Librarians Aren't Supposed to Party!

For those confused by the title of my blog, it is a reference to a movie with Parker Posey called Party Girl where she plays a librarian. A must see for all librarians with a sense of humor! :)

Check out this clip from Youtube:

Week One, Thing 1 - Library 2.0

Well, this may seem like a strange thought, but I am REALLY glad that someone took the time to develop this 2.0 class. Thank you to the folks at CSLA and the folks at MSLA! I am so excited to learn about all of the "things" and to hopefully incorporate most of them into my program (and my life). I find it so important to be at least one step ahead of the students when it comes to technology. Otherwise, they just see you as out of touch and "lame". This is a rather long, but very interesting article about librarians and Web 2.0. I liked the part about the virtually empty libraries in Second Life.

http://weston.org/orgs/mslib/Web2.0.pdf

Week One, Thing 2 - 7 and 1/2 Habits

I like the idea that learning continues throughout life, but more than that I liked discovering that I am already a life long learner. I love to read and have discussions about what I have read. I take classes in yoga and Swing dance, as well as classes that pertain to technology and libraries. Learning new things is sometimes difficult for me because I tend to compare myself to others. I just have to remember that they may have been doing this longer than me or remember that some people have more of a talent for certain things. I also need to remember that there is always help out here in the form of friends with expertise, the Internet, and countless other technologies, etc. Habit 7 and 1/2 is definitely my favorite. I love to play! :)

Week Two, Things 3 and 4 - Blogging

Creating this blog has been alot of fun. I especially enjoyed creating my avatar, which I think may have something to do with my paper-doll obsession as a child. :)

Anyway, I have friends who have had blogs for a while, and I always thought of it as quite a self-indulgent thing. Now I have realized that you can use a blog to communicate anything, not just use it as a personal journal. Our sixth grade is doing a special project currently on the environment and we are going to have the kids create a blog where they can go for information and to communicate their progress on the project. I think it's a great tool to keep kids interested!

Week Three - Thing 5 - Exploring Flickr

I could probably get lost for hours on this site. Scratch that. I have already been lost for hours on it. I began by uploading a bunch of my own photos to the site. This felt really good because I feel I have been behind the eight ball as far as uploading and sharing photos. I have certainly tried it before on other sites but something has always gone wrong with it. Using Flickr seems really easy.

I feel a bit strange about everything being public, but I also get annoyed when someone sends me an email that says "view my photos" and when you go to whichever site they used, you need a password to see them. I have a friend who recently sent me a link to his Flickr photos that he took at a party that we had. His photos are public and this makes it SO much easier to access and view them.

As a matter of fact, one of the photos that he took from our roof-deck was picked up by a site called shmap http://www.schmap.com/boston/home/. I had never heard of this site but it is basically for getting information on various places fo traveling - sort of like an online guidebook. It's pretty cool and it sends out what I think are called "spyders" (if anybody knows about this, let me know) to search for photos of various places to add to the site. Anyway, the photo that the schmap site found is here. This is a church by our house. Unfortunately, though it looks lovely in this photo, it was gutted in a fire several years ago.

I especially enjoyed searching around Flickr for librarian photos and seeing how the tags can work within the photo itself (like this one). Unfortunately, though I've tried several times, I cannot get an image to show up on my blog, which is why I'm creating links instead.

Week Three - Thing 6 - Mashups

Woah! I never knew what mashups were before. This opens up a whole new world for me. Not that I will have much occassion to use mashups, but I definitely like to be educated on what is out there. The Montagr site is really fun. I know that my friend's Flickr page has photos of me so I put my name as a search in Montagr but there are way too many little pictures to be able to find my own face. It's neat that you can scroll over everything to see the pictures, though.

The Mappr site is neat, too. It is similar to the Schmap site where you are seeing photos from certain places. The difference is that Mappr solely uses images from Flickr and Schmap gets them from everywhere on the web.

It is just amazing to see all of the different avanuse one can travel down when using the internet and to see the imagination that goes into coming up with these mashup sites.

Week Three - Thing 7 - Something I've Learned

I learned a new techie term this weekend. I wanted to load some photos onto my laptop from our camera but I have only ever loaded thewm onto my desktop computer and the software that I needed was not loaded onto my laptop. Anyway, I went to the Pentax site to download the software and there was a link for software and something called "firmware," which I had never heard. The site said that software is what you download to use on your computer to allow your camera to download images, etc. Firmware is something you download onto your camera that might update its settings, like the way that it records date and time, for instance. I'm not sure if it is called firmware for all portablwe devices, but I think it's cool that I learned something new!