Disappointment

I had my last online class yesterday afternoon and it was as much of a disappointment as the previous two. Or I should say three since I missed one while I was at CiL and he never got back to me about how I could make that up. Anyway, we learned about iGoogle and how to create our own custom search engines with Google.

I haven't done this custom search engine thing yet. I wanted to know more about how you could use this for reference since the class was supposed to be about new ways to do reference in the 21st century. I think this could have great applications for searching government documents in certain areas. You can also put the Google gadget on your iGoogle page, and perhaps find the code to put the search box on a subject guide Web site or in Moodle (our course management system).

Speaking of search boxes, I went out for wings with two friends last night. Lynette had read part of my blog that discussed widgets and wanted to know what a "widget" was. The definition of a GUI widget is in Wikipedia. They had to add "GUI" to it because "widget" apparently means many different things in the context of economics, beer, TV, comics, and law. Even within computing, it has different meanings. I know previously this and "gadget" (which even in the context I'm interested in can be used interchangeably) have also meant the same as "thingy," as in "oh, he sells some type of widget or other." I guess looking at the other meanings for this word, it is understandable why it is so hard to explain to people. It's all the more complicated when you are upto your wrists in Cajun chicken wing sauce rather than in front of a computer where you can pull up iGoogle and show a wide variety of widgets/gadgets.

We may be inviting one of the CiL speakers to come do a presentation to a local library organization on Web 2.0 technologies. One of the organizers was particularly interested in a speaker who talked about mashups at CiL. I did not attend this as something that seemed more relevant at the time was competing for that time slot. I am excited since I don't know the first thing about mashups and see that as probably the hardest Web 2.0 technology. I haven't been able to figure it out by reading about it on the Web or even by looking at examples. This won't be until October, but still. I also should get my chance to present a poster session as well.

Flash Programming Genius

Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but you have to celebrate life's little milestones!

I have successfully created a brief Flash quiz that tracks how many questions a person has right and what their name is. You can find my quiz here. You may want to know the answers to the quiz... the first answer is "Snowden," there are 5 librarians and 4 floors to the library. They're silly questions, but that wasn't the point.

I will still need to figure out how to do other types of question input, but I am so proud of the work I accomplished this morning!

Britannica & Free Blogger Access

I just read in LIS News that The Encyclopaedia Britannica is offering free access to bloggers. I have access through my library, but they allow you to link to their full text articles on your blog. I guess they're going to comb my site and see if I'm legitimate, I will be very surprised if I don't pass the test, I'm sure it's already annoying how often I post.

If it works out, I could link to all kinds of things and be a good librarian role model instead of linking to Wikipedia.

If anyone else is interested, you can find their application form here.

Sprylibrarian

I love blogging, but there are still things I don't understand. During the whole non-MLS-librarians thing where I gained a bit of notoriety (and probably not the good kind), I had a comment from the Sprylibrarian that was very supportive and intelligent. I wanted to read her blog, but couldn't find it by clicking on her name or through a Google search. I must not have been doing a good job at Google searching, or gave up too quickly (I have been struggling at not spending too much time looking at blogs since I got into them at the beginning of the semester). Anyway, my Google Alert on "Reflections from a Small College Library" returned her blog, which links to mine under her "What I look at" section. I'm not sure which excites me more, that she's put me as a permanent link on her blog or that I finally found hers, esp. since she is also from a small college.

This is a wonderful way to start a new week, esp. the first week of summer for us and a particularly dreary Monday morning when I am stressed out about many huge life changes and minor frustrations with myself and office politics.

I am planning on spending a good part of the morning reading this, esp. since there is a heavy focus on marketing and I think that is the key thing our library could work on. We've got great people, great services, an impressive colletion, good faculty-relations, innovative ideas, a top-notch instruction program, yet struggle to get students involved.

I don't understand how our students aren't overwhelmed by the amount of information available to them. I have all but given up fiction and am reading stuff like Beginning Flash Game Programming for Dummies and Home Buying for Dummies. I'm overwhelmed by trying to learn basic programming as quickly as possible for my professional activities, and gather all necessary information to get married and buy a house this summer. I feel sometimes like my brain will explode. I guess most people don't bother with seeking out information for buying a house and making informed decisions. That probably is why the housing market is currently in so much trouble.

I digress. Thank you Sprylibrarian for linking to me so that I could find you!

What I'm Learning

I put my new JavaScript knowledge to use to display our impessive collection of READ posters yesterday. I can say "impressive" because I had nothing to do with the creation of the posters other than standing in the Harry Potter one. I already knew how to do slide shows, but did learn quite a bit from the Learn JavaScript book our library has an e-copy of.

I'm also slowly working my way through Beginning Flash Game Programming for Dummies. I'm not all that bad with basic flash (see my tutorials), but have been really limited as to how much interactivity is involved. The previous books I used that discussed the programming aspects were way over my head.

I am so excited to see that after working through a basic JavaScript book, the ActionScript in Flash is almost identical... except easier! The main difference that makes it more difficult, though, is that the code is put into a particular frame of a Flash document, so it doesn't apply to the rest of the document. That means if you want something in on eplace to affect something somewhere else, then you have to add additional code to tell it that. Once I wrap my brain around how that works, I'm sure I'll get pretty good at it. I can already have it generate random numbers between 1-6 to simulate rolling a die, a person can enter their name and get a message saying "Hello, !" (with whatever name they entered), and a math game that keeps score. I understand almost all of the code, though I haven't tried to apply it to new situations yet.

I presented my CiL 2008 to the staff this morning. I had to stop myself a few times to explain what a widget was, what RSS was, what Web 2.0 meant... I'm sure I forgot to explain a few things, and I regret not being able to get other people as excited as I am about what I learned, or how cool it was to see the librarian blog celebrities.

Success as a Librarian

My two favorite blogs are The Pegasus Librarian and Meredith Farkas's Information Wants to Be Free. Meredith wrote a recent post about success as a fairly newbie librarian. Now that I am finishing my second year as a professional librarian, I have been thinking a lot about expanding my horizons. I want to be "more successful," though I am proud of what I have accomplished so far.

Two things that go beyond my college's walls include my Reference Portal featuring Reference Universe and our redesign of our classic OPAC. Reference Universe chose our library to be the first four-year college profile for their Web site because of my Reference Portal, which strove to combine print and electronic resources, which is what their product tries to do. I haven't heard that they have officially published this profile yet, so I can't link to it. But she was very impressed with the page I had created. The reason I am proud of the redesign of our classic OPAC is that TLC, the vendor we get our OPAC from, decided to base the next version of their standard OPAC on my design. When I saw them at Midwinter she looked at my name and institution and said "oh, you're the one who did the design!" And that was something I had done (with some help from a coworker) after two months of professional experience.

This year has been a big year of transition for me. I have started my annual reflection for the past year, though I keep stopping. As far as successes, my reputation with faculty is great, I taught almost 70 classes this year, my Harry Potter Night back in October was an enormous success, and I believe my efforts to improve traffic to the reference desk paid off better than I could have hoped for (unfortunately we weren't keeping the right kind of stats to prove that). I restructured the library's Web site and moved it into the new college format, instituted Meebo IM reference, had positive feedback on my roll as discussion leader for our college's Scholar's Program, am a valued member of at least one campus committee, and created several signs that seemed to have greatly improved students' ability to navigate the library. I have also worked with two evaluation projects that have provided a lot of useful data and hope to work with a statistics professor this summer to get more information out of that data.

When I say it was a year of transition, I feel I have spent a lot of time on and off the clock transitioning into a more technical-minded librarian. I started this blog saying I was a techie-impostor. I'm still shy about calling myself a true techie. But I am very comfortable with HTML, Photoshop, Illustrator, Moodle, basic Flash, I am addicted to iGoogle, Shelfari, Flickr, widgets, writing blogs, reading blogs, RSS, growing warmer on facebook and MySpace, fascinated with library videos on YouTube (though I do have to learn to focus...). I am teaching myself JavaScript and ActionScript. I was completely in my element at Computers in Libraries and nothing that was presented to me was completely new (though I don't know anything about mashups and still don't understand Twitter). I played around with Second Life two years ago but haven't seen any evidence our students use it.

I'm now finding that as I attend this online class and think about attending local workshops on Web 2.0, I know more than the instructors. The five-part online class I am currently taking this month is turning out to be a waste of time. I even jumped in at one point because he was telling everyone the wrong information about Reference Universe. I feel bad that my library paid $160 for this class when I know I could have taught it much better.

In comparison with people like Meredith Farkas, my knowledge might not be all that impressive. But I don't think that's what's normal. The other librarians at my library are not all that into any of these technology things. Some of these make your life so much easier and have a lot of potential to enhance reference and instruction. Knowing how these things work and how students use them is critical to our effectiveness and relevance.

I think after such a long post, I am a librarian who is truly passionate about what I do. I don't want to be a "celebrity" in the library profession, but I want to help others. I have a hard time seeing the niche that needs filled because I'm having a hard time figuring out what others don't know. I would love to create resources to help librarians who did not have training in the things I know to transition to a tech-minded librarian. Then they can contribute their ideas and creativity so I can use their ideas where I am and be inspired to yet new things.

Okay. I'd better get off my soapbox now. I'm not normally a self-promoter. I think I need to learn to be one because I think it would make people more interested in the things I could show them. There are so many great things out there that have endless possibilities with just a dash of creativity and patience.

Shelfari Updates

I just got an e-mail from Shelfari with their update announcements. I'm so excited about the addition of a "When I read this" date you can add to each book. If you want to share your books, when you read a book is an important thing to share!

For those who aren't familiar with Shelfari, it's a social networking site for bibliophiles. I believe there are a number of these, Library Thing being a popular one I don't know much about. You can post books you have read, are reading, want to read, give each one "tag" keywords, tag your favorites, rate and review each one, set up groups, make friends, look for people with similar tastes and contact them. It's a lot of fun, though I know all four of my "friends" in real life, so I'm not using the site to its fullest capabilities.

The addition of the date feature may seem very trivial, but it's one I have wanted since I got hooked on this site!