Librarian Blogs

A few weeks ago, I stated that I was going to follow two blogs of librarians and blog about them. They are Hey Jude and Academic Librarian.  Academic Librarian was a poor choice.  It looked like it was a fairly active blog, but has not turned out to be so.  I am changing my second blog to Annoyed Librarian. 

Fifth Item for 23 Things

The fifth and final item I am going to try for this activity is #10: Find and play around with an online image generator.  There are many online image generators and editors to choose from.  Some of them have pictures that allow you to place captions, or make signs, or even put your face on another body.  Other sites allow you to upload your picture and modify it in any way imaginable.  You can resize it, recolor it, give it a different border, frame it and many, many, many more.  Some sites that I found were Imagegenerator.org, Online Image Editor. and Pixlr.  These are all free sites and very easy to use.  I really liked the Pixlr site, because it allowed you to change the color and texture of your picture.  You could make it look really old, or have spots in it, or pretty much whatever effect.  It is a really fun site, and simple to use.

  Here is a pic of me and Kris Kristofferson at the Tampa Theatre last month.

I really like the way the picture looks old, and almost like light had leaked through and exposed the film.

I also used the Imagegenerator website for some fun with celebrities and made my own captions.

These image generators and photo editors can be very useful in the library.  Librarians can use pictures to generate their own captions for signs in the library.  They can use photo editors to manipulate photos of events and save them to a flickr account for the library.  These tools are very useful in many different ways in a library settings.  All you need is someone creative to figure out how to make them effective.

Fourth Challenge Item

The fourth item I tried was #20: Discover Youtube and a few other sites that allow users to upload and share videos.These sites allow people to watch videos and upload them to their various websites, blogs or Facebook.  Millions of people view these videos everyday.  It would be a great way for libraries to "advertise" their services in a fun and creative way.
  Usually, I utilize Youtube for purely entertainment purposes.  I don't really go to the site to search for videos, but watch the ones that my friends post or share with me.  Sometimes after watching a video, I might scroll through related videos that are posted nearby.  There are several other sites for sharing videos including Google Videos and Yahoo Video.
  There are many videos that would be useful to librarians. A lot of the videos are instructional. The Library of Congress has their own Youtube channel to which one can subscribe.
  


There are also videos about the proper way to conduct a reference interview





and how not to conduct a reference interview.






There are many, many more videos about libraries and quite a lot of really funny ones, too, including, but certainly not limited to, the following:

My Third Challenge Item

For my third 23 Things challenge activity, I chose #8:  Learn about RSS feeds and set up your own Bloglines account.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  An RSS reader allows users to get all the information for their favorite websites and blogs sent to one central site.  That way, they can see when new information comes up and don't have to check all their favorite sites individually.  It is a time saving mechanism.  Also, only the new posts or stories will post to the site, so there is not any advertising to wade through. The user subscribes to their favorite website by clicking on the RSS icon on the web page. 

I tried the Bloglines website, but didn't care for it.  I am completely clueless to RSS feeds and that sited did nothing to help or enlighten me in how I should start out.  I read another classmate's blog and they suggested Google Reader.  I went to their site and found it to be much more user friendly.  Since I already had a GMail account, it just took a few minutes to set up the reader and determine what sites I wanted to follow.  That was the hardest part.  I don't generally follow a lot of websites, so I don't know that this particular application would be so great for me, but I can see where it might be useful in a library setting.  There are websites with RSS feeds for book reviews like this one by the Reader's Club of the Charlotte Mecklenberg Library.  New book reviews are posted.  Libraries can use this information to determine what books to add to their collections.  Libraries might also be interested in some of the many library blogs out there, too.  RSS readers are very useful tools in the new 21st century library, but I don't know personally how long I will continue to use the feed I set up.  Maybe it will be a time saver.  As a side note, I did add the RSS option to my blog.

Second Challenge Item

The second thing I chose to do was: 11. Explore any site from the Web 2.0 awards list, play with it and write a blog post about your findings.  I actually use quite a few of these sites on a regular basis, like Youtube, Facebook, Monster, Careerbuilder and a few more.  A few days ago, while wandering around through the Hillsborough County Library website, I found Mango Languages.  This is a sight that everyone with a Hillsborough library account can access with their card.  They offer 48 languages with 14 ESL options.  I played around with French, which I have experience with, and German, no experience.  There are different chapters with different lessons in each chapter.  It starts you out easy, with simple salutation phrases.  The phrase is said aloud, which the user is then supposed to repeat.  More words are added, but their is constant repetition and you can always choose to hear how the phrase is supposed to be said.  This is definitely one of the coolest, FREE, things I have seen in awhile.  Who needs Rosetta Stone?  Mango Languages might be where it's at!

More on the 23 things

Okay, I decided to use the challenge that the San Jose State University and San Jose Public Library employees did.  It's pretty much the same as the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg.  The website is here: SJPL 23 Things.   Since we only have to do five things (but can do more, I'm sure), I am going to skip around a bit. The first thing I chose to experiment with was #3: creation of a blog.  Turns out, it's not too difficult.  The hard part is finding things to write about.  Guess it's good that I have this assignment to write about. 

23 Things Challenge

For our 23 Things Activity, I have obviously chosen to make a blog as one of my activities.  So far so good.  As instructed for a different class assignment,  I have chosen two librarian blogs to follow and discuss.  My choices are HeyJude and Academic Librarian.  These blogs seem to be very current and update fairly often, so I should have lots of material to work with.