Thing 9: Online Collaboration Tools

Wow -- I've really enjoyed looking at these applications! Finally I've got something to recommend to our patrons who need a good word processor -- not just barebones online typing (like Writer, from bighugelabs.com) -- and find that all of our "full-service Internet" stations -- the ones with Microsoft Office Suite installed -- are being used.

What a great opportunity for kids working in teams on school projects!

Would that I have had such a tool 28 months ago -- when putting together the invitations list for my son's wedding. That and online chat would have saved hours messaging back and forth to my inlaws!

Individual use aside, one work application jumps out at me. Every three months or so, we start taking patron registration for the next round of computer classes we offer. We announce the start date for registration, and patrons call, or come in, to register. We handle registration centrally -- at our Roseville location -- and use a longhand notebook to record registrant's names and phone #s. Our portable computer lab has 12 laptops, so registration is limited, and fills up fast. Calls and in-person registrants come in fast and furiously during the initial hours of registration, and passing the paper record book back and forth among librarians is, to put it mildly, a hassle. What we need is a document that multiple librarians can add names into at the same time -- and view edits in real time. To the rescue GoogleDocs (rather than Zoho Writer, which appears to have more editing versatility) just because it appears to be easier to keep as an internal, non-public document.

I'm going to try this out with a fellow reffie next week -- and blog here about the results.

Thing 8

Share Your Creations: Photo presentations, Powerpoint-type slideshows, Databases, and Portfolios

Having already spent so much time getting a Flickr slide show to work properly (see Thing 6), I decided I'd look at some of the other sharing options available. I was not at all impressed with Lazybase. I did not find it intuitive, and the lack of instructions, hints, FAQs, or suggestions for use other than the few examples you are supposed to look at for an immediate understanding of the process made me abandon this tool quite early. The idea of cooperatively adding to and editing a database is particularly attractive, though, and I may go back and take another look.

It looks like another productivity and collaboration tools provider, Zoho (http://zoho.com/index.html) also has a database tool (Zoho Creator) which would be worth exploring. I'm impressed with the same site's online presentation tool, Zoho Show, and the possibilities that offers for publishing brief tutorials for staff or patron use. Time doesn't allow me to develop a whole tutorial, but here are the first few slides of one that I wouldn't mind spending time working on:



I don't seem to have quite the hang of all of the editing features, but I've managed to fix the HTML code! to adjust the margins of the show as it displays within the blog. Now if I could figure out why it doesn't seem to automatically republish in my blog when I make changes in the ZOHO SHOW original...

Efolio Minnesota (http://www.efoliominnesota.com/) was an eye-opener. What a wonderful way for Minnesota students and jobseekers to showcase their accomplishments. Or library staff members to introduce themselves, their backgrounds, projects, specialities, and reading interests, to patrons. I'd like to see a link to this site from the Careers area of our website!

Thing 7: Communication Tools

Email, IM, Text, Google Groups, Web Conferencing

A lot of ground to cover in one Thing, but most of it familiar.

Email: We've been using email internally and for reference ("Ask A Librarian) at Ramsey County Library for a very long time.

The best "productivity tools" I've run into are email groups (allowing for quick addressing to multiple people), and canned messages (for those responses to commonly asked questions that make you feel like a recording each time you have to pen them...How do I get a pin number? Do you have a notary public? I need a St. Paul obituary from ___ (insert any year prior to 1972). Do you take donations? I returned my book to the ____ (insert any MELSA library outside of Ramsey County) three days ago but you still show it checked out to me...)

The hardest thing for me to master is refraining from editing (and re-editing) my text.

Instant Messaging: IM is newer here -- but already an old friend (at least for me). So nice to get business accomplished quickly, privately, and SILENTLY -- no overhead paging; fewer noisy ringing phones! Potentially impressive when used for customer service -- at least with older than teen patrons. I'd love to try my hand at chat reference via some IM platform available to our patrons.

SMS: Text on the other hand, is less useful for me. I'm not a phone keypad wiz, having missed the opportunity to practice stealthily, cell phone in pocket, during class. I lack educated thumbs and the visual acuity needed to read messages on my cell phone without my glasses. Bah! Fairly recently, one of my children removed my cell phone from my hands with the comment, "You're still sending that? Here, let me finish it for you." Well, once upon a time, I had a similar experience with another child and a mouse. I did learn to use the mouse. Problem is, I really have no desire to text.

Groups: I'm not really a fan of Google Groups either. Okay -- I do see their potential, but unless there's a lot of moderator attention, which probably takes more time than many of us have to devote to it, I'm not sure it's worth the effort. There's far more spam and other "unrelated content" unpleasantness posted to the 23 Things group (nothing worth reading since mid-summer!) than anything else. Got so fed up wading through the trash that I dropped my membership in the group. Writing this, however, I decided that was probably a mistake, and reported the abuse to Google, and to the group owner as well. I'm waiting to see what happens next.

Web Conferencing: Proquest offered a webinar on Ancestry Library Edition at the end of September. It was of particular interest to me as we were scheduled to begin offering an ALE class for patrons at the end of October; I wanted to see what the database vendor had to say about their product. I registered for the class, did all the appropriate login stuff, and discovered that even major database providers are occasionally plagued by technical difficulties.

The class didn't happen. Instead, I got a message back from Proquest staff member Aimee Leverette that read, in part, "Due to serious technical problems with our web-based presentation software, I am unable to host today’s session. Please accept my sincere apologies for any inconvenience and consider attending a future session. I would also be happy to schedule a one-on-one session to make up for this last minute cancellation."

Needless to say, the "one-on-one" was great, and probably answered my questions about teaching the class better than the scheduled session might have, but I do like the webinar format, and I'm still interested attending a future presentation.

Thing 6

After a trip to New York City over an extended Fourth-of-July weekend, I've been getting back into work mode with Thing 6, and experimenting with some of the image editing that's available "out there".

I tried the trading card generator on Big Huge Labs, thinking that it might be a fun way for a library to introduce staff members to patrons, but I wasn't all that happy with my product's readability, and I couldn't figure out a way to make the font size larger.



I played with some of the other widgets on Big Huge Labs, creating a postage stamp (yup, that is the living room of my newly-remodeled home -- finally on the market) and trying out their Writer--an Internet typewriter. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of formatting offered, but if no word processor were available, it does offer some bare-bones functionality, and allows you to store and e-mail the documents you create with it.

I also tested a couple of the options on ImageChef. There are so many options available -- no excuses for a lifeless blog. Wonderful While It Lasted is one; Kid Stuff images are others. My repeated problem is layout; I've discovered how to paste code into an element, but not how to tweak the code to make the layout look the way I'd like it to look. Images are too big or too small or would look better if they were laid out differently; margins are off.

On the bright side, when I couldn't find a bumper sticker mix that allowed me to use my own image and text, I found a commercial site that offered design features, copied the image I created into Paint, played with the background, saved the whole thing to my computer, and uploaded the picture into Blogger. I would really rather be gardening, but this is the next best thing.

Thing 5

It wasn't hard at all to create a sorta/kinda mashup on Flickr. Just for the fun of it, using images on the public catalog, I uploaded cover art for ten travel books in the library collection into my Flickr photostream. I then plunked those images onto Flickr's world map as appropriately as I could. The next step was to bring my map here.

Three cheers for widgetbox again (and of course for Google, which brought me to widgetbox, using "import flickr photos into a map on blogger" as a search. )The widget I used was
http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/mapsack-flickr-map [and additionally, when I forgot my Flickr ID and how to find it: http://idgettr.com/. ] This tool asks you to enter the address of your photostream or group pool and it'll find the number for you.

Once I'd gotten the new map settled nicely at the bottom of my blog (see below), I discovered that, much to my dismay, with the new images in my photostream, my Thing 4 Keji slideshow sported travel book cover art instead of stunning Canadian park images.

I went in search of a new widget for the slide show, and found one; I'm not entirely happy with it -- it insists on "branding" and if I ask for medium size images instead of thumbnails, it cuts off my images at the right margin. At least at this point, I don't know how to change the format to make the right hand column wider -- I can change the column widths in the template (thanks to help from my HTML-savvy colleague, Carol Jackson), but doing that adversely affects the nice rounded corners of the template.

It seems like a lot of my difficulty might be solved if I knew how to write HTML; alas that is not one of my pitifully few languages. So, I compromised and went back to thumbnails; at least the images are not cropped at the right, the widget correctly selects all the images I want and none of the others, and the photo credits are properly displayed.

Thing 4

Whew!

Thing 4 finished -- sort of...

I ran into all sorts of roadblocks here. To begin with, while I grew up taking photos (literally--my first camera was a cereal-box-premium point-and-shoot that used 620 film and let its 6-year-old owner take pictures "just like daddy"), I have not yet entered the digital age. Without a store of images from which to draw, I could read all about Flickr ... and not gain the hands-on experience of uploading, creating sets, tagging, and all the concomitant activities.

I considered asking family, but then reconsidered. Pictures of the granddaughter? Too public. Pictures of the house remodelling project. Nope -- needed to leave that out of my life for at least a few hours each day.

Then I stumbled onto a website that had all the photos I wanted and rekindled fond memories of my childhood. My father's annual effort to escape New York City's rampant ragweed late August and early September drew us into Nova Scotia. A 500-mile drive, a bout of seasickness on the seemingly interminable ferry crossing between Bar Harbor and Yarmouth, a bounce along Provincial Route 8, then unpaved, and we arrived at our cabin for a magical month at the lake, at Arthur Merry's "MerryMaKedge" -- land that has since been incorporated into a Canadian National Park, Kejimkujik. The park has a Friends group, and the Friends have an annual photo contest.

I created a Flickr account and tried my hand at adding some of their wonderful photos it, keeping the images private until I asked for permission to use them publicly. I added notes with credits for the images, played with the editing features on Flickr, created a few sets for practice, and having done that, emailed the site webmaster, explaining this project and my desire to use the photos.

My next hurdle was creating a slideshow to use on my blog. Yes, there's a page element on Blogger that is supposed to let you add a slideshow; I tried that, and it worked -- but my original set included two images that weren't part of the Friends of Keji site, and I didn't have permission for those. I tried to delete the images from the set, but the slideshow still showed the images even after I had removed them from the set, and even from Flickr. Then, somewhere in the trial and error process, the slideshow element decided --independently and unexplainably-- to show about half of the images in my set, and omit the rest.

Frustrated, I went in search of another way to embed a Flickr slideshow into a Blogger blog. Google yielded a number of possibilities, and I worked my way down the list.

At http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/2005/09/flash-slideshow.html I found a template that asked for a Flickr user ID or set ID and given that, purported to generate the HTML code that, if pasted into the blog, would create the slideshow. Even after I discovered where to find my Flickr ID, the code I generated was not accepted by Blogger, which kept finding HTML errors that I don't have the slightest idea how to repair.

I tried using the set ID # (which was my preference anyway--I didn't want to use all of the images I'd put on Flickr, just a set of them, as this seemed like the most probable of future scenarios). The set ID# didn't bring up any images at all.

Another template called pictobrowser at http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/2007/05/pictobrowser-embed-flickr-slideshow.html wanted my Flickr user name (more user friendly, anyway), but the code it generated still didn't work.

Finally, I tried a widget I found at http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/flickr-slideshow-pricew. Lo and behold: slideshow -- that didn't fit into my sidebar. In order to resize the widget, I needed to sign up for a free widgetbox account. After that, it was trial and error to get the correct size in pixels. The slideshow displays only 14 of the 28 images in my set. I still can't get the display to show my credit captions correctly (the reduced size of my widget seems to be the culprit, and I still don't know how to limit my slideshow to a particular set on Flickr, but at this point, I'm going to move on.

Any suggestions, friends? I don't think I've got the tools to answer patron questions on this one.

Thing 3

Subscribing to the feeds through the Google Reader was easy enough. Too easy, actually. I thought the hardest thing about this Thing was going to be getting the RSS feed link to show up on this blog. Wrong! The hardest thing is keeping up with what is fed -- conscientiously.

New equation:

RSS + happily subscribing newbie = Sorcerer's apprentice enabled.

The rest of ye apprentices, do pay careful attention to the number of posts your feed is probably going to generate, and how badly you need to review all that stuff. I'm playing the sorcerer, here, of course. Now I have to get rid of the 700+ posts that just showed up on my feed...

Thing 2

I admit to having very little patience for reading philosophy. Wading through pages of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 backgrounders is no exception. I crave the excitement of "hands on" -- to play with the tools, see how they work (or don't) and think about what I might use them to do.

Reading, well... I'd rather be reading something else, like Meredith Hall's incredible memoir, Without a Map, which I just finished. Egregiously betrayed by all who mattered to her, Meredy maps the road she walked from disrupted childhood to middle age, from desolation to wholeness, forgiveness, and unconditional love. Here's a taste, from the concluding chapter:

I forget that I am fifty-five years old until I look in the mirror. An average, lumpy, middle-aged woman, I move in the world in another body, my younger body, a body I lived in sometime in the past ... But the mirror reminds me I am a middle-aged woman. I have grown invisible in the world ... I resist this invisibility ... but I understand that what I am resisting is not just the inevitability of becoming no longer seen... What I fight is this certainty: I am slipping along toward erasure, toward no-body. I will die. Once, I was young and vibrant; now I am in the middle and eclipsed; soon I will be old, and then I will be gone. Every time I walk unnoted among people, every time I glance in the mirror, every time I look down and see the ropy veins of my hands, I have to tangle, in a quiet, stunned moment, with this underlying truth: I am far along the path...

Each glance in the mirror startles me not only because I am suddenly, shockingly, a middle-aged woman, but because I am so much my mother... Mostly the eyes, my mother's eyes that stare back out at me from a life lived and ended ... In the mirror, her eyes speak to me from before those years of illness. Middle-aged woman, my mother, she is a shadow moving just ahead of me, calling back with news...

I am memory. Everything I have been is carried here in my body. I am written, the pain and the great love, the surprises, the losses and the findings. The young woman's body I live inside still, that unforgotten home, is a text. It is engraved with memory, my life. Psychologists believe that grief and trauma are taken up by our bodies and held, that we envelop the memory and build it into ourselves, make it part of us, write it into our cells. We think we have mostly forgotten, but our bodies do not.

And we remember love. I have often wished that my children could remember all the tender floating hours of being nursed, of being held into my heart, stroked and safe. I believe now that they do remember, that their bodies know love and safety. If this is true, then I, also must carry my mother's love, my father's. Whatever else may have gone wrong, whatever of grief and loss is carried by each of us, so too is love. Nothing is lost.

Thing 1

So, here it is -- the results of my best electronic paper-dolling; would that I could look as good as the avatar! Funny the way one becomes connected with the image -- I don't like seeing her without bangs almost as much as I don't like seeing myself without them.

My first post and on to Thing 2.