly. I'm not trusting my visual memories to that kind of business-dependent future. Not to say I won't be putting stuff up there, but I'll also be doing the real backup of my photos (as of all my documents, music, etc.) on an external hard drive kept in a separate location. Cause I'm paranoid like that.

But hooray Flickr for making it all so easy to share!

Thing 4 - The Flickrman

MCPL from Kirkwood
Originally uploaded by choslermcpl

Here's our beautiful library on a sunny Wednesday morning August 26, 2009. Took this shot for the PowerPoint presentation part of a school tour for the kids at New Tech High School.

Thing 3 - RSSing

I've had a RSS aggregator (Google Reader) or two (iTunes for podcasts) over the last few years, and I've found them to be wonderful in the sense that they cut down on surfing from site to site. As an avid fantasy sports player, I've found them to be particularly useful in gathering dozens of sports player and team news in one place, and I've also used RSS readers to subscribe to music blogs (reggae and British folk rock blogs, for example). I tend to not subscribe to CNN-type news, because there are so many stories and I end up marking everything as read just to clear out my unread list. I'm more of a newspaper (or online newspaper) reader anyhow.

If you haven't checked out some of the widgets that add mini RSS aggregators to your compuer desktop, you might want to try it. I like having a little window pop up on my desktop when I turn the computer on that gives me the headlines of the posts I subscribe to - I just double click the widget and get my list of feed entries, and it helps to minimize the number of windows I have open (yes, I'm one of those neat freaks who takes the obsession against clutter to his computer - give me a break - aren't librarians supposed to be organized?).

Thing Two - Skidoo.0

I'd like to use this blog for Thing 2 to ruminate about MCPL's and my own knowledge of things Web 2.0. After viewing the video and reading the articles contesting the definitions of Web 2.0 and debating libraries' future in this rapidly changing environment, I feel as if the 2-3 years since these articles were written have gone some ways to at least acclimatizing many libraries and librarians to the concept of continual, technological- and user-driven change implicit in the idea of Web 2.0. What I don't think I personally, and MCPL as a whole, have achieved yet is the next level after having heard about/used/felt comfortable with 2.0 technologies such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. This level would include struggling with how these technologies fit into our library world - what do we do with them, to what extent do we try to control them, who uses them at work and in what way, etc. We're starting, and I'll give an example that illustrates both my struggle with this and the Library's as a whole.

Since taking my position as Teen Programmer, I've wanted Teen Services to have a presence on Facebook. It wasn't my brilliant idea - previous Teen Services folks, the current Teen and Adult Programming Coordinator, and I'm sure other Adult Services and IS staff have had this idea already. But my joining up with the department coincided with an organization-wide effort at revamping our intra- and external websites, with the idea of adding some social networking tools for our patrons. So I've kindly been asked provide some input on the idea of a Teen Facebook page and to think through some of the considerations before we go live. These considerations involve whether to allow user comments, what kind of moderation would be involved, whether the Facebook page should be primarily to point users to the MCPL webpage or a social networking tool or both, etc. My first reaction was that of course we should have comments, that there be little to no moderation, and that if we wanted a place that simply pointed users to our main library page we could just have another static webpage. But thinking things through I realized it's not as easy as all that.

There are considerations to be wrestled with. We want comments to be allowed but need a mechanism for removing abusive or libelous postings, for example. We want to have user submitted graphics, video, etc., but our target audience is made up of minors whose permission must be received and privacy protected. There needs to be a balance between enabling our users to view our content and add their own while respecting their rights and our organizational values and mission. We'll see how this all plays out in the next month or so, when we finally go live. Keep an eye out for out Teen Service Facebook page, and watch as it evolves. By all means, if you have questions or ideas, let me know!

Thing 1 - House of Skidoo is Open to YOU!

Well, I'm finally getting around to starting my 23 Things (hence the name, not in reference to the experimental post-punk band) here at MCPL. I have to say that I am very glad we are taking part in this training regimen, both generally because I feel we'll all benefit from learning about new communication methods (being the information professionals that we are) and personally. See, I grew up in that odd generation that was exposed to computers but very often did not have one at home - I didn't until I reached high school. So even though I'm comfortable using computers and many of their applications, I don't pick this stuff up like those of younger generations. I sure love to mess around with new things, though.

As far as blogs go, I had a Xanga blog back in the late 90s, but it's been a good decade since I've made regular entries. I find Blogger much easier to get up and running, and somewhat more intuitive. I was stumped for a moment when I first tried to put my LibraryThing widget in this blog, because I expected to have to enter the HTML in the blog's code myself. Obviously, I was making things harder than they needed to be, as Blogger lets one simply paste the HTML into the Third Party gadget. It took a bit of experimenting on the LibraryThing website to create a widget that was an appropriate size for my Blogger page, but in the end it was relatively painless, and left me excited to move on to Thing 2.