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.

Suggestions, Anyone?

Any Lakeview patrons who would like to make your library better, please feel free to use our online suggestion box. Suggest programs you think the neighborhood would like, or ways we can make Lakeview more user-friendly!

Survey Monkey-ing the Northside

I did ask for and receive responses to recent posts (thanks guys, that was a great assignment and gets us more united as an online community), open my blog to comments from anyone, comment on others' blogs and even did the online suggestion box (see above post). But it seems a bit of a Week-Four-cheat to piggy-back on someone else's efforts; in this case the Northside Planning Council which has conveniently set up a Northside Consumer Questionnaire in Survey Monkey. We at Lakeview have been collecting the paper copies hand over fist for the last couple of weeks, but any missed Northsiders out there can also take it online through October 29th. All you Project Players out there can check out a real world example.

As to the part of the assignment that asks for us to comment on how we could use feedback thingies for our library, my first thought is that I would solicit opinions both by posting online and by using the neighborhood paper (done by the Northside Planning Council), The Northside News. The whole neighborhood receives it in the mail and it is very widely read. The Northside Consumer questionnaire hit all 'venues': with a copy in the current Northside News, copies available in the Library and at the Northside Farmer's Market, and, as mentioned, online. They did a really good job.
As to what I would ask in a feedback thingie, the suggestion the Project Players made to solicit programming ideas struck a chord. This is fun!

It's Not Books, Lakeview or the Northside, But...

I just heard a terrific Wisconsin Public Radio show featuring the chief curator of the Milwaukee Art Museum. Through January 13, 2008, self-taught folk artist Martín Ramírez (1895–1963) is the subject of their featured exhibition. He came to the United States from Mexico in 1925 and worked on the railroad and in the mines of Northern California for 5 years before he was picked up for homelessness and institutionalized. He spent the last 30 years of his life in "asylums", probably wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic, making large scale drawings and collages which were thrown away (for 15 years!) until a professor, curiously of both psychology and art, happened upon some of his work while visiting the asylum. It was thought for a long time that many of his paintings depicted the Statue of Liberty until the art world realized they were Madonnas modeled on those of his Spanish Catholic roots. Kathleen Dunn, host of the WPR program, raved about the sheer beauty of the pieces, which is all the more incredible as one learns that he used available materials such examining room paper, cups from the water cooler, and mashed potato paste and oatmeal for glue for his collages.
This Wikipedia article has some good links.
I haven't seen the museum since the "wings" were added in 2001, but this story is great motivation for a road trip

136 Friends and $1.53 million

While Doris Lessing was out shopping today, the Swedish Academy announced that she had won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. I remember reading The Golden Notebook in the heady days of the late '60's/early '70's wave of the U.S. feminist movement. Interesting that someone who was uncomfortable with the feminist label is only the 11th woman to have won the prize since it was first awarded in 1901. Cybertrivia from the above linked article: "She is also probably one of the oldest people anywhere to have her own page on the popular social networking web site MySpace. On a recent visit the site announced, under the label "Female - 87 years old," that "Doris Lessing has 136 friends.""
Has anyone read her lately?

Book-Loving City

We're lucky to live a city which, for it's size, is able to attract big name authors. This week, from tomorrow through Sunday, the sixth annual Wisconsin Book Festival presents a mind-boggling array of authors and bookish events in venues all over town. From the biggies, like Michael Cunningham, Harold Kushner, T. C. Boyle, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rick Bass, Terry Tempest Williams and Zakes Mda to more local favorites like Jean Feraca, Jacquelyn Mitchard, David Obey, Matthew Rothschild, James DeVita and Michael Perry, there's something for everyone. Be there or be square.

http://www.wisconsinbookfestival.org/

What events are you planning to attend, or what would you like to attend if you could?

So Goes the Weekend

It was a one-day weekend, but had fun. Saw a great production of "Death of a Salesman" at the Madison Rep. Also started a book, "A Beautiful Blue Death", by Charles Finch, the debut novel of a British mystery series which looks like the perfect book to curl up with on a cool Fall day (hey, sooner or later...).

RSS feeds for a good time

I already subscribed to blogs through Google's feed reader, so this (note "fave blogs" lower left) wasn't new to me. Blogs I like to read and find helpful for work include Pop Culture Book Review http://popculturebookreview.blogspot.com/, which my daughter Emily does. She reads books "all the cool kids are reading", keeping me informed about the young twenties demographic. I read Sarah Cords' Nonanon http://nonanon.com/blog, because I always feel there is enough non-fiction in real life, so I let her read it !

Banned Books Week

The books on Lakeview's Banned Books Week display have been flying off the shelves. Interesting, non?

There are some great sites out there with Banned Books week information.

http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bannedbooksweek.htm#booksandauthors

Did you know that one of the reasons "My Friend Flicka" was challenged (yes folks, it's true) was because the author (correctly) calls a female dog a "bitch"? Pretty inflamatory stuff.

The most fun part of the book display is all the patrons who come up to the Ref Desk waving books like Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" and asking why.

Rainy Day in the Neighborhood

Ok, you've convinced me, all you Project Play mavens. Having a blog for your library is exciting, doable, and good for, in this case, the neighborhood. So I've decided to do my PP blog as a 'virtual' Lakeview Library blog, trying out different things that will not only flex my new blogging muscles, but will also air content that makes sense to our little community.

Thursday's adult book group (6:30pm- and it's a potluck! I know the staff is excited) here at Lakeview will discuss Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell.

Here are some interviews with her:

http://www.loadedshelf.com/page.php?14

http://www.bookpage.com/0502bp/mary_doria_russell.html

Stay tuned....