Thing # 24: End of the year, end of the project!

I can't believe I'm done with the 24 things! It's been fun, and I've learned a lot. A bunch of the things--especially near the end--were applications I'm familiar with, mostly from non-work-related stuff I've done just for fun.

But here were also several things that I'd been avoiding because they just seemed too complicated or mysterious, or I had one of those random techno-blocks about them. Having to explore them for work was enough to get me past that, and that's been good.

Since it's New Year's Eve Day, and a big time for reflection and list-making, I'll hand out a few Playground-related awards:

Thing I Hadn't Known How to Do Before That Became an Addiction: RSS feeds, in a landslide. What did I ever do without Bloglines?

Thing Whose Appeal Continues to Mystify Me: Technorati. Maybe it's because I'm a lazy tagger, but I'll never understand how this is better than just Googling.

Biggest Surprise (besides the wonder that is RSS): Discovering the depth of my e-mail phishing naivete.

Happiest Reunion: Library Thing and me. I still don't know if I ever will add enough titles to my account to justify my paid membership, but it was good to get reacquainted.

Would I participate in another program like this? Sure. I like the self-paced exploratory nature of it, the support materials were really helpful, and it was fun.

That's all-- Happy New Year!

Thing # 23: Audiobooks

I just had a quick look at the Overdrive catalogue to see what's new there and what I might want to listen to. I've downloaded books from them before, and listened to them on my computer--a good book can make doing the dishes go much faster!

One thing I like about downloading audioboks: no overdue fees. When your loan period is up, the book just disappears from your hard drive. Of course, the downside of that is that...well...the book just disappears from your hard drive, whether you're done with it or not. Thus it was that I only got halfway through Meg Cabot's Avalon High a few months ago, and then--zoop!-- it was gone. Maybe this "thing" will inspire me to download it again and finish it!

Thing #22: Podcasts, and the Lure of the Familiar

First, to be totally clear: The CBC is a wonderful organization, better funded and in many ways more creative and adventurous than its U.S.-based equivalents, NPR (National Public Radio) and PRI (Public Radio International).

That said...sometimes, since moving up to Vancouver, I miss the NPR/PRI shows that I used to listen to. I miss the indie-hipster storytelling of This American Life, and the charming goofy panelists on Wait, Wait! Don't Tell Me! and Terry Gross's soothing and occasionally off-kilter interviews on Fresh Air.

For a while, I wandered unmoored in a brave new aural universe. Then, a few months ago, I discovered podcasts. Oh blessed podcasts, connecting me with the radio voices of my past! Now I subscribe to my old NPR shows--not to mention such CBC gems as Writers and Company and The Vinyl Cafe and listen to them whenever I want.

Then I discovered I could subscribe to podcast-only shows, like the kidlit-centered Just One More Book! and the universe expanded once more.

So these days, I don't turn on an actual radio much any more, except in the car. Instead, I've pretty much created my own radio station from podcasts. I miss the virtual-community feeling of tuning in at a certain time, and knowing I'm listening to a radio show at the same time as thousands of other people, but on the other hand I don't have to be sad any more that I'm missing Stuart Maclean's finest just because I'm on the reference desk Saturday mornings.

Plus, I have "Dave Cooks the Turkey" saved on my computer for posterity, just in case I ever get the urge to laugh so hard I fall over.

Thing #21: YouTube, ITube, We All Tube

A couple of months ago, some friends and I got insanely ambitious and even though none of us had any filmmaking experience whatsoever, we decided to make a 5-minute video about the financial crisis. With Barbies. (Our kids helped.)

So we did, and we posted it on YouTube, and it was fun. Here it is:

Thing #20: Askaway

I've worked three or four Askaway shifts now, and have gotten a bit more confident about it. The hardest part for me has been signing in! There are two or three levels of sign-in, and at least two windows that need to be open during the Askaway session, and it took me a while to get the hang of it.

The last shift I worked was the busiest-- the questions just kept coming, and we were shortstaffed, and I'd somehow gotten myself out of the chat page that lets librarians staffing the service communicate with each other, so I wasn't sure exactly who else was on or what they were doing, so I kept trying to take all the calls I could.

A lot of the questions I've gotten on Askaway are pretty simple--people want a single reference, or, alternately, they want to know about something so specialized that I know it would take me a long time to dig up even the beginning of the answer, so I refer them to a more specialized resource (like an archive, or a law library). That seems to work fine, and people seem to be happy with the information I can give them.

I think it's hardest on Askaway to do the kind of iterative reference work that I think of as the bread-and-butter of in-person reference service: someone comes in with a vague idea about what they want, you start to show them something but keep talking with them at the same time, and then they talk a bit more and clarify what it is they're looking for-- sometimes it's something they didn't think of mentioning, or sometimes their own needs become more clear as they look at the first resource and realize it's not what they want after all--and then you look together for something else, and then they get more specific, and finally you hit on the thing they really wanted, or at least figure out what it is and how to order it, and everybody's happy.

That kind of reference interview depends so much on in-person give-and-take, tone of voice, body language, back-and-forth conversations; it's hard to reproduce in an online chat environment. But for more straightforward questions, Askaway works pretty well.

Thing #19: Liveblogging a Couple of Databases

I've used EBSCO a lot, and found a few car things for people in the Auto Repair Centre, and I taught a lesson once on Canadian Newsstand QP Legaleze, so I should know my way around those (though I continue to have a hard time actually finding what I'm looking for in QP Legalese-- maybe I need to take a class before teaching another one!), but there are a bunch of databases I've never even looked into. So I'm going to look into a couple of new ones, and liveblog my experience here:

1. Encyclopedia of British Columbia:

I'm interested in finding out about the street trolley that used to run along Hastings Street, near my house, so I did a search for "Trolley". I got the "Street Railway" entry, which gives me a nice little article with a lot of links to other encyclopedia articles, and a photo of one of the President's Conference Committee cars which ran in Vancouver starting in 1939 (see photo above.)

That search reminded me that I want to find out more about the Kettle Valley Line, about which my daughter learned a song last year. So I'll do another search, and:

Hmm. "Kettle Valley Line" gets nothing, so I'll try just "Kettle Valley."
Bingo! An article on the Kettle Valley Railway. Informative, filled with links, includes links to other related websites, more photos, and a map of the Kettle Valley Line route. Nice!

Oh, and there's a helpful Subject Search feature that lists and links to long feature essays on topics like Architecture, Peoples of BC, and Physical Geography. Good to know.

Okay, on to another database...

2. Oxford Reference Online

This is mostly a literary/language reference, so I wanted to see if they had any citations for a folktale I heard at a workshop with Margaret Reid Macdonald last week. She told it as "The Great Smelly, Slobbery, Small-Tooth Dog," but then said she'd made up the "slobbery" part, so I just looked up "small tooth dog."

And there it was:

Small-Tooth Dog, the. A Derbyshire fairytale, an analogue to Beauty and the Beast, with the hero in the form of a dog; he recovers human form when the girl renames him ‘sweet-as-honeycomb’ (Addy, 1895: 1–4; Philip, 1992: 69–71).

Groovoid!

Thing #18: Office 2007

One day, a few months ago, I came in to work, double-clicked on my trusty Word icon, and whammo! What was this?? Everything was different!

I had been transported into the magical world of Office 2007, and my life would never be the same.

Well, okay, my life was basically the same. But my experience of using Microsoft Office, particuarly MS Word, was not.

Here are some things I like better about the new version of Word:

• Sliding bar to zoom bigger or smaller-- easy! intuitive! I use this a lot, especially when printing up big song lyrics to display at story times.
• No more paperclip office assistants! (I always did think that paperclip was creepy...)
• Strikethrough font now has its very own menu button!
• New menu design makes it quick & easy to change paper orientation from portrait to landscape, insert page breaks, and do other tasks.

And here are some aspects of Word 2007 that have been, er, challenging for me:

• The automatic double-spacing in the default format is awkward
• I'm finding it harder to change the margins to non-standard sizes
• There have been version compatability issues on some computer terminals, making it impossible to save a document until the hardworking Technical Services folks come and do something to the computer to fix it
• I've had a hard time getting used to the menu bar at the top; there are menu items I've been using for literally decades that just aren't where they've always been. The help system seems pretty good, and I've been able to use it to find some things that mystified me (like the "Select all" button), but it's definitely a learning curve.

All in all it looks like the new version is a Good Thing: more powerful, more features, and sometimes even more intuitive. It's going to take me a while to get used to it, though.