We are so 2.0!

Here's John Russell's post today from his blog ...Best!...Dream...Ever! This is really what web 2.0 is about, sharing ideas, posting from one blog or website to another. Are you reading any of the blogs by the our staff? Take a look through them, find a few that interest you, and add them to your reader. Don't forget to read the comments on the posts on this blog (and others). This is how a conversation gets going, and when the conversation is about library services, this is how change happens.

10 Ways Libraries Can Use RSS

Cheryl Wolfe from JFG added the following great post to her blog, The Moxie Librarian.

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Because using RSS is about sharing and delivering information, it seems perfectly natural for libraries to adopt this technology for library services. Here are my 10 ways for how libraries can use RSS.
10 Ways Libraries Can Use RSS
1. Create an RSS feed for new additions to the online catalog.
2. Create an RSS feed tied to a library card account for hold notifications and/or overdue materials.
3. Create an RSS feed for new programs and events posted on the library website.
4. Create an RSS feed for the library’s electronic newsletter.
5. Create an RSS feed for press releases and other media advisories.
6. Create an RSS feed for library closings, including emergency closings.
7. Create an RSS feed for library job openings.
8. Subscribe to a few RSS feeds, such as local news websites, and share the content on the library’s website. This could be included on a page containing other local resources and local links.
9. Subscribe to RSS feeds of interest to library customers and share the content on the customer’s personalized library webpage. Customers can choose to access selected RSS feeds, their library account information, subscription databases, and email/chat with a librarian all in one spot.
10. Subscribe to a few professional RSS feeds and share with library staff on the library intranet.

Finding RSS Feeds

Now that you've been exploring news feeds, you might wonder - "how do I find more?" or "does my favorite web site have one?"

Internet Explorer 7 (standard throughout the library) looks for feeds, also known as RSS feeds, on every webpage you visit. When it finds available feeds, the Feeds button, located on the Internet Explorer toolbar, will change from gray to orange.

To view available feeds...
On the Internet Explorer toolbar, click the Feeds button .
If multiple feeds are available, you'll see a list of available feeds. Select the feed you want to view. When you click the feed, you'll see a page displaying a list of items (topics and articles) you can read and subscribe to. Copy the URL to your feed reader to subscribe.

What formats do Feeds come in? The most common formats are RSS and Atom. Feed formats are constantly being updated with new versions. Internet Explorer supports RSS 0.91, 1.0, and 2.0, and ATOM .3, 1.0. All web feed formats are based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), a text-based computer language used to describe and distribute structured data and documents.

Lookybook!

Lookybook is a new, free, 2.0 site for parents, children's librarians, teachers, and kids, to use and love. It's in beta right now, but can you think of all the ways we can use this one?
Go ahead, click on the book. And keep clicking. Or click those googly orange eyes.

Learn More about RSS

Learn More is a series of Web 2.0 lessons posted on yet another library blog called Library Stream.
Here's a new one on RSS.
Several supervisors have asked if we can alphabetize the growing list of staff blogs on our hcplc=lib 2.0 blog. Well, we could, but they'd be sorted by blog name since that's how we entered them, not by staff name, so I'm not sure it would be all that helpful. But if you want to follow a few blogs, those of people whom you supervise, or just blogs you find interesting, why not subscribe to them on your news reader?
Need help? Take a look at some of the blog postings since we started this lesson last Monday, or look at the comments and ask someone who has already set one up to give you a hand.

A Library Toolbar

Look what the library in Columbus Ohio is now making available for its customers!

http://www.columbuslibrary.org/ebranch/index.cfm?pageid=209

Why Meebo?

A few weeks ago during the IM and Virtual Reference part of our training we were using a Meebo room to investigate the virtues of chat. Here's an interesting post from David Lee King's blog on how it works in his library. Don't forget to click on through to Helene Blower's post on her blog to see his inspiration. And Helene is quoting from yet another blog....

101 BLOGS!

What an amazing response from our hardworking staff!

All 101 training participants will be having fun and learning.

One will win an iPod Shuffle!

Let them come to you

The more blogs I read, the more I click on the blogs that their writers read and refer to in their posts and next thing I know I have another blog, or ten, I want to stay up to date on. I started with only a few library blogs and now there are more and more that are of interest to me. It can be time consuming, and frustrating, to have to go looking for new posts. And then there are the newspaper blogs, the theater blogs, oh, I could go on and on. Until I hooked up with Google Reader. There are other readers out there, of course, but I'm going to focus on this one today because it is the one I use. And because, since most of you set up your blogs using blogger, also a Google product, you already have gmail accounts. So with one login you have your email, your blog, and your news reader at your fingertips. (There's much more but that's for another time.) It's all so easy to use, and to tie together. But if you would like some help, here's a short tour, here's a short video (a bit dated but you'll get the idea), and here's the official Google Reader blog.

#4 - RSS, News Feeds & Newsreaders

Learning Objectives

• Learn about RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
• Be able to subscribe to a feed and use a newsreader/news aggregator.


• RSS in Plain English (tutorial on YouTube)
  

Skills Practice

• Locate a few library related blogs and/or news feeds and subscribe to them using a free newsreader (like Bloglines or Google Reader).
• Locate a few RSS feeds that interest you personally and subscribe to them.

Experience Sharing

• Share your library related feeds with the hcplc=Lib2.0 blog.
• Share your experience with RSS feeds on your 2.0 Learning blog - What is the feed address for your blog?
• How would you use RSS in the library?

Resources

1. Library Technology Reports (July/August, 2006) - "RSS."
2. "RSS" - on Wikipedia.
3. SirsiDynix Institute. "Free Your Content? RSS for Libraries."
4. Check out the blog, RSS4Lib.

2.0 Alphabet

is for Furl , from Look-Smart (remember them?). It's kind of like an online filing cabinet that lets you save, store, and share Web pages of interest. As with del.icio.us, you can get an RSS feed of the most popular items that people are currently Furling.

Furl is a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us or Simpy, Furl enables members to bookmark, annotate, and share web pages. Topics are used to categorize saved sites, similar to the tagging feature of other social websites. Additionally, a user may write comments, save clippings, assign each bookmark a rating and keywords (which are given greater weight while searching), and have an option of private or public storage for each topic or item archived.
Considered one of its main features, Furl also privately archives a complete copy of the html of each page that a user bookmarks, making it accessible even if the original content is modified or removed, an antidote for link rot. This also allows full text searches to be made within the archive. However, as highlighted under limitations below, images that are embedded using links are not archived with user's copy of the html page, so images may disappear over time. [Wikipedia]

Web 2.0 Alpbahet:Part 1 (letters A - M) were originally published in Information Today 24.9 (Oct 2007): p.17(2).

Teens @ the Library

Our discussions of blogs would be incomplete without pointing to our very own HCPLC teen blog. It was created a year ago and published in time to celebrate the first Teen Tech Week. Updated faithfully by a dedicated team of librarians and LTAs, it provides comments on just about everything that might interest teens in our community including the results of the Gaming Tournament Qualifier Events.

This Week's 2.0 Book

For more examples of how libraries are using blogs and RSS feeds, take a look at Blogging & RSS, a Librarian's Guide by Michael P. Sauers (Medford, N.J : Information Today, 2006).

Libraries increasingly use blogs and RSS feeds to reach out to users, while librarians blog daily on a range of personal and professional topics. The way has been paved by the tech-savvy and resource-rich, but any library or librarian can successfully create and syndicate a blog today. In this readable book, author, Internet trainer, and blogger Michael P. Sauers, M.L.S., shows how blogging and RSS technology can be easily and effectively used in the context of a library community. Sauers showcases interesting and useful blogs, shares insights from librarian bloggers, and offers step-by-step instructions for creating, publishing, and syndicating a blog using free Web-based services, software, RSS feeds, and aggregators.

Michael P. Sauers is the Internet trainer for BCR's Member Services Division, and a part time reference librarian for the Arapahoe County Library District. He is currently on the Board of Trustees for the Aurora Public Library and the board of the Friends of the Aurora Public Library. He is the author of seven books on technology for librarians and has written dozens of articles for library industry journals. [Amazon.com Review]

Icarus

This blog for customers of the Santa Fe Public Library has contributors from staff throughout the system. One of the nicest of its kind I have seen. And look how they put that catalog search box right there.

Blogging Journals

Following up on Andrew's post, quite a lot, maybe all, of the professional journals we read already have seriously invested in the 2.0 world. Blogs, and e-newsletters are common now, and so much more timely than the print journals, especially if you get them routed through the system. I often find that by the time I get a journal I have already read the news, and sometimes the articles, online. Lately even the reviews are becoming available. Lots of the content, however, is exclusive to the web. Book Group Buzz is a Booklist blog that is really valuable if you run, or participate in, a book club.

More than the Front Desk

Darien Library has lots of blogs, btw. They have a consistent look and are all for the public as well as staff. I particularly like their book blog, and the ones for children and young adults. And their community blog is a great service. Even their director blogs.

Professional Journals as Blogs?

That's what Marcus Banks thinks. Take a look at his latest blog entry on the subject.
He's became firmly convinced that the traditional journal model is antiquated for sharing research and knowledge among librarians. A better course is to develop and nurture excellent blogs, with multimedia capabilities and guaranteed preservation of the postings. This could be an entirely new blog that starts from scratch, or an established journal that evolves into a blog.

What do you think?

Blogs 4 U

Have you found lots of great blogs to read? In our next lesson we'll talk about how to keep all this good stuff under control, but for now, in case you have not yet found a few blogs of interest to you, let me tell you about Technorati. This is a website that tracks blogs, 112.8 million of them to date. Here's a bit about blogs in general from Technorati:
A blog, or weblog, is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others vie for readership with national newspapers. Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them.
Blogs are powerful because they allow millions of people to easily publish and share their ideas, and millions more to read and respond. They engage the writer and reader in an open conversation, and are shifting the Internet paradigm as we know it.
On the World Live Web, bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, creating the type of immediate connection one would have in a conversation. Technorati tracks these links, and thus the relative relevance of blogs, photos, videos etc. We rapidly index tens of thousands of updates every hour, and so we monitor these live communities and the conversations they foster.
The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.
You can take a look at the most popular blogs according to Technorati right here.

And here are just a couple of interesting blogs I am sharing today.
At the Darien Library, the public service staff have their own blog that they are encouraged to post to, The Front Desk Speaks. I love this recent post.
If you are having a stressful day, try a one minute meditation at this very unusual blog, Moments of Rest.

59 Blogs and counting...

Yes, that's right - there are already 59 blogs linked to hcplc=Lib 2.0! You still have until next Monday to get your blog created to be able to fully participate in the remaining training sessions - don't forget to send the URL in a comment to the workbook section #3 - Blogs & Blogging.


Do blogs really have global reach? Sure they do. Just check out a comment on Julie Troupe's very first blog posting on her Storytime Staples blog...she mentions using the book "One Frog Sang" and the author of the book - Shirley Parenteau -left a really great comment.


I guess you could say - "One Blog Sang."

How's your blogging?

2.0 Alphabet

is for eSnips is a free, web 2.0 interest-driven social sharing site that allows users to share content and promote their creations and form social niche communities around their specific areas of interest. Members can upload and share content in any file type from one centralized profile, in folders representing their different areas of interest, and can determine the audience for each folder. eSnips is a Flickr type service for data files.

We've already used eSnips to view the survey results from the "How 2.0 R U?" survey.

There are many free online Image Storing and File Sharing sites:

flickr - zoto - glide effortlessly - Shutterbook - Fotolia - iStockPhoto - PhotoBucket - fotki - BubbleShare - openomy - xdrive - omnidrive

Allmydata - Avvenu - SendSpace - eSnips - StreamLoad - Wiki upload - Pickle

Web 2.0 Alpbahet:Part 1 (letters A - M) were originally published in Information Today 24.9 (Oct 2007): p.17(2).

Blogs: Sources of Social Knowledge

This past week we’ve read posts and articles which have discussed the many varieties of blogs and how they fit into the landscape of social networking. David Weinberger mentions in his article, Libraries in the Age of Social Knowledge, that successful social networking sites provide social objects, items that the group can share, talk about and build relationships around. Blogs can be included in the discussion of social knowledge even though they tend to be written by one person because they still offer the social functionality of comment fields. The social object Weinberger refers to in this article is knowledge. Yes, we could start a totally new discussion on whether people are sharing information or knowledge, but for the sake of this post I will refer to the social objects being shared as knowledge.

Weinberger goes on to say that libraries have many virtues but treating books as social objects is not one of them. A library book is passed from one person to another, in serial fashion, intact. You are penalized for making the book your own by, say, highlighting passages or writing in the margins, no matter how smart your annotations are…Because libraries have been physical spaces, this has made perfect sense. Your book mark-up, no matter how smart, distracts others. Your jabbering away in one of the library’s reading room disturbs other. That’s just how space and matter work.

How can libraries compete or even keep up with the social exchange of knowledge? Should we even compare our printed materials to blogs and other knowledge sharing tools? I don’t think we have a choice. Libraries will have to continually examine their role in the exchange of knowledge if we are to remain relevant in this digitized, networked world.

Weinberger ends on a very positive and encouraging note when he asserts: As works of knowledge become more and more social, we will still need humans staying one step ahead, guiding us with greater wisdom than the works themselves can muster. Those are our librarians.

2.0 on the Book Shelf

Here's two books that should get you thinking about blogs:

Blogging for Dummies by Susannah Gardiner (Hoboken, NJ : Wiley Pub., c2008. )

* In Part I, readers learn what a blog is, why they might want to create one, and what they need to get started.

* Part II gets readers up and running with their first blog.

* Part III shows readers how to make their blog stand out in a crowd.

* Part IV teaches readers how to customize their blog by adding eye-catching features like expanding a blog's sidebar (where bloggers are able to post personal recommendations, surveys, etc.), adding photos or even delving into podcasting and videoblogging.

* Part V shows readers how to get the word out about their blog and maybe make some money at the same time.

* Part VI discusses how to keep a blog's comments useful and on topic, ten cool tricks tools to make a blog shine, and examples of successful blogs.

How To Do Everything with your Web2.0 Blog by Todd Stauffer (New York : McGraw-Hill, c2008. )

Incorporate the hottest new Web technologies into your blog! How to Do Everything with Your Web 2.0 Blog makes it easy to choose the blogging tools that are best for you and master the basics of blog design and template manipulation. You'll learn how to add different Web 2.0 services to your blog, including images, video, audio, forums, tags, wikis, and even money-making features. It's time to take your blog to the next level and get more hits, more fans, more friends, and more customers.
*Learn about different blogging tools, including Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, and ExpressionEngine
*Customize your blog's design by editing templates and style sheets
*Share your blog headlines and story feeds via RSS and Atom
*Add photos, video, and audio--including podcasts--to your blog
*Drive traffic to your site with tagging, social bookmarking, and ranking services
*Collaborate with users through wikis
*Promote visitor participation using forums, community blogs, and newsletters
*Make money through your blog with Google AdSense, Amazon, and other affiliate programs
*Track, optimize, maintain, and back up your blog.

Blogs, blogs, everywhere

Maybe you have started your own blog (lots of you have, congratulations!), or maybe you are just thinking about it. One way to get started is by reading other blogs. Certainly read those of your friends and colleagues, but there are so many more you might want to take a look at, visit regularly, add to a newsreader. (I know, I know, that's the next lesson.)
Anyway, here are some blogs for you to consider reading, commenting on, subscribing to.

It's official, libraries and blogging go together. Check out the Library of Congress blog.

The librarians aren't the only ones in Washington blogging. Yes indeed, here is The Hill's Congress Blog (where lawmakers come to blog).

This one is a wiki, but I just want to point out that lots of public libraries are blogging away.

Since you work in the library there is a good chance you love books. Even if you aren't into creating your own personal library on LibraryThing, you may want to get into the LibraryThing blog.

Stay on top of local happenings with Sticks of Fire.

You can also stay current on Tampa, and the world at large, by reading newspaper blogs. There are so many to choose from, here are blogs from The St. Petersburg Times, The Tampa Tribune, and the newspaper of record, The New York Times. What a wealth of information and conversation! More opinionated, and often more interesting, than the articles in the newspapers.

If you still want to know some more about this blog stuff, here are a couple of blog entries you can read.
How Blogs Work is an entry on a blog called How Stuff Works.
And you can Learn More about Blogs and Blogging on this entry into the Discovery Series on a blog called Library Stream.

Now get blogging!

Intro to Blogging

Today we are starting workbook section #3 - Blogs & Blogging in the hcplc=Lib 2.0 training.

During this two week period, you will be:

• exploring library & non-library blogs,
• learning how blogs are being used in libraries (and maybe adding to the list of possibilities yourself),
• posting on a few comments on a few blogs,
• creating a blog of your own that will be your 2.0 workbooks through the rest of the training.

Don't worry if you haven't created your blog yet, you have another two weeks. Take a look at the "hcplc=Lib 2.0 Participants" area on the training blog - 48 of your eager colleagues have already created a blog and are posting.

Here's some links to get you started exploring blogs:

• Top 10 Library Blogs to watch in 2008, from LIS News
• Top 10 non-Library Blogs to watch (see comments to post), also from LIS News

Here are the Top Blogging sites in December, 2007 (from Nielsen Media Research):

#3 - Blogs & Blogging

Learning Objectives

• Learn about blogs & blogging by reading some of the articles in the 'Resources' section of this post.
• View the CommonCraft video, "Blogs in Plain English."
• Find, read and post comments to library related blogs (you can start by exploring the links in the 'Library 2.0 Blogroll' at the right).
• Check out Blogger's online Tutorial about blogging.


• Blogger Tutorial (on YouTube)
  




• WordPress.com Tutorial (on YouTube)
  

Skills Practice

• Create your own 2.0 Learning blog (using Blogger, WordPress, Xanga or similar free blogging service) and create posts.
• Share your 2.0 Learning blog URL (as a comment to this post) for the hcplc=Lib2.0 blog

Experience Sharing

• Use your blog to chronicle your Library 2.0 learning experiences
• How do you think blogs can be used in the library?

Resources

1. Library Technology Reports (July/August, 2006) - "Blogs."
2. Meredith Farkas, "The Bloggers Among Us: A survey of the library blogosphere shows the mainstreaming of the medium." Library Journal (Dec. 15, 2007)
3. SirsiDynix Institite, "Weblogs & Libraries: Communication, Conversation, and the Blog People."
4. Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers.”
5. Brian Kenney, "Ann Arbor's Web Site Maximizes Blogging Software: Library's Interactive Site Consists of 7 Web Logs."
6. Mary Ann Kajewski, "Emerging Technologies Changing Public Library Service Delivery Models."
7. Tame the Web (blog) - “Ten Things a Blogging Librarian Must Do.”
8. "Blog" on Wikipedia.

2.0 Alphabet

is for del.icio.us, "social bookmarking" for the great unwashed (e.g., everybody else). This is the 1,000-pound gorilla of social bookmarking sites (for some reason, I always have trouble spelling this one). If you're a voyeur or just want to make sure you don't miss anything cool/interesting/useful, snag the RSS feed from the front page to see what people are bookmarking right now. del.icio.us is part of the Yahoo! family of sites, along with Flickr, the iconic Web 2.0 photo-sharing site.

del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. You can use del.icio.us to:

• Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more, and access them from any computer on the web.
• Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community.
  Discover new things.
• Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite -- they've already done the work of finding it. So del.icio.us is full of bookmarks about technology, entertainment, useful information, and more. Explore and enjoy.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website -- the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.


We'll spend a great deal of time discussing social bookmarking and tagging in session #10 - Social Bookmarking, Tagging & Folksonomies.

Web 2.0 Alpbahet:Part 1 (letters A - M) were originally published in Information Today 24.9 (Oct 2007): p.17(2).