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.