When exploring mashups this morning, I spent a lot of time learning some really cool things, and also wasted a lot of time.  I stared mesmerized as tweets (twitter entries) popped up around the globe in real time.  I created an Obama logo from my photos. I played flickr sudoku.  I learned about to which political campaigns the president of my university doantes, and I explored Middle Earth and the World of Warcraft.  It was a lot of fun, and, sometimes, informative. (Okay, so I could’ve chosen ones with wikipedia and news feeds, but come on…)

Today was also my first experience using Rollyo.  I had always used Google Custom Search Engines before today. I created a custom search engine that searches all of my Unversity Libraries’ websites. The neatest thing about using Rollyo is that it then allows you to add the search engine you created to your firefox search bar, which is awesome.

When searching the librarian blogs for privacy entries for the assignment, I noticed a lot of discussion about the age gap in privacy concerns.  It does seem that there is a bit of an age gap in how people feel about putting themselves out there on the web.  I find that my middle-aged friends are less likely to populate their social network profiles with tidbits of information about themselves, and more likely to stick to the professional facts.  I have enough sense to know when something is inappropriate for the general public.  There are no pictures of wild parties on my facebook profile.  I do, in fact, choose not to share my religious or political views.  (If a future employer finds this blog post and chooses not to hire me based on my Obama-space logo, then I probably didn’t want to work for them anyway, though.  My mom would have totally had a Jimmy Carter logo on her facebook page.)  But I do share my love for football, fantasy literature, gadgets, new knowledge, the Harry Potter fandom, and general geekery with whomever chooses to take a look.  It helps me connect with others and express myself.  I’m pretty sure there aren’t any geek-girl haters or fetishists that are going to camp out at my place of work and attack me because I shared that information.  I recently moved 6 hours from home and 4 hours from my college campus.  Sharing and communicating on social networks allows me to keep connections.  I’m pretty lonely here during the week without many flesh-and-blood friends to hang out, but at least the internet keeps me connected to my friends all over the world (many of whom I met online).

I love listening to podcasts (and video blogs), especially to break up monotonous trips.  In fact, podcasts are second only to audiobooks in my choice of listening, and I love music.  It’s just I love new information (and fantasy novels) even more.  My favorite podcasts include:

• Buzz Out Loud – Tech news from one smart and funny team at CNet
• GeekBrief – Happy, shiny tech news in video podcast form
• Brotherhood 2.0 – Videoblog of brothers John & Hank Green (a YA author and EcoTech blogger respectively), now also a social network for their followers, nerdfighers
• Pottercast – Harry Potter news and discussion from the crew at the Leaky Cauldron

I’ve heard several good library podcasts in the past, but none that entertained me enough to subscribe.  I also hear most of that news in the form of blog posts before I listen.  The analysis would probably be wonderfully informative for me, I just haven’t found the one that would keep my away on highway 45 yet.

I feel that videos are probably the way to go when it comes to libraries reaching out to patrons, because most of the zombies walking around with ear buds, are not working on the edification of their mind while doing so, but people are perfectly willing to watch a video that explains how to perform some research or technology-related task or watch a book talk on a book that they might wish to check out.  Most other library related videos seem to fall flat.  Library tours or videos that are supposed to be funny, don’t often seem to be a hit amongst patrons, but I’m eager to keep an eye out and see libraries surpsing me and innovating.  I’ll be so proud the day a viral video comes from a library!

Hank Green performs a song for his Wednesday Challenge right before the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

My favorite video about becoming a librarian:

Video I made this morning:

Libraries can use Flickr to store photos from the archives, pictures of library events, or photo tours of the library.  Getting a feed with pictures of new books instead of just lists might also be a fun thing to try. One wouldn’t have to have any XML know-how to upload a photo to Flickr and include a desciption, and Flickr would automatically generate an RSS feed to which people could subscribe or sign up for email updates (by using RSS to EMail tools).  YA librarians could use Flickr accounts for games, like scavenger hunts, too. Take a picture of a place where a clue or prize is hidden, upload it, and they have to go find it. There are lots of good and creative ways to use photo sharing to make a more personal connection with patrons.  Flickr allows people to comment and tag, as well, so someone looking at a picture of a special event from the 40s on the library flickr site might be able to comment and give more details about the photo or event if they attended or heard about it.

Here are some pictures from adventures in my new city and the surrounding area:

The nature of the way people can collaborate and share with these applications is also very impressive.  Being able to operate a slide show, make comments on shared documents or view the history of changes on a document is such a relief after the days of mailing multiple copies back and forth amongst a group or clunky, expensive software for making remote presentations!

Google Docs is usually my office webapp of choice, but only because I already had a Google account and store a lot of files with them.  I found ZoHo to have a lot more features and a much better interface, but it’s just one more place to go, and when I’m already using GMail, GReader, GCalendar, GSearch, and Picasa (Google’s photo sharing and storage site), why not just go for broke and use their office suite, too.

I’ve also been using del.icio.us as a discovery tool, both as a search engine and for social discovery. I have a network in del.icio.us of friends and colleagues, and they are always bookmarking things that are relevant to me, so I follow the RSS feed of my network in my feed reader. I also search del.icio.us like a regular search engine. People bookmark things that are useful or interesting and tag the with relevant tags, so the results you get from del.icio.us are a lot neater than from a regular search engine. The power of folksonomy is great. While our carefully organized and classified information is an incredible resource, it’s just not possible to apply that power to the internet. Tagging has given us some semblance of order and selection in the chaotic mass of information available out there now.

In a research setting, social tagging sites create great tools for discovering, organizing, recalling, and sharing information.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to connect personally with patrons in the information society. Most of this thinking was done while in library school preparing for a career in an academic library. Well, I was lucky enough to find employment in an academic library, just not the type I expected. In the biomedical library, most of our patrons are doctors or students at least as old as I am. I had prepared to spend time hawking my Facebook profile to barely-listening 18 year olds in an English class so that they would remember when paper-time came that someone at the library cared. Instead, I have a very focused group of mostly graduates who are experts in a subject that I’ve never before studied. It’s been quite a challenge to change my frame of mind (and begin to learn the nuances of medical information searching). So here I am stuck wondering if, even with all the 2.0 know-how in the world, I’ll be able to connect to, relate with, and help my patrons.

The thing about it is that I am a stereotypical millinneal, and to be honest, I now feel like a bit of a hypocrite for not getting it when the so-called “digital immigrants” didn’t feel comfortable connecting with students through these technologies. (I’m not a huge fan of all the divisive labels and stereotyping, but it helps me explain the situation.) Even though almost all of the librarians and doctors I have met have been very encouraging and forward thinking, I now feel unsure of myself in a setting where these are not the norms for communication and my style might be seen as too casual in what I have always considered to be a very dignified and somewhat intimidating setting. I’m quite afraid that the friendly enthusiasm that people have praised in the past will come across as frivolous or even flippant. Any young librarian starting out is bound to be nervous in the first weeks of his or her job, I imagine, but preparing to work in a place where students are (rightfully) so serious and searches have real-life consequences that affect the health of others has been rather sobering to my usual jocular nature.

All that being said, and to answer the actual lesson questions, social networks are a great way to connect people and to give a human face to librarians. I’ve come to know so many wonderful librarians by starting to follow their blog and friending them on social networks. I even follow many of them on Twitter. All of the sudden, you not only know when she has a great idea for a service you can offer your patrons (right away without having to pay for a conference to hear her ideas) but you also know when her kid pours Sunny D down a police officer’s leg or which awesome new movie she’s seen, or even when she suffers a personal loss. And from this you can start a real conversation about librarianship or about other aspects of life. It’s been very rewarding for me personally.

I believe it’s also a great way to offer that human face to patrons. These tools can also be used to alert patrons to new services or resources, but I believe that it is a real value to just be there so that when they do have an information need, maybe they’ll say, “Oh yeah! I can call/chat/write/go to the library!” instead of, “Well, I guess we’ll never know.” or “Well, Google says…”

Wikis are best when there are many people collaborating on one project such as a editing a document or collecting links or information. Blogs are better when a person or group of people need to put information out and have others be able to respond easily to what they have said. For instance, my library is starting a website redesign. While we are interested in everyone’s ideas for the website, the most of the major tasks and decisions fall on one or two people. It is easiest for us to use a blog to post ideas and have people respond in threaded comments than to edit wiki pages. On the other hand, if we were authoring a strategic plan for our website redesign or collecting links to other library websites, a wiki would have been better. (We are actually using del.icio.us to collect links, but that is another lesson.)

The wiki I created for this weeks lesson is (the beginning of) a collection of resources for new medical librarians.  Anyone who wishes should feel free to add their favorite sites.

Not only has it been of great use to me personally, but there isn’t a person to whom I explained RSS who wasn’t excited and interested in learning more. I’ve become something of an RSS evangelist, and now that I’m in a medical library I find that it is especially suited to the needs of the faculty here, no matter their roll. RSS can help researchers stay on top of the latest articles, it can help teachers learn about new ways of getting information to students, and it can help administrators learn about new ways to more effectively manage people.

During my job search following my degree, I subscribed to a myriad of RSS feeds for library jobs and waited for the advertisements to come to me. Even static state library pages that didn’t yet have RSS could be syndicated with tools like Page2RSS. And now there are great job search engines like SimplyHired where one can perform a search like ‘Medical Librarian” and get notified whenever new jobs including the words medical and librarian are discovered by the search engine.

RSS can be used in a number of ways by libraries some of my favorites have been:

• Notifying faculty or grad students of new research published on a topic
• Syndicating the “What’s New” section or blog on a library website
• A new books feed (which can be divided by call number)
• A new faculty publications feed
• Creating a homepage with all of the news a reference librarian would need for the reference computers
• Getting professional journal article lists on your computer instead of waiting for the journals to make their way around the office

In short, I heart RSS.