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.

Thing #17: Shared Calendars in MS Outlook

I use online calendars a lot. A ton. Almost constantly, to tell the truth. At my old job as a teacher-librarian I was juggling so many balls that without my calendar (and the old catalog cards on which I kept a constantly-updated set of to-do lists) I would have been utterly lost.

These days, I use Microsoft Outlook for my work calendar and Google Calendar to coordinate my schedule at home: my spouse, my daughter, and I each have a different complex and variable schedule that could change at a moment's notice, so we finally jettisoned our paper calendar and rely on Google to keep track of our work schedules and auxiliary shifts and PAC meetings and childcare needs and birthday parties and piano lessons and...and...and...I'm sure I'm forgetting something; let me check my calendar ;-)

So inviting people to meetings isn't new for me, but I'd never known about shared exchange calendars, so it was neat to poke my virtual head into the LV Board Room and see what's going on there.

One caveat/funny story about using Outlook to schedule meetings: five or six years ago, at my old job, I was scheduled to go into a classroom to teach some information skill or online database. I made myself an Outlook appointment so I'd remember it, and invited the classroom teacher as well. I set the pop-up reminder to two days ahead of time, so that I'd remember to prep and make handouts for the lesson.

Little did I know that this meant that the classroom teacher would also get a pop-up reminder two days early. Being something of a technological novice, she couldn't figure out how to make it stop popping up-- I think she was setting it to "snooze" so it kept showing up every ten or fifteen minutes--and eventually she came over to the library to complain and ask me to please stop constantly emailing to remind her about the session!

After that, I stopped setting reminders ahead of time when inviting others to a meeting; instead, I made myself a separate meeting or task at the same time and put the reminder on that. Complicated, but it worked.

Thing #16: Email and Phishing

I read up on email etiquette, which I'm mostly familiar with, and on phishing, about which I thought I was pretty savvy.

Then I took the SonicWALL Phishing and Spam IQ quiz. And I only got 6 out of 10! How embarrassing!

Fortunately, the results page includes a "Why?" link for each question, pointing out clues that should give you a good idea of whether the email in question is phishing or legit. After studying the questions I got wrong, I now have a better idea of what to look for: a message that addresses me by name, an actual link address that matches the address listed in the message, and a cut-and-paste option if the message instructs me to go to a certain website to take action.

OK, then. Good to know.

Thing # 15: Sandbox!

Well, that was fun. I logged into the NVDPL Sandbox Wiki and added my travels to the general list (Can it really be that I'm the only one here who's been to Wales? That seems unlikely, somehow), as well as my favorite book and movie, and a cute kid story from when I was on the LV Children's desk this morning.

Then I noticed that the "Favourite Movies" category, though it was linked in the narrative text on the home page, wasn't listed along with the other sections in the sidebar. I thought, "Hey, this is a wiki, I can add it myself! I am empowered!" So I did.

When I clicked "Save" on my sidebar edit, I got this message:

This page, 'SideBar', gets special handling on PBwiki — its contents will be shown as part of the sidebar drawn on all standard pages. By deleting this page you can remove the sidebar display. If all 3 special pages (SideBar, QuickStart, RecentActivity) are deleted or otherwise don't exist, the sidebar is not shown. In addition, the sidebar is not shown when viewing these pages themselves, like you are doing now.

And I thought, "Gosh, I could delete the whole sidebar right now if I wanted to! In fact, I could delete all the content, including everyone's travels and favorite books! I'm empowered!"

But I didn't.

Anyone else could, though. Such is the double-edged sword of wikis.

Thing #14: The Wackiness of Wikis

I read the Wiki articles listed under Thing #14, and was particularly intrigued by the comments on this post. Amazing how many commenters didn't know that anyone can edit a wiki. I was also surprised at how many commenters, on learning this, were ready to immediately dismiss wikis as an information source.

Like many teachers and librarians, I have my share of tongue-clucking kids-[and teachers]-today-with-their-ignorant-reliance-on-Wikipedia anecdotes. But I have to admit to using Wikipedia A LOT myself, though when I'm doing research for someone else I always try to back it up with a second source--often from a website cited in the relevant Wikipedia article. I think the breadth and collaborative aspect of Wikipedia is one of the wonders of the post-Internet world.

And Wikipedia's unreliability serves as an excellent reminder that all sources--even the blandest of print encyclopedias--have the potential to be unreliable and biased, and that it's always useful to ask the question "Who wrote this, and why?"

Thing #13: Library 2.0...version 1.0

Well. I have a LOT to say about Library 2.0. Maybe too much to fit in a blog post. I read the articles listed on the 23 Things page, and clicked over to a few of the links, and eventually found this 2006 article by Walt Crowley, in which he attempts to sort through all the writing and thinking and discussions on the topic. His survey is pretty impressive, and he seems to come away from it with the sense that people are using the term "Library 2.0" to mean pretty much whatever they want, but that overall it has to do with use of social networking software and how that affects libraries.

I tend to be skeptical when people talk about impending sweeping changes to any widespread institution, like libraries or schools. It's not that I don't like change, or that I don't recognize that it happens; it's more that change of the kind the Library 2.0 pundits are writing about is usually limited by the budget and human resources of the institution: people--both employees and the public--are not going to adapt to an entire new set of skills or attitudes instantaneously, and change, when it comes, tends to sort of creep up on you until you turn around and realize that things are quite different than they were a generation ago.

Here's an example, from the last wave of the technological revolution: when I started working in libraries, in 1990, I was a clerk (like an LAII). One of my jobs was to place holds for people: if they wanted to reserve a book, they had to look it up in the online catalogue, write down some information about the title and themselves on a Reserve Slip, and then I entered it into the computer for them. When the hold arrived at the library, they'd get an automated phone call or a computer-generated notice in the mail. (This system had been implemented before I started, but there were many employees who remembered having to phone each patron to let them know their holds were in.) When the patron came to pick up their hold, we would pull it from the Hold Shelf and check it out for them.

I remember when the online system was upgraded to allow patrons to place their own holds on the public computers. Suddenly, we needed twice as many hold shelves! People placed many more holds when they were empowered to do it themselves.

A few years later, by the time I started library school in 1995, the library had its own website, and patrons could place holds from their home computers, receive email notices, pick up their own books from the hold shelves, and check them out themselves from self-checkout terminals. Much more autonomy for the patrons, much less need for intervention or assistance from library employees. And yet there was still plenty of work: since so many people had such open access to the library, they were placing even more holds than before.

There was lots of anxiety among library people around that time: would libraries as we knew them become obsolete? Were we library-school students being trained for a profession that had no future? Were we the buggy-whip makers of the late 20th century?

As it turned out, no. The Internet revolution happened, sure, and it swept libraries along with it. But the basic shape of libraries has remained the same, despite predictions to the contrary. As with the book reserves example above, the shape of what we do has changed in some ways-- less calling to notify patrons and entering hold information for them, and more database instruction, printer troubleshooting, and handing out of temporary Internet slips--but what library users want from us is pretty much the same: help finding stuff, and suggestions about good things to read (and listen to, and watch) and ways to search for information.

I don't see that changing much in the face of Web 2.0. We'll respond to its demands as patron interest and library resources dictate, whether that be a library presence in Second Life, classes in blogging and Flickr, more responsive online catalogue software (that would be my vote!), and/or other methods that haven't even appeared on the horizon yet. But though the shape of the library may stretch and change, I don't think it's going to be demolished and rebuilt anytime soon.