Category Archives for Rutgers SCILS598
As I was stumbling through a big list of social media and web 2.0 sites today, I came across Good Reads. I had heard my friend here at school mention this once before (she had previously completed a degree in Children’s Literature, so you can imagine, she likes to read) but I’d never checked it out before.
Essentially Good Reads is like a social networking site, but with just a dash of Amazon.com thrown in. It runs on reviews: you tell Good Reads what you’ve been reading lately, provide a rating and a review, and then it broadcasts your information across the network. You can have friends, whose recent activities (reviews, books they claim they’re reading, books they have marked as “favorites) you will see when you log in. You can search for reviews of books that you want to read (to get a sense of if it’s worth it) or of books you love (so you can scoff at and insult those who have given it a bad review).
I find that with social software tools I feel a little spread out if I have to sign up for a new one. I like to integrate them as much as possible… or at least make it so I don’t have to a visit yet another web page when I start up my browser. I run Twitterific in the background all day and import my Delicious bookmarks into Firefox’s menubar. Good Reads, it turns out, you can import into your facebook account (if you have one), and you can access and edit your life there all through the facebook interface, which is nice. I tried it out, and found a couple friends already using it (turns out a friend from high school likes The Great Gatsby.)
I was an English lit major in college, so I tend not to rely on online reviews when selecting my next book. I also tend to go to used book stores instead of ordering them. In spite of the greyish yellow color scheme of the site, Good Reads will never smell delightfully musty like Bridgid’s Books. That being said, I am still intrigued because if I had an active community of friends on Good Reads, I wouldn’t argue with participating. I, like any other person who likes reading, like talking about the books I read and enjoy bullying people into liking what I like. Then again, being a librarian, perhaps I would rather be a part of Library Thing…
I am not going to pretend neutrality on this issue. I started reading feeds a few years ago to get through the workday in a library office without windows. My first feed reader was a desktop client (had to download and install it) called BottomFeeder. My supervisor used Bloglines so I set it up, too, but quickly found it too clunky to use. Then I found Google Reader and my life hasn’t been the same since.
Anyway, I suppose it’s always good to have options. It also seems as though there are many librarians on Bloglines: a techie librarian blog, the Shifted Librarian, was listed as one of the 50 most popular!
Regardless, I won’t be switching back anytime soon.
Found this blog on the Blogging Libraries Wiki: Duke University’s Library Hacks. Basically this is a blog dedicated to hints and tips about library use, and productivity in general. From their about page:
Library Hacks is a place to find out about tools, resources, services, and ideas that can help make your research and the library more efficient for you. It’s written mostly by Duke Libraries staff, but we’ll also have occasional student and faculty guest bloggers. (Want to be one? Let us know!)
Our inspirations are blogs like LifeHacker, LifeHack, AcademHack, and ParentHacks, and book series like O’Reilly’s Hacks Series.
I think this is a great way to draw in users that may not already be a part of the library’s normal audience. I am a believer in “bridging” the gap between non-users and the library using social software because of its low commitment level. The readers of this blog may already know about the library. But, they may have simply done a search on audiobooks, or multiple-computer productivity, and found that there is someone at the library writing about how to deal those sorts of problems.
And it may stop there. Read the post, move on. But some may read it, see that it is from the library and then come back for more information, or look at some of the other library resources that are linked to on the blog’s home page.
The problem with this model is that this is most likely not going to be the first blog a library produces. That may need to be modeled more around news and library programming. In that instance, however, posts along these lines could be sprinkled in, just to add a little spice to the normal fodder.
It seems to me that commercial blog software these days is pretty standard. Some features you get on both Blogger and WordPress.com:
- Templates for blog layout
- Widgets or gadgets to display archives, blogroll, rss, etc.
- Certain level of control as to commenting, trackBacks
- Either WYSIWYG (What-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor or HTML.
The first ever blog I wrote was on Blogger. It chronicles the road trip that I took while driving from Minnesota to British Columbia. We did this in the car, connecting to the internet via a cell phone. I did the posts quickly, and didn’t fuss with many settings and found it very easy to use.
The second blog I wrote was on WordPress.com, which I found at first somewhat unsettlingly complicated. This blog was written on how libraries are using Flickr to enhance their collections, and was done for a class last term. This meant it was to my advantage to tweak the settings and make everything look as nice as possible. I found that once I got used to the more advanced “dashboard” that things were very customizable.
After just looking back over my accounts I’ve identified a few differences:
- There are many, many more templates to choose from on WordPress.
- However, you cannot edit the HTML/CSS of your template for free like you can on Blogger. This is so cool and something I really wanted to be able to do last semester.
- WordPress.com blogs allow “Pages”–a separate area for information like, About the Author, or Additional Resources. Nice for separating that information from the side columns on your main page.
- WordPress.com settings take a long time to save, and it takes a while to move between pages in your dashboard. This may be due to the site traffic, who knows, but it’s annoying.
- Blogger makes it hard to have an abbreviated post on the main page. This is when you see a little “More…” link on the main list of posts. I think those are nice, and keeps many posts visible at one time on the home page. In WordPress you can insert this by clicking a button. In Blogger you need to edit the HTML of your post with specific code found on a help page somewhere.
As for data portability, it is hard to say. Can you get your data elsewhere after you have put in so much work? WordPress imported my old Blogger blog just fine, and I didn’t even have to export it first, it was all done automatically through the web.
However, Blogger couldn’t import my WordPress blog, to my dismay. It apparently only supports importing from other Blogger blogs. I’m not sure if that is the fault of the WordPress export file (i.e. they export in a proprietary XML format), or if Blogger simply hasn’t written the software that can do the import. Either way, it seems once you are on WordPress it may be hard to get off.
This may not be an issue, however, because WordPress.com also supports a stand-alone server version of its software called WordPress.org. This is fairly robust, I think, and if you have the know-how and staff for it, could be a good option. There is an active community of WordPress users, as well, so tech support is probably often free. Perhaps you would never want to leave.
I think, overall, Blogger is the way to go for ease of use (and that CSS template editing). And, if it turns out I’m wrong, I can always get my data out. The page loading time issue on WordPress is enough for me to stay away, unless I was going to be running my own server.
The American West: land of the free, home of the brave, frontiersmen on the brink of discovery and families that braved it all for a piece of the big sky. Pioneers heeding the call of mystery: the invisible pull on your heart, a quiet whisper on the breath of the wind, that takes hold and doesn’t let go until you strap on your spurs and head out, following the sunset.
A couple hundred years later, frontier librarians have taken the charge of this bedrock region and are forging new alliances; merging melting pot wisdom with traditional American values. The result? The Douglas County History Research Center.
Moving across the pond, so to speak, we find ourselves down under, at the Flickr pool for something called Re-Picture Australia. This project allows Flickr users to take public domain images of all things “australiana” from the National Library, and remix, mash-up and generally “2.0″ them into something new. Users then title and tag their images for them to be available for display in both the Flickr pool as well as on the National Library’s project site.
This is but one part of a large project undertaken by the National Library of Australia entitled “Picture Australia.” Essentially the National Library and many other institutions have submitted photographs to the project to be displayed in a giant, centralized digital repository. It is an ambitious project to be sure, and the thing I like about this is that they are throwing in user-submitted images right next to the institutional images. Talk about a two-way street!
Now we will be turning to the eminent, the evanescent, the entropic Library of Congress, to examine their Flickr know-how. Outlook good.
From the home page, hiding away towards the bottom-right is a link to some info about their Flickr projects. Turns out that they have quite the collection, and they are actually co-founders of something called “The Commons,” which is a project on Flickr to generate user tags and classification for some of their public domain photographs. There are now around 15 museums and libraries contributing to and participating in this project. A similar project is underway at Steve.museum.
On This Day in History – Oct 9th:
Che Guevara is killed
Originally uploaded by
Clemens & Alcuin Libraries
This is too cool to pass up. Sister schools in Minnesota, St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict, have a huge collection of web-powered utilities as part of their services and I got all excited paging through all the multiple different types of Web 2.0 tools they tap into.
They blog. They podcast. They IM. They have a Flickr photostream which they actually advertise. I’m not saying that all of these things are perfectly implemented, and it looks like their online books and slideshows are somewhat of a work in progress, but so far what I’ve seen here is definitely heartening.
Here’s another great example of how to attract users and use Flickr in the process.
This summer, the British Library put on an exhibit called “The Ramayana: Love and Valour in India’s Great Epic.” Essentially, the exhibit was showcasing illuminated manuscripts of the epic story of Rama, and had a slate of other programming to accompany it. Hundreds of manuscript images were on display, and, in a wonderful moment of extreme Library 2.0 fever, someone decided to start a Flickr group to assemble some users takes on Ramayana imagery.
First off, I have completed a good enough draft of the Resources page to recommend you take a look at it, if you are hankering for some more Flickr stuff to do.
Secondly, I dug up some better examples of how libraries are using Flickr in the real world and I am going to list them out over the next week or so. The first one I want to talk about here is Winnipeg University Library, because they have done one of the simplest things a library can do with Flickr: an slide show library tour.
And I don’t mean simple in a bad way. I mean simple good. Simple easy. And simple effective.
