Library Twittering Its Resources

If ever a service was aptly named, it is Twitter.

When you sit near a flock of house sparrows in early Spring, the sounds of the throng are both cheerful and annoying. Try to identify the song of one bird. It's almost impossible to discern one voice. Perhaps they all have a vocabulary of different sounds. Or it could merely be 75 Johnny-One-Notes chirping at random intervals. It is layered, intense - even competitive. And so like Twitter.

Twitter is a whole world of users talking at once. Who can absorb it? Who wants to?

The service has undoubted value for marketers and projects to raise public awareness, which is what the Library's Twittering is all about.

Personally, I can't imagine subjecting myself to this nattering network. I simply don't give a sweet Tweet.

LibraryThing

For anyone pining for a book club, without the time or the contacts to join one, or someone just looking for recommendations for a good read, LibraryThing has a lot to offer. The site provides information about millions of titles, including reviews and links to similar books. It offers connection to other people with similar reading taste and a system for keeping track of the books you own.

Today, I checked out reviews on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, as well as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The reviews are uneven in quality, often sketchy in content and merely providing a opinion about whether or not the book was enjoyable without developed reasons for why it was. Still, with enough people contributing to the discussion, you start to get an idea about a book.

I am a lucky woman. I belong to a relaxed book club where discussion is wide ranging. It flits from the book chosen for the meeting to any good book we have recently read (digressing along the way to families and current events). At work, I have Terrill Budd, my maven for quirky good reads and films. And generally, the CPL work culture is a place where good books are shared.

While it's not a substitute for readers' advisory, it is a place to start.

Google Documents

Google Documents offers a nifty way of working on a collaborative document or presentation. It is also a boon for accessing work-in-progress, using different computers at different locations - no memory stick needed, no need to attach a document to an email (a multi-step process when you store documents on the I drive at CPL).

Access to technology is becoming more democratic with the development of online productivity tools. In recent times past, expensive software was required to provide the applications that are now available online for the taking. Part of the appeal is the collaborative way the products evolve.

Who would choose an expensive networking system when you have free access to an online solution?

Flickr and Youtube and Foodies

For some time now, I have been thinking about writing a food blog, and if I ever finish paring my life down to manageable levels, it could happen.

There are a lot of them out there. Some are astonishingly good and others are very, boringly bad and self indulgent. Then, there are those that are just plain freaky. I visited one "food" site where the author devoted an entire blog to killing a snake in her garden. If you are as pretentious as moi, you know which side of the scale I am aiming for, which of course keeps me from moving forward. The potential for egg on the face is enormous.

Flickr is a goldmine for anyone thinking about writing food and punctuating the text with pretty pictures. There are many ways of searching which produce quite different results, for example, food and produce or vegetables and eggplant.

With Youtube, cooking becomes comic entertainment. Try "cooking with Christopher Walken" for some unconventional advice and hilarious parodies.

If you are going to be bad, you may as well be funny.

RSS

RSS is a technology that I have now happily embraced.

Using Bloglines, I subscribed to feeds for food and the arts. Next, I added two favourite blogs - You Grow Girl and Apartment Therapy - employing the two different methods described in the CPL2.0 blog. Both methods were easily accomplished.


I enjoy dipping into the content provided by this service that is accessed from one source.
It was like creating my own magazine.

The best part is that, unlike Facebook, it requires no meaningful input from me on an ongoing basis. Interesting content, no relationship. I'm loving it.

GOOGLE and CPL2.O

Google's basic service has eliminated the routine use of many reference sources and gives every user access to a dazzling source of information. The astonishingly good gets even better with the extended list of specialized products.

This morning, I dabbled with SketchUp, a tool for creating 3D models which can be imported into Google Earth. Because time and firewalls prevent downloading the program, I explored the warehouse of models of famous sites.

On Google Scholar, I took a look at my son's list of publications. Joe J. Harrison is a post-doc at the University of Washington and writes things like, "Chromosomal antioxidant genes have metal ion-specific roles as determinants of bacterial metal tolerance". Who knew?

My personal Google favourite is the image search which allows me to find pictures of unusual things like angel wings. That was a customer's request and she was impressed with the thousands of pictures revealed by this search.

Last year while making sketches for window painting for Stampede, I wanted a model for the back end view of a horse. You guessed it; I googled "horse rear end" and found all the images I needed.

I think this makes me Joe's smart-ass mother.

Facebook, CPL 2.0 and Friendship Circles

Friends require care and attention. At my age, I have more friends than I can look after with the care and attention they deserve. An embarrassment of riches. Most of my sins are sins of omission, after all.



In my day-to-day social world, one of the greatest problems is friends who want me to be friends with all of their friends. There isn't enough of me to go around. (And, occasionally, I need to call the kids.)



In short, I'm not looking for more friends or trying to reconnect with people from past lives, however fine they might be. Downsizer mode is about trying to simplify and be selective. Removing extraneous stuff. Paying attention to what matters. Doing less, but getting more out of it, and on. I don't want baggage, including electronic baggage.

Don't call me cranky; call me selective.

Wikipedia and CPL 2.0

Wikipedia is the reference worker's best friend. When you don't know much - or anything - about a topic, Wikipedia will usually get you started and point you in the right direction for further research.

However, like many a best friend, it's a know-it-all that is sometimes wrong. No problem. There is a whole circle of other friends that love to point out the wrong-headed errors and make corrections.

I had to look no further than the CPL entry in Wikipedia to find a small grammatical error to correct and a start-class article that could be easily augmented with an additional paragraph.

CPL 2.0 , Delicious and Downsizing

Delicious is the tasty work around for providing Calgary Public Library staff's Best Websites to the customers. Library workers certainly love to hoard information and sort it into tidy little bundles!

When suffering a vacant moment on the reference desk, Delicious can help you to remember a useful site. It could also prove invaluable for training new reference staff in some of the hard-to-remember resources for complex subjects.


Unfortunately, Delicious is buried several clicks away on the CPL home page, making it an unlikely find for most of our customers. As well, you can usually find the same information faster by Googling. These days, I try to keep my headspace in downsizer mode. Layers and hoarding are out. Simple and direct are in.

All in all, Delicious is not to my taste.

Cut Down to Size

I am an early baby boomer whose generation has slung its collective weight around the world for half a century. However, age is beginning to cut us down to size. Maybe it's about time.

I have recently moved from a house to an apartment and the process of winnowing through accumulated possessions is both humbling and exhausting. Worse to confess, I have had practice. This is the second time I have downsized from house to apartment.

For most of my adult life, I moved about every four years. Then, seven years ago, I moved to the house I just left. When this stone stopped rolling, it gathered a lot of moss.

This blog and first post is part of an assignment for the Calgary Public Library where they hope to make me more technically savvy. How can you argue with an exercise aimed to make you a better person?

Not this little worker.