Thing 22

For months I've been meaning to download an audio book on my home computer so that I could be more knowledgeable in explaining to patrons how the process works. Unfortunately Once I got home it completely slipped my mind. Now thanks to #22 I've finally done it and it was quite painless. I was pleasantly surprised to see that many people are taking advantage of the service...several of the titles I wanted to try were unavailable. I haven't transferred the book to my MP3 player because my player is loaded. A second one will come in handy. I also downloaded an e-book for practice even though I personally prefer reading in bed. This exercise has been a motivator in more ways than one.

Thing 23

I've used more resources and explored more websites in the past few weeks than I have in the past five years and it's been a joy. I feel enriched not only professionally but personally. I'm now able to do things that I wasn't even aware of before. I thought tag was a kid's game,flickr... an eye movement, RSS feed...say what? I was of course aware of blogs and wikis but hadn't a clue as to how to create them. I also have developed a lot more self-confidence because I was able to complete tasks that were often intimidating at first glance. In doing the various exercises I also became acquainted with a number of other resources that I want to explore. The most important single thing that I've learned is that the more I learn the more there is out there to learn. I also have to mention how inspired I was by reading the blogs of my co-workers and thank them for the clever ideas that I incorporated into my blog. I'll take responsibility for the corny ones but it was always the process that concerned me most. I'm now going to continue working on the rest of the tasks and perfecting the skills that I've acquired. I've noticed that I'm spontaneously using many tools now when searching the net... technorati1, del.icio.us, furl, RSS feeds and flickr, to name a few. Adding buttons to my web page for the various sites makes it so simple to utilize the resources. I have no doubt that this experience will increase my ability to help our library patrons use technology. I'm looking forward to participating in Library 2.1.

Thing 21

I checked out Podcastalley.com, Podcast.com, and Yahoo podcast and used keyword libraries on all of them. I found a few interesting ones that I added to my feeds. . On Yahoo I found Nancy Pearl book review podcasts which I added also. In general I would say there are way to many podcasts available and it's rather time consuming to separate the wheat from the chaff. On the other hand it is an important new tool to communicate with library users and potential users. Unfortunately there is still a large segment of the population that is unaware of the many services we have to offer and we need to use every means available to get the word out. As a reward for slogging through so many rather silly and boring ones, I added the Onion Radio News Report ,which at least is intentionally silly, to my blog.

Thing 19

What an interesting and informative exercise. Even though I had already become familiar with several of the award winners or nominees there were many other that I couldn't help but try. I started a web page with Findory, used furl and ma.gnolia and though I had already created a document using Zoho I decided to give google doc a try. I am actually infatuated with most things google already. It was really quite easy. My love for google grows day by day. There are a number of useful sites and I'm going to explore all of them eventually but I was really impressed with Zoho, Google Doc, and Wiki.