Thing 10: Future Trends

For this Thing, I read "The Future of Libraries: Interview with Thomas Frey."  I'll admit I was pleasantly surprised; most of the articles I've read on the future of libraries are doom and gloom predictions that they're an endangered species.  Mr. Frey, however, sees libraries as evolving, rather than becoming extinct.

I work in a library at one of the agriculture and technology colleges in the SUNY system.  Assuming that our campus survives to 2020 (I think we will, but you never know), and given that we are currently under renovation (my office is being moved as I write, on my laptop, in limbo), I don't know how much our building will change in nine years.  Services, to be sure, will continue to evolve.

I work in circulation and interlibrary loan.  The migration to an online world has been continual; the catalog, indices, journals, and general workflow have all moved, in whole or part, to digital formats, and as ebooks proliferate, circulation adjusts.

Thing 9: eBooks

Yeah, so, we bought a house in December... and I still don't really have room for all the books.  Not until I can afford to have custom shelving put in the dining room...

I'm one of those people who's not a fan of reading on screens.  I'm sure I'll get there eventually; as much as I love physical books, there's only so much space, and for most of what I read, the content is not format-dependent.  (In my head, I'm imagining what life would be like if I had my Betty Crocker cookbook in e-format, and an e-reader that could pull up, in parallel, the brownie recipe and the frosting recipe on the same screen...)  But, I have no e-reader, and my phone is a Windows Mobile 6.1 Treo that's two years old.

My husband, on the other hand, loves electronic books and has repurposed one of my older laptops (I'm a fan of 10" or smaller laptops for portability) as an ebook reader.  He reads a lot of pulp sci-fi, and he can get titles easily in a format that works on a variety of platforms.  He also reads on his phone, which would drive me nuts - the screen is so small!  He's getting a new Android phone in a couple months, which may or may not expand his options.

Thing 8: Video

This is the first Thing that I couldn't do everything I wanted to on my work computer; the Microsoft Live Movie Maker requires Vista or later, and my work computer is still on XP.  My home desktop and my laptop are both on Windows 7, though, so I still had options.

Once the rain finally let up a bit, I was able to take my camera and wander around my back yard.  Uploading from my camera is pretty easy; it has a USB cable, and Windows will pop up an import wizard for it.

Movie Maker was easy to use for basic functions - I didn't dig into the sub menus much since it was my first time using it.  Browse for a video file, add the music file, add some words.  I minimized the movie sound so that hopefully all you hear is the music.  (It's hard to tell here since my husband has music playing in the room.)

Productivity, Part 2

I want to get going with Thing 8, but I'm waiting for it to not be raining when I get home so I can take some video of my backyard.  (The house is still new-to-me, so it's all very exciting.)  I've been reading through other people's Thing 7's in the meantime, and so many people love Evernote that I decided to give it a whirl.

Well, I set it up this morning, and I've done squat with it, but I have a feeling (especially since my Outlook at home has a weird crash-bug that sometimes eats my notes in it) that it's got quite a bit of potential.

What I did learn from trying Evernote out was how to install the app on my Windows Mobile-based phone.  (It was surprisingly painless, other than having to use a micro-SD/USB adapter to get the file onto my phone in the first place.)

Thing 7

I'm bad about remembering to stop and do things on the way home (my autopilot doesn't turn off easily), so I figured I would look at Remember the Milk.  Signing up was easy, and I started poking around the site.

As soon as I got to the map tab, I laughed.  This?  Quite familiar, for reasons entirely unrelated to work.  That link?  A screenshot of the log and map from World of Warcraft that tracks what quests your character is working on, how much you've completed, and where you need to go to complete them.  Knowing how well that set-up works for optimizing time use in-game (doing geographically clustered tasks at the same time), this could be quite useful, if I needed to run a bunch of errands and wanted to map them out with a checklist.  On the other hand, I'm not sure my life is complicated enough to need mapping out errands.

Thing 6: Online Meetings

I went with option 1 for this Thing; I was browsing through the list of archived webinars and saw a bunch on Booklist's site that might be handy.

Then I made the mistake of picking "Booklist Webinar—Beads, Bulbs, and Books Bringing Home and Garden into the Library video archive" for my webinar.  That was dangerous.  Easy to download, easy to install the player - and crap, I want a bunch of those books now.

I've attended webinars and online meetings before, and this one was definitely less participatory, judging by the archived recording; since it was focused on pitching books, there didn't seem to be places for viewer questions while it was live.  As someone who still sometimes scrambles for places to find new titles, these archived webinars from Booklist could be quite useful.  (They could be useful to me live, too, if there aren't time conflicts.)

One more Thing (5)!

One of the things I wanted to get out of doing this series of Things was to be motivated to write on my other blog more often - so far that seems to be working!  I'm aiming for about once a week, and doing the Things and thinking about blogging and Twitter and such has been prompting me to write about other interests.

Thing 5

Take the weekend off?  Nope, I drew the Easter slot in the reference librarian rotation this year.  We were surprisingly busy, with actual research-related questions and not just, "Do you have a pen I can borrow?"

Feedback first so it's easy to find:

1. The "in plain English" videos are great!
2. It feels like there should be a more cohesive place for discussion for a program like this than in comments on blogs, but then I wonder if that wouldn't just end up being another "Thing" for people to learn.  (A forum, or a chat room, or some other group communication tool.)  Blogs can work for group communication, but it can be more cumbersome than some other media if not everyone is posting on the same one's comments.

And a summary of what I've learned (and/or observations) thus far:

OPML file #5

I've uploaded another .ompl file. cdlc4 and cdlc5 combined should have all the currently listed blogs from the Google spreadsheet whose URLs worked.

(I fixed file #4 so it really should be just the Learn with CDLC blogs and not just my whole .opml export. Apparently I clicked 'no' to save changes the other day. >.<)

Instructions for importing into Google Reader, if you're catching up and need them still.

Barcode scanner!

I now own my very own barcode scanner! It's an Opticon my husband found for me on eBay; it looks similar to the white one here. (That's the same model; this one is refurbished though, so it's not as pretty.) I'd take a picture and post it, but I'm at work (on Easter, alas). It is basically the model we use at our Circ desk here.

I discovered when I went to start scanning books to test it that some paperbacks have a generic paperback UPC on the back cover, and an ISBN barcode on the inside front cover. For most of the books with barcodes that I tested, however, the barcode is the ISBN. I can scan straight into Excel.

Soon, goodreads, soon...

A picture is, as they say, worth a thousand words

My folks' power is out right now (and may be through Easter), so they don't have internet or anything. (Or water - they're on a well, and no power means no well pump.) Mom called yesterday to tell me about a barn that they lost from the bad storms; I thought it was much worse than this:

Goodreads, day 2

Hm, I deviated from my 3-5 page average yesterday and rambled on quite a bit.

I poked around goodreads a bit more since Polly friended me (thanks, Polly!), and I looked through all the friend suggestions it gave me (since now we had a friend in common). There were a lot of names I've seen from both this project and various mailing lists, which was a nice reminder that the library world has a 6-degrees-of-separation thing going on.

Thing 4: Online Communities

Given which of the online communities (goodreads) I'm looking at for this week's Thing, a couple of confessions are in order:

Firstly, I don't read for pleasure nearly as much as I used to. There are a lot of reasons for that, but what disrupted my habit the most was eight years of college. When I do stumble upon a series I like, I tend to inhale it. (By inhale, I mean multiple books in a day/nothing else gets done/oh, did you want supper? kind of reading.)

Secondly, I didn't actually join goodreads for this Thing.

No, I signed up Friday because Felicia Day linked hers on Twitter in response to a review, published on the New York Times' website, of the new "A Game of Thrones" series on t.v. (If you don't know who Felicia Day is, this is one place to start.) If you don't have a digital subscription to the Times and don't want to use one of your 15 free articles for this month, basically, there's a point where the reviewer suggests that all the sexual content in the HBO series is to attract female viewers, since the reviewer doesn't know of any woman who prefers fantasy over romance as a genre.

More thoughts on Flickr

I do a small bit of programming at our library (a small bit - I just don't have time to assemble bigger things), and quite a few displays. Flickr is a nice way to show those off, but for me, it's even more awesome as a way to get ideas for things to do here.

The University of Chicago has a repository of the graffiti in one of their libraries - not something we would encourage our students to do, but it's fascinating to see what they leave uninvited.

We did a small event for National Gaming Day (who knew Monopoly would be more popular than the Wii?) - for ideas to build on for it, there are tons of examples.

Banned Books Week is always a popular display here, I think partly because so many of the titles that make the 100 most challenged lists are titles that a lot of our students have read, or at least heard of. The books don't change a lot from year to year, though, so new ideas for displays or events are always helpful.

Next time I'm planning a display or event (which may be a couple months, since we'll be under construction again all summer), Flickr is something I'll hit up for ideas.

A 3rd OPML

Here's a few more of us who have recently added blogs to the Learn with CDLC Things: .ompl file 3.

PS: If you need the previous ones, or the instructions, I have them all tagged "opml files."

Thing 3: Photo Sharing

I was going to create a new Flickr account for Thing 3, but, surprise! I had associated the email I wanted to use with the Yahoo! account I used for for my existing Flickr account. This wasn't necessarily bad, since I had forgotten which password I had used for that Yahoo! account, and I had to go through the password recovery.

Lesson learned: I have way too many email accounts, and I used different passwords for most of them. (Way too many means, basically, more than I remember having.)

So I've already got a Flickr account, and I apparently made it, judging by what's up there, to post pictures from the Tulip Festival a couple years ago. They're even already neatly in a set. For this, I'm uploading a handful of display pictures from the past few years; I was digging in the garden all weekend, and I really don't feel up to wandering around with a camera right now.

Hm... Test 1 (posting with the Flickr Blogger "Share This") did not do what I wanted it to - it just posts straight to the blog. I want to put all the pictures I want to share straight into the post. Normally I just use Blogger's upload straight from my computer (which puts them all over at Picasa Web, organized nicely by which blog I uploaded it to). Test 2 (using the URL from Flickr with Blogger's upload) didn't work, either. So I can post pictures from Flickr to the blog, just not quite how I want to.

Well, then! Maybe I can link it with the URL? Yep, that worked. Still, not what I want to do!

Blogger upload-from-hard drive to the rescue, then. Here's the full set over on Flickr. And here are the pictures:


This is, as the labels hopefully make clear, our circulation desk. It will be here through sometime in May, when our area gets hit by the renovations. (I would love to keep a 6-foot section for workspace and storage in my office, but I don't know if they'll let me.) I actually took this picture for a workshop PowerPoint for interlibrary loan, as a visual for "Go here to pick up your books!"


Our wonderful reference and instruction librarian worked with faculty across campus for an interdisciplinary faerie display. (I wish I had pictures of the display cases - the chemistry faeries were awesome.) The leaf was a patio accessory donated by one of the clerks, and I worked out the fishing line arrangement to hang it from the clothesline that runs around the railing on the second floor. It took a couple of us to actually get it up there.


"Faces of Cobleskill" was the homecoming display in 2009. The concept wasn't mine - our cataloging/acquisitions librarian did the homecoming displays for a long time, but got bogged down in projects that fall, so I picked up the wall display part of it. I think it was the most looked-at display I've assembled. The pictures on the wall were culled from yearbooks (scanned, cropped, printed, glue-sticked). The mirror on the far right made every observer one of the "Faces of Cobleskill."


Doing 2009's homecoming display landed me 2010's. I didn't want it to be nearly as labor intensive, so I took 8 yearbook pictures, culled from the decades since the yearbook started, and sent them up to the print shop on campus to have display-case-sized copies made. Older yearbooks, I learned, have a lot more full-page pictures that lend themselves to enlargement. (There's one more wall display case, on the far right, with a mortarboard on a rotating pedestal - representing the graduating class for that year.)


This was the museum case display that went with the 2010 homecoming display. I take it back - this was my most looked at display item - because it was a huge version of the campus map, and people used it heavily for directions. The map was left over from my "Need a map?" display, which highlighted services on campus, and I repurposed it by adding the years buildings were constructed. (We're in our charter's centennial year as a college.)


Banned Books Week! This was another of my ideas that was better in concept than in execution - the most recent 100 most challenged books, on little book outlines; the ones we own are in the upper half, and included call numbers. Making each little book in Publisher, printing, cropping, and assembling took too long for the purpose.


One of the display cases for New York's Quadricentennial. Not being from New York, but having a history M.A., this was a fun project. The most interesting thing to me was how close Samuel de Champlain and Henry Hudson got to each other's explorations in 1609, albeit six or eight weeks apart. (The display is organized chronologically, starting when Hudson leaves Europe.)


This is the other half of the New York's Quadricentennial display. It's practically impossible to find a model of the Half Moon (I even called the State Museum's gift shop, and they said they hadn't been able to find any to sell), so I had to settle for a photograph of the replica rounding the tip of Manhattan.


Flickr's menus and tools don't feel as intuitive to me as most of the other web 2.0 tools we've tried out thus far. Picasa Web isn't really any better, unless I want to add my photos to my "Google Profile" (no, thanks). Most of my personal photo sharing nowadays I do through Facebook, which hits everyone I really want to share them with except my mother and grandma. (Do you hear that, Mom? If you get back on Facebook, you can see my garden pictures without having to ask me to email them!)

If I need to link to a picture somewhere besides a blog (for which I'll just use the Blogger upload), I usually upload it to one of my domains and link it from there. I actually didn't get a Flickr account for a long time because I was just using that. The limitation on free uploads per month is the main reason I didn't continue using Flickr; I think it used to be much less than 300 mb, because the last time I used it, I uploaded 20 pictures and hit the monthly limit.

Flickr, with its tags and public options and searchability, is a great place to post any pictures a library would want to use for publicity. It's well-established and has a huge userbase. I would need to use it regularly to be comfortable enough with the interface not to be reading through all the menus trying to find the option I'm looking for, though.

Continued blog observations (and another .opml)

I read a handful of heavily commented blogs regularly, and I also moderate an online forum, so I've been noticing how the different blog platforms handle comment threading.

Comment systems that allow replies to replies, threading the conversation, really help to foster discussion, since it's easy to tell who is talking to whom. With out the reply-to-comment, it can be more difficult to unravel the threads of the conversation. Thus far Blogger doesn't seem to do comment threading; WordPress does.

Seeing how different people name, design, and use their blogs for a shared purpose is fascinating! Which tools people choose, how they use them, and how they envision the relationships between themselves, their blogs, and the central purpose (the workshop) are all very interesting to me.

A large number of us are using Blogger, but WordPress is a significant minority (compared to a paltry number of Posterous and Edublogs users). A large number of us are using post on the left/menus on the right layouts, with a handful putting the menu-type items (archives, 'about me' sections, etc.) on the left or trying out the three-column options. I wonder if there's a correlation with something (like right-handed/left-handed), or if it's just because that's the layout most of the default templates suggest first.

Given how interesting all those things are to me, you'd think I would be better at filling out conference evaluations. *sigh*

And last but certainly not least: the .opml file for all the blogs added to the spreadsheet since I last looked at it. If I've missed any, please let me know! This is just the new ones, so you shouldn't have to worry about it accidentally importing duplicate feeds.

To save others some time

I made an .opml file with the RSS feeds for all of us so far. I'll add to it as people continue to register their blogs.

If you want to use it, you can either right-click on the link and save-as, or let your browser open it, copy and paste the contents into a text file, and save it as an .opml file.

After that, you can import it into whatever blog reader you're using if it allows .opml imports. For Google Reader:

1. Go to Reader Settings (it's a little cogwheel icon in the top right of the page for me, next to my logged in name);
2. Click on Import/Export in the settings;
3. Browse for and upload the file.

Google Reader will then pop you into your Subscriptions page after the file has uploaded, and if you want to change tags, you can. (They should import with a "Learn with CDLC" tag.)

(Save the time of the reader, right?)

PS: A selective .opml file wasn't hard to make - I just exported my Feedreader .opml, then deleted the non-Learn with CDLC feeds, as they're all arranged hierarchically in <outline> tags.

Later that day...

I had a stint on the reference desk this afternoon to play around with iGoogle more; I'm still not sure whether or not it's useful for me, but there are a lot of gadgets out there. Right now I've got it set up with a handful of search boxes on the left, my Gmail and Google calendar in the middle, and the weather and one of my Twitter accounts on the right. The header image is a crop of this one, keeping just the island:



The WorldCat search box seems like it could be really useful for the 'do you have this book?' questions - rather than searching the catalog, telling the patron no, then pitching ILL while pulling up the item in the SUNY union catalog or FirstSearch WorldCat, all the information would be right there, making the ILL pitch faster. Of course, we could also use the IDS search at our library, but it's just not growing on me. (Odd, really, since I like clean-cut designs like that.) I suppose I could also be going straight to WorldCat and bypassing our catalog altogether, since we just did a reclamation project with OCLC and our catalog and WorldCat agree pretty well right now, but the FirstSearch interface is going away, so I may as well get used to the new one.

Hm... apparently the WorldCat.org local links are still pointing to our old ILLiad server. Another thing for me to figure out to fix. Back to work!

Thing 2: RSS

I don't remember when I first started subscribing to RSS feeds. I also don't remember when I set up the iGoogle page I have, or the Google Reader feeds. Once I looked at them again (and Netvibes), I remembered why I'm not using them.

I love RSS feeds! They let me put all the stuff I read regularly into one spot. The first RSS tool I tried was, I think, Bloglines. I didn't like their website layout. That led me to look for an RSS software solution, and I was using a little program called, simply, RSS Reader. At some point it died for me (some kind of incompatibility), and I switched to Feedreader. The biggest downside to Feedreader is that I have to manually export/import the .opml file to each computer I use it on if I want the same feeds in each instance. It can be installed to and run off a USB stick, however.

The need to update the subscriptions on each installation is why I first looked at Google Reader, but the loss of some functionality ultimately made me decide to stick with Feedreader. The comparison:

• Organization: You can create folders in both, but there's limited folder management in Google Reader. You can delete or change sharing options in the folder management, but you can't add them there; you have to click on a feed and manually tag it to make a folder, after which you can drag and drop items in, or later tag them while they're selected. Feedreader uses standard right-click/create-folder functions, as well as having a menu option for creating new folders or feeds. I prefer to preload most of my folders, especially if I decide to seriously recategorize things.
• Import/Export: The export functions for both Google Reader and Feedreader are pretty much identical in function. Get into the menus, export a file. Google's saves by default as an .xml file, and Feedreader's as an .opml. Importing in Google Reader is similarly simple, but if you've already subscribed to a feed, Google may add it anyway, and it may or may not put it in the folder it was in in the import. Feedreader uses a smart import: it only imports feeds you don't have, lets you selectively import in case you only want to import some of them, and if you have folder names matching the ones in the export in the import location, it puts the feeds there automatically. This is why importing files around between Feedreader installations is relatively painless.
• Sharing: It's much easier to share items in Google; Feedreader being a standalone means it's not tied in with all of Google's host of products. You have the option to email articles if you configure the mail settings, but not entire feeds, although Google's version of sharing entire feeds is for you to make public that you follow them. The actual "share" option only applies to individual items.
• Adding feeds: Both Feedreader and Google Reader make it easy to add feeds; Google's option sort of has a search option, but depending how well-known the site you're looking for is, it might be faster to just copy and paste the feed URL into the subscribe box. In Feedreader, F3 will pull a URL from your clipboard into the subscribe box. The important difference: Feedreader will tell you if you already subscribe; Google Reader will just add the duplicate feed.

I also looked at both Internet Explorer's and Firefox's RSS bookmarking options, and of the two, I vastly prefer Internet Explorer's, mostly for ease of reading. Unfortunately, that would mean I have to use Internet Explorer, and for general web browsing, I vastly prefer Firefox. (Although given the changes in Firefox 4.0, which I reverted back to 3.6.16 after 15 minutes of frustration at how buggy a release version was, Internet Explorer may become a rosy option if Firefox 3.x ever goes away.)

I haven't used RSS feeds in Outlook because that function is disabled on our campus, and I have an older version of Outlook at home.

RSS summary: Google Reader is great if you read a feeds on a lot of computers and you can't or don't want to install a program that you need to manually synchronize. If you get frustrated by its options, there are other options out there. I tend to prefer Feedreader for ease of organization and duplicate feed management; if you're a heavy sharer, however, Google Reader is probably more convenient.

Now, on to iGoogle and Netvibes. There's a really short answer why I wouldn't use either of these options for RSS feeds: screen space. Netvibes seems to paginate after a certain number of items. iGoogle gets scrolly really fast. I subscribe to a couple hundred feeds; it's just not practical.

Dashboards in general don't work for me. We have Angel on our campus (it's a course management software), and it has a dashboard option. I looked at all the default Netvibes dashboards, and I played with the one I had apparently set up in iGoogle at some point (which was kind of cool - I was able to use one of my own pictures as a header image). I added and rearranged widgets and subscribed to feeds. I looked at the Dublin City Libraries' page. All in all, they're just too busy for me.

I'm easily distracted. I have ten icons on my work desktop; only two are a direct shortcuts to a program, and once ILLiad 7.x goes away more or less for good, I'll take that icon off my quick launch toolbar and put 8 down there, and just Internet Explorer will be left there. (I leave it there since I only use it for Banner access.) I'm a heavy user of the quick launch bar, and I put almost all the icons that land on my desktop in a folder called "Shortcuts." I then added my desktop as a menu to my taskbar, and can access all the shortcuts as a sort of personalized start menu. Programs I use regularly end up on the quick launch bar.

In a way this correlates with how I use my browser; I'm a heavy user of bookmarks, and I keep eight or ten tabs open across the top. I don't try to focus on more than one page at a time. The tabs I have open aren't the kinds of things I could compile onto a dashboard, because they're not set up to be - they're things like our text-a-librarian interface (which has its own dashboard option for reference - also not using), our ILLiad server's PDF folder (I often check manually if something uploaded), Angel (again with its own dashboard option), the SUNYLA website (for editing), our Reserves interface, and so forth.

Basically: Putting all those boxes on a page makes it hard for me to focus on one. I do better with peripheral icons and a single piece of content, with menus to get to things I use less frequently.

Our library's catalog doesn't have a widget or gadget that I can find; somewhat surprisingly, there isn't an option for the SUNY-wide catalog, either. There is a WorldCat search option, which pushes you out to WorldCat.org for the search results, and with WorldCat local can give you local results. Hm... That's something to explore.

The Dublin City Libraries page was interesting; they have so much useful information they've added by including del.icio.us bookmarks and widgets. And then they link over to their website, which confuses me. What's the benefit of having the Netvibes site when they also have a website? If you go to google.ie and search for the Dublin City Libraries, you get their website on the first page of results, and the Netvibes page over on the second page of results. All the content that seems to be unique to the Netvibes site, rather than linking to items found on their website, are below the fold, so to speak. It would have made more sense to me to put the unique content on the introductory Netvibes page at the top, or to just have it all on their website via RSS includes. Basically, I don't understand why someone would go to the Netvibes page. It's not at all easy to find their Netvibes site from their website. Perhaps the website is not freely controlled by the librarians, and they are using Netvibes to offer additional web resources they can't easily on their website.

There's an advantage of Netvibes over iGoogle: you can create a public site. With iGoogle, you're tied to a personal log-in and are making an entirely personal homepage. Netvibes lets you build an entirely public site for sharing web resources. It's more dynamic than just "here's a bunch of links to news sites," since you can give your patrons a couple recent headlines, as well, or updates from a database on a topic. If your website is locked down by ITS and not flexible for adding content like RSS feeds, del.icio.us bookmarks, and such, you can create an online portal for your users. I think it would be a lot more useful if it were more obviously linked from the library's homepage, though.

Dashboards summary: Not for me personally, but for libraries, a public dashboard could be a way to extend dynamic web content if it's not possible to do so on their own websites.

Tweaking

I like to rearrange furniture. That's not really feasible in my office (limited outlets), so I tend to rearrange websites (blogs, forums, etc.) I administrate when I get to feeling like something needs to be moved around.

I didn't do a ton of set-up on this blog yesterday - picked a template that I could live with, and such - so I started fiddling around with the gadgets today. One of the things I decided to add and keep (so far) is the RSS feed for the other blog I write under this log-in. (Three posts in the past six weeks... hopefully I can get it moving more.)

One of the things I went through setting up but didn't keep was a list of links to all the other currently registered blogs for this program. It was great to set up because it meant I went and read what everyone else has written so far, but it occurred to me that, if all 150 participants register, it will be way too long and scrolly.

Past experience says scrolly is bad; people don't like to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to get to something, the same way that above the fold/below the fold matters in print newspapers. I find the scrolly problem to be true for a lot of news sites that I read; they tend to put the newest stories at the top for that reason. If I have to scroll too far from the top of the page, I don't really bother to go all the way down to see what's there.

Of course, this conflicts pretty directly with my tendencies towards verbosity. I've found that 3-to-5-page-paper is a length pretty well ingrained in me from all those assignments in high school and my undergrad. Three to five pages doesn't really sound long (double-spaced, right?) until you realize your medium isn't 8 1/2" by 11" paper, but a probably 5" column down a screen. Scrolly.

The Blogs in Plain English video has me thinking about my high school journalism class: the funnel shape for stories, putting the most important information towards the beginning, and the later paragraphs are all details the loss of which won't make the story unintelligible if they have to be cropped for space. I was never good at that, probably because I've also never been good at drafting; most of my writing is my train of thought in action, and I never learned to think in a journalistic style. Given the whole problem of scrolly, the journalism concepts are probably good to keep in mind: how many people actually read to the end of a long post?

Perhaps this is why, in my high school journalism class, I was the copy editor. I proofread, cropped, and assembled, but I didn't write a lot of content. We didn't have journalism software in my class: the school paper was all assembled on large sheets with a wax gun. If there was something last-minute to go in, I had to pull apart the sheets, rearrange, and make it fit, occasionally slicing off a paragraph here or there to make it work. I like to tweak, to rearrange, and although the list of links was pulled because it would be scrolly, I'm sure I'll find another gadget to fiddle with here before the course of Things is done.

Thing #1: Blogging

Howdy to all the people Learning with CDLC!

This is Thing #1, answering:

Tell us a little bit about who you are, what library you work for, why you’re taking part in this program and what you’ve learned this week.

I'm Katherine over at WKM, the Van Wagenen Library at SUNY Cobleskill. I'm the Circulation & Interlibrary Loan Librarian here, and like a lot of ILL people, I recognize libraries by their OCLC code. I don't know why Cobleskill is WKM, especially since so many of the other SUNYs are X's or Z's, but there we are. (To add other levels of confusion, our CDLC courier code is SUCO, which is an acronym the SUNY College at Oneonta down I-88 from us uses for itself.)

SUNY Cobleskill, if you're not familiar with us, is the State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill. We teach agriculture, culinary arts, hospitality & tourism management, early childhood education, business and computer science, and a variety of other technologies, which has led to our library having a diverse and fascinating collection. Our histotechnology program is, so far as I know, unique in the SUNY system. (You're probably wondering how early childhood education slipped into a technology school as a major area of instruction; it was added early on as part of the home economics angle of technology instruction, and it's a huge program here. They bring the little kids over to the library to see our children's book collection.)

So, as I've said, I'm Katherine. I came to Cobleskill about 6 years ago now, doing part-time reference about 6 months out of library school, and I like it here so much I jumped at the opportunity to become full-time when the previous Circ/ILL librarian left about two and a half years ago. I'm now tenure-track, with all the joys that entails. I did all my degrees over at SUNY Albany - history B.A., M.S.I.S., history M.A., in that order.

I live over in Schenectady, so if there's anyone from SCPL doing this program, I'd just like to apologize for my serial tardiness returning things, but dealing with fine appeals from the library side of things, I'm never going to argue about paying my own.

My husband and I bought a house in December (moving in December: at least it wasn't January), and I've actually got ground now that isn't sand to try to plant things in, so working at Cobleskill is coming in really handy - we have a huge gardening and agriculture section. I grew up in Indiana, so waiting so long for the putting-stuff-in-dirt-outside season to start here is still a bit unfamiliar.

I signed up to do this program for a variety of reasons:

• Despite my personal Apple boycott, an iPad would still be kind of neat. (Not that I ever win anything, but still.)
• I have blogs, but I don't blog nearly as often as I'd like to; I'm hoping this will inspire me.
• Did I mention that I'm tenure-track? I do all the continuing education I can afford, and the price for this was awesome.
  
• Poking around the 23 Things other places have done, not all of the Web 2.0 stuff listed is stuff I've tried out, so yay! new stuff to try!
• I'm an introspective geek. Writing about me exploring technology should be fun. :)

Writing this as early in the week as I am, I haven't had a chance to look around at what other people have written yet, so most of what I've learned this week is the two blog sites I haven't used before, Posterous and Edublogs. I've used WordPress in the past, but as the downloaded and installed on my own domain version, and I switched to Blogger at some point because it tied in neatly with my Gmail account and because I wasn't having to update software. I decided to use it again since I could just tack another blog onto my same log-in. Blogger blogs port around easily, so if I decide at some point to kill this blog, I can just fold the posts over into my other blog on this account, and they'll just fall neatly into its archives.

So that's me, and why I'm here! I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.