Method 5 -- Flickr Continued

displaysoctober09 011
Originally uploaded by molli.hall

So what is cooler to teen but to be uncool? Be Punk for a Day is one of the teen displays that we have in the library for October. We take photos of all of the displays every month so that we have a document of what they looked like. One day in the future if we ever want to do Punk Day again, we may not want it to look like this or it may not be cool to be uncool anymore. As I stated before, I truly believe that if you want to post photos of the library, the photos need to be "of the library" and not of people in the library. As a legal issue, invading someone's privacy even by accident can be a messy and really uncool thing to do...So lets be cool people...

Method 5 --- Flickr

Smile...Say Cheese! Ready.... 1,2,3 FLASH! Oh the joys of taking pictures to make memories stay clear in your mind. But what do we do with them? Have them printed and put into photo albums or scrapbooks? And then when we need to track down a photo from Summer Reading in 2007, where do we even begin to search? Flickr is an online photo sharing site that I have used in the past. I never posted my own photos but I made an account so that I could see friends' photos. For this course, I added some display photos that I took of the Ocotber displays.

On the legal side of the question, I don't think that libraries should post photos that have library patrons in them. Privacy is an issue that affects all of us. We have to remember that some people just do not want to be out in the public eye. Remembering to ask permission of everyone at an event is possible but if one person says that they do not want to have their photo taken or published, we encounter a problem. I believe that it is best thing for we as librarian should do is if we want to publish photos to be seen by the public, let them be of just displays or interior of the library without patrons in the photos. If you must take photos at an event, save those for the scrapbooks and photo albums.

The next post is an experiment on how to "blog it" from Flickr. I hope it works!

Method 4 -- RSS Feeds

Just send it to me! Oh the junk mail that we get in our mailboxes and emailboxes, but how do we sift through what is good and what is bad? And how can I keep up with all of the news of the day, not to mention all of the Harry Potter and Twilight updates that I need to keep up with so that I talk to the teens that come in? If there was only a way....But wait there is, RSS Feeds!

Ok, that was kind of funny you have to admit, but seriously the RSS feeds feature on some websites is a great way to keep up with all of the items that you may find interesting. Instead of having to go to each website everyday, the items that you need to see are send directly to one webpage and you can scroll through it and weed out what you want or don't want to read. I personally had never tried this before, so when I did, I expected it to be more complicted than it is. After signing in to the GoogleReader, all I had to do was explore and see what news I needed to look at. I think it could be a little addicting to some people but really fun to see what we all deem really inportant news that we have to read everyday. I can tell you that it was very easy to do and now it is just remembering when I go to websites to look for the RSS button and send it to my reader. (Just a hint, I am already looking for a Harry Potter site and Twilight site to send to my reader.)

Method 3 -- Computing in the Cloud

Wow...living in a cloud...having the world at your fingertips. It all sounds pretty Utopian, but it is becoming a reality all too soon. I really think that at some point in our lives now, we have used one or more of these tools online. I have used Zoho in the past to compose a document when I was not able to use my computer at home. It was very simple and having the option to save my document or email it was great. I really think, with the increase of Internet usage at the libraries, that online word processing should be rather than having to deal with flash drivers or CDs. The templates that both Zoho and GoogleDocs use would be great to help some patrons that come in and need to make up a resume, a cover letter, or some other type of document that the library staff may not deal with on a daily basis.

We all have uses for many of these tools, but in the library setting some of the tools are still just a little bit "in the clouds." We can still strive to use all of the tools out there. Even things that we believe are new and over our heads one day maybe the tools we can not live without the next.

Methods 1 and 2 -- Intro and Blogs

What is Web 2.0 and how does it affect our lives as librarians? In reality, we all deal with Web 2.0 everyday from our cell phones that we cannot live without to the computers that we use on a daily basis to help the patrons that come in with questions. Web 2.0 helps us to stay connected with each other and communicate in real time. It allows use to share ideas and information and to collaborate with each other from across the street or across the planet. In libraries, we need to use this technology to allow us to better serve our public. We need to expand our ideas and minds to accept that we can understand and use the World Wide Web on a daily basis to help the patrons at large.

Library 2.0 is a wonderful way to say the library is changing and we need to change with it. More people can access the library from the comfort of their homes and never see the inside of the library. eBooks and eAudiobooks have caught on and now people can get them on the go. We need to allow for the need for ease in life. To accept that we live in a world of instant gratification and we have to serve them now. It will come to us ... We as librarians just have to wait.

Blogs are wonderful ways to express yourself. It is quite simple to get a blog going and just talk about whatever your heart desires. It is a very simple way for a library to get the information out to its patrons. The patrons could subscribe to the blog or the blog could be linked directly to the library's website.

Test post -- What I finished reading...

I just finished reading Dexter by Design by Jeff Lindsay. It is the fourth installment in the Dexter Morgan series. In this series, Dexter Morgan is a Miami-Dade blood splatter specialist with a dark secret. He is also a serial killer. He was trained by his adopted father to follow a code that would guide him in his killings. He only kills those that REALLY deserve it -- the evil doer. So the question becomes, is he a bad person doing good things or a good person doing bad things?