Library by the sea

I knew I would fall several weeks behind while on vacation, but plan to catch up in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, we're having a fun trip to London, Montpellier, France and back to the Lincolnshire in England next week.

I wasn't planning to visit any libraries on this trip, so what a delight to find "bibliotheque de plage" at Petit Travers beach in Carnon France. it was full of books for kids and adults. And also books in English and Spanish. The shady patio was full of people, young & old, enjoying books, newspapers and magazines. What a wonderful idea!

CPD23 Thing 1: Blogging

I just finished running a "23things" program for one of our large regional library systems - Learn with CDLC. We had a great time and many people wanted to continue learning over the summer. So this was perfect timing! I'm excited that we already have 7 people participating in this program.

I've been in the library field for over 30 years now. I spent 17 years in a number of positions in academic libraries. For the last 15 years, I've run my own consulting firm. I work with libraries and schools, mostly helping with technology issues, training and web projects. Most of my clients are in the Northeast US, but I have had some fun trips to other parts of the country too. My website is at: pafa.net

When I'm not at the computer, you'll find me in the garden battling the weeds and smelling the roses. Or possibly traveling and exploring. A trip to France & England is coming up soon. There will be lots of weeds waiting for me when I get back!

Looking forward to this program, the opportunity to explore more "things" and getting to know more colleagues around the globe.

Thing 5 Reflections

Like some of you, I'm scrambling to catch up and finish my posts. And doing them out of order! I've really enjoyed being part of this project. I've been eager to organize and run one ever since the original one in 2006 (?), since I believe it's a terrific way for many of us to learn. I realize it may not work for everyone, and there are times when we're too busy to finish all the assignments. But I do believe that even learning just one new thing is great progress! And it's the little successes that encourage us to learn more. Bit by bit, step by step.

A couple of things that I think we need to do better if we run this again:

• I wish I'd set up a database to manage all the registrations, blogs, checklists of things. etc. I guess we just didn't expect 150 people to sign up!!! Wow, so glad we had such a turnout. But a database would have made my life simpler. 
• The social component of the project didn't really take off as we'd hoped. Many of you mentioned this also in your reflections. We thought the Facebook page would be a gathering spot, but it really didn't turn into that. Hesitant to create yet another social-space for people to have to remember to visit though. Maybe the truth is that most people didn't really care that much about the social component? I'm not sure. Something we need to include in a survey after the program ends. 
• I had another point in mind..... now I've forgotten it! My brain is mush! 

AWOL

Testing to make sure blogger is working. Seems to be?? And apologies for being AWOL this week! Teaching all week out of town.

Thing 8 - testing video embed

I'm surprised this worked. I don't think it would have worked in wordpress.com. To embed a TED video

• go watch the TED video
• copy the whole embed code. 
• switch to the EDIT HTML tab here on your blogger post 
• paste the code. 
• Should work!

Thing #7: Google Calendar and Evernote

GOOGLE CALENDAR: I didn't really intend to do my own post on Thing 7 today, but as I was updating my Google Calendar today, I realized it was a mess. So, I took some time out to figure out some answers to my problems. First of all, I had all my public training events in the default calendar and have been hesitant to update the calendar from my phone/iPad for fear of posting a doc appt or movie date on my public training calendar. Since I really didn't want to move all those events one by one, I dug around and found out how to move them in one fell swoop.  This post explains it. Having moved all those events, I had to change out the calendar that's embedded on my web site. That wasn't a problem.

With that done, I moved all my non-public business appts to my default calendar, combined all my personal appts and travel on another. And resisted the urge to set up even more calendars! I even remembered to double-check that only the workshop calendar was public. Only problem now, is that the Google tool to synchronize with Outlook only synchronizes the main Google calendar, I need to synchronize all of them. I need to find a solution for that - or give up on Outlook for good. But I still like the way Outlook prints a paper calendar that I can scribble on. Yes, paper and ink. How old-skool of me.

EVERNOTE:  I love Evernote (but then you knew that already). But the one thing that frustrated me was not being able to take a screenshot of a piece of a webpage and immediately store it in Evernote. When I see things I want to use in a presentation, I want to grab it before I forget about it, get the screenshot, the URL and write some quick notes and move on. Then all that stuff is waiting for me in a folder in EN when I get around to updating/creating the presentation. So, silly me, EN has a very nice screenshot feature and it was sitting there on the task bar of my browser all the time. I'd just never taken the time to look for that feature before. Doh!!! So if you install the Evernote browser tools, right click on the little icon in the task bar and select "show clipping panel". Now I'm feeling really curious and wondering what else I might be missing.

Thing 6: Online Meetings

I'm all out of sequence now and didn't use our catch up week to actually catch up! But I will. I will, I will.

As for online meetings, I love having this option for training and meeting. Would I prefer to be face to face? Much of the time, yes. But webinars provide the opportunity to check out something that might be of interest, but not so essential that I could justify spending time & money to travel to a conference or training session.

On the other side of the screen, I've presented a few webinars and it does take a bit of getting used to! I used Elluminate for some small group sessions and we practiced with the software quite a bit in advance to make sure the folks sponsoring the webinar could act as the moderators for the session. That worked fairly well.

Another time, I was invited to consult with some folks out of the area about a WordPress project. We used WebEx for that meeting. They were all in their meeting room with my computer being projected on their big screen. We could all hear each other, but I couldn't see them and they couldn't see me. That software worked well too.

Since I'll be doing more webinars in the future, for bigger audiences, I've been looking for tips on how to present effectively.  Tips for Effective Webinars has lots of great advice.

What advice do you have?

Thing 3: Photo Sharing

Since I'm so familiar with Flickr, I decided to challenge myself a bit and take a better look at Picasa, both the online photo album service and the desktop software.  I've had the desktop software installed for a long time, though I haven't used it as much as I could.

Two features that I love are the collage making option and the face recognition feature. The collages are simple to create (once you remember where the option is!) and are a great way to make visuals for presentations. Or just pretty collages of spring flowers. :)

The face recognition stuff is kind of amazing to me. It's so darned smart about picking up who's in your photos, even when someone's face has changed a lot over time. I had to laugh when it even picked out a face that was in a photo hanging on the wall in a photo that I'd taken in someone's living room!

Picasa has terrific options for organizing photos, adding tags to index them and editing tools. Naturally, being a Google tool, it has an option to upload photos to Blogger, which is how I posted the collage above. But even better, for us Flickr addicts, you can send photos to Flickr as well. This article explains how.

I also took another look at the online photo storage service also and scouted around to find the features that  are similar to familiar Flickr features. I won't be switching my loyalties from Flickr though, I have too much time and energy invested in building a community of friends and colleagues there.

Adding a flickr photo from a URL

If you're having  trouble adding flickr photos to your blogs, check out these screencasts:

• Add flickr photos to Blogger
• Add flickr photos to WordPress.com

More RSS, sort of.

Zite knows me!

Thanks to a post by one of our participants (SkillCollection) I learned about a new iPad app called Zite. While not really an RSS app, it is a content aggregator. I gave it a try and told it what my twitter name is and gave it  access to my Google Reader account. In a flash it created a personalized 'magazine' with articles it thought I might be interested in. What was most impressive was the topic categories it picked up on - see the photo. Pretty spot-on for me.

I further customized it by adding sections on gardening, photography, macintoshes, wine, food, and more. As I read articles and give them the thumbs up or down, Zite will get to know me better and get better at recommending articles. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

Flipboard

Though it takes a slightly different approach, another amazing iPad app that serves a similar purpose is Flipboard. It connects with social media tools like twitter and Facebook and turns your stream of status updates and shared links into magazine-like pages of content. What I like most is being able to add a folder of RSS feeds from Google Reader and have a specialized magazine on just the topic of that folder. 

I think Zite may be useful for discovering new blogs, news sites and such. While Flipboard is a good way to sort through all the sources you're already aware of.  I'll be using both of them for a while to compare. 

Thing 2: RSS

I know this has been a challenging topic for many, but everyone who has written a post so far seems to have made good progress understanding what RSS is. Some folks just don't want to subscribe to any blogs and that's fine, maybe somewhere down the line they'll find a blog they want to get updates from and the RSS lessons will come back to them.

So what have I learned this week? Mainly that Netvibes can be pretty flaky with getting updates to some feeds. And that the toolbar button isn't the best way to add feeds to a Netvibes page. I still think it's a good tool for sharing a public page of information, but I won't be using it for my own RSS aggregator. Google Reader is just too efficient for me to bail on it.

I love that I can connect with other people via Google Reader and that we can share interesting posts with each other. This really helps filter the ton of content that I try to sift through. Some people are really efficient about going through their lists of feeds and sharing the most interesting posts. I'm not so good at that and  feel a bit guilty when I depend on their hard work, so I do try to share interesting posts as often as I can. Building a strong community of people who are interested in the same topics is key to making this work.

Thing 1: Blogging

Ok, I'm going to join in the fun too and see what extra things I can learn about all these tools too.

One thing I discovered today is that it's not uncommon for Blogger to default to foreign languages. Someone had a problem with everything being in Japanese today. There's a fix for that! See the drop down box highlighted below? That's the language box - English is towards the bottom of that list.

I'm not as familiar with Blogger as I am with WordPress.com, so that's why I picked this tool.

Oh, right, forgot - Who am I?  I'm a librarian and have worked in the Capital District for over 30 years. First at RPI in Troy. And since 1997, I've run my own consulting company. I work with libraries and schools, mostly helping with technology issues, training and web projects. Most of my clients are in the Northeast, but I have had some fun trips to other parts of the country too.

When I'm not at the computer, you'll probably find me in the garden battling the weeds. Or maybe traveling overseas and exploring.