Exercise #20: YouTube

I first got turned on to YouTube by friends who wanted to share soccer highlights. The emails would come in imploring one another to check out the goals by Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry, the archived footage of George Best and Johan Cruyff ... etc. It seems positively old hat by now, but obviously the YouTube universe has done nothing but expand and it's incredible how vast the site has gotten with a seemingly endless supply of videos in spite of the regular cease and desist notices that YouTube receives from the predictable media giants. Could libraries use this technology? Yeah, I suppose we could make boring snippets showing how to use the self-check machines and the latest things that patrons need to be aware of, but we could also get more creative than we're accustomed to being by putting together mashup videos promoting our programs, events, and anything that can serve as creatively self-promotional or informational. As with many of the tools we've pondered through Library 2.0, the possibilities are limited only by our self-imposed boundaries.

I was tempted to post "Rebel Girl" by Bikini Kill, but my musical tastes are more than 2 minutes longer than the blurb I chose.
You know where I represent when it comes to baseball ...

Exercise #19: Library Thing

For years I use to keep a battered little notebook with titles of books I had read and what they meant to me at the time. I stopped cataloging years ago but always felt a pang of guilt knowing that the last book I read wouldn't be included in "the list." The insignificantly odiferous titles never made it anyway. Library Thing is giving me the insane desire to transfer yet more data into an online existence so I can refer back to all of those titles that formulate the basis of who I am through what I read (and have read). Thank God I am not tempted to do this with music other than a simple iTunes collection. Library Thing is a fun tool, functional in many ways for libraries and literacy advocacy and just pretty cool all around. My books are not the most popular in anybody's collection, but they all kick ass. How's that for a recommendation?

Exercise#18: Online Productivity (not an oxymoron this time)

Great flippin' tool. Who would have anything negative to say about it? Granted there will be those who are devoted to using their preferred suites of services, but for convenience and simplicity this is a great tool for anyone who has a need to produce documents and such. I am finding it a little stickier to publish directly from Zoho Writer or Google Docs than I anticipated, though, for something seemingly simple. Hmm, I'll have to get back to that and play around. In any case, if you are using these "Online Productivity Tools" (high hopes there with the P word) then you have to be impressed that they are so readily available and excited that you'll never be worrying about competing platforms and carrying storage devices and such. During the course of the past 6 months or more I have shared the tool with a few patrons here at the branch in an effort to turn 'em on to the possibilities and they were duly impressed if a little dubious at first. How are you not gonna like the potential of something so practical? In the words of Bill & Ted ... "excellent!"

Exercise #17: Sandbox wiki

I added my blog to the fave's list ... picked a favorite restaurant, too. I was too verbose with the dining suggestion. I will not be here.

Exercise #16: wikid wikis

Yeah, so what wouldn't work for libraries employing the use of wikis? Seems to be so practical on so many levels as evidenced in the many examples throughout the exercise. As a collaborative exercise with the public we have peer-generated ratings for reading materials instead of just the "voice of the librarian," and also community wikis developing to share a myriad of info and links found by informed individuals. As a tool for staff purposes we have a replacement for an intranet structure where the gatekeepers write in code and need to be directed to post simple additions meant to share and facilitate a learning process. Lots of examples to ponder the benefits of utilizing multiple wikis, but let's not bore each other with the details and the obvious challenges to maintaining a strong wiki. Let's empower the willing and start creating more avenues to actually utilize the potential.

Exercise 15: Library 2.0

I am particular to the ideas expressed by Michael Stephens in his essay "Into a New World of Librarianship" as it seems to present a rational approach to the adoption of a mindset and the skills necessary to build a believable 2.0 existence. Specifically, I appreciate how he uses key phrases of simplicity addressing how libraries need to embrace web 2.0 tools to "... further the mission of the library ..." and how the technology must meets the needs of the users in a beneficial way and NOT for the sake of trends or status. The arguments he presents are lucid, practical, and present a groundwork on which one can easily relate to the promotion of all of the tools necessary to make 2.0 (and further) more than an idealization of concepts and models of service for the library of the future.

My feeling about the 2.0 future is, to say the least, ambivalent or at the least shrouded in a haze of uncertainty. I want to believe that the libraries of tomorrow will in fact adapt to technological trends and employ them in a manner which is functionally sound and benefits everyone involved. Do libraries need to evolve to fit into an ever-expanding technologically advanced world? Of course they do, but the traditions that have made libraries the valued institutions that educated societies recognize them to be probably shouldn't aspire to abandon those basic tenents and properties in a rush to fit in to the virtual future and beyond. Nobody, well at least nobody that I know, wants to be viewed as some outdated Luddite when it comes to adapting to technology and it's place in our world, but to presume that libraries need to rapidly adapt to 2.0 existences is a stretch that just isn't ready to happen on a large scale basis. But it's like the man said ... one boat at a time.

Exercise 14: Technorati and tags

Exploring Technorati at the least has given me some additional insight into the reality that as print and network news sources struggle to maintain readers and viewers, the blogosphere just continues to expand at an astounding exponential rate. Hard to believe that so many people want to be connected so much of the time, but then again we're talking about those denizens of the globe who are entrenched in an online existence and define themselves as such. While there still exists a very clear "digital divide," I believe that another separation is becoming quite prominent and that relates to how and what people are accessing online. How bloggers and the virtually connected utilize the web is still by and large vastly different from those still contentedly putzing around the web in more rudimentary (not meant as an insult) ways. Technorati is a great tool for searching the blogosphere and happening upon information that resides somewhere in the world between search engines like Google and traditional news sources and combined with del.icio.us it offers a simple combination of information gathering through the options of social bookmarking and tagging. My only problem with tags, however, is that the user driven definition of a tag can be almost anything according to the individual's preferences. There is no uniform terminology and thus it seems that searching by tags can be as random as can be expected by that lack of uniformity. This, I imagine, is where del.icio.us and folksonomies come into play in an attempt to create connections and group consensus or aggregations of info. At times, I'm not even sure I understand what I'm trying to communicate, and I apologize for that, but that's what is making this whole 2.0 exercise intriguing.