My favorite, of course, was LibraryThing, because I’m doing so much with it at work, and because it’s been so rewarding at home.  I also enjoyed playing with different brands (Wetpaint instead of PBworks wikis, Google Reader and Bloglines Beta instead of old Bloglines blog reader) of tools I was already familiar with.

My least favorite tools were Digg and LibWorm, simply because I don’t see a lot of use for them either personally or in my library.  These were both new technologies for me, though, and I enjoyed learning about them.  Fortunately, I didn’t find any of the activities to be too challenging.

Besides those mentioned above, another new thing for me was Google Docs Forms, which I definitely will use, particularly for in-house polling, and nings – although I’m not sure I’ll have much use for the latter. I would like to further explore using instant messaging, podcasts and video tools like YouTube, Animoto and vidcasting in our library, particularly for reference and outreach work and instructional sessions.

Thanks so much to the North Texas 23 leadership team and particularly to Rattlin’ Blogger, my resource person and encourager on that team, for a great experience!

We did things a bit differently from most 23 Things programs.  We decided to just do a few things (blogs, photo sharing, and online image generators) in the fall semester and then a few more (tagging/Delicious/LibraryThing, photo editing, and podcasts/video/YouTube) in the spring semester. The program was completely optional, but we did offer incentives each semester.  They were a surprise since we didn’t know how many people would complete the program and how much the incentives would cost, but we gave out large flash drives in the fall to finishers and an MP3 player to spring finishers.

Out of the then-30 full-timers on staff (five at a remote location that as of this September will be a separate university), all but seven started the fall program, and 21 completed it.  Spring participation was down; I believe because we tried to cram too many activities into the time period.  However, all 12 staff members who attempted the program completed it in the spring

A BIG difference between our program and the typical 23 Things program was that we did NOT require members to set up individual blogs.  We have a number of staff members who weren’t real keen about setting up yet another user name and password, and Blogger allows comments either anonymously or by an entered name.  We made setting up a blog an optional activity under blogging, and instead measured progress by asking people to comment on specific things under the relevant instruction DSL post. If  there was something (such as a creation from an online image generator) that needed to be posted, staff had the option (if they didn’t put it in their own blog and provide a link in the comments) to post it in a sandbox wiki that I also set up.  We kept track of everyone’s progress in our staff wiki.

In my opinion, one of the biggest advantages to doing it this way was more interaction between staff; you could easily see what others on staff were doing.  One of my frustrations in North Texas 23 was having to click on individual blogs in the huge list of supposed-participants, only to find that more than half of them did not get past setting up the blog, and half of those that remained did not do anything beyond Flickr mashups.  For those that did complete the program, you often had to wade through a lot of stuff to get to the post on the activity you wanted, depending on how they had their blogs set up.

Another big difference is that we offered a number of Friday two-hour open labs in our instruction classroom, where one or more of us from the Tech Task Force was available to help other staff members with the activities.  We set up every one of the six activities so that all you had to do to get credit for participating was make a relevant comment on the associated blog post, but many staffers wanted to do the optional, more advanced activities (such as set up blogs, Flickr accounts, etc.).  We offered eight such labs in the fall (although only five were attended) and three in the spring.  Tech Task Force members were also available to help other staff one-on-one.  I think a program like this is hard to do completely on your own, particularly with some of our less tech-savvy staff members.

I’m not sure yet what we will be doing in the Fall 2009 semester.  Next Wednesday, August 19, we’ll be showing off the things people did in the Spring 2009 program at our monthly staff training session.  We’re going to get some feedback on what, if anything, people might like to repeat or go more into depth on, or what other 2.0 tools they might want to learn about.  There are a lot of great 23 Things -like programs out there to use for additional ideas:

• 23 Things on a Stick
• More Things on a Stick
• ESC1 Learning 2.0: 23 Things
• Five Weeks to a Social Library
• Learning 2.0 (the original)
• Learning 2.0 Through Play
• Learning and Fun = iHCPL
• NVPDL Playground
• School Library Learning 2.0
• Library2Play
• Library2Play2
• Learning 2.1

I have a long commute (40-45 minutes one way) and I love listening to audiobooks, but have found that fiction (and biography, since it tends to be narrative) works better.  I tried listening to some nonfiction informational audiobooks in the car (Stephen Hawking books!) and found I had to concentrate too hard and kept needing to repeat sections, distracting from the driving.

Our reference librarian said, “Let me see the person doing the talking or give me a transcript. Otherwise it becomes background noise and I daydream and lose my place.”  I’m with her, for the most part.  In fact, with the National Library of Medicine’s podcasts, I just went straight to the transcripts.  I can read those a lot faster too, and they have useful links.

But, I think I would enjoy fiction podcasts, assuming I could download the whole book at once.  I just  got an MP3 player but it won’t plug into the USB port on my older computer at home, making downloading difficult.  My assistant listens to Podiobooks and I’ll have to give that site a try.  Apparently the author reads the book there.

The other problem I had with some of the podcasts I tried was that there was nothing up front to tell you how long the podcast was going to be.  The Library of Congress was a notable exception.  I think this is very important information to include.  Not everyone is going to be downloading podcasts and listening to them at their leisure; they may have neither the storage space nor a portable player.

I do think people who prefer an auditory learning style will like podcasts and that the library could use this tool for trainings for those people, as well as for library news.  Our outreach librarian had the following suggestions:

-A podcast on finding a job, plus career resources in the library.

-Podcasts highlighting databases and/or reference tips.

-Librarians could interview faculty members from their liaison areas about challenges students face when searching for research in their subject area.

-Historical information about our university or the local area [this might be good linked to old photos from our online collection]

-Book reviews [I liked Nancy Keane's Booktalks Quick and Simple podcasts - all of them were exactly one minute long, good audio quality, consistent beginnings (music and Nancy introducing herself) and endings (title, author, publisher and year).  The only improvement I would make - and would do if we embedded book review podcasts into our website or blog - is add a photo of the cover of the book, particularly important in my opinion for children's picture books.]

-Converting blog entries to audio format for people with visual disabilities.

Our access services librarian said, “I think that the library should try using podcasts to advertise events, or services available. Maybe do a vidcast of the library as a short tour.”  I’m with her on vidcasts/screencasts/webcasts – include those visuals, please!  One of our circulation supervisors suggested using them “to advertise our theme displays, what is available in the different departments, and how to use the library in general.”

Our instructional librarian said one professor here “made a podcast of one of our library sessions she had for a face-to-face class so she could upload it for her online class. In general, the students said they found it useful.”  Other ideas she had were:

- explanations of some “how to” steps: username & passwords, personal accounts in the catalog, etc.  These could make handy “Need Help” buttons on some of our web pages in “point of need” spots.

- If we had presentations by speakers, they could be podcast.

- Not sure how useful podcasts would be really for lengthy instructions (i.e. how to use a database), but they could be useful for a talking through of identifying search terms, search strategies, etc.

- Interesting idea about recording faculty comments . . . maybe they could tidbits like “What I mean by quality sources” and explanations of assignments?

Hmm – this has given me lots of ideas – looks like I’m going to have to explore making a podcast and give that a try!

I did some searches on “Texas library” and “academic libraries” and found the following videos:

City of Plano Library Technical Services

new Azle Public Library (my mother-in-law was born in Azle)

Scholarly vs. Popular? – I particularly liked this one because it was cute AND short (34 seconds).

And like many universities, ours has its own channel at YouTube.

Being one of those visual learners, I think videos have all kinds of library applications, particularly when demonstrating how to do something. The shorter the better! I found three YouTube videos, all 15 seconds each or less, demonstrating different types of fore-edge paintings for this post on our library’s public blog.

Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations are all pretty self-explanatory and similar to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint respectively.  I thought Forms might be something similar to Access, but found that it was more of a way to do a survey and then tabulate the responses in a spreadsheet that you could let everyone see.  Watch this video.  Best of all, those who respond to your survey DON’T have to create Google accounts if they don’t want to.

So, I used GoogleDocs Forms to create a brief little questionaire I needed to send to some co-workers:

And, as the results come in, they get tabulated in a spreadsheet:

I thought this was pretty cool!  I can definitely see using this feature in the future, especially since I am the head of the staff training committee at my library.

Not so sure about the rest of GoogleDocs though, mostly because of the requirement to have a Google account.  We’ve used our internal wiki to collaborate on some documents.  I also don’t like the idea of saving my stuff out in cyberspace rather than in my own hard drive or thumb drive.

Being an academic librarian, I am already pretty familiar with Wikipedia and its pros and cons.  Not surprisingly, few if any professors here allow students to cite Wikipedia as a source in papers and projects.  Nevertheless, I will often use it as a starting point for research on a topic. The best articles in Wikipedia have citations and footnotes, lists of additional reading (links and print publications), and cross-references.  I might start with Wikipedia and then go to one of those sources to get additional information.

For example, I’m currently reading The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff, and I wanted to know more about Ann Eliza Young.  The Wikipedia article did provide some additional sources beyond those on the author’s website.  I also used Wikipedia to look up magnetic cartridges (for phonographs), but unfortunately this article doesn’t have any citations or links outside Wikipedia, so I’m not too confident about its accuracy, although it might still help me figure out what to buy to get the record players in our AV collection to work again!

I think it’s VERY important to look at the “discussion” tab for a Wikipedia entry and see what if any controversy and arguments the article has stirred up – that can give you a clue to its accuracy and neutrality.

I did see a feed category that might be useful when I get to Thing 21 – Podcasts.  According to the LibWorm About page, “If you browse by the FEED CATEGORY “Podcasts : Academic Libraries,” you see ONLY content from feeds that are podcasts produced by academic libraries. If you browse by the SUBJECT “Podcasting” you’ll get all items that contain the words “podcasting”, “podcasts” or “podcast”.  I’m finding the Subjects to be too broad a search, the Feed Categories too narrow, and the Tags completely useless.

I could see LibWorm as a good starting place for someone looking for relevant feeds to subscribe to, but I feel like I already have enough.  I could also see it as a way for someone starting a new library-related blog to get some free publicity, by registering with LibWorm and submitting the feed.   I’m glad to learn about LibWorm, but beyond North Texas 23, I don’t think I’ll be using it.

I’m not really on LibraryThing for the social aspects, although I did join the Librarians Who LibraryThing group on my personal account.  I really don’t have time to follow it or any other group, though.  I See Dead People’s Books looks interesting, but Name that Book would probably be more useful in a library, particularly a public library.

Also, I notice a lot of North Texas 23 people have been recommending Shelfari or Goodreads in their blogs.  I can’t recommend Shelfari and refuse to even try it myself  because of its e-mail spamming and astroturfing.

I did set up a Goodreads account a few months ago.  I’ve added one friend, and follow a couple others’ reviews, added a few books these folks had and rated a couple of them, made a couple comments on others’ reviews, but that’s it.   Frankly, I really don’t care what page someone is on in a book or how many stars they gave it.  Here is a good post that compares Goodreads and LibraryThing – be sure to read all the comments.

Why does LibraryThing cost money ($10 a year or $25 a lifetime) if you want to add more than 200 books?   Because, unlike Shelfari and Goodreads, there are no annoying ads on LibraryThing and it helps defray the costs of running it.  The librarian in me really prefers the features in LibraryThing.

Some Texas libraries are using LibraryThing for Libraries, which provides a “Catalog Enhancements” package and a “Reviews Enhancement” package.  Bedford Public Library was the second library ever to adopt this, and they use both packages.  To date, other libraries in Texas using the Catalog Enhancements package (with examples) are the Irving Public Library, the Richardson Public Library, and the University of Texas at Austin.  As an academic librarian, I’m really interested to see how the latter uses LibraryThing for Libraries.

I have a couple LibraryThing accounts – one personal, and one that I use at work.  I started the personal one a little over three years ago as a way to track the books I read.  I just recently went over 200 books and very happily paid the $25 for a lifetime membership – WELL worth the money!  Of my 202 books, I have written reviews for 163 of them (and of the 39 without reviews, 9 are sitting in my finished-but-need-to-write-a-review pile – my husband’s hospitalization in May followed by a couple trips and then a substitute college teaching gig have put me behind schedule).  I think because I have written so many reviews, I get a lot of books through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program.

What I really want to write about is how I am using LibraryThing at work.  I manage the curriculum collection at an academic library.  This includes (besides teacher resources and state-adopted PK-12 textbooks) children’s literature.  “Introduction to Children’s Literature” is a required course for future elementary education teachers at my university.  Students in this class have to produce annotated bibliographies for eight genres of about 35 picture books and one chapter book/novel per genre.

Students were having problems finding books with our traditional  catalog in particular genres.  They often don’t show up in MARC records and even when they do, they aren’t searchable with our integrated library system (Sirsi).  Subject headings work OK for some genres (poetry, biographies, for example), but you have to get the wording just right.

My first solution to this problem was to create spreadsheets for each genre with books in our collection published since 1998* (*Originally, when the current professor started teaching this class in 2007, she only wanted students to use books published in the last ten years).  The spreadsheets were uploaded to a wiki (more on that in Thing 18) that the students in the class could access.  We also printed copies of the spreadsheets and kept them in a binder near the children’s literature collection.

However, I quickly found that the spreadsheets were a pain to maintain, particularly when we received new books.  I first started using LibraryThing in the class as a way to let them know (with a post in Blackboard, the campus’ course management software) that new books were available.  I would tag the books by genre and type (picture book, chapter book, etc.).

LibraryThing proved to be so flexible that I ponied up the money to add over 200 books.  Fortuitously, about the same time I was assigned an intern (a student graduating from a campus major that requires an internship who is thinking about going to library school) and I made it her primary project to add books from the spreadsheets into LibraryThing – plus a whole lot more beyond that – using the tags I already had in the spreadsheets and more.

At one point my full-time assistant, two student workers, and the intern were all adding items to LibraryThing, sometimes up to three at once!  One of them was able to use our bar code scanner (used for marking items as used in our circulation system) to input the books, but we also found that typing in the ISBN worked just as well.  We’d always use Library of Congress data when it was available.

The recent addition of the collections feature to LibraryThing is making this project even more useful.  One problem I had previously was that it was hard to do a search on two or more tags – there is a way to do it, but results were inconsistent.  For example, if I wanted to search for books tagged both as biography and picture book, I sometimes got results that were neither.  With collections though, you can easily pull up books within just one collection with one tag.  Currently we’re putting all the books into collections based on type – picture, chapter, etc.   Since a book can be in more than one collection at a time, later we’ll go back and add genre collections as well.  This way users could search for all books tagged biography in the picture book collection, or all books tagged picture book in the biography collection.

We’ve pretty much got all the children’s books published in 1998 or later in our LibraryThing account.  After we finish placing these in their respective type and genre collections, we’ll start working backwards, adding books published in 1997, 1996, 1995, etc.   Besides the children’s literature class, I have introduced this tool to a math content area class (one of the assignments there is to develop a math lesson around a children’s literature book), and to a couple of graduate-level education classes.  One professor recently told me one student got a grant to implement LibraryThing in her classroom library; I’ll add more details about that in an edit to this post later!

More here on Thing 16.