Summary (Thing #23)

My favorite discoveries were the Library Thing website and the Web 2.0 Awards. I am now much more familiar with the concepts of social networking, RSS feeds, wikis and podcasts. I've tried to relate the new things I learned to the work done in libraries. Podcasts are useful for storytimes for children and book talks for all ages. Blogs and wikis are a great way of encouraging input from the community, with book reviews, discussions and suggestions. I really enjoyed reading the blogs of others and found many of the exercises to be fun and challenging. One frustration I had was the amount of time it took to complete the program - much of it was done on my own time since I just didn't have the time in my work schedule. All in all it was a wonderful and rewarding learning experience.

Audiobooks (Thing #22)

There are over 20,000 titles in the Project Gutenberg catalog.I downloaded Pride and Prejudice by clicking on the title and then selecting a download site, which was the Guttenberg site on Sailor: ftp://sailor.gutenberg.lib.md.us/gutenberg/etext98/pandp12.zip
I was able to download and open both the plain text and pdf versions. In addition to searching the online catalog, books can be chosen by browsing the "Top 100 Books" list. I chose Pride andPrejudice from the list of "Top 100 Ebooks yesterday". There is also a list of "Top 100 Authors yesterday", from which I chose William Shakespeare and was given the choice of dozens of Shakespearean plays. You can also search the most recent titles posted, and subscribe to an RSS feed of these books. There is a Project Gutenberg wiki to which users are invited to contribute.

Tools for Locating Podcasts (Thing #21)

I discovered several interesting podcasts on Podcast.net that would be useful in a library setting. "Book Voyages" is a podcast about children's literature from the point of view of a school media specialist. It features book reviews as well as interviews with students and authors. "Library Channel" is a weekly podcast that discusses trends in research libraries. The Sunnydale Public Library has a podcast where users can watch, download and comment on library programs. From Podcastalley.com I found a live tennis podcast which I added to the feeds in my Bloglines account.From a personal standpoint, I really liked the daily newscasts that you can subscribe to. The ones I looked at were highlights from the NBC Today Show, the "What's in the News" podcast which is a wrap-up of the day's news and headlines from CBS, and the daily podcast of ABC World News.

Discover YouTube (Thing #20)

There is a Dan Rather video on YouTube which depicts him spending several minutes deciding whether or not he wants to wear a trench coat during his report, and then deciding whether or not the collar should be up or down. Katie Couric did a spoof on it, and her spoof ended up on youtube also! Youtube is a wonderful resource for teachers, such as the documentary produced by the Lincoln Institute discussing issues surrounding the drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation. Just about any recently televised important event can be found on youtube, such as presidential debates, interviews, and newscasts.

Web 2.0 Awards List - Craigslist (Thing #19)

I chose Craigslist from the list of winners of the WEb. 2.0 Awards. This site offers a tremendous amount of classifieds information. It would be very useful to a reference librarian helping customers researching jobs, housing, or community activities in any state in this country, as well as many other countries. The site is intuitive and easy to navigate.

Online Productivity Tools (Thing #18)

I like Zoho Writer - it seems to have all the features of Word and more. It's nice that you can save documents to the site and access them from any computer, without having to attach files to an e-mail account. I also like that you can post documents to a blog from here.

Learning 2.0 Sandbox Wiki (Thing #17)

I added my blog to the library's sandbox. The PB Wiki Tips site would be very helpful in creating or editing a wiki. This was an interesting thing to learn about, but at this point I don't see that I would have a need for it.