Infopeople's 23 Things Experience

I have really enjoyed the experience of the 23 Things challenge. I want to thank those who put it together, and look forward to the next 23 Things! It is important to keep some kind of dialog going on this subject, as well as gauge the progress that is being made in public libraries as they apply some of the Web 2.0 applications to Library 2.0 operations - wouldn't be a bad idea for a wiki.

Web 2.0 and Library 2.0

I have enjoyed my recent exposure to Web 2.0 websites as part of Infopeople's 23 Things challenge. I had not been keeping up with many of these new applications, and was pleased to have the time to explore some of them. I have been pleased with the fact that I am now more knowledgeable about many of the terms when I read about both Web 2.0 applications in the news and popular literature as well as Library 2.0 in the library literature. I must admit that while I usually like commentary from Walt Crawford, I found the "Library 2.0" blog in Cities and Insights too long and cumbersome and slowly lost interest about half way through it (even though I read the whole d. . . thing). I guess part of the difficulty he had in finding the essence of the term "Library 2.0" is part of the lesson in itself.

As with anything, there are some things I like about Web 2.0 and some things I don't. I am encouraged and discouraged by the burgeoning number of blogs and the explosion in personal expression that they represent. However, I'm also concerned that there is no "publishing house" control over the "literature." In other words, how do you separate out the truely expert commentary from the dribble? There isn't time to read it all, even when narrowing it down to specific subject areas using a Technorati tags search. I need a service that sorts through all of the background "noise" of all these blogs and finds the ones that are particularly expert and thoughtful. I need tools that don't make me read more (I already can't read everything I want to, and I read a lot), but allow me to read the best that is out there without spending a lot of time searching for it and reading inferior quality blogs along the way. It doesn't really matter if certain blogs have more hits than others to me - just being read a lot doesn't mean you know what you are talking about or are particularly good at saying it. There still needs to be some qualitative review of all of these blogs to separate out the good from the not so good. There may be a niche here for some enterprising librarian to start a blog evaluation service. Probably a daunting enterprise given how many blogs there are out there now, but one that is obviously needed. Maybe someone has already started it, and I just haven't found it. If anyone has, let me know.

My Wife Discovers Flickr

As part of the 23 Things, I introduced my wife to Flickr last night. It started out with a "Honey I really don't have time to learn something new tonight, and besides I'm tired" and turned into "Wow - This is cool" and we didn't get to bed until 3 hours later. My wife is an Art History major and has been dying to travel to Italy for many years. After I showed her how to log in, she immediately typed in "Italy" in the search box. "Wow, 11,032 groups about Italy!" She added "Art" to the search, and "narrowed it down" to only 4,139 groups. Then she added, "Florence" and came up with only 295 groups. Finally she added "David" and got 13 groups which she promptly started to peruse. As I turned away to work on something else, I kept hearing things like "Amazing," "Oh my" and "I gotta go there - NOW!" So anyway, thank you Infopeople for making me a hero last night - I'll send you the bill for the trip to Italy that I have a feeling may be happening sooner rather than later.

Image Generators

The image generators available were fun, although I'm not sure how useful they would ultimately be for the library facility planning field - except they do add a little humor to some of the things we might do. See this link as an example: Copy this link to send this page to a friend: http://atom.smasher.org/bar-b-q/?l1=Our+BBQ&l2=is+sooooo+good&l3=our+pigs&l4=can+fly

I particularly liked the Dylan cue card image generator and made up one that showed the steps in planning a public library building - Not particulary detailed, but probably memorable to the novice library planner. I may explore more of these later, but this would probably be of most interest to children's and young adult librarians.

Twitter

23 Things blog about Twitter. I frankly don't have a clue how I would use Twitter for a library website or construction application. I suppose if a manager had a lot of consultants running around out in the field and he/she wanted to keep up with what they were doing all of the time, that might work, but WHY? On a personal basis, if someone had a lot of friends all over the country/world that they wanted to keep up with all of the time, that might be a possible application, but I think it would probably die out fairly quickly unless you were really good friends and really wanted to know what all of your friends were doing all of the time (not me).

Web 2.0 Applications for Library Website

As part of the 23 Things exercise, a Web 2.0 application that might be useful is a future Google Map application that shows all of the recently constructed public library buildings in California. The map could show a photo of each library and be linked to other photos as well as basic information about the recently constructed building. It would also be useful to provide RSS feeds from the website so that any time additions or changes were made to the map or website material, interested users could be notified of those changes.

Pictures of California Public Library Buildings

It would be interesting to set up a Flickr group about the subject of California Public Library Buildings (and/or about public library buildings on a national or international basis). There are plenty of pictures of libraries in Flickr already and some groups at the state level like New Jersey Libraries, but so far I haven't identified a group that is just for California Public Library Buildings only. If Flickr would allow, the State Library could invite public library staff, users, consultants, architects and interior designers to post the pictures that they have taken or own the copyright on and post them to Flickr. Specific tags could be suggested so that users could sort the photo database on specific terms like, "Children's Room," "Teen Center," "Lighting," "Technology Infrastructure," "Sustainable Design," etc. Over time, this could become a wonderful resource for library staff, boards and Friends groups working to plan new and improved public libraries in the state. If this was done on a national or international basis, additional state and country tags could be used as well. I suppose a similiar kind of thing could be done on U-Tube or a similar site for videos of public library buildings. Hmmm . . . any interest?