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.


Well, I haven't read George R. R. Martin's books (couldn't get into the first one), and I don't have cable, so I won't be watching it, either, but fantasy is one of my main genres. I don't read as much as I used to, but I thought it might be neat to have somewhere to keep track of what I've read and what I'm reading. And then, hey! Monday morning rolls around and I have a reason to be sinking time into looking up books I've read.

Almost right away I popped into the 'who can see what' parts of the privacy settings, since I went in to set up a profile, and things like birthdays are just too risky to leave dangling out in the public for everyone to see. (Not that I care if people know how old I am; I'm just not going to make things that much easier for identity thieves.)

I've added almost two hundred books, just going off a couple of authors' whose series I've read (or want to read), and, well, it takes a while. I own 1100 or 1200 books, and adding which ones I've already read will be really helpful so that I can try to read some of what I've accumulated but not read before buying yet more. (Or, as I've finally gotten back around to, hitting up SCPL and ILL for them.)

The fastest way to add books in the search results seems to be to give them a one-to-five star rating; this automatically puts a book on your 'read' shelf, and it doesn't pop up the review editing window. Of course, this means that I'm rapidly adding a bunch of titles by just defaulting them to a '4' unless I felt strongly enough to push them up to a '5' (a couple of Terry Pratchett's books, among others) or down to a '3' off the top of my head.

Well, one thing led to another, and my husband ordered me a refurbished Opticon barcode scanner for about $20 on eBay this weekend.

See, goodreads has an import function, and for the books I've got that have barcodes, I should be able to just blip the ISBNs into Excel or a text file, save them in the appropriate format, and mass-import. Mmm, mass importing. I learned about scanning barcodes into Excel or a text file doing inventory last summer at the library; the little USB scanners we had... well, they're kind of sad. If you exceed their memory capacity, it ruins the whole batch of data, and there's no indicator on them to tell you how full they are. So I pulled the barcode scanner from the circ desk workstation, plugged it into a netbook (plug & play is awesome sometimes), and did inventory that way. No import-from-scanner step; it just all went straight into a file for me. I figure I can do that with goodreads once the barcode scanner gets here - and I can rapidly populate my 'to read' list and hopefully pare that down some, as well.

Of course, all my old, pre-ISBN books and volumes without barcodes are going to have to be entered manually, but I should be able to get a bunch of the paperbacks in with the scanner before I have to start typing in titles individually.

Once I'd started adding books, I discovered the gadgets. I added one to both my Blogger blogs (so you can see it here, rather than clicking over to the other one to see what it looks like). As you can see there, I'm six books into the Dresden Files. One of my friends has been pitching it to me for a while, and after watching the t.v. spin-off via Netflix (my husband and I didn't watch t.v. for years, but Netflix is sucking us back in, one series at a time), I went ahead and started the books.

The biggest downside of goodreads? I don't know anyone there. If anyone here is there and they want to friend me, please look me up! (Wait, I've found a colleague - hooray! But still - please look me up.)


I've joined a lot of social networks as they've come out; most of them I've done very little with:
Multiply, MySpace, LinkedIn, MeetUp, and others I don't remember at this point. MeetUp is the only one I got actual value out of so far - I met the people I play pen & paper RPGs with through that, the same day I interviewed at this library for my first professional library job, though we stopped using the site when they went to a pay model.

I do use Facebook somewhat regularly; I'm only about 10 years out of high school, and I moved a thousand miles away, so most of the people I went to high school with (in one of those rural school corporations where most of the people you graduate with you've known since kindergarten) I haven't seen since then. Facebook has been great for finding out who got married to whom, who has kids, who went on to do doctoral work in chemistry and DNA research, and all the stuff I just don't hear now that I'm not local. Plus, all my younger cousins whom I see once a year (if that) are active on there, so I can keep up with what they're doing. I don't post often; I do tend to post pictures of what I've been up to most recently, though.

Plus it gives me a leg-up on Mom for knowing when people I know get engaged. ("Did you hear?!" "Oh, yeah, I saw that on Facebook last week.")

I joined Twitter more recently than Facebook, but it's still been a couple years. (Sometime in 2009, maybe?) I have a couple accounts - one for a gaming community I'm part of and one for general use. I tweet more on the former, but I follow a lot more people on the latter (@kebrent). I had never used Twitter lists before, so this morning I went and made a couple to sort out the hundred or so people or news outlets I follow.

Facebook can be useful for a library for disseminating information to its patrons and the world at large - our library has a page. Twitter can do the same thing. The key to successful use of both, though, is likes/followers. If no one's listening, the information's just getting shouted into empty space. And if you do have people listening, it really helps if you say something regularly.

Twitter is also useful as a conversational tool: during the ILLiad conference in March, you could search for #illiad11 and get tweets related to the conference. Some people live-micro-blog the sessions they're in. It can give you some snippets from the sessions you couldn't attend. (Unfortunately the hashtag doesn't bring up results on Twitter right now, so I'm wondering on the long-term use of this, or if Twitter is just having... issues... today.) I've seen hashtags for a variety of library conferences, so sometimes it's an interesting little window into some event you weren't able to go to, sort of like the Cliff's Notes version.

I follow a variety of people on Twitter - librarians, authors, a handful of celebrities, news outlets, and so forth. Some of them are entertaining, some give useful information. The fake feeds, like the one for the Bronx Zoo's missing cobra, are often good for a quick smile. NPR has a bunch of Twitter accounts, and the New York Times has at least one. My mother is an avid NPR listener, and I drive a commute that kills radio reception multiple times, so Twitter helps me keep up with her on that.

Another thing Twitter can be useful for: immediately breaking news. The earthquake in Toronto last June was perceptible at our library - not hugely so; we were under construction at the time, and those of us on the first floor thought at first that one of the construction vehicles had backed into the building or something, but the people upstairs were more certain. There was nothing on the major news sites for most of 45 minutes, but searching "earthquake" on Twitter to see if there had been one or if we were just going crazy almost immediately zeroed us in on the correct event, just from the sheer quantity of tweets.

Twitter feeds have RSS options, so you can pull them into a feed reader. If you were setting up a Netvibes for your library and providing local information, you could include local news sources, or a link to something like #518wx - a Twitter search on the hashtag for weather in the 518 area code. (This is what I used to do before I actually joined Twitter - pulled tweets into my Feedreader via RSS.)

I rarely use Twitter's website; instead I'm using Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck lets you watch multiple accounts, lists, searches, and such at the same time. I was initially frustrated because I had news sources and librarians on one account, and I had the gaming community I'm part of on the other, and I wanted to have both at the same time, but not under the same @; Tweetdeck solved that problem for me. It's sort of an interesting dilemma of multiple internet identities: some of the communities you interact with the most never know your real name (or even if they do, the medium you're interacting through makes using it for communication confusing); others you know the participants from the real world first, so using an alias is equally confusing. (An interesting illustration: Blizzard's player forums and real names, and the reversal.)

If you signed up with Twitter and need someone to follow (or to follow you), I'm @kebrent.

I will probably hook goodreads up to Twitter after I get the import done - I don't want to inadvertently spam the world with a ton of the books I've read all at once. That is, of course, assuming I don't spend most of the next week outside work finishing off the Dresden Files.