New blog 8/10

It's been awhile since I blogged. I have been listening to books on my MP3 player. It helps kill the time while I'm waiting for a meal in a restaurant. I have read quite a few authors, Nevada Barr, Margaret Maron, M C Beaton, Susan Wittig Albert and Rita Mae Brown. I especially liked Rita Mae Brown because I have trouble reading her books, but I find listening to them delightful. Her animals talk and are really fun. I am reading books as well as listening to them, Clive Cussler and Mary Higgins Clark.

What's happened

It's been a while since I signed in. I've had a lot of sadness in my life this last year. I was taking care of my dad who passed away in November and now I have a lot to do to get his estate taken care of and I cut hours at work from 40 to 32. I never seem to have time to get to the blog, but hopefully in the future I will. This is just to let you know that I'm still here.

Wrap-up

Well, I finished all 29 exercises and will need to review some of the ones I really want to be able to use (like generating images). I look back on the exercises and can't remember exactly what I did during process. I thing that a couple of things that could be used to make service to patrons better are Library Thing, which would help us and them keep track of what they read and if they liked it. Another one is our blogs which we could do to keep the public right up to date with what's going on day to day. Some of the other I can see helping the staff do their jobs working better with patrons and other staff members. During some exercises I got myself lost, a little explanation and I will be able to proceed in using the ones that will help me. Having to do this really got me out of my comfort zone. I'm always afraid that I will do something that will wipe out everything. (This last weekend I was recharging my MP3 player and wiped out everything, all the music and the two books that I had been listening to. If I just knew what I did I wouldn't do it again.)
I now know what Myspace is like, even though I probably will never use it, but it nice to know what people are talking about and Youtube can be interesting. I'm not fond of the violent videos that some teen post, but there are some cute ones on it.
Flickr is neat, but you must have the right kind of camera. Tagging and technorati where things I'd never heard about, now at least I don't have to play stupid when others are talking about them. Rss feeds can come in handy if you don't have time to surf the whole internet to find out something - I did like the on-line production tools which would come in handy when I don't have word on my computer.
Even though I dreaded this whole exercise it turned out that it really was a lot of fun and a neat learning experience.

Google Docs

Well, I'm in Google Docs and posting this to my blog from there. I think it's really great that people don't have to have word on their computer to be able to write documents and such. It will be great to be able to help people on our computers write a letter or something else so they can do something other than e-mail. I have come back to a portion of Library 2.0 that I didn't take the time to work on something I wasn't sure of doing right.

Podcasts

Some I found very entertaining and some strange. I can see how the library could use them in one phase or another of getting information to the public. We might even use them to communicate between ourselves. I checked out some podcasts on books and libraries. There were some funny ones with Mr Bean and some serious ones. I saw some book reviews by teens and couldn't really understand what they were about. Most of these were on Youtube. There were some on dominoes that used books in a library and people on the street as dominoes. You could do a lot to get to the teens and other who are really computer savy through these different means. I don't know how may older library patrons might be reached by these methods, because like me they thing they are the realm of teens.

Net Library and Youtube

As you can see below I found a video clip on YouTube and posted it here. I have a password somewhere that is Catsglore, so I thought this one would be good. I also got by MP3 player and downloaded a book from Netlibrary. I still need to practice using the player so I know which button to push. I also set a radio station on the FM radio. I am beginning on podcasts now and with write about them next.

Tired kitten from YouTube