CCLS 23 Things #16: Playing around with PBWiki

If you're used to blogger software, there's no problem at all transferring to wiki software.

But to my surprise, it does somehow feel different to contribute to a page created by many users. It's more "communal" in every sense of the word, good and bad.

I added my blog, then added a favorite restaurant.

CCLS 23 Things #14: Library 2.0

After several years of reading about Library 2.0, I no longer think it's all that revolutionary. Shouldn't any organization that is providing a public service be responsive to its patrons? As far as having patrons "create content" in the library OPAC, I'm not sure whether this is a practical way to involve patrons. I can't see Innovative ever getting as good as Amazon, in terms of a flexible search engine, ratings by users, comments by users, etc. So rather than compete with Amazon, maybe our OPAC should link to it. I'll bet most librarians have Amazon bookmarked on their browsers anyway, and use it on a daily basis, as a research tool instead of (or as well as) a vendor. On second thought, public libraries probably can't link to commercial sites, so maybe a site like Librarything or Shelfari would provide similar advantages.

I read a few of the resources linked to wikipedia. Is your OPAC fun? (a manifesto of sorts) is a nice "wish list" of some practical and some impractical suggestions. It reminded me of Dr. Seuss's comment "If you never did, you should. These things are fun, and fun is good" (One fish, two fish).

Library 2.0 and the Problem of Hate Speech raised an issue that never would have occurred to me. Maybe it's a realistic fear, but then again maybe it's more paranoia. Some librarians (and other people as well, but librarians seem especially cautious by nature) seem to go around looking for reasons not to make changes, especially changes that might challenge their hold on their pathetic little fiefdoms. My inclination would be to just have a strategy in mind to deal with the problem if it should happen to arise (e.g. moderating comments posted to the library website or OPAC), but otherwise don't even worry about it.

CCLS 23 Things #13: Technorati

To me, the blogosphere seems like cable TV -- all those choices and still (almost) no content. The time you need to invest in exploration just doesn't seem worth the return. And from my limited exploration, I don't think Technorati would help very much with this problem.

I'm interested in music, so I clicked the music link in the Technorati Blog Directory. The first page of results included blogs focused on the gay male lifestyle, celebrity gossip, and electronic gadgets, none of which interests me. Presumably all these blogs include music in their list of topics somehwere?

I tried the suggested search on library 2.0 and found the results similarly frustrating. Apparently the default is a full text search, and none of the results on the first page was even related directly to libraries. Changing the search to target tags produced results that were at least a little more relevant.

I checked out the top 100 most Popular Tags, and found that library was not among them. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise! Sort of keeps our work in perspective...

This is not to say that I never read blogs. I receive a daily email digest from ArtsJournal that includes a number of blogs. I'm OK with a choice among several targeted blogs like this -- I'm not OK with pages and pages of mostly irrelevant search results.

CCLS 23 Things #10

Here's a fun one:



I could easily spend all day playing with image generators.
As it was, I spent about an hour and barely scratched the surface of the list at the left side of The Generator Blog.

I made a Magic 8 Ball with the ultimate answer:



And a Seussian commentary on our project:


















There's even a choice of generators to see what the offspring of two particular people would look like:

http://makemebabies.com/
http://www.vw.com/vwhype/babymaker/en/us/

gotta try that when I have more time...


And finally, a preview of what we might look like after the proposed budget cuts...