Wikis

In the library setting, I'm especially fond of the subject guide in wiki format. In my personal life, I can see how a wiki would be a great way for my family to plan our Thanksgiving meal. Instead of multiple emails per day, we could all coordinate who's bringing what in one spot. No back and forth emails clogging up the inbox... Perhaps next year?

Editing the project play sandbox wiki was fun and easy. I just added to the list of authors, but I can see that creating a new page/topic would also be easy.

yummy or del.icio.us?

So now I finally know what "add to del.icio.us" means when I see it at the end of a blog entry! I know that my coworker Emily uses del.icio.us and LibraryThing in her pop culture blog and now I finally understand why.
I love the idea of tagging and understand the draw of personalizing and simplifying all your "stuff". Using del.icio.us to find a recipe for roasted vegetables was a breeze. As Pinky mentioned in her blog, using del.icio.us to find and organize recipes is a great idea.
The next step is opening my own account.

LibraryThing

Yes, I've known about LibraryThing for quite some time. No, I've never used it... until now. Why not? Believe it or not, I'm a librarian who doesn't own a ton of books. Why buy when you can borrow? Most of the books I own are those that were given to me as gifts. I never felt like two bookcases justified cataloging. For example, I opened a LibraryThing account and realized that I only own one of the five books that I added to my catalog.

Even though I don't plan on cataloging my books, I do plan on using the suggester. In my opinion, it's a huge improvement over Literature Map and similar reader's advisory tools from Novelist and other literature databases. Based on the book Little Children by Tom Perotta the suggester says that I might like The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart, a book that I've always thought about reading, but never got around to. Maybe I'll give it a try.

Flickr

IMG_0185
Originally uploaded by Jones the Librarian

I'd love to be sipping a cappuccino and wandering the streets of Florence... but I'm not so I'll talk about Flickr instead. How could libraries use it? My coworker Katie's blog is a good example. Not only would library staff be able to take pictures, but patrons could contribute their photos as well. The major barrier would probably be the privacy issue, especially as it relates to minors.

I'll definitely use Flickr to share photos, such as this, with family and friends. Not too big a fan of the making all photos public option though.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

So Much Music

In my music obsessed house, we are big dorks and come up with top ten lists of the best albums each year. Any other music freaks out there? What are you listening to?

These are a few that are in heavy rotation on the jukebox right now:

The National

Arcade Fire

St Vincent

Online Surveys... useful, but also kinda annoying in that telemarketer way

I can definitely see the purpose of the online survey, especially when it comes to reaching potential library patrons. However, I can also see how it would be difficult to get people to participate/respond. I'm thinking of times that I go to website to check something- for example airline prices- and I get a popup asking me to fill out a customer service related survey. I always decline. I suppose an incentive would help?

Google Reader vs. Bloglines

I'm already familiar with RSS feeds because I use Google reader. Just for the heck of it, I opened a bloglines account too. I think I'll stick with Google reader- like the layout much better, but at least now I know what else is out there.

I'm enjoying the library related blogs that I found through the project play blogroll. These are a few of my favorite non-library, non-book related blogs:

http://www.thegrammarvandal.com

http://www.amateurgourmet.com

Fancy

OK- now that I now how to create a post with text only, it's time to try to upload some pictures.

Day 1

I've read many, many blogs... but this is my first time writing a blog. Very exciting- who knew it was this easy?