To-do: Make to-do list

What, you may ask, does a picture of our kayaks, poised to launch, have to do with Remember the Milk or Jott? Not a thing! Except, let's all add to those lists the things we mean do more of when summer actually comes.

[Actually, those would be more suited to 43 Things.]

Features I liked about this weeks' tools are the interfacing possibilities with Google Calendar. I will be able to see my posted Remember the Milk tasks on my Google Calendar, or send events to it, via my phone, using Jott. I did sign up for a personal Jott account, so it will be fun to play with that. And think how much I will get done!

Now Flash Drives are old news

So if I use Google Docs to do the documents I'm forever shuttling back and forth on the flash drive...Hmmm... I think I get it.

I was already signed in to Google Docs and had some things languishing in cyber-limbo, but now I see that it just becomes part of my web-based world (web-based email, both work and home; web-based photos, web-based calendar, etc). Who needs a briefcase anymore?

My coworker Mary already has us Lakeview Ref staff started with a project we all need to weigh in on and through that already I see some features about Google docs really make sense. The fact that you can not only see who made what changes and when, but that you can roll back to earlier versions make the program especially useful.

For our purposes here at Lakeview, the public can save documents that they would otherwise not be able to save to the library's hard drive, even if we're out of the notoriously unreliable floppies.

"Mr. Watson. Come Here. I need you."

I'm still IMing here, PPers. I loaded the Meebo Widget, mainly because I wanted the practice of dumping HTML code onto the blog. (thanks Emily) At this point, I like Google chat better, but that's just because I'm new to Meebo and it keeps whimsically logging me out and I'm not sure why.
I also downloaded Google Talk to a computer in our library work area as per a PP suggestion, but I'd like to think if I were more savvy I could disable the feature that alerts you when you receive a PERSONAL email, by popping up a window with the email displayed (OK, that alert feature is disabled and, once again, thanks Emily). For our Lakeview purposes, it will be lovely to have that pop-up window for a chat alert between workers, since it would be an upgrade from Sequoya's cast-off walkie talkies. I can see how this would not only be helpful for intraworkplace communications, but also be a great boon in many ways to keeping the library world relevant to patrons.

A Sticki Wiki

Wow. There are lots of ways we could all use wikis in our real and work lives - make that "personal" and work lives :). The trick would be getting your family/colleagues to contribute, though PP even spoke to that sticking point. Professionally, I can see using a wiki for organizing library staff large group projects and parties or other gatherings. And personally: who's bringing what to Thanksgiving again, and who's staying where? The trick would be using a wiki when everyone has a lot to contribute and where the topic generates a lot of interest. My favorite of the wikis linked on this week's lesson, bar Wikipedia of course, was the one for the city of Davis, CA. What a great community builder!

Okay, I actually did set up a family wiki this week. Nothing helps you learn an application like actually noodling around with it. I started with Thanksgiving assignments and then added a Family Calendar with pbwiki's cool plugins option. As seems to be typical with my family, so far members have added a lot of smart aleck remarks, so it's been fun. You gotta love 'em-at least I do.

del.icio.us

This one's fun to play around with. Clicking on different parts of any entry leads you serendipitously to other things you already are interested in. Clicking on the "saved by xxx people" link (in this case using the broad term "recipes"), yields not only the taggers' description of the site they've saved, but also the ability to click on 'them' to see other sites they've tagged.
You Project Play mavens asked whether we as librarians are unsettled by the uncontrolled vocabulary aspect of del.icio.us. Veddy interesting to consider... I suspect that to a certain extent this may be more unsettling to the older generation of the library world. (Oh wait, that's me!)
Most librarians tend to think that a side benefit of our profession is that we are better internet searchers. We think in keywords, and have a certain hierarchical organization of information hard-wired into our brains. One consequence of tagging which I personally like is that it encourages the rest of the world to also think in keywords. We should applaud that somewhat unconscious organizing of information by the non-library world and find it informative. For example, the tag cloud on the teen site listed in Week 8's lesson in itself provides a graphic illustration of interests of teens today.

One use of the social bookmarking aspect we at Lakeview are just starting to explore is using del.icio.us to organize some of our often-used bookmarks, thanks to Andrew in Automation for adding the buttons to our toolbar. Almost any worksite can benefit by aspects of the 2.0 world and this one has us excited. Ya gotta love Project Play. (shameless pandering alert, but true)

This Is So Last Week...

Ok, I'm still LibraryThing-ing over here. I like the concept a lot and have played with it in the past very briefly, not making my own Library until now. The Reader's Advisory aspect interests me most, though of course when I put a single title into the BookSuggester or UnSuggester, I find the titles listed less on the mark than when using the LibrarySuggester, but then programs using this kind of algorithm are always a crapshoot. I like perusing the Zeitgeist page, with its features like top 25 books by star rating, 50 top-rated authors, and always fun, 50 lowest-rated authors.

All in all, I just find it encouraging that the Web 2.0 demographic includes so many readers!

Flickr-ing

As my colleague Mary said in her blog, if you have a library blog, it's great to add photos of patrons using image sharing sites such as Flickr. And come on, what librarian doesn't love a site that has the capability to sort and categorize?

Here's a picture of two of our favorites,Tahji and his Grandma Renee, who just today brought in this lovely thank-you poster for the whole Lakeview staff, though we all know he loves Jill best. These are the kind of people who make it all worthwhile. After Tahji finishes at Harvard, when he writes his first book, perhaps he will fulfill one of my life-long dreams and, in the acknowledgements, say he would not be where he is today without a chhildhood spent at the Lakeview Branch Library.