#16 Learn about wikis

Most of the links on this "thing" are dead links. One that is still active is the Bull Run Library wiki and there is a YouTube link on this site entitled "Wikis in Plain English". It is a clear description of the functionality of wikis. A children's librarian programming wiki is in the beginning stages which will be posted on our intranet. This will be very useful because J staff will be able to add all sorts of ideas and resources for programs. It will be a great time saving device when it gets up and running. It will be a wonderful place to compile all the great ideas and resources our staff has to share.

Thing #9

I am now subscribing to librarian.net, Resource Shelf, and the Shifted Librarian on my bloglines account.

Thing #23 - A Long Journey

I've reached the end and it's been quite a journey. I've learned about many new technologies and that has been great because we certainly need to keep up as best we can. The frustrating piece were the dead links, but this program has been operating since 2007 so that is to be expected I suppose. Now when I see the little icons on web pages and internet providers home pages, I will have some idea of other services they provide. It will be fun to keep up with the rss feeds, to make use of the downlaodable audiobooks, and to continue exploring the Web 2.0 awards page.I imagine the best way to provide training in new technologies like this is the "discovery process" because the possiblities are so limitless. I have registered with Library 2.0 and Merlin so hopefully that will help me to keep up with some of the many new techologies out there.

#21 Podcasts

I enjoyed listening to a couple of podcasts that I located on podcast.com. They were postings from Nancy Pearl's "Book Lust" program. I listened to interviews with Tracy Kidder where he talked about his favorite children's books which were baseball titles by John Tunis. The period of history he would like to travel to was Cuba during Hemingway's stay there. I listened to Nancy Pearl's interview with Paul Zelinsky where he talked about his art career and travels in Italy http://podcast.com/show/31762/Book-Lust-with-Nancy-Pearl/. I tried some other links to podcast directories but they were dead links.

#20 YouTube

YouTube is a great site. When I was helping to search for my daughter's wedding music, I used it frequently to help select the music and how it would be performed. I could check for the song and then check type of instrument (trumpet, harp, organ, etc.). It was very useful in selecting the type of performance we wanted. The students who performed a duet at the wedding even posted their performance on YouTube. Here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah6mwmToDG8

#17 Sandbox Wiki

I tried to get into the Sandbox Wiki and e-mailed the administrator but I never got a response. I did google "sandbox wiki" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial_(Wikipedia_links)/sandbox) and discovered that a sandbox wiki is an experiment with using a wiki, without the contents being posted.

Overdrive/Gutenberg/Thing #22

Reading the introductory information to Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page was very interesting. I had no idea you could volunteer to be a reader or digitize books for this project. I was also interested to see that the vast majority of the top 100 books and authors downloaded were classic authors and titles. This is probably because of school assignments, but it's good to see that the classics are still being read and listened to. I also created an account in NetLibrary and explored the Overdrive site. I downloaded children's books from both of these sites and listened to parts of them with my grandson.