OK, here’s the mashup I tried…the Trading Card Maker. And here’s the card. What a goober!
Librarian trading card from Trading Card Maker
Thing 7 August 13, 2008
Just exploring on Flickr and looking at pics tagged “Spain”…found this one of a book buyer/seller at a market in Barcelona. Wonder what he’s got on those tables…maybe some used textbooks at reasonable prices? 
I have a flickr account with a few pics of my son Daniel uploaded about a year ago, but I have used Shutterfly for photo-sharing in the past, and I’ll be sticking with that one. Shutterfly seems to be geared to those less geekier types who just want to put together a nice album of vacation or kid photos and then send out a “share photos” e-mail to everyone. That’s where I fit in. At this point, I don’t want the tagging and comment features, or the ability to post the pics to a blog. However, I can see how these features are very useful when trying to get widespread exposure for your photos, or – in fact – for your library.
Things 5 & 6 August 13, 2008
I’ve had an iGoogle page with lots of RSS feeds on it for some time, as well as a My Yahoo page with a bunch of feeds. I like the Google homepage better than the Google reader, so that’s where I put my feeds.
I used to get e-mail updates from sites I frequent, but I prefer the RSS because my inbox doesn’t get overloaded with unread messages, and the format is easier to handle — most recent stories on top, older ones move down and just plain disappear after a bit, but I can always click over to the site from the feed and catch up whenever I want.
I just added a feed to my iGoogle page this morning; it’s for book recommendations and reviews from the National Association of Mothers’ Centers, which is an advocacy group for mothers, parents, and caregivers.
Thing #4 July 20, 2008
I love Wired. I have only a passing knowledge of techie stuff, but I love reading top-notch writers who interpret the ways technology affects and changes our lives, culture, and everything else. For those of us who know even just a little about the nuts and bolts of it all, Wired runs stories that give context and meaning to all these gadgets. Every library professional should be reading (at least skimming) something like this, to stay familiar with names, terminology, and trends.
BoingBoing and sites like it annoy me. People post links to news stories and photos they think are hip & edgy or whatever, and I just get this sense of desperate look-at-me-ism when I scroll through it. I really & truly don’t care about a photo of people flinching at a flying baseball bat, or about the Japanese dot-drawing artist who lives in a mental hospital. I’ve seen people flinch before; I’ve even seen people gasp, hiccup, and trip. I don’t care how pleased the taker of that photo is with him or herself – it’s just not interesting. And would anyone take note of that artist if instead of being Japanese, she were of a less hip ethnicity, like Portuguese, or from southern Ohio? I’m thinking no.
I like the more polished tech-related sites, and I feel like I just don’t have time for the ones that are rougher around the edges. But it’s good that it’s all out there. More to pick from, and always the freedom to choose. That’s the bottom line.
Thing #3 July 20, 2008
What do you hope to learn from the program?
* What do you think about Lifelong Learning?
* What other blogs have you discovered? What do you like about them?
* Can you see a use for blogs inside the Library?
Although I’ve already played around with some of the things on this list, I hope to learn even more practical ways to use these tools in my personal & professional lives. I’m also looking forward to reading other 23-Thingers’ blog posts to learn from their observations and experiences.
Lifelong learning is just a given for a lot of us in the library profession, I think. We have never consciously made “lifelong learning” a goal; we’ve just always gotten personal satisfaction out of acquiring new knowledge and skills, and by helping others do so. If any of my colleagues are actually reading this, you ‘ll probably agree that when we were kids, we read The Book of Lists, almanacs, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not when we weren’t reading all the children’s fiction in the public library in alphabetical order by author. (Okay, I only got up to Joan Aiken before I decided to go backwards from the Z’s, and then got irreversibly distracted by Nancy Drew in the K’s.) Many of us have been instructors in some capacity, and still are. We listen to CDs in the car so we can learn a little Arabic or Chinese. We like Mental Floss and New Scientist. We watch Discovery Channel, and we can’t live without NPR. Some of us are experts in specialized fields, but don’t earn our money that way. You get the picture. We love knowing more today than we did yesterday, and we love being able to support other people’s lifelong learning process for a living.
I look at some blogs on a regular basis via my Google homepage and My Yahoo page. The ones that get my time and attention have to do with books, libraries, news, and parenting. And I read maybe two or three of those on a somewhat regular basis. What I love is that a blog can be a space for discussions that would never otherwise have taken place. I’ve learned a lot from others who’ve shared their insights and information on blog posts and responses to posts. But I haven’t been won over yet. I love that anyone can write and post anything, but it’s also endlessly frustrating that anyone can write and post anything. I don’t agree with the wisdom of crowds…I believe that editors (good ones) are valuable and necessary. And I mean editing for quality of writing, not editing for viewpoint or opinion. I’m glad newspapers and magazines are expensive to print, because that means their content will always have to meet editorial standards of quality. Although I’m sure there are good writers whose only opportunity to get noticed has been through blogging, which is a beautiful thing. Anyway, blogs increase opportunity and choice, and that’s also a beautiful thing. And as far as quality goes – we are free to choose what we read, and I’ll defend that right over everything else.
Blogs are a fabulous library tool. We’re using the SAM blog as a common space to keep everyone up to speed on problems & solutions. We’ve launched some reader’s advisory blogs which increase everyone’s access to good info about reading choices. As with any other tool, I think we just need to make sure we use them appropriately and skillfully. We can aspire to have our publicly-read blogs serve as examples of quality writing and effective use. (It helps when people write well on an internal blog, too. But I don’t get as worked up about the infuriating “its/it’s” error or a run-on sentence when I know that the blog is really just serving as an electronic office bulletin board.)
