LUV U LULU

Thing 19

Lulu is a website where you can publish your own books and have them printed individually. Lulu will even sell them for you - you set the price and take 80% of the profit. Books are not printed until they are sold. In addition, Lulu offers ISBNs, editing services, and marketing services. You could even create and print a photo album - one copy for each of your kids or employees for example. How about making a book for children introducing them to your library? Everyone has a book or two floating around in their brains...

Zoho...OHO!

Thing 18

This is so cool! Not only can you share documents, but there is no more upgrading to new software all the time. It's just THERE! I had a play with ZOHO Show. I have to do a power point presentation for one of my my classes at school, and I don't have MS PowerPoint on my computer (my Office package did not come with it). So I made a simple slide show, and I exported it in ppt format. It saved to my computer and opened fine with my PowerPoint viewer. Another neat thing was that I did not have to create a new account - I signed in with my Google account. No additional passwords to record in the trusty rolodex! Yea!

Digging for treasure

Thing 17

The sandbox was great fun. I cannot think of a use for wikis in my library at the moment, primarily because I would be the only one prepared to use the technology, and because we are small and it is easy to share in person. At some point, I would like to see us do something in the way of collecting community history, and perhaps a wiki might be useful for that. It would take some training, though, to set it up so that it is user-proof. The sandbox method can be quite messy!

Wiki is Hawaiian for fast

Thing 16

I really liked the Library Success wiki. Someday I will have clever things to add to it. In the meantime, it is full of cool links from other librarians. I used a wiki once in a class for a group project. We were writing a group paper, and we were each to add a "page" and post our part for others to see and edit. It was less than successful, though, because the paper was too long - everyone's part was several screens in length, and the editing was awkward. We resorted to sharing document files in the end. So wikis are not for everything. (Photo from IDblog)

Library 2.0 - Instant messaging

Thing 15

Meebo seems like it would be a really easy way to connect with patrons. The patron does not have to install any software - just type a question in the box. The only problem with it, for a small library, is lack of personnel to be online all the time. At our little library there is a lot of multi-tasking going on with just a few staff members, and it seems a bit daunting at this point to allow this much access to our already limited reserves. Perhaps when we grow a bit... Also, it doesn't seem like you could limit access just to your patrons, at least not the way our website is set up. Normally, I would not want to limit resources to patrons only, but again, I worry about our over-stretched personnel.

Tech Tech Tech

Thing 14

Technorati was an interesting tool to explore. I searched for "librarian," as I often do, and found a couple new blogs to add to my feeds. I liked that I could search on posts or blogs, so if I was searching for something very specific, I might find a mention of it in someone's blog post. These searches I found to be quite slow, however, and not necessarily any better than a Google search. When searching posts, you can specify entire post or tags, language, and degree of authority. The results are posted by most recent post, and unfortunately you cannot sort them any other way (like by authority). So prolific bloggers will get their blogs at the top of the result list. I prefer Google's attempts at relevancy ranking. Technorati duplicates utilities found elsewhere (like adding blogs to Technorati favorites instead of adding them to your feeds), and personally I find it a site for people who have a lot more free time than I do.

Delicious! Yum!

Thing 13

I LOVE Delicious! Here is my page: http://delicious.com/mtwtf I use it to collect all sorts of websites I can use for work. I can access it from any computer anywhere, and sometimes I give out the web address to patrons so they can access it from home to get to wildflower links, for example (local students do a wildflower project each spring). Whenever I am asked a reference question and I find the answer online, I tag it so I can find it again. Periodically, I go in and bundle up my latest tags so they are easier to find.