The end is just the beginning

Whew! I made it through all the different 2.0 tasks...just in the nick of time! So many things got in the way of completing each item's required tasks, I feared I would not finish before my 4 months were up.

It's been quite an adventure going through each step. I learned so much, and there are so many things (the rest of the video sites, for example) I plan to go back and explore further. My favorite pieces were the steps where I signed up for a Facebook account (and later when I learned how to add Scrabulous to it--both are addictive!), signed up for a Pandora Radio profile, watched funny videos, and learned how to create this blog. I did enjoy many of the other sites & features we tried out as well--Flower Sudoku was fun, Flickr can be an enjoyable way to waste time online, RSS feeds are good for helping me remember what the heck it was I wanted to keep reading (like friends' blogs and so on) and letting me know when Nancy Pearl has a new podcast (radio broadcast). Meebo with the Firefox add-on helps me keep track of when friends & family are online without me having to toggle back & forth between tabs--this is a handy timesaver for me. I already had a Goodreads account, but I enjoyed creating a LibraryThing account and comparing the two. And it was good to create a Google doc from scratch instead of only knowing how to follow a set link to get to one particular file I could edit--a wide world opened up for me with that one.

I won't bother to talk about the steps I didn't like as much or find as useful. I've ranted about those enough already. If you really want to know how I feel about them, you can always re-read prior blog posts. I won't bore either of us with a repetition of my complaints & frustrations.

When I began this program four months ago, I had no idea I would find some of these 2.0 technologies so incredibly addictive or fun. I wanted to learn more about them so I wouldn't sound so clueless when interacting with patrons (especially teenagers), but I didn't think I personally would find some of them as fabulous as I did. What a wonderful surprise! And to think I got paid to learn these great new tools...wow.

I was able to find friends on Facebook whom I had not spoken to in years--never knew what happened to them after we graduated, for example. I'm glad I was sitting at my desk at the time so I didn't startle any patrons with my exclamations of joy & astonishment. :) (Apologies to any coworkers who weren't so lucky and got to share in my delight.) That was probably my most favorite aspect of this whole program and the part I'll use the most in the future, both on a personal level and probably on a professional basis as well, eventually.

My only suggestion for improvement with this 2.0 program would be that a few of the steps could use more explicit instructions. There were several times when I had to ask Sam for help because I had no idea how to accomplish something. (I can track backwards if you want to know specifics.) And there was one item where the instructions on how to accomplish a task were in the comments below the post, not the post itself. I have no objection to asking colleagues for help, and I actually think it's a better way to learn something if you have to teach someone else, but sometimes there isn't anyone around when you get to a step where you need help. So rather than saying things like "Go here and embed such-and-such in your blog," it would be helpful to include step-by-step instructions as to HOW to do that, for example. Overall, though, I think this whole experience was fantastic and completely worthwhile. Thank you very much, Discover 2.0 planning team! I look forward to using my new skills for years to come, adapting to updates and changes and new inventions as they come.

Too many videos, too little time...

Everyone has heard of YouTube, but I have to admit this was my first experience searching for something there. Mostly I'd seen a few of the One Minute Critic videos Sam had posted on YouTube, and I think I'd seen some other random "hey-you-should-watch-this" videos other people had pointed out to me. For my search, I typed in "Library Week," which brought up ALA's videos that I wanted plus other videos I didn't particularly care about. Revising my search to "National Library Week" helped a bit with that. I also got to view a short video from some university library that was pretty cool--video of the library on campus overlaid with clips of students talking about their favorite places in the library & why & what they'd like to change if they could. That was fun!

And I like the option YouTube gave me to put one of the videos (I chose the Nat'l Library Week video about Reference) on my Facebook profile. Very cool!

Next was blip.tv and another search on "National Library Week." That brought up a whole list of videos in a format that was much easier to scan. I like it better than YouTube's too-crowded layout. Here's my favorite Reference video (the same one I posted on Facebook):



Blip.tv makes it really easy to embed their videos. I appreciate that! Plus, on their site, the videos are larger (easier to see) than on YouTube. You can even click a little icon and make them full-screen, which is fabulous!! (note: I just discovered almost by accident that YouTube offers this feature, too. That's good!)

I also discovered that blip.tv has a drop-down menu off to the side of the video you're watching that lets you "share" the video via a selection of options which includes Facebook. I think I'll try it and compare the two....OK, at first glance they appear the same, but clicking on the postings to view the videos has two different effects: blip.tv takes you to their site in a new tab, while YouTube lets you view right there within Facebook. I prefer the latter, I think. Still, it's good that no matter which of the two sites I'm on, I can add a favorite video to my Facebook account. (So again, why in the world would you need one of those tumblelogs??)

As for library applications, well, bring on the videos! Sam's One Minute Critic program should be advertised on our FVRL website with all kinds of videos--he's certainly got enough to choose from! Why are we not taking advantage of them? He's been posting them on YouTube & blip.tv & elsewhere for months. But why not here, where our audience/participants are likely to be?

Likewise, I think we as a library system should be using videos and podcasts to advertise all kinds of library programs and activities. Currently we're only just beginning to do this, and mostly through our teen MySpace pages, etc. This is fine--a good thing--but not enough. We're not maximizing our potential yet. (Incidentally, why can I not find links to these MySpace pages from the FVRL website? Am I just looking in the wrong place, or do you need to go to MySpace directly and then search for FVRL?)

The tricky part is overcoming search quirks. How can we be consistent in our tagging so that all related things can be found by unrelated users? Tags and titles are crucial for the ever-important "findability" factor. It's why I prefer Goodreads to LibraryThing and why I like Blogger's "show all" option for a post's labels--so that I can see what tags (or bookshelf titles) I've used in the past and remember to use them again for related items. I don't have any magic answers here. Just my opinion that there is great potential out there in techland to reach new and returning patrons, and we should be thoughtful in how we go about doing it. That's my 2 cents' worth. For today. Tune in tomorrow....

LibraryThing vs. Goodreads

I already had an account with Goodreads, so for this program I signed up with LibraryThing. It's been interesting to compare the two. I think Goodreads is more intuitive to use at first, easier to add books, but I really like that you can rate with half stars on LibraryThing. It was really helpful to have a total stranger comment right away on one of my reviews because she's the one who told me about the half-star capability. That never happened to me on Goodreads! Well, to be fair, I set higher privacy levels when I signed up for Goodreads last year, so that could be a big reason why I rarely receive comments on my reviews.

I think I like LibraryThing's displays a little better, although I like the choices lots better on Goodreads now that Discover 2.0 helped me accidentally stumble across them. :) I do not, however, like the way you add tags on LibraryThing--I can never remember what ones I've used before, so I'm quite likely to have similar things NOT grouped by tags purely through faulty memory. I MUCH prefer the "bookshelves" concept of Goodreads. It's so much easier to choose from a list of options that I've created and can edit at any time. On the other hand, Goodreads' version of tagging that occurs at the bottom of the review, when you say who else would like the book is, well, not at all useful so far as I can determine. Where does that go, and what does it do?

I do like that both sites create "clouds" based on my tags/bookshelves. That's kind of a cool visual of what I like to read. And it's another way to find likely books to recommend for reader's advisory, which is the reason I joined in the first place--because my memory isn't good enough to keep track of what I've read for longer than a nanosecond.

I love that LibraryThing lets you add favorite authors to your profile--in a totally different manner than Goodreads, which just lets you list things about yourself. But I don't like that you have to pay (admittedly not very much) to add more than 200 books to LibraryThing. I know it's not unreasonable for them to charge for their services, but still...I like free. :)

I REALLY like how LibraryThing keeps track of who has similar libraries to mine and what my ratings statistics are, etc. That's very cool. But it's too many steps to add books from other libraries or from an author's profile page to my library. Once you're on a book's page, clicking "add to my library" should do just that, not make you go select the book from a search page, and especially not a search page that doesn't even come up with the right book at the top of the list, as happened to me once! What's up with that? Goodreads is much more streamlined and easy to use.

Bottom line? Each of the two sites has their moments of greatness, and both are useful in a library setting when you want to find something to recommend to a patron, but I think overall I prefer Goodreads purely for ease of use.