Shirlee’s Weblog

How appropriate!  I am working on the Twitter curriculum, and look what’s outside my window!  I call it My Twitter neighborhood.  They are bushtits and a hummingbird in the background!  You can click on the picture to get a larger version.  These are some of my favorite feathered friends.

Some librarians are really over the top.  These two, from Florence, Colorado, have written a song about their open source library software.  Keep in mind, this is a very small library (the staff totals 5) but it rocks!  Listen up — “it’s not Sirsi!” 

More Neat Google Stuff . . . 

Some of these tips you WILL NOT be able to utilize on library computers, but try them at home. CustomizeGoogle.com only works if you are using Firefox, and the attitude at the Internet Librarians’ Conference was—“if you aren’t, why not??”  What this will do for you Firefox users is:  

         Remove all ads;         

         Give you an infinite scroll of results so you do not have to select the next page;

          Add “favicons” to your search results (a box for you to put a check in so you can remember which ones you liked)         

          Numbers your results; and 

         Lets you repeat your search in other search engines! And much more; makes you want to check out this Firefox thingy!  

SearchMash is an unbranded Google site with a very clean interface.  The results are sorted by type:  one list is for web pages, one for images, one for blogs, one for videos and one for Wikipedia.  Once again, you have the ever-popular “infinite scroll!”  www.searchmash.com

 Other Stuff: Christmas shopping?  Check out www.thinkgeek.com, especially the “Think Geek Exclusives” in the Gift Guide.  Shower Shock Caffeinated Soap or a Wi-Fi Detector T-shirt might be just the thing for someone on your gift list! 

Is your electric bill escalating at an alarming rate?  Maybe this will help:  www.blackie.com.    What is it??  Read on: 

How is Blackle saving energy?

Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.” Roberson et al, 2002

I think I’m going to try this.   Not only does it save energy, it looks kinda cool, don’t you think?

 Another planet helper site is www.PrintGreener.com.  There is a free trial, and then a charge for the software that eliminates wasted paper, ink and trees.  Here is what blogger Treehugger.com has to say about the product:                   

You set Greenprint as your default printer and print; highlight the pages or images you want to delete, and then print to your favourite printer. A few extra seconds, a good look at what you are getting and thats it. It even comes with a little meter to tell you how much paper and ink you have saved to make you feel better. In this open source era, we have almost forgotten about paying for software. and as we said, every printer driver should do this as a matter of course.  It is a bit big at 12.9 meg and a bit slow on the printing, but hey, it is version 1.0! At end of 14 days, I suspect I will be shelling out $25 bucks for this. The meter may even indicate that it has paid for itself already!  Windows only.

More good stuff will be on its way, soon. . . 

This is so cool!  Log into www.google.com/experimental/Join one of the experiments (I’m starting at the top). 

If you selected the first experiment, go to the search screen and put in your query.  When your results come up, notice the tabs under the query blank.  Your results are shown in the “list” view.  Notice the commercial sites along the right side.   

Select “info” view.  Now along the right hand side you have choices!  You can select dates, measurements, location or images, depending on the nature of your search. Back to the tabs under the query blank:  select timelines.

The chronology of your search will be displayed in the timeline, but look down below!!  The chronology there is supported by links to articles, book reviews and resources.

Now click on the maps tab.  How great is that?  

Whew!  This should be very useful! 

I just returned from the Internet Librarian conference with a ton of notes/tips/ideas.  If you are interested in hearing more, visit this blog!   It will take me awhile to work through it all, but I think you will find it useful and fun—just like KRL2.0!!

Bundling was the traditional practice of wrapping one person in a bed accompanied by his/her courtier, usually as a part of courting behavior. The tradition is thought to have originated either in the Netherlands or in the British Isles and later became common in Colonial America, especially in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. The aim was to allow intimacy without sexual intercourse.  Wikipedia.

Don’t get excited;  bundling in Delicious is not going to be that interesting.  It’s more like tying up bunches of kindling with string!

Bundling involves categorizing your tags under a major heading; this allows you to use more specific tags for your sites and group them under a general term.  The general terms with the tags assigned to each will be listed on the right of the page–much neater than a confusing list of tons of tags!

Tags can be assigned to more than one bundle.  You might, for instance have  sites that pertain both to geneaology and immigration, or training and employment.  Placing tags in multiple bundles means you are less likely to miss a site that could help you find information. 

It works best to bundle your tags as you save your sites.  Go to the bottom of your Favorites page and click on “bundle tags.”  The bundle tags page shows all the tags created.  If this is your first bundle, none of your tags will be in a frame.  As they are added to bundles, they will have a frame around them.

Name your bundle, select your tags and SAVE your bundle when you are finished.  You can go back to your bundle at any time to remove a tag; simply open the bundle, click on the tag you want to remove and resave the bundle.

If you have a category that you want to remain at the top of your list, give it a bundle name that begins with “A” or “1.”  Remember, too, you can use non-linguistic symbols for either tags or bundle names.

Between imaginative tagging and artful bundling, you can create a beautiful delicious to organize and share your sites!

As you select sites and save them in Delicious, you may or may not have some idea of how you want to structure your account.  If you save more than one hundered sites, you are probably going to have a very long list of tags and, although you can use the searching facility to help you locate what you have saved, it would be easier to keep the tags down to the necessary and not be redundant.

For instance, look at your tags in the list format and see which can be combined.  If you have a situation like the title to this post, combine the tags into one tag.  This is very easy to do in Delicious:  the last line on the Your Favorites page is “edit tags.”  You can decide which of the three tags is most useful and rename the other two.

Tags are space delineated.  That means that if you have a two-word tag, it has to be connected by–for instance–an underscore, a hyphen, a period, a slash or a colon or you are creating two tags.    Check your tag list for those orphans.  Because there are so many sites and so many tags in ptref, I recently utilized the colon as a way to keep the tags together in the tag list.  This is a great help if you bundle your tags.

Social_Libraries

• 3 Social_Libraries:Blogs
• 1 Social_Libraries:Content_Management
• 5 Social_Libraries:Delicious
• 1 Social_Libraries:Libraries
• 1 Social_Libraries:Library_Blogs
• 7 Social_Libraries:Online_Education
• 4 Social_Libraries:RSS
• 1 Social_Libraries:Tagging
• 1 Social_Libraries:Wikis

You will be using tags in Flickr, too.  I am doing a pictorial history of my family, and I find it helpful to tag each picture with a chronological tag, a tag with the name(s) of the person(s) in the photo, or a location.  Subject tags might also be used. 

I was recently asked, “Why would I want a network in Delicious, and what is it a network of, anyway!”  

Delicious networks are where you save the name of another Delicious user so that you can easily access his account.  Once you add the name of a fellow Delicious user to your network, all you have to do is go to your network page and click on that name to see the sites he has saved.  Obviously, there would be some reason for you to want to do this:  either you are part of a group where members want to share sites, or you have happened upon another user while working in Delicious who seems to be interested in your subjects and you are curious about other sites he may have saved. 

Here is what the ptref network looks like: http://del.icio.us/network/ptref  Sites have been added for many KRL branches so that we can share reference sites among us.  There is also a site for Port Orchard Circulation, Youth Services, and Wally’s programming site.  Other entries are for Delicious accounts that we may want to refer to in the future.

When you visit a different account, you can select any of the sites  saved and shared and go to that site.  Once you are on the site, you can click on the Delicious Tag in your links or toolbar and save that site to your own account.  Anyone who finds your account can do the same thing and, once they have accessed your account, their account name is listed as a “fan.”  If they were interested in your site, you might find their site interesting, also, so go explore it! 

Another way to network in Delicious is to look at the list of your own favorites and click on the  “saved by ___ other people” notation in the record.  This will take you to a list of all those who saved that site AND the tags they used.  You can view all of the tags in a separate list or as a tag cloud, which shows which tags are the most popular.  This is a great was to expand your horizons, and you may find another user you will want to add to your network.

If you have friends or relatives who have Delicious accounts and you want to share your web discoveries with them, simply edit the site once it is saved in your favorites by adding “for:biref” subsituting their account name for biref.  You can also send a site the same way from the posting screen when you first save it.  The person you have sent it to will find it in “Links for You” at the top of the page when he logs into his account.  He can save it or not.

Networking in Delicious is sharing and social.  Try it out!

More and more libraries are using del.icio.us for internet linking.  Some are even displaying their Tag Clouds!  Even little tiny Seldovia Public Library in Alaska, which doesn’t even have an online catalog, has a blog with a link to their del.icio.us bookmarks!  Check it out at:  http://seldovialibrary.blogspot.com

Another great use for del.icio.us is in YA services.  Obviously, their world and vocabulary changes faster than most adults can keep up with, so del.icio.us is a perfect match for that evolving world.   See http://www.library.nashville.org/teens/teenweb.asp

Another example–in adult reference–is at  http://www.menashalibrary.org/research/websites

Many other libraries use del.icio.us, but are using different interfaces.  Check out the long list here:  http://angelacw.wordpress.com/2007/06/04/delicious-libraries/

I did my first podcast from home, downloading Audacity and purchasing a Logi-tech earphone/mic set.  It is really fun!  I even sent a few talking emails.  I think this little tool has great potential in the library for training.  How great it would be if I could record my two-three hour long Sirsi trainings!  I’m working on this one!

This is my first posting on my first blog.  My curriculum for Week 3 is semi-finished.  I want to do a podcast for the intro, and I need to add some materials on subscriptions and saving sites from a public computer.  I have finally mastered inserting photos where I want them.  I wish I’d named this something else, but I can’t change it!