20th Thing - Summary

20th Thing Summary:
The 20 Things was an excellent exercise both personally and professionally. It did meet my lifelong learning goals of always learning new things and satisfying my curiosity. My one surprise was the amount of people out there ‘sharing’ whether it is pictures, favorite books, music, etc. Not my style but apparently for many it is!

Favorite sites that I explored included My Space, Library Thing and Flickr. On the personal level, My Space gives me the opportunity to ‘visit’ with my new grand nephew in Massachusetts and other far away relatives and Library Thing is a good spot to put all those books I’m meaning to read. I am excited about the possibilities of using Flickr at work for a project long in the works – a visual storytime resource catalog. PRL may want to have a presence on My Space as well, especially for teens. Many branches found a great side benefit to the 20 Things project – team building.

If we were doing the project again: I would have preferred to set up the program with basic training by trainers and then let staff explore the related links and do their exercises independently. I know my husband is currently doing a train the trainer program at another library system for their 20 Things. I think this would have relieved a lot of the frustrations and produced a more positive experience.
The list of activities was a good selection and mix, excluding perhaps Technorati which seemed to stump many people! The number was very difficult to keep up with whether for our predominantly part time staff or for full timers.
On the technical side, it would have been easier to have required software and hardware in place before beginning the exercise. Can anything be done about the spy ware? I’d caution people initially about keeping a list of passwords and user ids – maybe even several copies ;-).
These observations are based both on mine personally and on other staff’s comments.

11th Thing - Rollyo

11th Thing Rollyo: This site would certainly be a good one to utilize for the poetry month promotion of handling out quotes. I searched daffodils on Quick Quotes and got a number of hits on William Wordsworth's poem but also some commercial sites such as FTD! I started my garden searchroll just in time for spring planting!

10th Thing - Online Image Generators

10th Thing Online Image Generators: Acouple of technical problems here: The text on Helene Blower's video on adding RSS feeds to Bloglines is too small to see and I couldn't get CNET video to open. The picture here is my great nephew which was 'framed' on Big Huge Labs - home of fd's flickr toys. More babies: at the Generator Blog's Who Generator, I adopted a "Who" and named her WhatWhenWhy (from Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who) but couldn't get her embedded in my blog.

5th Thing Flickr

5th Thing Flickr: Certainly a way to share photos with others. Exploring Virginia Libraries group, I see that Arlington Public Library has a Flickr presence though it merely directs you to its website. Maybe old fashioned branch photo albums are still the way to go as all these photos of library programs would require many many permission forms! I am wondering about a storytime resource catalog on Flickr though! Photo credited to pollyalida of New York State Libraries SRP.

6th Thing - My Space

6th Thing My Space: Checked out Gosnells on My Space and only found 4 - none of whom I know at all unless they are verrrrry distantly related. My nieces are on My Space and that's where we go to keep in touch and where we saw our great nephew's first picture! I have a half completed My Space page from a CAPCON class last spring but find my friends and I prefer to keep in touch by phone.

8th Thing - Library Thing

8th Thing Library Thing. Created a list of five favorite books for Library Thing. Oddly enough, it's easier for me to list my one favorite book than to select five! And at number one would be Pride and Prejudice, the book I have reread the most, starting in high school.
I also like the idea of creating a list of 'books waiting to be read.' We had a great time at Rockville's branch staff meeting in the lab creating Library Thing accounts and sharing our booktalks on our favorite book! The online store has some great stuff - T-shirts and magnets -What's on your bookshelf?


Questions anyone? why don't all the covers show up - perhaps Amazon doesn't own the rights but you don't find out until afterwards?
Instructions are needed for the linking to your blog although I finally found them on Library Things' Tools.

4th Thing: You Tube

4th Thing You Tube Viewed some videos on You Tube this week. I'm not really a videoholic so I didn't find the personal videos of particular interest but I can see an application for the instructional ones. I tried looking up storytelling videos and found some done by Monroe Free Library in New York to advertise their library services.