Thoughts of the Week, Part 2

I Could Really Use a Nap

I never thought I could read so much in three weeks.  The phrase “information overload” has taken on a whole new meaning for me… and I am already considering taking another Maymester class next year.  Maybe it is all of the new technology we are covering in class.  I have always stayed away from social media because I do not see the point, but I kind of like watching my Twitter feed.  I liked wrestling with Joomla and creating something that looked like an honest-to-goodness website.  Now, I am waiting for my Assignment 3 interviewee to email me about the questions I sent him.  All of this in less than a month.

Meanwhile, I have also spent the past month preparing for the chaos that descends upon the library every summer.  We call it the Summer Reading Program.  Every moment not spent reading articles for class has been spent drawing and painting and preparing for a Superhero Story Time.  My coworker, a brave volunteer, and I finally finished decorating the library yesterday and now we are ready to kick things off tomorrow.  I know it is going to be a blast.  Librarians, library assistants, and library volunteers really are superheroes!

And I could really use a nap…

Here's a peak at what we've been working on for the past two months.

Level 1: Read 10 books or 5 hours.

Level 2: Read 20 books or 10 hours.

This is my favorite wall.

Lesson Learned: Nothing sticks to brick.
And glue dots don't stick to butcher paper.

We ran out of walls.
This one is behind the desk.

QR Codes

I’ve seen them everywhere, from websites to advertisements and on the sides of cereal boxes.  Now I finally know what they are, besides funny looking pixelated squares: Quick Response (QR) codes.  According to Hampton, Peach, and Rawlins (2012), QR codes are “two-dimensional barcodes that can be scanned by a mobile device camera” (p. 404).  Interestingly, this technology has been around since 1994, when a Japanese company used it to track manufactured parts.  The company decided not to exercise their patent rights and now the technology is freely available and, apparently, everywhere.

Everywhere now includes libraries.  QR codes have a lot of potential for marketing, it seems.  Unlike conventional barcodes, which can hold between 20 and 40 characters, QR codes can store up to 7, 089 characters (Hampton, Peach, & Rawlins, 2012, p. 405).  Libraries have used them in online catalogs, websites, and to send a book’s call number, title, and author information to a patron’s smart device.

The great part about this is that there are a lot of websites that create QR codes and some of them are free.  To create a QR code for my blog, I used the website https://qrcode.littleidiot.be/.  I just had to paste the website address in and click "Generate B & W."  There was the option to personalize the code, adding a background picture and changing the color, but I chose to leave it alone.  It is probably redundant to put a QR code for my blog on my blog, but, theoretically, if I were to try and increase my social media presence, it would be really helpful to put the code on all of my accounts and connect them.  A library could do the same or create physical displays and include a QR code that would lead the patron to more information about the topic.

Joomla: The Continuing Saga

On the one hand, I learned about something called Lorem Ipsum.  It is filler text created from a scrambled section of one of Cicero’s philosophical writings.  On the other hand, Joomla also had me scrambled for hours at a time as I tried to adjust pictures so that they looked… just… right… and very often they did not.

After signing up for Joomla’s demo, I watched the tutorial videos and followed along.  I tried downloading extensions and when that did not work, I borrowed a laptop and worked on my Joomla site from there, while watching the tutorials from my computer.  I downloaded the JCE and Akeeba extensions and tried JEvents and a newsletter extension, but did not end up using either of those.  I did successfully add events and teasers that showed pictures.  I also added a cool looking Search bar like the ones on real websites.

While wrestling with extensions and picture placement, I also finally came up with a theme for my website.  With my newfound appreciation for dummy text, I decided to embrace the chaos and dedicate my site to garbled Latin, meta books, and long dead guest authors, creating the Lorem Ipsum Library.

After a while, I started to catch on to the pattern of things on the Joomla Administrator site.  Once the major features were installed and the categories set up, editing and fixing things seemed to be a little more intuitive.  There were so many options and steps and pages and… stuff.  As I continued to create new things to put on the website, I grew paranoid that I would forget to go back and edit something.  (Like that newsletter option.)  Keeping the site simple and straightforward worked best for me.

My biggest problem, as seen in the picture at the top of the page, was a box of text going too far to the right.  Crazily enough, this was what plagued me for the majority of the time I worked on the site.  I just could not get the picture and the text to stay in the white box.  After using my best resources – my awesome classmates – I must have clicked something right, because the text lined right up.  Somehow.

What helped most (even beyond the tutorials) was keeping logged into my Twitter account and checking the class discussion boards every so often.  I got around a lot of problems by asking classmates or reading what someone else had asked.  While the tutorial videos did a good job of taking me step-by-step through how to set up a website, I did not dare wander off the beaten path and try to add, say, a newsletter mailing list, because the videos did not explain all the steps.  Maybe with more time, I would have figured it out, but that just was not possible with this assignment.

The source of most of my website’s text?  Lorem Ipsum Generator: http://www.procato.com/lipsum/

Thoughts of the Week

I have just completed my first week of class and already have learned much more than I expected.  I have learned how to tweet and how to set up a blog, which were both completely foreign concepts to me before.  Hopefully by the end of Maymester, I will have learned some of the finer points of writing a blog post.  I have also learned how helpful and fun it is to have contacts in both public and academic libraries.  Through tweets and mile-long discussion threads, I have read a variety of different opinions and experiences courtesy of my classmates.  Already, I have dozens of ideas for future library displays and crafts, library Twitter accounts, and new methods of handling the more bizarre patron interactions.  This just from viewing a few pictures on Twitter and reading madly to keep up with discussion assignments.

I was more than a little nervous about taking my first Maymester during a month that is already hectic with Summer Reading Program preparations, but so far the pace seems to agree with me.  That mild state of constant panic over due dates keeps me from procrastinating and the friendliness and thoughtfulness of my classmates keeps me interested.

One week down, two more to go!

*Image from http://secondchancetodream.com

Timeless Tweets: Of Libraries and Twitter

Friends with Libraries

Reading through this week’s assigned articles about the role of social media in libraries has caused me to ponder some ethical questions.  Bodnar and Doshi (2011) write about Georgia Tech’s library, which has a Twitter account and actively seeks out Tech students on Twitter so the library can follow their accounts and be on the lookout for potential reference questions.  While it is great that Georgia Tech is embracing social media and using available resources to connect with their patrons, is it ethical for a library (or any organization) to follow an individual’s social media account, even if it is set to the public option?  Bodnar and Doshi raise this same question, stating that while following student accounts allows the library to “actively engage” students and “seek out  opportunities for reference and other library-related interactions,” is it ethical to follow student timelines that “contain profane, explicit, or private information?”  Should it only be up to individuals to choose to follow or not to follow the social media account of a library or any other public organization?

To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

Now for the next question.  Reading Verishagen and Hank’s article about how libraries use Twitter, the part that stood out to me most was the mention that the Library of Congress has been archiving public tweets since 2010 and has access to all of public tweets posted since Twitter’s beginning in 2006.

While I know that what is posted on the Internet is there to stay, should something like this be explicitly archived and organized, as in the case of the Library of Congress Twitter archive?  Should the public have a say in whether or not their tweets are archived – or is the fact that they are posting it on the Internet tacit permission to save it for possible future research?  The Internet keeps everything forever, but having tweets archived and available for research purposes is different from having tweets lost and floating somewhere in the tangles of the Web.

For those who do not want their tweets archived, however, there is another option!  It is called #NoLoC and is a registered Twitter app that will automatically delete a tweet after 23 weeks, before the tweet is sent to the Library of Congress in the 24^th week (Mansilla, 2010).  The application is available at http://noloc.org/ and by including #noloc, #noarchive, #noindex, or even #no in a tweet, you can prevent your tweets from being archived by the Library of Congress.

References

Bodnar, J. & Doshi, A. (2011). Asking the right questions: A critique of Facebook, social media, and 

libraries. Public Services Quarterly.

Mansilla, N. (2010, May 16). #NoLoc.org – Delete that tweet, lest it be immortal! Retrieved May 18, 2015, from http://mansilla.com/2010/05/noloc-org-delete-that-tweet-lest-it-be-immortal/

Verishagen, N. & Hank, C. (2014). Are there birds in the library? The extent of Twitter adoption and use by Canadian academic libraries. First Monday, 19(11), 115-129. doi: 10.5210/fm.v19i11.4945 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4945/4161

If You Build It, Will They Come?

Wiki: a Web site that allows visitors to make changes, contributions, or corrections

From http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wiki

The Children's Corner at the Statham Public Library.
Even toddlers use computers these days!

In today’s Web 2.0 world, libraries are constantly looking for ways to connect to the community.  Some people may rarely enter a library, but they can still benefit from library resources and seek help from librarians through online services.  These days, libraries have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, Instragram, Tumblr, chat services, and wikis.  Maybe it is an “if you build it, they will come” sort of mentality.

The Library

The Statham Public Library where I work has one room and 11 public access computers.  It is run by a staff of five part-time employees (including the manager) and offers a limited number of programs.  It serves a population of 2,408 in the city of Statham, Barrow County, Georgia.  The population is made up of students, a relatively large senior population, young families, and a sizeable minority population.  Located within the city are an elementary school, a middle school, a senior assisted living center, and numerous small businesses.  Recently, more families have moved to Statham because of job opportunities in the nearby city of Athens.

The Statham Public Library is part of the Piedmont Regional Library System and shares resources such as eBooks and database subscriptions with other libraries in the region.  On its own, the library does not have a very large budget, but sharing resources with other libraries allows the Statham library to offer more services and programs.

The Wiki

To fit with the requirements of the Statham Public Library, a wiki would be most useful shared among the libraries in the region.  This would enable staff members at different libraries to share ideas and collaborate on projects.  It needs to be customizable, easy to use, and recognizable as a part of the library system.  With these qualifications, as well as features such as a page history, English as the main language, and an unlimited storage quota, I chose Wetpaint (http://www.wetpaint.com/) as the best fit for my library.  Wetpaint is free and does not allow ads.  It allows for corporate branding and is intended for all users, requiring no special skills to use.

Hopefully, by creating a place for library staff to interact and collaborate, where questions can be asked and answered, the library region and its communities can all benefit.

Hello, everyone.  In this blog, I plan to chronicle my experiences in my first Maymester class - Applied Technologies in Library Practice.  Over the following weeks I will write about Web 2.0 technologies, their impact on libraries, and creative and effective ways to use these tools.  Full confession?  I have avoided social media in my personal life.  My only experience comes from a Twitter account I haven't used in four years.  However, I have dipped my toes into the deep pool of social media recently through regularly updating my library's Facebook page.  I hope that this class will teach me how to successfully provide interesting and informative content and use platforms like Twitter and Facebook to get the word out about libraries.