I love flash and unfortunately, I am not picky about substance. However I do want the widgets I use to be meaningful. I am experimenting with BubbleShare as I hope we can successfully incorporate it with the Mooresville project. The eBay widget I am exploring as I update my handouts for the Searching on eBay class. eBay is constantly changing which makes my screenshots obsolete quickly.
The following is from a New York Times article detailing widgets as being used by bloggers. Ed Anuff, a co-founder of Widgetbox.com, divides widgets into three categories. “One is self-expression widgets, like photo galleries, games or YouTube videos that you like,” he said. The second category includes widgets that generate revenue for a blogger, like a box that displays auctions from a particular eBay category, or a blogger’s favorite DVDs from Amazon.com.
The third category, Mr. Anuff said, encompasses “site-enhancement widgets, like discussion forums, news feeds or a guest book, which provide better utility for your Web site.” Widgetbox is a site begun in September (2006) that collects widgets, spotlighting the newest and most popular ones; it offers more than 500 widgets.
As of September 25 of this year, Widgetbox now offers over 20,000 widgets. I wanted to explore widgets which I thought could be a viable option for Mooresville. I know every public library in the state of Indiana is required to fill out a report detailing their impact on their surrounding communities. One of the seemingly endless figures that is needed for the report are the number of hits on the library's website. On one of the listservs I belong to, there was a discussion not too long ago about where the counter should be located to provide the most accurate results.
Hence I have incorporated a counter on this blog, just to see how hard it is to create and use. I ran across the black cat widget on the main page of Widgetbox and while not practical for Mooresville (maybe at Halloween???), it gives me great enjoyment, especially when the cat is purring. A contented cat provides a calming influence and has been proven to lower blood pressure.
So my frustration this week has been my inability to successfully insert either a counter or change the skin for ALL users on the MPL wiki. Hopefully at class, I can verbally communicate my efforts and we, as a team, can rectify the problem. My fingers are crossed.
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Monday, September 24, 2007
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
No One Cares What You Had for Lunch and other Ideas
Since we are dealing with library procedures and flowcharting them this week, my topic, in a roundabout way, deals with improving the flow of how long a printed book takes to get on a shelf once it has entered our physical location. Sara Laughlin, new interim director of the Monroe County Public Library and adjunct faculty member at the SLIS program here at IUPUI, conducted several many months’ long “Continuous Improvement” training sessions for my library. One of the processes able to be dissected (the terminology was: charter given) by a group of diverse employees was “How long it takes to process a book before it is available to patrons”.
The idea was to eliminate unnecessary or duplicate efforts to narrow the wait time. I had no idea all the different steps involved except for the part where a book sits on a cart in the Reference Area Workroom for anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks prior to being sent to Lending Services. Lending then “receives” the books and they are shelved or placed in holding or whatever happens to them. I never really understood what the books were doing just sitting on a cart in Reference until I witnessed librarians perusing them when they had the time.
My initial thoughts regarding this sitting of materials were: “Eureka! We can just cut this part out.” Well, that did not turn out to be a viable option. Here’s why… The reference librarians act in a Reader’s Advisory position for patrons. They felt strongly that they needed to view all the books entering the collection so they would have a better understanding of available resources, appropriate subject headings and not potentially ordering duplicate books. The ordering duties are split among more than one librarian so they are all legitimate reasons for continuing the practice. Ultimately, the amount of time the books sit in Reference has been drastically cut but it still does happen.
This brings me to my topic of my blog. One of the books sitting on a cart recently was “No One Cares What You Had for Lunch – 100 Ideas for Your Blog” by Maggie Mason. According to the review distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc., it is “a unique idea-book for bloggers seeking fun, creative inspiration. Margaret gives writers the prompts they need to describe, imagine, investigate and generate clever posts.”
Since I do not want to write unfunny, uncreative, uninspired posts, I thought “Eureka! I’m gonna check this book out immediately.” That did not happen because I personally thought many of the ideas were not exactly what I would consider inspired: Gripe, Tell us what you have done, and other briefly described writing prompts
I did go to Margaret Mason’s blog: MightyGirl.com (it is famous among dozens!) to check out what she was blogging about. I thoroughly enjoyed the post from September 3:
http://mightygirl.com/2007/09/03/duh/
The idea was to eliminate unnecessary or duplicate efforts to narrow the wait time. I had no idea all the different steps involved except for the part where a book sits on a cart in the Reference Area Workroom for anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks prior to being sent to Lending Services. Lending then “receives” the books and they are shelved or placed in holding or whatever happens to them. I never really understood what the books were doing just sitting on a cart in Reference until I witnessed librarians perusing them when they had the time.
My initial thoughts regarding this sitting of materials were: “Eureka! We can just cut this part out.” Well, that did not turn out to be a viable option. Here’s why… The reference librarians act in a Reader’s Advisory position for patrons. They felt strongly that they needed to view all the books entering the collection so they would have a better understanding of available resources, appropriate subject headings and not potentially ordering duplicate books. The ordering duties are split among more than one librarian so they are all legitimate reasons for continuing the practice. Ultimately, the amount of time the books sit in Reference has been drastically cut but it still does happen.
This brings me to my topic of my blog. One of the books sitting on a cart recently was “No One Cares What You Had for Lunch – 100 Ideas for Your Blog” by Maggie Mason. According to the review distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc., it is “a unique idea-book for bloggers seeking fun, creative inspiration. Margaret gives writers the prompts they need to describe, imagine, investigate and generate clever posts.”
Since I do not want to write unfunny, uncreative, uninspired posts, I thought “Eureka! I’m gonna check this book out immediately.” That did not happen because I personally thought many of the ideas were not exactly what I would consider inspired: Gripe, Tell us what you have done, and other briefly described writing prompts
I did go to Margaret Mason’s blog: MightyGirl.com (it is famous among dozens!) to check out what she was blogging about. I thoroughly enjoyed the post from September 3:
http://mightygirl.com/2007/09/03/duh/
"This week I’m posting from ideas in my book, No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog. I’m doing this because I spent far too long wondering what to write about this morning before it occurred to me that I had written a book on the subject. Can you feel the force of my intellect from where you are? The way it’s blowing your face back slightly? I thought so. "
She seems like the type of person I would like to be friends with or have as a coworker: one who can laugh at themselves.
So, I see nothing wrong with writing a blog entry about a book which deals with helping you come up with material for writing a blog entry.
Friday, September 7, 2007
Medieval Help Desk Part 2
A coworker recommended this video as a possibility for the “entertainment combined with a thought provoking sentiments” segment during an upcoming Staff Institute day. As soon as I saw it, I thought: "This shows better than any words I can write, how new technology users sometimes feel." While I laughed all the way through, another coworker thought it was mean-spirited as she perceived it as poking fun at technologically challenged individuals. I can see both sides of the argument however I still think it is priceless.
I especially like the part where the Help Desk person asks the user “Did you read the manual?” Well, it is definitely a Catch-22 situation as the manual is in the same format as the book, just smaller. If the user has difficulty in reading a book, then theoretically how did the creators of the manual think the user could read the manual? This lack of comprehension by designers of documentation and other help systems is the bane of new users worldwide.
The video is from a Norwegian television show called Øystein & Meg which translates to Øystein & I. Originally aired in 2001 by NRK, it was a big hit in literacy circles in February 2007 when it was posted on YouTube. There are other versions out on YouTube which differ in brightness. Also the English translation varies from different submitters and since I do not speak Norwegian, I choose this version as it is the one posted by the actual producers. It is written by Knut Nærum and performed by Øystein Bache and Rune Gokstad, according to the Norwegian Broadcasting Channel.
I had to break my blog posting into two parts as YouTube does allow you to post directly to Blogger however you can not enter any additional text as it then causes an error entitled "unknown error". So after a couple of tries, I figured out I could simply post the video with no accompanying text and have an entry with the descriptive content. Without doubt, this is a case of "live and learn" for me.
I especially like the part where the Help Desk person asks the user “Did you read the manual?” Well, it is definitely a Catch-22 situation as the manual is in the same format as the book, just smaller. If the user has difficulty in reading a book, then theoretically how did the creators of the manual think the user could read the manual? This lack of comprehension by designers of documentation and other help systems is the bane of new users worldwide.
The video is from a Norwegian television show called Øystein & Meg which translates to Øystein & I. Originally aired in 2001 by NRK, it was a big hit in literacy circles in February 2007 when it was posted on YouTube. There are other versions out on YouTube which differ in brightness. Also the English translation varies from different submitters and since I do not speak Norwegian, I choose this version as it is the one posted by the actual producers. It is written by Knut Nærum and performed by Øystein Bache and Rune Gokstad, according to the Norwegian Broadcasting Channel.
I had to break my blog posting into two parts as YouTube does allow you to post directly to Blogger however you can not enter any additional text as it then causes an error entitled "unknown error". So after a couple of tries, I figured out I could simply post the video with no accompanying text and have an entry with the descriptive content. Without doubt, this is a case of "live and learn" for me.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
How Many Is Too Many
Ok, I am asking how many is too many accounts? I am so frustrated right now because it has taken me seven different attempts to access my gmail account to post to this blog. I did not realize I had two Gmail accounts so I kept trying to log in using my first (and I thought only) Gmail account to get into my blog on blogger. A waste of over 45 minutes when I could have spent my time spell-checking, editing and posting my blog entry. I truly felt like I was on a hamster wheel in the town of Aggravation, New Mexico. Inane error messages such as “that account does not exist” to “username and password do not match” to “reclaim your old blogger account” did not help. I wish it had said “Hey, not that Gmail account but the other one - you know, the one where you quickly created a gmail account to access something and promptly forgot about it.”
Personally, I try to keep track of five different email accounts.
2 Yahoo! Accounts: one I use to teach an email class and one I used to use as football team mom
1 Verizon email: this is my main email account for family
1 work email: use it at work
1 college email: Where all correspondence from my school ends up
All have different passwords. At work, we have easily over 40 usernames and passwords to provide online access for different sources such as the New York Times subscription to Interlibrary Loan to our new payroll system which forces us to change our password EVERY MONTH.
All these passwords and accounts cause needless confusion and eat up valuable work time. Currently I am researching using Meebo for our instant messaging “Chat with a Reference Librarian”. I needed to set up new 5 different messaging clients (AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, Jabber and ICQ) to test it out. No problem except that another librarian thought I had reset the AOL password and delayed replying to email questions over the weekend because she did not think she could use AOL. AOL blocks as spam all emails from our library so we have to answer patrons’ questions using a special AOL account.
I am going to answer my initial question. How many is too many? When you can not remember them all.
Personally, I try to keep track of five different email accounts.
2 Yahoo! Accounts: one I use to teach an email class and one I used to use as football team mom
1 Verizon email: this is my main email account for family
1 work email: use it at work
1 college email: Where all correspondence from my school ends up
All have different passwords. At work, we have easily over 40 usernames and passwords to provide online access for different sources such as the New York Times subscription to Interlibrary Loan to our new payroll system which forces us to change our password EVERY MONTH.
All these passwords and accounts cause needless confusion and eat up valuable work time. Currently I am researching using Meebo for our instant messaging “Chat with a Reference Librarian”. I needed to set up new 5 different messaging clients (AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, Jabber and ICQ) to test it out. No problem except that another librarian thought I had reset the AOL password and delayed replying to email questions over the weekend because she did not think she could use AOL. AOL blocks as spam all emails from our library so we have to answer patrons’ questions using a special AOL account.
I am going to answer my initial question. How many is too many? When you can not remember them all.
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