Project Play Semester 1

I couldn't consider myself finished with Semester 1 until I'd carried through on my intention to create a Wikipedia entry for my hometown. I'd come across the entry for Ginger Beaumont, an early Major League baseball player who'd lived in Honey Creek for many years, but the link put him in the Honey Creek in Sauk County. I couldn't fix that until there was an entry for the Honey Creek in Walworth County, where I grew up.

The problem that held me back for some time was that the entries I found searching online continued to scramble the data for the two towns. I sent for information from two books via interlibrary loan, which gave me some history on the early settlers. I also located the latitude and longitude online, added a population estimate from Rand McNally's Commercial atlas & marketing guide, and could list Ginger Beaumont as a notable person. I then added Honey Creek to the entry for Spring Prairie, Wisconsin, and fixed the entry for Ginger Beaumont.

To my surprise and delight, it took less than 24 hours for someone else to add to it, linking to an article with more information under the Notes section. I will be watching to see what else I might learn from other people's additions.

Other tools I have continued to use on a personal level are: LibraryThing, where I still enjoy adding my books as I find time; Bloglines, to which I already subscribed; and I've tried to fall into the pattern of adding and accessing my bookmarks through del.icio.us instead of the individual PCs' browsers. Our library intends to add at least one blog to our website, and I've proposed using a wiki for a project among librarians, but I don't know if they will do it that way once they start work. My own goal is to continue to try more things instead of keep putting it off until I find more time. That extra time never seems to appear and there's so much out there to play with and explore, much of it free and very useful.

Wikis

For the purposes of this week's assignment, I added North Fond du Lac's Public Library as an external link to the North Fond du Lac entry in Wikipedia, but what I'd really like to do are fix are the entries for my hometown. An early baseball player named Ginger Beaumont lived for many years in Honey Creek, a fact you would learn from his entry in Wikipedia, but the link for Honey Creek, Wisconsin takes you to a town in Sauk County. There is no entry for my Honey Creek in Walworth County, which has existed since 1836. Since it's an unincorporated community, I wouldn't be able to get the same depth of demographic information as the Sauk County page, but the Spring Prairie, Wisconsin page has an external entry to another little community within the township. I've sent for two books for more background on the history of Walworth County's Honey Creek so I can create a page for the community and return Ginger Beaumont to the Honey Creek he knew and farmed.

One use of Wikis for library staff is for cooperative projects, either staff within our own library working together or staff from multiple libraries. Instead of sending group e-mails, which may or may not be read by all, or which may not be received if someone forgets to reply to all, the work can be found and edited in one place. Everyone has the same working copy and can make their contributions as they find time. I also like the library and community sites that let users make changes, though I do like the log-in features that add some responsiblity for the changes made rather than let edits be done freely and anonymously. There's a lot that can be done with Wikis and with the software and often the hosting free, it's well worth exploring.

A del.icio.us list of favorites

Our library website has a recommended sites page. A great deal of thought went into the selection of sites and how we would arrange them. Then we had to lay them out on the web site, typing out their titles and creating the links. What a different process it would have been with del.icio.us: find a useful site and simply click on the tagging icon and it would go into our list. We no longer would have to worry about arrangement or where to put sites that fit into more than one category. A site could have several tags and be found under any of them, with the user moving quickly from tag to tag, scanning the contents. I've been impressed where I've seen this in practice on library sites.

For me, del.icio.us is useful because I use four different computers on a regular basis: my office PC, a Reference Desk PC, my home desktop computer and a laptop. There are some sites I go into no matter where I'm logged in, but inevitably, I've ended up with different bookmarks on each. I've also added many, many favorites without getting around to doing much organizing of the list. Tagging on del.ico.us should help me get faster to the sites I'm trying to get back to when I'm trying to solve a problem. I've just started my del.icio.us list, but will try to make this part of my usual web experience.

LibraryThing LibraryFun

I've had a LibraryThing account for a while now. I'd like to go back soon and enter more of my books-- I was surprised how quickly the list grew while I only got through one of my bookcases. It's so easy to enter them and a pleasurable thing to do because trying to think of which tags to apply had me remembering what the books were about and trying to recapture how they made me feel at the time. It was also interesting to discover that there were one or two people who not only had some of the same limited-ownership books as I did in their collections, but those people seemed to like many of the same bestselling titles.

The tagging seems to me both a strength and a weakness of LibraryThing. By not enforcing a defined glossary on catalogers, it makes it easy to enter books and may striker closer to the way that the average person thinks when they're looking for books on a topic. But there's also going to be a large range of specificity and broadness, plus people who have contrasting ideas of what tags belong with a book. With the large volume of books and people entering their collections, it likely is an effective way to tag books.

At least, I'd judge so by trying a couple titles in the Book Suggester. First, I tried an old favorite: Ross Poldark, by Winston Graham. The Suggester came back with the other titles in the Poldark series, which I've already read, but also Penmarric, which is also a historical novel set in Cornwall, and a couple titles by Daphne Du Maurier. A recent book I enjoyed, Dead Connection, by Alafair Burke, resulted in a list of other suspense novels. The Unsuggester is more of a wild card: it seemed like a hodge podge of books suggested at random. Perhaps I'd look there if I reach that desperate point of being out of things I want to read, but as per usual, there's a small stack of library books on the end of my kitchen table now waiting for their turn to be read. So many pages, so little time ...

Flickr

gozo, originally uploaded by mbrashier2007.

This was a wonderful day on Gozo. I had spent most my trip on the larger island of Malta, but took the ferry over to Gozo for two nights. This day I had rented a bicycle and it was a beautiful, sunny day. I cycled to the sites I wanted to see, and took a lunchbreak eating ravioli at a quiet outdoor cafe looking out over the ocean. I loved the view looking through the flowering bushes here towards the shore and tried to catch it with the camera.

It's one of the many places I would love to go back to, but until then, a glance at a photo like this can bring back a flood of memories or one happy moment in time.

For libraries, the use of Flickr is less reminiscence than it is promotion and creating a sense of shared community, the idea that the library belongs to all of us and we want the user to feel part of it rather than a passive customer. We can let people know what's going on at our library and try to put photos out there that make them feel excited about what they can do there. With links to our website, and importantly, links from our website, we can hopefully pull in more of the audience who use each of those sites.

What's on the user's mind?

We work hard when working together a website or blog. When I get absorbed in the work, I think of the eventual viewers in the abstract, considering how it might appear to them or whether I'm getting across what I hoped, but what we actually need are ways to get feedback from individual users on what they want when they visit the library or website, whether they they were able to accomplish that, and what we can do better to make that happen. Feedback can shed light on where we've confused users by using terms clear and comfortable to us, but that can have different meanings in the real, non-library world. It also can be uncomfortable in that we're inviting the negative views, too-- we'll have to hear from those who don't think we're doing a good job or who might criticize something we prided ourselves on as a good idea. Asking for feedback on a library sites requires that we consider the feedback we're sent, consider whether we can or should change how we've been doing things, and send back a polite response to those who ask for (or demand) things we can't do.
We have a form on our site to Make a Suggestion. We also have our e-mail address prominent at the top of the site. Both welcome visitors to comment, but aren't actively inviting them to do so. What ways have you found to encourage feedback, to let users know that you want to hear their thoughts?

RSS Feeds and Aggregators

As librarians dealing every day with rapidly changing technology, it's imperative to stay informed, but what we have little of is extra time to keep up with our reading. RSS feeds collected through an aggregator like Bloglines help with that task by reducing the time spent hunting for relevant information. In one place, we can have gathered together articles from sources we've selected and can choose at a glance which individual articles we want to read or scan. It's also quick and easy to experiment with new feeds, giving one or two a try to see if they're useful or interesting enough to us to keep up with them.

A favorite feed of mine is BBC News Technology World Edition. There are a number of posts I skip over because they deal with strictly British telecom and credit issues, but it keeps me informed of what's going on the world scene for technology.

Our library's website uses feeds to provide a Headline News page, using feeds from CNN and the Fond du Lac Reporter, but that's not something I did for the site. It was done by a librarian at our system headquarters. So I wanted to try one of those services that lets you mix your own feeds, creating one with Wisconsin news stories from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Green Bay Press-Gazette. (I would have added my own hometown paper for sentimental reasons, but it's a small paper without RSS feed.) I let Blogger do the work adding it to the sidebar of this blog, but I will try inserting the code below as well.

Things We Can't Live Without

During the time I've been a librarian, computers and other technology have changed in unimaginable ways. It all becomes so familiar and natural, that it soon becomes impossible to imagine what we did without them.

There was a day when we had no computers on our desks! We had a dedicated OCLC terminal, but that's all you could do with it, connect to OCLC. I can't fathom now what we did all day as we're at such loose ends now when the system is down.

Next came dumb terminals. It became a challenge coaxing some of the older staff to try them out, convincing them that they wouldn't actually break it if they pressed the wrong key.

We made our first forays online. I can scarcely remember now the world before Graphical User Interfaces, when we would Telnet or FTP to sites. And remember the glossaries we had to consult to conduct proper Dialog searches?

I can remember how clumsy a mouse felt when I first needed to use one. I was sure that I would never consider that better than good old keystrokes. Now my laptop has even done away with that. I navigate my route with a finger.

Some of my first looks at Windows 3.1 and the internet came at library conferences, where it was too often the case that the presenter would have to say, "This is what you would see if we could get connected today." Now our library runs some 90 computers and we expect every one of them to be connected, smoldering with impatience if they don't respond smartly to our commands.

E-mail is a great tool, a way to keep in touch and informed, but for many people it's no longer enough. They want instant messaging and chat, carrying on multiple conversations at once. Or who needs the computer when they can text-message and search the internet on a cell phone?

We expect now when we travel that there will be wireless. It's common when you don't bring your own computer with you, that there might be one or two in the hotel lobby for you to use. We expect to be able to stop in at public libraries on the road and be able to use their computers because we need to be connected.

We expect information to be there immediately at our fingertips. Have a question? Surely, Google can give you the answer. Driving somewhere? There's a route and distances right there. Have bills to pay? Why take the time to address envelopes and drive to a mailbox? We can do so much now without even leaving our chair. But then, thanks to wireless, my favorite computer chair is the recliner on my front porch. No reason to look at a wall because I'm tethered to a wired connection.

I have gone cold turkey on my travels and not touched a computer for times that were actually longer than a week! But it's a hard, hard thing to do and my palms were itching to get back at that keyboard. I truly can not imagine any more what a library would look like with desks barren of computers. That must have left us all that time to file catalog cards and pull the old ones.