Thing #16: Wikis

Other than Wikipedia, I'm not very big on wikis. My old ALSC committee tried creating one as a means of sharing information about how children's librarians were using technology to serve their customers and in their programming efforts. Unfortunately, it stuggled to really catch on. We even tried advertising it with little photo cards when we went to ALA conferences and meetings. Part of the problem may have to do with the platform used. We used a very basic platform and that made things like comment pages hard to find. I'm not sure our audience really knew what to make of wikis or how to use them either. They may have thought it was just a webpage and didn't recognize that they could participate in creating it and thus make it dynamic. SJCPL's wiki of subject guides was impressive, but I'm not sure it makes the best use of the wiki format. Since only library staff are involved in creating it, it might as well be a static webpage. There was a page for customer comments, but only one person has so far found the discussion tab where one can post such comments. There were also only sporadic comments on the discussion tabs of the various subject guides. Other 2.0 technologies may already be eclipsing the wiki. The Book Lovers Wiki that the 23 Things page linked to was not updated after 2006 because the library system who created it upgraded its public catalog to allow review to be attached to its records. This was something that was touched on in my previous posting on Library 2.0.

Thing #15: Library 2.0

Today's "Thing" dealt with reading about Library 2.0 and various perspectives of it. See http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002/1.htm. It's been almost 4 years now since this article and its follow-up perspectives were written. That said, it's uncertain whether the statements within still hold true or not. I am of the thought that most do, though not all of our 2.0 technologies have taken off as originally thought. (Does anyone still visit Second Life frequently?) However, I'm not sure taking the opportunities to make the best of use of these technologies and build on them for the future. Unfortunately, the economy has had a lot to do with that. Many library systems, including mine, can't afford to be too cutting edge at the moment.

One idea that caught my eye in the discussions I read was the seemingly simple idea of linking one library (system)'s catalog to others to create worldwide catalog access. Santa Monica (CA) Public Library did this with their catalog (which is iBistro based like ours) via OCLC WorldCat. Montgomery County could make such use of this with so many other library systems in the area. We do have a page that contains links other systems' catalogs, but one much search in each individually. However, we are soon losing our subscription to OCLC WorldCat so such an advance with have to wait. (It's an imperfect technology right now anyway, because the results from other libraries are listed by distance from your ZIP code. MCPL is listed with a Gaithersburg ZIP code since that's where are collection management office is. Hence PGMLS actually shows up first in my search list even though MCPL's Silver Spring branch might have a copy of what I'm looking for.)

Other libraries have taken other steps toward making their catalogs more user centric and Amazon.com-like. There are places on their catalog page for the public to tag and cloud and leave user comments about a given title. It seems like many of us still have a ways to go before we are taking advantage of all Library 2.0 has to offer. Will we get their before Library 3.0 beckons?

Thing #14: Technorati and Tagging

Today, I explored Technorati a little. It was difficult because the site had been changed quite a bit since the 23 Things page first linked to it. Several of links no longer worked and redirected me to the main page. I could only figure out how to search blogs and posts, not tags. However, the was a listing of the most common tags. The list of the Top 100 blogs was not very surprising. Among the top 10 were a few the frequently mentioned by the mainstream media, including the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com) and tmz.com.

Thing #13 - Del.icio.us

Spent some time this afteroon exploring the del.icio.us world of website tagging. I searched the most recently and most popularly tagged websites about all sorts of things. The tricky part is knowing just how vast the database of search terms or tags must be since everyone tags their chosen websites independent of everyone else. Two word possibilities could be two separate tags or they could be one tag (i.e. montgomery+county vs. montgomerycounty). Incidentally, the most popular site tagged with montgomerycounty is our very own Montgomery County Public Libraries. We were beaten out in montgomery tags by a youtube video about a Flea Market Montgomery but we win again if you count the 34 people (as of today) who also tagged our webcat (ibistro) page. One could probably search for hours here. I also checked out the tag libraries and I have a connection to the most popular hit there too - the IPL (Internet Public Library), formerly housed at my alma mater, the University of Michigan. I answered virtual reference questions there while in grad school. Ah, the good old days!

Thing #12 - Rollyo

Today I tried to explore the search engine creation site rollyo.com. Unfortunately, rollyo.com seems to be too popular for its own good. Several times I got a "Too many connections" message while trying to explore the site. I did look at just a few of the searches created by rollyo users but not enough to comment on yet. I tried creating my own but again got that dreaded "Too many users" message. If rollyo.com really wants to be a player in Web 2.0, it will have to find a way to fix its bandwith issues. I will continue to explore the site and update this blog as necessary.

Thing 11 - Library Thing

Today, I explored the world of Library Thing. I thought I had initally started a Library Thing library many moons ago, but I was able to find it. Although, someone was using the username I wanted (LibrarianChris). I wonder if it's me? Anyway, you can visit my Library Thing library at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/LibrarianChristopher. I've just started to get my feet wet, so there are only a view books listed and no tagging as of yet. Searching for these books was harder than I thought. You would think finding a American copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix would be easy using Amazon as the search database, but alas it took me several pages of results to find something close. I searched LC and Maryland Interlibrary Consortium too with no luck. Very odd!

Thing 10: Online Image Generators

I was ahead of the game on this one, having created an avatar for our Staff Development Day back in October. Visit http://www.meez.com/ to create your own. :) Yes, some of the physical attributes, clothing, and accessories require coins, but many, including everything about my meez, are free.