Catch up Week!
Welcome to Week 16! There aren’t any formal exercises this week, as we’d like you to have a bit of time to catch your breath and catch up on anything you haven’t had time to do in the project so far.
If you’re struggling with a lesson or just have a question, please be sure to contact us. We want to help!
This week, you’ll learn about some cool tools to manage tasks, reminders, and to-do lists. I’ll tell you a little bit about two tools – Remember The Milk and Jott – and give you a chance to play with them in the assignments. In this week’s reminder email, there are some passwords and other information you’ll need to complete this lesson. You might want to dig up the email right now, if you don’t have it handy!
Listen to this week’s podcast and then read the info below. If you have any questions about anything along the way, be sure to contact us
Remember the Milk
Remember the Milk has the features of a traditional to-do list. You can set up multiple lists, sort tasks, set due dates, set priorities, and add notes. You can print a weekly planner of tasks. But what makes Remember the Milk so nifty is its “Web 2.0”-ness:
Jott
Jott has a very simple purpose: you call a phone number, speak a message, and the message is converted to text and sent somewhere. It’s the “sent somewhere” part where things get interesting…
Using Jott, you can send a message to:
So, while the concept is simple, what you can do with it is far from it. Jott is yet another illustration of how these productivity tools can actually make you MORE productive by interacting with other services you use, making it easier to keep everything in one place and to keep organized!
Required assignments:
1.Add a task to the Adventures in Technology sandbox list at Remember The Milk by sending an email.
2. Blog about Remember the Milk and Jott – would they be helpful for you? What do you think about the interaction between these tools (and others that you’ve learned about)?
Optional assignments:
1. Edit the task you’ve added to the Adventure in Technology sandbox list at Remember The Milk.Change the priority, add a due date, or add some notes.
Here’s how:
a. Log in to Remember the Milk using the username & password that was in the email you received from your library system’s Project Play coordinator.
b. To get started, click on “Tasks” at the top of the screen.
c. Click on your task in the list, and then click on what you’d like to do in the right-hand pane.
d. Once you’re done, visit the published list to see how it’s changed.
2. Use your phone to add a task to our Adventures in Technology sandbox list in Remember the Milk using Jott! (mind-bending, isn’t it??).
Here’s how:
The first thing you’ll need to do is associate your phone number with the Adventures in Technology Jott account:
a. Log into the Jott website using the information included in the email you received from your weekly reminder email.
b. Click “My Account” up in the top right corner.
c. Click “Phone” in the left-hand frame.
d. Click "Add a new phone number" and type your phone number in the box provided.
e. Click “Add”.
f. Call 1-866-JOTT-123 and enter the validation number listed on the webist
Now you can add your item to the Adventures in Technology list in just a couple of steps:
a. When it asks who you would like to Jott, say “Adventures in Technology”.
c. Say what task you would like to show up on the list.
d. After a few minutes, check the Adventures in Technology list to see if your task appears.
Fun extra: 43 Things
Whether you want to write a book, be happy, or travel the world, you’re not alone. Want proof? Check out 43 things, a site where you can make lists of your goals, share them with others, and find people with similar goals. The 43 Things Zeitgeist Goals
This week you’ll learn about tagging and the social bookmarking web site called del.icio.us (it’s pronounced just like the word “delicious”).
Listen to our podcast for this week and then read the content below. If you have questions about anything along the way, be sure to contact us— we’re happy to help!
Tagging
Tagging is a new form of classification used in many Web 2.0 apps, including some you’ve already learned about in previous weeks — blogs, LibraryThing, and Flickr.
You can think of tags as informal labels, used to help organize a collection of resources or to find a specific resource again. When tagging, you can use words, acronyms, numbers, asterisks, or whatever makes sense to you. Tagging gives you the power to tailor and give organizational value to your own online experience, and contribute to the online experience of others.
The concept of tagging may cause discomfort to library staff! Rather than a cataloger assigning Library of Congress or Sears subject headings to a web site, individuals assign subjective, unstructured & free-form keywords and/or phrases. There is no controlled vocabulary or synonym control, and there are no hierarchical relationships in tagging.
In the words of Ellyssa Kroski, “The wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence are doing what heretofore only expert catalogers, information architects and website authors have done.”
The best way to understand a tag cloud is to see one! Here are a couple of examples:
Some libraries are opening their online catalogs, allowing customers to add user-friendly tags to library item records. Melissa L. Rethlefsen says this new trend, “… help[s] librarians bridge the gap between the library’s need to offer authoritative, well-organized information and their patrons’ web experience.” One library offering this feature is the Ann Arbor District Library. In the right-hand column of the catalog’s main screen are dynamically-generated lists of the Top 10 Tags, 10 Most Recent Tags, 10 Random Tags; here’s one example http://www.aadl.org/sopac/tag/time%20travel/ of a record that’s been tagged “time travel”.
del.icio.us
To understand what del.icio.us is, first enjoy this 3-minute video, “Social Bookmarking in Plain English”:
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website, which means it’s designed to allow you to store, create and share bookmarks online. It makes your bookmarks personal, portable & sharable. It’s a collection of favorites – yours, mine and everyone else’s.
Each del.icio.us bookmark contains a link, an optional description, and a set of tags. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like, and easily rename or delete them later.
You can even subscribe to the newsfeed for someone’s bookmarks, or just items that have been tagged with a certain keyword.
Here are examples of some ways you can use del.icio.us:
Research – Use del.icio.us to keep track of all the materials you find online. Jill keeps tracks of websites that she's discovered that she thinks look interesting; you can peek at her del.icio.us bookmarks here: http://delicious.com/hansje/bundle:Adventures%20in%20Technology
Wishlist – Instead of creating an Amazon wishlist, use the tag “wishlist” for the items you’d like to receive, and then share your wishlist by giving a link to http://del.icio.us/username/wishlist
Cookbook – When you find a great recipe on a website, save it to del.icio.us. Tag it with the recipe’s ingredients, method or style of cooking (grill, Chinese, etc.) and when you need ideas for what to make for dinner, you can use your del.icio.us bookmarks to find those recipes you saved.
Collaboration – Friends, coworkers, and other groups can use a shared account, special tag, or their del.icio.us networks to collect and organize bookmarks that are relevant and useful to the entire group. As an example, here’s the del.icio.us bookmarks http://del.icio.us/haveuheard/ that I & three colleagues used as a workspace to collaborate on a WAPL 2007 conference program; we tagged items with asterisks to indicate which ones each person felt were most important to cover during the presentation, and it worked really slick. 
Here are examples of ways libraries are using del.icio.us for their patrons:
• Seminole County Library http://del.icio.us/SeminoleCountyLibrary
• Menasha Public Library Recommended Websites http://del.icio.us/MenashaLibrary (note the “bundling” of tags by topic)
• San Mateo Public Library (tags are bundled together by Dewey Decimal number) http://del.icio.us/SanMateoLibrary
• Nashville Public Library Teen Web Links (note the use of a tag cloud) http://www.library.nashville.org/teens/teenweb.asp
Tagging your blog postings
So, at the beginning of this lesson, we mentioned that blogs use tags. You can use tags for your blog postings on Blogger, if you’d like. In Blogger, they call tags may also be called “labels”.
When you’re adding a new post, just add some subject words (separated by commas) to the labels box at the bottom of the post. It’s that easy! You’ll see the labels appear at the bottom of the post.
If you’d like to add tags (aka labels) to posts you’ve already written, it’s easy to do that, too:
1. After you’ve logged into Blogger, click “Posts” to manage your posts.
2. Click “Edit” next to any post you want to add labels to.
3. Add your labels.
4. Click “Publish Posts”
Not so bad, right?
You can also display your labels in the sidebar of your blog, so people can click on a label and see all of the posts with that label. You do this with Blogger’s “Layout” feature. If you’ve already added a blogroll or picture or other things to your blog, you know how to do this already. Just choose to add “Labels”. If you haven’t done this before, and you’re interested in doing it, check out the step-by-step instructions from Blogger.
Assignments
1. Write a post in your blog about this week’s lesson and add some tags/labels to the post. Some questions to consider: How can libraries harness the “massive amounts of participation” in tools like del.icio.us? Where else could libraries use tags? Is the concept of tagging, with its uncontrolled vocabulary, unsettling to you?
2. Explore del.icio.us: Search for something you’re interested in. Try clicking on different things in an entry to see what happens (What happens when you click on the title of the bookmarked page? How about the tags? How about the “saved by xxx people” link?)
Optional assignments:
1. Set up your own del.icio.us account and share its URL on your blog. Del.icio.us has a How do I get started? page to get you started!
2. Choose someone’s account in del.icio.us who is linking to things you particularly like, and subscribe to their RSS feed in your Google Reader account. (HINT: Once you get to their del.icio.us page, look for the orange RSS icon at the bottom of the page!). If you can’t find someone’s account to subscribe to, try Libraryman.
3. If you really like del.icio.us, set up the del.icio.us bookmarklet in your browser. This allows you to add new websites to your del.icio.us collection. You just go about your business on the Web until you find a website you want to visit again, then click the bookmarklet on your Web browser. del.icio.us will then automatically open a window that lets you write any notes you want to save about the website, as well as “tag” it with keywords.Welcome to the 2nd semester of Adventures in Technology!
We’re starting this semester off with instant messaging, or IM, as it’s also known.
Listen to this week’s podcast and then read the info below. If you have any questions about anything along the way, be sure to contact us ; we’re happy to help!
Put simply, IM is a way for people to communicate online in real-time. In other words, I type something to you. You see it and type something back. We can talk privately or we can join a group of other people, and all talk together.
Sounds simple enough, right? But how do you actually do this? Well, that’s what this week of Adventures in Technology is all about.
There are 4 steps to getting started with IM.
You don’t have to do all these steps to complete this week’s lesson, but please read them all and then check out the assignments.
Let me reiterate that—you don’t have to do all these steps to complete this week’s lesson. It’s just to give you an understanding of the process.
Step 1. Decide what service(s) you want to use for IM.
There are four primary providers of IM:
• AIM (from AOL)
• Google Talk (We used this through our chat in our email.)
• MSN Messenger
• Yahoo! Messenger
Right now, you can only IM people who use the same service you do. So, if I’m using AOL’s instant messaging service, called AIM, then I can only talk to other AIM users. Same thing is true for the rest of the services.
Luckily for libraries thinking about providing IM reference, there is software that allows you to log into all of these services at one time. That way, people using any of the IM services can chat with you. Two examples of this software are Trillian and Meebo.
Step 2. Decide if you want to download software or not.
Most of these services have two versions: one that is web-based (so you don’t download and install software), and one that requires software installed onto your computer.
The web-based version may not have some advanced functionality that the installed version has, but it’s more secure and easier to use. When you’re just starting with IM, we recommend the web-based version. Here are the URLS for the web-based versions:
Remember Meebo and Trillian that I mentioned above? Well, Meebo is a web-based product, while Trillian is a piece of software you download and install. So, if you’re interested in trying one of these products, we’d recommend Meebo (and there’s another reason why you’ll find out about in a minute!)
Step 3. Create an account or screen name with the service(s) of your choice.
The process to create an account varies, depending on the service you choose, but you typically have to pick a screen name (which is what you’ll be called in the IM world), a password, answer a few questions, and agree to the terms of service. You can create an account by visiting any of the links in Step 2 above.
Step 4. Login to the service, and you’re ready to go!
Once you’ve created an account, you should be able to login to the service you’ve chosen.
What you can do with IM depends on what software and service you’re using, but there are a couple of standard things in all services, like:
One last thing about Meebo
There is one last thing I want to tell you about Meebo—it has a really cool feature called the Meebo Me widget. Here’s what it looks like:
If you have a Meebo account, Meebo will make this little widget for you. You can then put the widget on any web page or blog. The especially cool thing is that anyone can IM you through your widget. They don’t need to have an IM account on any service!! This is a great feature for libraries with IM reference services. You can put this on any page on your website, and anyone can contact you.
Check out how David Lee King is using the Meebo Me widget in his library’s catalog.
Be sure to read the blog post’s comments for lots of other great ideas on how to use Meebo Me and IM.
Required Assignments:
1. Try IMing someone.
a. You can use the MeeboMe widget above to IM me (Melissa) if I'm online
b. Try chatting with one of your co-workers using Google Talk. One cool thing about our email, is that Google Talk is embedded in the left hand column of our inbox.
c. Try some from the “Libraries Using MeeboMe for Embedded Chat” at the Library Success Wiki.
(P.S. – This is a great place to find more information on how libraries are using IM —scroll down to the “Specific Blog Posts/Articles to check out” section.)
2. Write in your blog about your experience trying IM, and how you think IM could be useful in libraries or in general.
Optional Assignments:
1. Create an account or screen name for yourself for one or more of the IM services. Once you’ve done that, add Jill to your buddy list.
For Jill:
AOL Screenname: ifowlpres
Yahoo Screenname: hansje54
Google Talk Screenname: jill.lininger@gmail.com
MSN Messenger Screenname: ifowlpres@hotmail.com
2. Create a Meebo account for yourself, and a MeeboMe widget. Once you log into Meebo, you’ll see a “meebo me” link right at the top to get you started.
Congratulations on making it to the final weeks of Adventures in Technology! While we have some closing thoughts included below, we’re going to take it easy on you for the next few weeks and give you some time to catch up and finish up your AIT stuff.
Be sure to take a look at the video and info below. If you have any questions about anything , be sure to contact us - we’re happy to help!
Wrapping Up
In Week 1 we started things off by having you watch a video about Web 2.0. The video’s creator, Michael Wesch, recently created another video entitled Information R/evolution. Play the video below to see his latest installment.
The world is changing! And it’s changing fast. We need to be willing to take a look at what we’re doing and re-frame things in light of what’s happening around us. Will every tool we’ve shared with you be something you want to use at your library? No. But we hope you’ll be more willing to play with new tools when you discover them and more open to how they might the library solve a problem.
We also hope that you’ll use at least one new tool and come up with some ideas to share with the Emerging Technologies team to invite our patrons to share their thoughts about the Racine Public Library. People expect to be able to participate when they visit online services. By providing opportunities for patrons to interact with our services, to let us know what they think, we show them that we value them and want to provide the best service possible. Take a look at David Lee King’s post, Valuing Users by Allowing Comments. He does a great job of talking about why inviting participation is so important.
Besides using these tools to communicate with the community, we might consider using them to find out what your community is saying about the library. Our patrons might be blogging about their library experiences, and it is important for you to know what they’re saying. Do a Google or Technorati search once in a while to get a reading on what people think about what you’re offering and how your services are being received. And then take it a step further - if you find something, add a comment to the post! It shows that you’re out there and willing to start a conversation.
Our Favorite Blog Posts
We have enjoyed reading your blogs and appreciate the thought and time you put into creating your posts. We hope that you'll continue sharing exploring new technologies and sharing your insights either via your blog or through email or face-to-face communication with the Emerging Technology Team. There's a lot out there and we can't do it without you.
The Last Assignment
Your last assignment for Semester 1 of Adventures in Technology is to reflect on your experience with the Adventure so far. Have you started using any of the tools we shared, personally or at work? What was your favorite week and why? Do you think you’ll continue with the 2nd semester? Let us know what you thought about the process and how it has (or hasn’t) affected you. We'll take your feedback and incorporate it into how we proceed with Semester 2. We also need to know which of the incentives you would like to receive, so remember to include that in your final posting. Semester 2 begins September 8, 2008 so sign up today!
Fun Extras
We couldn’t resist including additional tools that we like but didn’t have time to cover. Take a look when you have a minute or two and play at will!
Relaytor
“Email your messages, files and polls in seconds to query your friends and get the results and comments aggregated automatically for you!”
I can has cheezburger
A blog of LOLcats (or, basically a bunch of pictures of animals with funny captions)
Western Springs History
Not a tool, but an interesting use of a blog from the Thomas Ford Memorial Library. They’ve posted historical pictures of houses to a blog and given people the ability to comment on the pictures. Thomas Ford Memorial Library also has created a newspaper obituary index with a blog.
LibraryThing
This week you’ll learn about phenomenal LibraryThing!
Listen to the podcast and read the content below. If you have questions about anything along the way, be sure to contact us. We’re happy to help!
What is LibraryThing?
LibraryThing is a wildly popular web site for creating and sharing personal library catalogs and book lists. Created by programmer Tim Spalding and supported by librarian Abby Blachly and a crack team of techies, LibraryThing has become the premier social book site on the web. Its users are called “Thingamabrarians.”
Here’s how it works. You can sign up and sign in in one step by providing a username and password (LibraryThing takes privacy very seriously, so they don’t ask for any personal info). You may add up to 200 books for free, or pay for an unlimited yearly or lifetime membership.
When you add a book to your LibraryThing account, the book is automatically cataloged by importing data from libraries and booksellers. Six Amazon.com stores and over 80 libraries supply basic book information. If you can’t find the correct book, you can add it manually.
So far, so good, right? Well, there’s much more! After you catalog your books, you can tag them. (Stef and Joy will get into tagging in more depth next week, but for now, just consider a tag a simple label you can make up.) You can add cover art. You can write reviews. You can add a LibraryThing badge or a “random book widget” to your blog’s sidebar. You can compare your library with other people’s collections and comment on the profiles of your LibraryThing “soulmates.”
Explore LibraryThing
As you can see, LibraryThing has the potential to be the ultimate readers’ advisory tool. They make it even easier with their “Suggester” feature. The Suggester provides book recommendations based on users’ catalogs with similar books. Conversely, the “Unsuggester” lists books it thinks you won’t like, and is good for more than a few laughs!
The Suggester works by leveraging the massive amount of Thingamabrarians’ participation to find truly smart recommendations. Unlike Amazon.com, which just looks at what you’ve recently bought (which can include random gifts that skew your results), LibraryThing uses the richer data gleaned from comparing users’ whole libraries.
LibraryThing also makes it easy to see book data from several book-swapping web sites such as BookMooch, What’s On My Bookshelf, and Bookins.
Finally, LibraryThing loves libraries and works with them on exciting projects such as “LibraryThing for Libraries” (LTFL). LTFL is a way for libraries to integrate LibraryThing tags and recommendations into their catalogs. See it in action at any of these libraries and check it out for yourself! (Some books won’t have the extra LTFL data - if all else fails, search Danbury PL’s catalog for Harry Potter and scroll down.
Related sites
There are a few other social book sites out there which deserve mention.
Shelfari allows people to catalog their books, and puts more emphasis on the social aspects of interacting with other members. goodreads is another, reviewed briefly at infodoodads. Finally, Revish has the added feature of a reading journal that you can use to keep track of what you’ve read.
Assignment and Tasks
Fun extra: FOR DUMMIES book cover generator
Since this is a bookish week, we thought you’d enjoy this one: supply your own title & cover info, and the Dummiez Book Cover Maker 2007 will generate a “For Dummies” book cover image. They say you can even buy your image as a fridge magnet!
This week you’ll learn about social networking tools, with a focus on MySpace and Facebook.
Listen to the podcast and read the content below. If you have questions about anything along the way, be sure to contact us. We’re happy to help!Sit back and watch this 2-minute video that explains what social networks are and how they work:
A social networking service focuses on building an online community of people who share interests and activities. Most social networking services are web-based, and provide a variety of ways for community members to interact via chat, IM, email, blogging, discussion groups, etc. Members create profiles that include personal interests & photos, exchange private or public messages, and join groups.
What do people do on social networks?
There are lots of social networking sites out there; here’s a chart showing the notable ones. That aside, for this week we’ll just focus on the two “500-pound gorillas” of social networking, MySpace and Facebook.
MySpace
As of January 2008, MySpace is the 3rd most popular U.S. web site. MySpace attracts 300,000 new registrations per day, and has more than 110 million monthly active users around the world.
Originally MySpace was for people 18 and older and all data was public. Over time, the age limit dropped to 16, and later to 14. The youngest users are given the option to make their profiles visible only to people they’ve friended, and their profiles don’t appear in search results.
Users may post personal profiles including photos, videos, and lists of favorite books & movies. They can email, post bulletins, and chat with their MySpace friends.
Facebook is the second-most popular social networking site. As of January 2008, Facebook has more than 62 million active users worldwide. It attracts one quarter of a million new accounts per month, and receives over 65 billion page views per month.
The name Facebook refers to the paper facebooks provided by some colleges, which depict members of the campus community as a way to get to know students & faculty.
When Facebook launched in 2004, only people at Harvard University could sign up for an account; within a few months it opened up to other colleges, then to high schools, and now anyone 13 or older with a valid email address may create a Facebook profile. At present, people using Facebook are mostly college and post-college; more than half of Facebook members are out of school. The fastest growing Facebook demographic is 25 years old and older.
Originally Facebook didn’t allow institutions to create Facebook accounts, but in November 2007 they opened up the ability to create business and institutional profiles. Now you can create a profile for your library so you can interact with other members of Facebook, they can become your library’s “fans”, and you can create updates that feed into the newsfeed your friends will see on their own profile page.
In May 2007 the “Facebook Platform” was created, which allows third-party developers to create applications that work within Facebook. Two library-specific apps are:
A big difference between Facebook and MySpace is… to view a Facebook profile, you must have a Facebook account. This makes Facebook a private social network; MySpace is a public social network. You can see just as far as a public search listing into a person’s profile before logging in to Facebook.
Why would a library be interested in creating a social networking presence?
Even though social networking services were set up with the individual in mind, libraries are creating a presence in both MySpace and Facebook…
Meredith Farkas writes, “I think there is a big difference between ‘being where our patrons are’ and ‘being USEFUL to our patrons where they are.’” In that spirit, instead of simply creating a MySpace or Facebook page with your library’s photo & hours, consider “surfacing” your library’s services right there: try including your library’s MeeboMe widget to make it easy for people to ask questions or give feedback, or try embedding a search box that goes right into your library’s catalog.
But are social networks the right place for libraries?
There’s been debate in the library community about whether social networks are the right place for libraries to be.
For a good overview of the pro’s and con’s, read Libraries in Social Networking Software.
What’s your opinion?
As an alternative to a library presence in a social network, individual librarians can create their own MySpace and Facebook pages so they can network with others. Judi Sohn’s 12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally has some helpful tips for doing just that.
Great places to find other library folk with which to network are these Facebook Groups:
Examples of ways libraries are using MySpace and Facebook
MySpace
Note: when visiting these web sites you might want to use Firefox with the Adblock Plus add-on; I think you’ll enjoy MySpace more without all the advertisements!
Facebook:
A.
1. Watch this 2-minute video to get details on registering for an account.
2. Go to Facebook to register & set up a profile for you.
3. On your blog write about your experiences and post a link to your Facebook page.
B. Already have a Facebook account? Become a fan of Racine Public Library and Friend Jill Hanson Lininger. And then write on your blog about your Facebook adventure.
Fun Extras
Open an account for you at MySpace.
MySpace:
1. Take the MySpace Tour.
2. Go to MySpace http://www.myspace.com/ to register and set up your page.
3. On your blog write about your experiences and post a link to your MySpace page.
