Thing 16: LibraryThing

More books in my personal collection are former finalists for the National Book Award than actual winners of the National Book Award. I didn't realilze that until I tried LibraryThing.

Collection analysis is one of the interesting aspects of LibraryThing. The statistics page reveals aspects of my own collection that I hadn't realized. The percent of living vs. dead authors, the percentage of male vs. female authors. That sort of thing.

The tag cloud page shows a graphic representation of my books for further analysis. I haven't entered all of my books but after tagging a few I now see my bookshelves as not just rows of books but as a cloud of ideas weighted toward American and Mexican classics and historical fiction.

LibraryThing is inspiring me to classify and rearrange my own books.

I do not yet know how to compare MARCThing and ISBN Check and that ISBN language analyzer tool to the library cataloging tools at use in current practice.

I enjoy Librarians Who LibraryThing. It's insightful when it delves into topics such as the future of classification and it's funny when it opens discussions on Annoying Things that Patrons Do Say, Don't Say.

Photo by austinevan from flickr's Creative Commons

Thing 15: Digg

I must say, I do agree with Mick O'Leary, inconoclast and librarian, when he says that Digg, designed to let users "collectively determine the value of content," is a flop.

It's popular. But is it useful? O'Leary describes Digg items as commonplace and trivial

In Digg and the New 'Me Generation' in the June 2009 Information Today, O'Leary reveals that at 1:30 p.m. on April 7, 2009, he discovered these Top Diggs by Topic:

• This Is the Worst Movie Tagline Ever!
• Hot Celebrities We Want to See Naked in Movies
• Build Your Own Multitouch Surface Computer
• Cartoon Characters and the Drugs They Abused
• Pitcher of Beer Down in 5 Seconds
• The Science of Cow Tipping
• What if the World All Used the Same Currency?
• The 7 Least Practical Controllers Ever Assembled
• Obama Administration to Launch DATA.GOV!!!
• Obama: The U.S. Is Not at War With Islam

I saw similar stories when I visited. I find it interesting that Digg divides topics by categories, such as Technology, World & Business, Offbeat and more, yet all of the topics seemed to carry offbeat webpages.

I can think of one library-related use for Digg: Use it as a demonstration on why so many people would benefit from information literacy training.

Illustration from Microsoft clip art

Thing 14: delicious

The good folks at http://www.wordle.net/ have a tag cloud generator that allows users to import their tags directly from delicious. The cloud below is an import of my delicious tags

I added four Web pages to my delicious account: Arts & Letters Daily from The Chronicle of Higher Education, ALA, the Smithsonian and UNT Libraries.

Libraries are using delicious. The Haltom City Library, for instance, has tagged TCU's Mary Couts Burnett Library. Sul Ross State University has tagged the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Delicious strikes me as a good way for librarians to organize reliable Web sites that they want to share with users.

Here's my account: www.delicious.com/JessMill

Thing 13: Tags

Tagging is in an experimental stage.

Marketing may be the greatest use of user tagging on library websites until the technique evolves. A greater structure is needed before it can be used as way to find, identify, select and obtain anything more than random resources.

For now, tagging on Delicious is mostly being used to describe the intellectual content of a website, but flickr tags are describing the physical features of a photograph and YouTube tags tend to describe the format and genre (Ding, 2009).

Yet the digital native generation wants to be able to interact and create when it seeks information.

Opening up some form of tagging on library websites makes sense, even if it is only used on a jump page designed for entertainment where online patrons could be engaged by creating tag clouds of popular novels (Yipes! We'd have to monitor it and use the C word to delete "bad" words) or, in an academic setting we could allow users to create their own networking pages arranged by discipline and topic where they could tag appropriate library resources that could be searched through the page (Group work has its merits, but....Yipes! The P word! Would the number of sources they seek lessen or be repeated too frequently? Would critical thinking skills wane?). I think we need some beta sites.

REFERENCE:

Ding, Y., et al, 2009. Profiling social networks: a social tagging perspective, D-Lib Magazine, 15(3/4) retrieved June 22, 2009 from

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march09/ding/03ding.html

Illustration from Microsoft clip art

Thing 12: Twitter

I keep arguing that my parents already gave me a user name but no one listens.

On twitter, my user name is JessMill.

The video on the twitter help page is indeed helpful in learning the basics of the service.

I signed up to follow the Texas Library Association, the ALA-Technology folks, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. The latter actually had an intriguing tweet stream about its Global Tiger Initative, a "save the tigers" movement. I learned that 20 percent of "tiger parts" are destined for the U.S. market. Disturbing news in 140 characters or less!

Tweets would be a good way to send alerts to mobile phones. Campus and library closures, for instance, would be worth tweeting. Twitter also serves as a portal where users can read tweets on new services or new items or events. Then, we hope, they will log on to the library website.

Perhaps twitter's greatest use is that it may be a platform from which next-generation technology springs. It makes sense to know how it works.

The last time I heard about twitter was when a home appraiser came by as part of my refinance application and said he was considering using twitter to market his sideline business selling raw, organic food.

A very twitterish illustraton from Microsoft clip art.

Thing 11: Instant Messaging and a Confession

I created an IM account at Yahoo!'s web-based service: http://messenger.yahoo.com/web/.

My user name is jessiemilligan@sbcglobal.net, which also is my email address. My email was automatically selected because I have an existing Yahoo account with my email address as my sign in.

I'd change my user name if I were to keep this as a permanent account.

The Yahoo! web-based IM service appears to only accept messages if I am signed into the account with the page open. That makes sense. IM wouldn't be very instant if the messages were accepted and stored for later reading. I think that would be called email.

I've used more than one university library's IM service to chat with reference librarians. The experience always has been good. Fast retrieval. Smart answers.

Confession: Once a caller to my workplace at a magazine wanted to find a story in an old newspaper that is no longer published. I admit that I established two simultaneous IM connections with reference desks at two universities to help out the caller. One library was particularly fast in telling me about a third library where the newspaper in question is kept in microform and I was able to help out the caller while he was still on the line.

Image from Typogenerator.com

That Shadowy Face on the Followers List

"Your (system) has blocked at attack on your computer," reads that warning box that pops up on my screen when I sign in to blogger now and then.

Yipes! That word "attack" just bothers me.

I am not sure what to do to prevent such attacks, outside of using Norton or some other security program. I really try to be careful about which sites I visit and what email I open. So, lacking any real knowledge, I just did something.

I removed the followers list. Since I've started this blog I've had a follower who describes himself as a French accountant living somewhere in Africa. I could never figure out why a French accountant in Africa would be interested in 23 Things. Just likes numbers, perhaps?

Not knowing how to delete one follower, I removed the entire followers gadget. It may have nothing to do with the "attacks" on my computer. So I hope people still visit my blog through some other means.

Update: I figured out how to delete one follower. From Dashboard, click on followers and click on the photo that accompanies the suspicious follower. From there, you can add the person as a friend or block them as a follower.

Image from typogenerator.com