Thing #39 -- Digital Storytelling

I knew this one would take a long time, I could edit and tweak my scrapbook forever! But I finally had to stop if I'm going to get the rest of the Things done in time.

I chose to try out Scrapblog for this Thing. It was quite easy to use, even without viewing the video tour or any of the help provided. I had no problem choosing a theme or building pages. There are a lot of options--almost too many. I'd keep browsing around for different backgrounds or objects to add to my book. I chose a similar theme to what I used for Thing #37, my garden.



Since I live at quite a distance from the rest of my family, I keep trying different ways to keep in touch with them by sharing photos. The tools I've learned about here are things I am sure I will use again.

The information about using scrapbooking for education reminded me that when my brother was working on his teaching license he learned about using scrapbooks as a tool. I can definitely see its place in education. In some classes at my college students are required to keep a journal, and e-portfolios are becoming common. Creating an electronic, multimedia scrapbook is an intriguing variation on both these approaches.

Thing #38 -- Screencasting

The things in this Thing are pretty old hat to me at this point. I've been using SnagIt for years to put screen shots in the database guides I create for students or email answers to student requests for help. And I also use Grab when on my Mac. In fact, it's how I captured my Wordle word cloud to put in the previous Thing.

I've used various tools for screencasting. The first one I created was about 2 years ago, using Wink. I didn't find the learning curve very steep, and it has a surprising amount of functionality for a free program. While it didn't take long to record my capture, it was extremely time consuming to edit my tutorial to get it the way I wanted it--adjusting the timing and adding branching. I have since given up on Wink in favor of Adobe's Captivate, which makes it a lot easier to edit my captures.

Primarily I use these tools for creating full-blown database tutorials. However, over the winter I discovered Jing, and have been using it heavily since. Since there are no post-capture editing options, it doesn't have the functionality of Wink or Captivate (or Camtasia, for that matter), but it fills a need for creating "quick and dirty" videos. Students often ask me for help via email. In the past I would answer their questions with a combination of screen shots and blow-by-blow text descriptions of what to look for and where to click. With Jing, I just create a short video of what they should do, upload it to Screencast.com, and email a link to the video. The students have found this approach very helpful, and it takes much less time to make the video than to explain the same concepts in the text of an email.

Thing #37 -- Photo Tales

For organizing personal photos I use iPhoto and combine it with the Gallery feature of my MobileMe account to share them on the web. I've found iPhoto extremely easy to use, and it's pretty economical for getting prints of pictures. The application comes with tools to design cards and upload the images and your design to Apple for printing. We used this for our Christmas cards this past year. One other project my husband is working on is a family memory book of old family photos. He is using iPhoto to layout the pictures on each page and add captions of who is in each photo. Once he's finished we'll be able to get a hardcover book of the pictures to give to family members.

Obviously, I have found a lot of use for these kinds of tools in my personal life, but (as with many of these Things) I'm not sure what place they have in my library. My college has a Flickr account used to share photos of student events and other happenings on campus, but the library doesn't. Photos that we share are posted to our Facebook page. One potential use of the tools in this thing would be to post links to some of the stock photo sites or captioning sites for students who may need to use images in presentations. But then again, how likely would students be to think of the library web site as a resource to fill that need?

I've played around some with iMovie, but for this Thing I tried One True Media's montage site. It is pretty intuitive to use, and offers a lot of choices for editing, even if you don't have a premium (ie. paid) account. My only quibble is the image quality of the online sharable version isn't very good, and the watermark takes up a lot of real estate. I used it for this project, but don't know if I will go back to it agian. Given the time of year, I created a story about my garden.

Make photo slide shows at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Thing #36 -- Generators

I played around a lot with the Generator Blog, Big Huge Labs and Glass Giant for Thing #5 and Thing #6, so I didn't go back to them this time. The category I was most interested in was the Tag Cloud links. Tag clouds have intrigued me ever since I became aware of them. I like the way their visual communication style makes search results, blog postings or other "data sets" easy to comprehend. At a conference session a couple years ago I wrote in my notes, "How do you make a tag cloud?" and I quickly replaced the standard label list on this blog with a tag cloud.

One of the most creative uses of tag clouds I've seen is Hindsight is Always 20/20 by R. Luke Dubois. This project takes the text of each of the President's State of the Union addresses and presents them as word clouds in the format of eye charts. Browsing through the charts, it's easy to discover what issues were important (or believed to be important) at different stages of our country's history.

Below is a cloud I created with Wordle using the words in this blog. I like the many options the site provides for customizing font, color, and word layout.

I did go to ToonDoo to find a library-related comic. The one I chose is by subDes, who has done many strips with a library theme. I don't like the options the site gives for embedding comics, however. One makes you have to scroll through the strip, which lessens some of its impact. The other option doesn't seem to work, it just shows blank space.

by subDes | Create your own Cartoon at www.toondoo.com

Thing #35 -- Books 2.0

As an academic librarian, I don't get much chance to help people find books to read just because they want to--mostly they're looking for books for class assignments. Those students who are looking for books for pleasure are thrown off by the fact that all our fiction isn't in one place like at their public library, and they don't want to browse huge chunks of the P call number range to find a book. (Or sometimes they want audio books to listen too as they drive home for vacations. We don't have any of those.) This is changing, though. We're trying to foster "extracurricular" reading on campus by beginning a browsing collection. A small portion of the book budget is now dedicated to purchasing books for pleasure reading, and these books are shelved in a prominent place at the entrance to the main stacks area. No confusing LC call numbers, instead it's alphabetical by author. I'm interested to see how much that collection will be used once students really discover it.

Our library also has a collection of juvenile books. These are to support the Education department, but they are also used by students, faculty, and staff with children. I was interested if the sites listed for this Thing under Children's Books would be useful for the Children's Literature Guide I maintain for the Education department. I already link to International Children's Digital Library, and was disappointed to see Lookybook no longer online.

I spent a lot of time looking around BookCrossing to if any books had been released near me, and viewing the histories of books that had several entries. I will definitely keep this site in mind the next time I have books I no longer want to keep. I also looked at BookStumpers. This site would have been useful a couple of years ago when I tried, unsuccessfully, to discover the name of a book a friend remembered from her childhood.

Thing #34 -- Online Answer Sites

I'm familiar with Slam the Boards, as I participated for several months when it first started. Primarily I answered questions on Yahoo! Answers, but I also did a few on WikiAnswers and Askville. During one session I focused on song lyrics questions, which are easy to answer using Google. I would also look for and answer questions related to the Twin Cities (travel, restaurants, etc.) or subjects in which I have expertise. In my answers I always made sure to include the fact that I was a librarian. It's been close to a year since I've participated, however. I began doing more virtual reference at my library, and with that and my regular reference desk hours I didn't feel I had any more time to devote to reference outside. And online answer sites do take a lot of time. The hardest thing for me wasn't answering the questions, it was finding suitable questions to respond to. Even filtering by specific subjects or keywords still left a lot of questions to browse through. I didn't feel comfortable answering any dealing with relationships or medical matters. Or the open ended questions that didn't really have an answer. I wonder if the people asking those view online answer sites as a type of social network--they're just looking to have a conversation with other people.

In a way, that's part of the appeal of these sites--they're the online equivalent of asking around when you want to know something. Studies have shown that's what people tend to do first, rather than turning to "experts" or researching for themselves. Even though they are asking an anonymous community rather than friends and family, they are still drawn to online answer sites over more traditional, library-based methods. Other qualities that make the sites bigger draws over reference librarians for some people are their easy availability, 24/7, and the ability for people to remain anonymous if they choose.

The other type of question I avoided were ones that appeared to be homework assignments. As an academic librarian, my philosophy is to be more concerned with teaching students how to find information for themselves, rather than simply giving it to them. This is often the type of encounter I'll have at the reference desk, but it's probably not the type of answer most online questioners are looking for.

Thing #33 -- Travel 2.0

At this point in my life I don't travel very much, and when I do it's usually to known places rather than new ones. I also tend to not pay a lot of attention to other people's reviews--it's hard to know what their criteria for judging are, or how similar those criteria are to mine. So I was a little skeptical about spending a lot of time exploring the sites listed for this Thing. But I can see the appeal they would have for other people.

Several of the mashup sites interested me, however. I like the focus of Green Routes, and can see myself using it to find places to visit on "travels" close to home. With my interest in food and wine, 2 other sites interested me: Wines and Times, because I have enjoyed visiting many wineries in the past, and My Kugelhopf for its focus on food and enjoyable writing. And the next time I do take a trip I'll have to remember MapVivo (provided it's still around in this quickly changing 2.0 world!). It would be fun to use to map out a trip, as well as to share it with friends and family afterwards.

How does any of this fit into my (academic) library? I don't think it does. We hardly ever get travel-related questions at reference, and have removed most of the non-academic related pages of links from our web site, figuring students have other places they are more likely to look for that kind of information than the library.