5th Entry

For the topic of podcasts I first listened to one of the Sarah Long interviews. She spoke to two men from Holland who created a coffee table book about libraries they had toured in the United States. They called it the Shanatchic Tour in honor of storytellers in Ireland who would travel from town to town and tell stories in exchange for food and lodging. They displayed great passion for libraries and discussed their goal of "libraries without walls," meaning the ability to share stories and knowledge as a global community.

I found that one of the man's last names is Boekesteijn which sounds like "Book stein." That's almost as good as the Library Cop's name from Seinfeld being Bookman. I should consider changing my name to this.

Somewhere along the line I learned that POD stands for "Personal On Demand." Makes sense.

I was disappointed that I couldn't download a book. I did download the Overdrive Media but when I attempted to download a book into it, I got an error message that the parameters are incorrect. I took it to Spencer in Computer Services who was unable to help me. Then I emailed Michelle Vonderhaar, who told me to download the Overdrive Media to the C drive, but I see that the site is down for maintenance today. Michelle told me to blog about it if I continued to have trouble, which is what I just did.

Browsing the available books to download, I was surprised at the selection at first, but came to realize that the most books available are newer books and best sellers, which is fine, but in general not what I would find appealing. Also, for some reason if a book is "checked out" you have to place a hold on it. I don't understand why the quantity of downloads is finite. If the website offers a book, can't it be downloaded an infinite number of times?

It may be best that I was unable to download a book anyway, as I find listening to a book on tape or CD to be kind of silly, especially when a male narrator acts out a female voice.

Fourth Post--You call this work?

I've been browsing Flickr and youtube for the past 20 minutes and I'm starting to feel guilty about it. I need to remind myself it's okay to do this at work, because this is the "work" I'm supposed to do. I didn't think much of Flickr when I first learned about it at the staff institute day, but now I realize how much I do look for pictures at home, using primarily Google images, and Flickr is a lot better. The photos are a lot better in quantity and quality.

I don't know how much any of this lesson applies to working at the library, especially my job as Security Officer, but I will enjoy it at home. I've been aware of youtube for a while, and I use it mostly to watch funny things or listen to music, and then add those videos to peoples' myspace pages.

I looked through photos of my favorite band, Gogol Bordello, and some of the pictures do capture the energy that the band brings. This particular photo features Eugene Hutz, the lead singer, standing on a drum being held up by the crowd. One of the go-go dancers bangs on that drum, but it doubles as a transportation device. This band's music is so beautiful and joyous that just going through the pictures made me a little emotional, thinking about the feelings the music brings me and singing, yelling, howling, and screaming along.

3rd Entry

I wish I had more time to spend on these lessons. I could spend a day looking through "delicious" and I think "Library Thing" would be fun to look through as well. I took the tour and I may sign up on my own from home. It seems like an extended version of the posts people make reviewing books on amazon.com. I can get addicted reading what peoples' ideas and interpretations of books are there.

As for tagging itself, I'm not sure it has much application when it comes to security staff. I can see how it could be useful if we had some kind of security database set up that showed how security staff handled certain situations. For example, if in the Security Log we wanted to know how certain parking situations were handled in the past, you might tag the word "parking" and then bring up every entry that had to do with parking. From that information a security staff member could determine how to act in a specific situation based on how it had been handled in the past. However, as far as I know the Security Log cannot be tagged.

Come to think of it, tagging could be a useful tool in just that type of situation, if we used an application where tagging is an option, but I'm not sure what type of application would be used. I'll have to ask Cathy Deane if and when we switch the Security Log over to some other type of application.

2nd Post

I need to cut these blog entries short because I've already spent an hour on the second topic.

I had fun working with the Wiki. I hope this particular Wiki continues into the future because it's nice to learn about my co-workers and their favorite things. It took me longer than I thought to add an entry about my favorite books, so although I wanted to add another about my favorite music, I'll put that on the backburner, and perhaps add more at a later time.

I see the value of a Wiki. The video explaining it was very helpful. Again, I see it as a tool that can be useful, but the purpose is defeated when using it is forced down our throats just because it's there. As it relates to my own job in security, I can see it being used when there are certain ongoing situations and each security staff member adds his own experience to the topic. For instance, parking in the garage posed a problem in the past, and maybe a Wiki could have been used for all of our opinions and suggestions.

Frankly, the Security Log is being used less and less now. That may be because we don't have any ongoing issues to deal with at this time. The newest Security Officer hasn't added one entry yet. The lack of communication amongst us may pose a problem in the future, but again, no need to fix what aint broke.

I think wiki literally means "quickly" from the article I read, but now it's been maybe a week since I did read it so don't quote me.