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AccuRadio is an Internet radio site definitely worth visiting. They not only have a wide variety of channels for rock, pop, jazz, classical, country, oldies, Latin, world music and more, but each channel is broken into even more specific channels. Even when you are listening to a channel, you can customize it and de-select artists you don't want to listen to. This is one of the most intuitive and fun interfaces I have seen in awhile.
Maybe it is just the librarian in me, but when Sacred Stories pops onto my screen, I can almost smell the aged paper. The British Library has created this evocative collection of sacred Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Christian, Islamic, and Jewish stories. Just click a cover and select a story. Each book is read aloud with moving images and effective reading. This is a great example of what can be done with digitized books.
San Diego's Union Tribune has an interesting piece on Movies Better Than the Books That Spawned Them. This could make great fodder for a blog post on your library site! Don't be too worried about the list, the most recent film on it is Carrie which came out in 1976. This is one of those blog posts that could start a real discussion. Hopefully!
NPR has several great book pieces to point to on your library blog in their holiday section.
First is a nice list of coffee table books recommended for gift giving. Just looking at the covers and some of the images make you want to pore over them.
Second is a mouthwatering collection of new holiday cookbooks. Yum!
And then you have a list of holiday books for gifts from Karen Grigsby Bates where you will find books for all kinds of readers.
Way to push the book NPR!
Here is one to crow about on your library website! The Million Book Project has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, all of which are now available online! (Right now the server is too busy for me to get into it and look around.)
It took us months to get our digitization project completed, and that was a few books and several hundred photos. Imagine the daunting task of 1.5 million books.
But even more important than that is what this says about OPEN access to library holdings with no fees, no teasers that lead to fees, nothing like that. This is the project librarians should be demoing and talking about to their patrons. This is what makes libraries and librarians cool. In a digital historical way of course.
Keep on learning by using the free university lectures at LectureFox. You will find lectures on physics, computer science, mathematics and other subjects from universities such as MIT, Vanderbilt and UC San Diego. The lectures come in several formats. Some are notes, others are audio and still more are video.
Cookthink is one of the more delectable-looking food sites online. Their images are consistently clear, clean and mouthwatering. The site appeals to many different types of cooks. If you are looking strictly for recipes, you can. Looking for advice, tips and beginner information, click on reference. Or you can read their blog which combines all of it in concise articles filled with images.
Travel into the Lord of the Rings with Planet-Tolkien, the largest JRR Tolkien site in the United Kingdom. You will find news, active fan forums, information on the author himself, movie reviews, and an image gallery.
Clipblast is the world's largest search engine for online video. You will find television shows, travel, celebrity sightings, news, and much more. You can create your own account which will let you save clips and get alerts. This is definitely a site to be aware of and a nice complement to YouTube.
National Public Radio now has a music page where you can find all sorts of great music just waiting for discovery. Listen via live streams or select specific songs to hear. You can also listen to interviews, live concerts, and studio sessions. But perhaps best of all is that the NPR focus on learning and knowledge extends to their music site. Right now, I am listening to Modern Classical Music for Pop Fans.
I got mentioned in Library Journal's November 15th edition! The article is all about blogging and libraries, very great stuff. To find the mention of me, keep scrolling down until you hit the boxed in portion and look for "Blogging Directors Embrace Transparency."
I am very flattered to have been included and blushingly aware that I am given accolades that I will struggle to live up to. Blogging has been such a blessing in my life and my career. This article is just another of those blessings. Thank you Sophie and LJ. You have given me yet another thing to be thankful for this season.
Petside is a newly-launched pet website brought to you by NBC. And what a featured-packed site it is! You will find pet news, tips and treats, videos, photographs, answers to pet questions, information on breeds and much much more. And if you are a sucker for cute animal photos, be prepared to suddenly desire both a Maine Coon kitten and tottering beagle puppy. Sigh.
Somehow autumn and spices go hand-in-hand in my mind. Perhaps its the cinnamon in the pumpkin pie, the sage in the stuffing, or the mulling spices in the hot cider. But this is the perfect time of year to highlight this very cool Encyclopedia of Spices from The Epicentre. Click on any of them and you will get an image of the spice, information on how it is cultivated and where it grows, how to store the spice, how to use it, and any medicinal properties it might have. Yum!
Wow! Search Engine Journal has an article on 10 Places to Find Free Images Online. And what a gold mine of photos it is!
His list includes my favorite spot: SXC.hu, but also led me to some great databases of photos that libraries can use with no worries because they are FREE for use. I am especially happy to find Fotogenika and MorgueFile.
On our new website, we have decided to use photographs rather than clip art, because so often the clip art is miserable stuff. Photos also seem to make the site look more professional. So if you are inclined to start a more blog-based site, you will want to bookmark these resources so you have plenty of places to look for photographs.
The winners of the 2007 National Book Awards have been announced. This is a great way to highlight real literature in your collection. So post it up there.
Personally, I am thrilled with the choice of Sherman Alexie for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It has been the one teen book I have told others to read this year, carrying a copy around to share. Definitely worthy of the prize.
At the library, we conducted a series of focus groups to gather information for our long range planning process. We decided against using surveys for a number of reasons, and the focus group model has seemed to work very well for us. We had four focus groups in all: Diversity Teachers, Diversity Teens, Special Needs, and Children. Our groups had users and nonusers, and we are very lucky they did.
I learned the most from the non-users and their opinions of libraries. Some of it was shocking but all of it informed me about what I need to do as a library director with this long range plan.
Here's what I learned:
Intelligent people in your community are not using your library.
Even more so, they have no idea what a modern library is.
They see us as conservative institutions.
They see us as insular and unresponsive in the extreme.
They believe every librarian fits the stereotype because they don't know or interact with librarians in real life.
They believe we don't care, don't want to serve, don't understand society.
My point is not to argue with these. Of course they are erroneous statements. My point is that these opinions offered so blatantly and openly were immensely valuable. They speak not about what we ARE doing, but about how to get our message out there that we are changing, interested, dynamic. We are not little old ladies with buns and no social aptitude. Even if we are ladies with buns of certain years, we are not insular and certainly not conservative!
We were told time and again that our collections were dated. We had no new movies, no new books, no new anything. Yes, it's untrue. But somewhere the message is getting lost. Perhaps it is less that non-users don't have time for us in their busy online schedules and more that they really have no idea what libraries offer.
And before you insist that of course your non-users know exactly what you do, I was speaking to people served by a variety of libraries not just here. All non-users said the same sorts of things, no matter which community they were from. This is a learning opportunity for us as librarians if we are gutsy enough to learn it. Or are we insular, conservative thinkers who refuse to be responsive? I think not!
Virtual Tourist has a very nice travel map feature. You can color in the map of the world by marking the places you have been, where you have lived and where you want to go in the future. Even for someone who is widely traveled you may be surprised how much of the map stays gray. Incentive for more travel!
The Literature Network is the place for librarians to visit when they need to be reminded that other people love books and reading too! Just visiting their very active literature forums is a refreshing change where you can see people really discussing the books they love and hate. You can also view their author list which is very handy. Click on any author and you are treated to a photo of the author, a list of their work, excerpts and any forum discussions where they have appeared.
Gomestic is a site that offers articles and information on domestic issues. You will find sections on apartment living, consumer information, home improvement, cooking, gardening, personal finance, moving, pets and organization. The site incorporates a lot of 2.0 bells and whistles, including comments, ratings, and tagging. Nicely, they have tag clouds that cover not only subjects but also authors of their articles. Very slick and easy to use.
When I worked a service desk, I was always being asked by patrons if we had something like Quicken loaded and available for the public. While I think that those patrons were misunderstanding the complexity of financial software and the efficacy of sharing it in a public place, I think there is a niche out there for people who want online financial management help.
Mint is a site that offers this sort of feature. It is free, online and offers ways to chart what you are spending your money on, interest rate recommendations, bill alerts, watching for unusual spending, and much more. Definitely a place to send those Quicken nomads to.
Splashup is a site that lets you edit images online within your browser. Sweet! It has lots of bells and whistles, including pixel-level editing, editing multiple images at a time, and its own file name so that you can safely save your edits without losing your original. Nicely, the site lets you take an online tour, or choose to click on "Jump Right In" to start messing about.
Conducted a three-hour workshop on blogging this morning. I enjoyed it a lot, but doubt that I convinced anyone to give it a try. I think that people responded better to a library website being blog-based, such as Drupal than starting their own professional blog. It's disappointing because I think the library blogging world really needs the representation of small libraries, and there were many in the group I spoke to.
Many people say that they don't have time, but I think it is more than that. I think that it is a combination of not being comfortable writing publicly and wondering what the heck they will write about. I also think though, that if you are really passionate about a subject, you will find it easy to blog about. You have plenty of opinions to express AND you are already researching it because you love it. Let's hope some of them give it a try.
I hope that at the minimum people head home and set up a feed reader. That alone can save them time enough to blog a couple of times a week.
Here are the slides I will use at my blogging presentation tomorrow. I "borrowed" art from my favorite online blogging comic, Blaugh just to lighten it up a little. I am speaking to public librarians primarily in my library system, Winnefox. I hope to give them a little something to dream about, ideas of what to be wary of, and send them out to conquer the blogging world. :)
I will caution you that I am blunt about issues involved. I used to be more light-hearted about the time blogging takes and commitment, but I realized that that doesn't help anyone. It doesn't help the new blogger figure out what is necessary to begin and it doesn't reflect accurately on the time and energy I put into these blogs.
Enjoy! And feel free to comment, question and wonder at what I am trying to.
The 2007 Weblog Awards finalists have been announced and voting is now open. Polls close on November 8th, so go ahead and vote! You can select your top picks in 49 categories. This is a great list to use to find new blogs to read. I'm speaking on blogging in libraries tomorrow and plan to point this site out there.
At the recent Wisconsin Library Association conference, I presented a session on Library 2.0. At the end of the session, I was asked if my library was unionized (which it isn’t) and then many in the room nodded sagely that that was why I could make changes and do Library 2.0 in the library I direct. Now, I am not saying that it isn’t more complicated if you do have a union, but most of the 2.0 ideas would be welcomed by a union: transparency, open discussions, trust, etc.
I didn’t react well on the spot. I believe I acknowledged that that would make it more difficult in general, but now that I have thought about it, I do have what I hope is a better response or at least more coherent. First, yes it does complicate things. However, many things about our libraries make change more complicated. For most of us, we don’t have the money we need. We don’t have the staff we need. Or the staff we have don’t have 2.0 skills yet. Or your library board doesn’t see a need for a new approach. Or…
It could go on and on. Unions are just another complication in a long list. My goal is to work with the limitations I have, look for strengths and ways to move ahead, and seize opportunities. I don’t want to get caught in the web of excuses that people use to justify being immobile. If you see something in 2.0 that gets you interested, excited and happy to head to work, then do it! Yes, you have to do it within your library whatever that entails. Union, lack of funding, old computers, no space. I understand that. But don’t let that stop you. Find those ways to move forward, grab on, and fly.
I guarantee that risk taking with its possible failure is a lot more interesting than standing still.
I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I
lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
-- Diane Ackerman
OK, I use Google for almost all of my searches, but I love to find reasons to use other search engines, even if it's another biggie like Yahoo! Digital Inspiration has a great list of five things that Yahoo! can do and Google can't.
I can see tips like this being used in libraries not only for the Reference staff to improve their searching, but also in an advanced class on the Internet. I think there is a real need for different tiers of classes for people of different levels. Yes, libraries must continue to offer basic classes for people who need them, of course! But we should also be looking to offer Office 2007 classes, Vista classes right after it was released, and high end tips and tricks not only for online searching, but also for using our catalogs and running Windows. Libraries may find that those already sold on using computers are interested in learning even more. It could be an even easier sell than to beginners.
As always, your mileage may vary. It will depend on your community, your publicity efforts, and the quality of your information. But hey, what a fun thing to experiment with!
I just discovered this handy new Firefox add-on called PermaTabs. It allows you to create tabs that are permanently available in Firefox. This means that you can close Firefox and reopen it and the tabs are already there. I am using it for just four of my main websites. I still use Morning Coffee to open my more transient tabs that I want to see each morning, and this is a great addition to that.
My permanent tabs are the library's website, WorldCat, Bloglines Beta, and Popurls. What would yours be?