Thing 20 – MySpace & Facebook

I took a look at the MySpace pages of Hennepin County Library and Denver Public Library with my teenage niece. I thought I might as well get feedback from the target audience of these pages. I asked,“I’d like to get your opinion if these pages – would you use these pages? Would you look at them?" She said yes, she thought she might – though her reaction was definitely not “Wow, that is so cool!” She preferred the appearance of Hennepin’s page because of its ‘neon’ colors. On the other hand, she immediately noticed and commented on the song offering at Denver’s page. (She hates the song but her male cousin loves it.) Also, she thought the embedded ‘virtual shelf’ from Shelfari on Denver’s page looked ‘cool’. She, like me, is very visually oriented. (Oh, look! It’s colorful and shiny!).

I wondered, though, if kids like my niece would be likely to discover these sites. She has a profile on Facebook, not MySpace and therefore doesn’t go to MySpace. So it seems that you’d want a profile at both sites if you were a library that had decided these virtual venues were important outreach channels.

I also had her show me her Facebook profile. I got to see how she, other family members and her school friends had ‘friended’ one another – she was impressed with how fast her cousin had posted a photograph from Christmas Eve and so typed a quick note of praise. She showed me the profile of my eldest nephew and his family. In the past, she has mentioned how Facebook is useful in coordinating schoolwork group project stuff, because you don’t have to keep exchanging e-mails. What struck me about how my niece uses Facebook is that for her (and I suspect a lot of others) these social network sites reinforce her already existing social relationships. I didn’t get the impression she was using it to discover people she didn’t already know – which is interesting because that particular use of Facebook is the focus of one of the recommended readings on this Thing.

“7 things you should know about Facebook” was a persuasion piece directed at higher ed faculty and staff. It aims to educate them about social networks and their use by students. It presented the scenario of a student, Angela, using Facebook to enhance her study abroad experience by communicating with people who had a connection to the country she would be visiting. This seemed to me a carefully selected (or constructed) example of a best-case-scenario use of social networking in an educational setting. On the other hand, just because this example may not be representative, doesn’t mean it never happens this way :).

All in all, Facebook and MySpace could be an interesting way to enhance your already existing social network or expand it by discovering other people with similar interests. I can see using similar types of tools for professional or personal interests and networking, but I’m skeptical about how effectively an institution can use a tool like this, one designed for real people not corporate entities. A library profile here might tend to devolve into a marketing effort that no one wants to bother looking at. It’s one thing to see if my best friend or my cousin has added something to their profile – it might even be a picture of me! It’s quite another thing if a library touts an author’s new book or their most recent program. And how much do I care if a library has ‘friended’ another library or a subgroup of ALA? It has nowhere near the same emotional resonance.

Thing 19 - Podcasts

I’ve been downloading and listening to podcasts for a while now. I bought my MP3 player specifically to be able to time-shift some of my radio listening by downloading podcasts of specific radio programs. WNYC’s "Radio Lab" episodes are favorites.

The podcast directories were new to me though. They looked helpful to someone who needs or wants to discover some particular kind of audio content, but I didn’t explore them in great detail. I’m not sure I want to discover more to listen to, read and process. Yikes!

As for library use of this technology, it’s a good fit for libraries. Some libraries are podcasting storytime programming. It expands your service of storytime into the virtual world, adding value for those parents who might not be able to get their kids to the library for a storytime. The Denver Public Library has a number of story podcasts on their website. The biggest obstacle to doing this would be resolving intellectual property issues – the Denver Public Library web site indicates that they have negotiated permissions with publishers (mostly Candlewick Press) or used stories in the public domain.

The Denver Library's podcasts seem to be set up like Minnesota Public Radio’s archived audio files, that is, clicking on ‘download’ opens the file in your browser to play on your PC, but does not allow transfer to an MP3 player. But you can download podcast subscription software and use it to subscribe to the podcasts and have them automatically downloaded each time the podcast page is updated. Juice (formerly iPodder) is one such software.

I downloaded Juice to see how this works. I subscribed to the Denver Public Library’s story podcasts and to MPR’s program on grammar and usage “Grammar Grater”. We’ll see if it gets updates as promised, but it worked fine after subscribing to pick out a particular podcast from the list, download it to my PC and synch it to my MP3 player. Sweet.

I wish I had time to experiment with creating a podcast – but that will have to wait.

Thing 18 - YouTube & other online video

Here's the video I'm posting from YouTube.

Come on... how could it be any other?




I've actually looked at Google Video more than YouTube, but the kinds of video you find seems similar on both services. I was interested during the presidential campaign to see what a lot of political video was on these sites, this is a fascinating new channel for information distribution (even if a lot of the content is copied from traditional media sources).

Thing 17 - ELM Productvity Tools

Some of the enhancements to the various databases available via ELM could be helpful in research. Features that allow you to mark and save specific research finds (articles, transcripts, etc.) and to create a folder of your research including a record of the specific search strategy – these are valuable time savers. Some could be improved, though, especially the ‘create a web page’ feature, which seems to be the most web 2.0-ish of these offerings with its potential to more easily share your research results.

The RSS problems were addressed at the 23 things mother blog, but still – an RSS feature that is largely dysfunctional with web-based RSS readers does not impress. I tried to set up several feeds over a two day span and never found a time when the EBSCO or ProQuest servers were at enough leisure to allow this to happen. Yes, one could set it up in your own browser – but isn’t a focus of web 2.0 that these resources are available to you regardless of the particular computer you may be on?

EBSCO’s ‘my account’ – oh goody – yet another username and password.

EBSCO’s ‘create a webpage’ offering is more robust than ProQuest’s. It gives you more flexibility in how the page looks, where things are placed, what can be included, etc. This also means the learning curve for figuring it out was a bit higher. But EBSCO’s webpage feature is not quite ready for prime time. I can create a page and download that file my computer, but when I view that webpage in my browser and try to click on the links to get to the articles, EBSCO can’t authenticate me for login. Apparently, unless I login to EBSCO’s ‘my folder’ feature via the ELM portal or via a subscribing library’s website to get to my webpage – the article links take me to a general login screen that does not recognize my user name and password. That being the case, what’s the point of downloading the webpage to somewhere other than the EBSCO interface? It becomes for all intents and purposes a static list instead of active links. There’s an interesting twist to this – if I go to my library’s website and sign in to EBSCO, and then click on links from my webpage of saved EBSCO research results (which is open in another tab of my browser) the links do go to the articles. After that, if I have cookies enabled on my browser, EBSCO continues to recognize that I have come in via my library’s website and the links go to the article in the EBSCO database. However, if I log into an EBSCO database via the ELM proxy, then this does not work – when I click on an article Iink on my created webpage I am sent to the generic login screen asking for User ID and password and EBSCO cannot authenticate me through that login screen.

Another detail – I could not figure out how to get the abstracts on this webpage from my results list. The 23 things instructions indicated that it could be done but I could only get the brief citation to show up on the webpage – huh.

ProQuest’s “save research” feature and “create web page” feature are easier to use than EBSCO’s but also more limited. And it wasn’t immediately clear (at least not to me) that to save it you used your browser’s “file” “save page as” function to save the webpage after clicking on download – which just created the web page in your browser window.

Netlibrary – the specific eBook example we were supposed to search for didn’t seem to be there, anymore, so I chose a different one to complete the exercise. It was interesting to see that the ‘notes’ feature is paired with the ‘favorites’ list. I had used the favorites list before (for eAudiobooks) but had forgotten about it. For those people who are using the eBooks for research, this notes feature is a nice enhancement. Obviously, you can’t use paper sticky notes on an eBook, so digital sticky notes are here.

Thing 16 - Student 2.0 Tools

The University of Minnesota Assignment Calculator struck me as a very helpful tool for students. Not only does it lay out a schedule for the various steps in writing a paper, but provides really useful links to explain each step or offer suggestions on research sources and strategies. Nice tool. I can see this as a useful link to put on a public library website for students.

The Research Project Calculator was somewhat less impressive, it seemed very wordy and there were a lot of bullet points crammed into the 5 steps. Still, it offers helpful structure and suggestions to high school students working on research projects. I really liked that the final step was evaluating how you had done on your project and making it a learning opportunity for how to improve your next project. Including information about how to create a slide presentation or video to communicate the research results is a nice feature of this tool.

These tools serve their specific education purpose well, but I can’t see them working to help manage a library project, for example. On the other hand, I’d love to find a similar tool that was more suited to the library world.

Thing 15 - Online Games and Libraries

Libraries and gaming. I just don’t get it. What is the connection? What is the purpose? Libraries are supposed to become community centers where we offer bowling leagues, Monopoly® tournaments, and WOW marathons? How does that fit into the mission of literacy and provision of information resources, including the various artistic expressions of the culture – books, music, and film?

Seems to me if we can afford the computer resources and bandwidth to have patrons using our resources for the gaming activity of their choice along with all the other online activities patrons want that pretty much covers the issue. And if we can’t afford those resources? Well, then we have to consider how to address that limitation. I’m not saying we should block gaming on our computers (unless it eats up so much bandwidth that it functionally kills everyone else's access to e-mail, info websites, employment searches, etc. - I'm just saying...)

I viewed the videos about Second Life from the Ohio University and the tour of Info Island Second Life Libraries. It looks like there may be potential in a virtual venue like Second Life to provide a virtual learning space, but the rhetoric used in the Ohio U video was pretty high-flown, I suspect the rhetoric outstrips reality at this point. One of the comments on the video at YouTube had it right – atact88 said “It’s a marketing medium, not replacing the classroom”.

And the Second Life Info Island concept was puzzling – I want to use a virtual computer as an avatar in a virtual world to search EBSCO databases or Amazon.com? Ummm… why wouldn’t I just search EBSCO or Amazon on a real computer?

Finally, and this is just a personal note, the graphics and animation in Second Life give me the creeps. Like claymation. It’s so artificial and stilted and limited – especially the avatars’ movement. The thing is, I kind of like unsophisticated graphics, like those in Roller Coaster Tycoon – but unlike Tycoon, which isn’t trying to be realistic, Second Life is and falls so short of the mark. Creepy. IMO.

Thing 14 - LibraryThing

I'm liking LibraryThing. Maybe it's because I 'get' this sharing site - I want to catalog & tag my books because that has value to me, and then I share that information with others because it can be mutually beneficial.

The site's basic features are really easy to use -- I input a few of my books into my LT library. I really like the option of viewing your library as the bookcovers instead of a list. Even better, it seems to have some fairly high-powered features for input and editing. For example, you can do a global edit on a tag, or select a set of books from your library and add a tag to or remove a tag from all of them at once . Also, you can add books by importing files and synch your LibraryThing collection with a master list you keep elsewhere. But the absolutely coolest thing was the barcode scanner they sell -- CueCat -- with which you can more speedily import your book info by scanning in the ISBN. Sweet. I am seriously considering putting this on my Christmas list.

I understand LibraryThing is also offering its tag content on a subscription basis to libraries who add it to their OPAC data. I'd be really interested to see any good data on how useful this additional content is for library users. Professor John Riedl at the U of M and colleagues have done some research on community tagging. I guess the upshot is that tagging can be very useful -- as long as it is of sufficiently high quality -- which is not inevitable.