7 1/2: the beginning at the end

I somehow escaped doing the entry on 7 1/2 habits of lifelong learning.
So here it is...

When it comes to my learning habits, the easiest for me is without a doubt accepting responsibility for my own learning. It's just natural for me. I am a very curious person and I love learning. I've been this way from birth and that's all the motivation I need! As a curious person I have also gotten pretty good at creating a tool box to work with. I keep adding to it all the time.

I would say the harder parts for me are having more confidence in myself and the viewing problems as challenges. I think that those two go together for me. Initially I have a tendency to view problems as merely problems and have doubts about how to deal with them. I need to work on having more confidence in my abilities to overcome the various "challenges" that I meet along the way.

Thing #23: Finito

Well, it took me a little longer than I planned, but that's ok. I am glad we had the extra bit at the end though; it was a good buffer for those of us who were delayed by distractions, obstacles or who are just plain slow. I am relieved that it's over, but I really do believe that I have learned quite a lot. That makes for a very satisfied feeling! I am already taking what I've learned as a part of this project and applying it to what I do here as well as to what I do on my own time. So many of these things were things I had read about and heard about but never really took the time to explore in greater detail. I appreciate the push to get me started in learning more.

It's hard to choose one clear favorite, but I do really enjoy Goodreads. (When I remember to log on!) It's great to see what other FRL-ers are reading and reminisce about books that I'd read ages ago and forgotten about. I think it's a nice way for those of us who are spread out at different locations to make more of a connection as well. I've also really loved reading and commenting on the fellow blogs. I am proud that we have so many witty, insightful and creative people in our Fontana circle. It's so refreshing!

I would certainly do a project like this again. There were a few things that I found to be a tad bit tedious or frustrating, but I have enjoyed the vast majority of our tasks. And I have definitely enjoyed the skills and confidence boost that have come out of it.

Thing #22: Netlibrary

I have browsed Netlibrary before, especially to look at all the Pimsleur language cds that are available there; that is quite an impressive selection! And I do know of some particular patrons who use the downloadable audiobooks. The fiction selection seems pretty good. I found several things that interested me right away without much searching. I was pretty disappointed with the children's and the young adult selection, though. That's really a shame because it seems like young adults especially would be more likely to take advantage of the downloadable books since so many of them have mp3 players and are not intimidated by computers. This is the exact opposite of so many of our adult patrons and the main problem I foresee in getting them to take advantage of Netlibrary downloads. I was also surprised that none of the downloads are compatible with zunes or ipods. I think that really limits the number of people who will use this resource. Maybe that will change eventually?

After playing around I feel a bit more comfortable and better informed about the whole process. I am glad to know that the audiobooks can be renewed! That was my first question. I logged in and downloaded Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat just out of curiosity; I was able to play it on my media player without any problems. I can't wait to try it out on my mp3 player.

Thing #21: Podcasts

Well, I must confess that had never actually listened to a podcast before today. I don't have an mp3 player (yet). And I spend so much time on the computer during the week that I try to stay away from it on the weekends. I have been quite curious though, and I feel sure that it is something I could get addicted to really easily.

I tried all three directories and personally liked podcastalley.com and podcast.com the best. I found loads of book reviews and film reviews, which I love. Not to mention language tutorials and Brazilian-themed podcasts. I can't wait to load my mp3player up with stuff!

I chose to listen to a podcast from Studio 360 which is a great show I know from npr. They do a lot of book and movie reviews amongst many other topics--hence the title "Studio 360." I saw a review there of David Gilmour's recent book Film Club. (This David Gilmour is a Canadian novelist/film critic, not to be confused with the other one from Pink Floyd.) His latest book is a memoir about his relationship with his troubled teenage son. Gilmour decided to let his son quit school in exchange for watching three films a week with him. The idea of film watching instead of high school really made me wish I had a film critic for a dad. I would have totally traded chemistry for Italian neo-realism!

Thing #20: Youtube

I love Youtube!!!

Yes there is a lot of junk, but there is so much great stuff there. I don't mind sifting through the other drivel for the gems. Maybe we should broadcast "trailers" for upcoming programs on Youtube? As long as it's not me on there...I'll bet Charlie would do it.

This is Marisa Monte singing "Para Ver As Meninas." She's the best living female vocalist in Brazil, singing a song by the best living samba/choro songwriter in Brazil, accompanied by the the best cavaquinho player in Brazil. That's just my opinion, but I don't think you'd get many arguments from Brazilians. (I have to post the link because the embedding has been "disabled by request.")


"The Lonely Goatherd" from The Sound of Music. I love this movie, this song and those puppets!






And here is "Library Limbo"--a short cartoon by Cornell film students. Really adorable!

Thing #19: My choice

Naturally I gravitated towards the book category here. I didn't see a cinema category which would have also been high on the list. I found biblio.com which is a site for used and rare books. It's the rare part that interested me most. They have a great feature that allows you to browse their rare book room. So I browsed their rare art and architecture books. Too bad I don't have an extra $15,000 handy. Sigh. There on biblio I also found a great e-zine called Biblio Unbound. I found this article there about paperback preservation . Anyhow, it's a great site! I will be going back. There is lots there for those of us who collect books, read books or provide books to the public.

Thing #18: Google Docs

After exploring Google Docs I found myself lamenting: "Why didn't this exist when I was in college?" Or even better: "Why haven't I been using this already?" There are no drawbacks that I can find to being able to access your documents from any computer. It's organized. It saves space on the hard drive. It makes collaborations easy. As an employee it means I don't have to save everything I'm working on at my desk to a flash drive or send it to my e-mail in order to continue working out in the library. For patrons I see only advantages as well. No lost work. No more desperate purchase of floppy disks! (It's amazing to me they still even make those...)

Thing #17: Wiki part II

That was sorta fun! It took me a minute to get it to work, but that's what I get for trying without following the instructions. Once I read those, though, it was simple. I'm not very good at narrowing down to one favorite anything but I added The 400 Blows to the favorite movie list and Arts and Letters Daily to the favorite websites.

Thing #16: Wiki part I

This is a great concept, with all the things that I like about it also being the reasons it is difficult to manage, but what the heck! Overall I really like the idea of wikis, mostly because they're accessible to everyone and they have the potential to be a great free resource. It appeals to the egalitarian nature in me. I do realize that with this kind of setup there are guaranteed problems, but I still (at least in theory) like the idea of everyone being able to contribute. I have no doubt that library wikis have the same basic issues as wikipedia does, so it seems like some kind of structure is needed from the beginning to cut down on the confusion and inappropriate editing. Of course that would require some kind of "wiki master" to make sure the content is correct and appropriate and well...that's a big job! I think that the end result would probably be worth it, though.

Thing # 15: Library 2.0

I like so many of us feel conflicted about the idea of library 2.0. I love the traditional, nostalgic image of the library. I love books--the real tangible kind made of bound paper. And there are still many people in our area that come to us for just that. No one I know of wants to turn our backs on those people or that library. But there is a whole new generation of people who require a whole new kind of library. Why not be prepared to serve them as well? After all, we are in the business of providing people with information and the tools with which to acquire that information. Some of those tools are changing. Just because the majority of our patrons don't seem to need those tools right now doesn't mean they won't in the future. Eventually we'll have to catch up and integrate these two kinds of libraries, or we'll have a lot of empty chairs.

Thing #14: Google Books!

I already mentioned my interest in the digitization of books in my "any technology that interests you" blog entry. So it's no surprise that I am familiar with Google Books. I use it frequently, in fact. Particularly when I am looking at a book to make an order card for or thinking of buying one personally that we don't have a copy of here. The Google Library project has some amazing institutions associated with it, so I think only good things are to come from such a collaboration--particularly for people like us who live in rural areas. Most public libraries can only give you access to so much via their own collections. It's wonderful to have an alternative for accessing hard to find books other than interlibrary loan...or a trip to Oxford! And the search feature is great for someone who is really trying to narrow down within a book.

Thing #13: Del.icio.us

Aside from the nuisance of having to consistantly pause to remember where to type the periods in the middle of the word Del.icio.us, I thought it was a really brilliant idea. I signed up for a Del.icio.us account so that I can start putting it to good use. That is my goal, anyway. But I am slow to change my habits, and I do enjoy the familiarity of the good old "favorites" button. It can't compare to portable bookmarks with tags for categorizing, though! I took Kristina's suggestion (thanks Kristina!) and I checked out some of the sites referencing the growing use of this tool in libraries. Apparently several public and university libraries actually have Del.icio.us directly on their websites, giving patrons access to recommended sites and links for various topics, as well as news and assignments for local students. That sounds incredibly useful to me personally and professionally.

Thing #12: whatever I want

As far as technology related things, one thing that's always interested me is the digitization of books, especially rare ones. I am not really a fan of e-books. I would much prefer to read a tangible book, but as a total lit/language nerd I love the idea of having hard to find texts available online. You know, it's not always that easy to find 15th century French texts around here! I actually used Project Gutenberg as a college student in one of my classes. We read a variety of 19th century American short stories and didn't have a text book. These days I often use Google Books, the layout is much, much nicer.

Mp3 player for me, please!

Things #11: Digg

I've visited Digg a time or two before, without knowing much about how it functioned. The fact that the headlines and information that appear on Digg are all submitted by it's members, with only a select few being voted on to the main page, is a fascinating one. Given the popularity of Digg, it seems like that could be great advertising for some people. Imagine the kind of publicity you could get for your blog, or podcast etc...? If you campaign enough and network enough, you can recruit enough Digg members/fans to submit your work and vote for it, thereby landing it on the front page and immediately increasing your audience. Very good marketing.

Anyhow, all in all I like Digg. I definitely prefer Digg's setup to Technorati's. It seems much cleaner. I can see how it's useful in terms of bringing together a lot of fringe headlines and varied information, as well as "News of the Weird" as Abby has pointed out. But I still prefer going directly to certain sources. I guess I'm just old fashioned. And I can't imagine all the time and energy so many people put into social networking via the internet. I mean, I love my computer, but ride a bike people!

Here's a great piece with photgraphs of the world's most beautiful libraries.

Thing #10: Good Reads wins

It was Abby who first introduced me to Shelfari and also Abby who told me about Good Reads just couple of months ago. (Abby is usually way ahead of the rest of us in terms of that sort of thing.) I have been distracted by much bigger life issues of late so I haven't been spending as much time there as I did initially, but I can say that so far, in my comparison of the two, Good Reads definitely wins. There are several things about the setup that appeal to me more.

One thing is I noticed right away is that it's faster than Shelfari, which is a big plus. At times it seemed to take an eternity adding books on Shelfari. It's also easier to do basic things like tag and classify your books and edit comments or shelves on Good Reads. I have had a lot more success finding the exact book with their search option because I get a bigger variety of results. I guess they have more search engines for finding books than Shelfari has, which is nice for people like me who have a lot of obscure or foreign-bought books. Call me anal, but I like to have the right edition of the book on my shelf. I noticed that there's a way to import your entire bookshelf from Shelfari to Good Reads, which would save me some time, but I haven't figured out how yet. Has anyone done it?

I have perused the GR explore option quite a bit. I love reading the reviews! Which is also probably why I have been too intimidated to write more than one tiny review. I, like Abby, have noticed that the caliber of review writing on Good Reads is pretty high. I wonder if these people have jobs? Maybe they have jobs as reviewers or write synopses of books for magazines and book covers? I used to be much better at that sort of thing, but I'm out of practice, and it never came very quickly. In any case, it's nice to read them--especially when they come from the Fontana group. I really love the fact that I can see what fellow Fontanites are reading and recommending.

I must also confess that I frequently get sucked into the Never-ending Book Quiz. I just pick up where I left off and the next thing I know an entire hour has passed. I wouldn't recommend going too far with it, though. I've noticed that the longer you follow the quiz the weirder the questions get. Some of them aren't even complete questions, just words or phrases with a question mark tagged on like : "Blue bunnies?" HUH?

Thing #9: the Escher Egg, and me in a museum

This was fun, too! I played around with several different image generators through flickr and dumpr. Kristina is right, this could get very addictive. I kept trying this and that picture, in this or that image generator. In the end it was hard to choose a favorite. I liked the museumr a lot. Though it feels a bit weird to imagine people in a museum looking at an enormous picture of me in my shrimp colored uber-turtleneck. This is a picture of me on my way to visit a monastery on the island of Île Saint-Honorat which is off the coast of Cannes. It has to be among the most beautiful places I've ever seen. : )


I also liked this world map with all the countries I've visited. I'm still lacking a trip to Asia!!

There and Back Again

Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.com

And last, but not least, here is my M.C. Escher "Three Worlds" easter egg. I don't know why, but I really love those easter eggs. I made a lot of them...

Thing #8: Mashups

I found checking out different kinds of mashups to be a lot of fun! I saw quite a few interesting ones, but I only explored two in detail. First I played around with Blubbr where you can create comics from images or search for tags in their archives and see what others have been made. Check out these cute dogs.

But the one I really loved was a travel mashup called The Shady Old Lady’s Guide to London, where I learned that St. Bride’s of Fleet Street with its tiered spire (see the above right photo) was the inspiration for the first tiered wedding cake. Who knew? And while browsing the “medical” category I also learned about Martin Van Butchell, an “eccentric dentist” who put his dead embalmed wife on display at his place of business at 56 Mount St. in order to attract more customers:

When his wife Mary died on January 14 1775, he decided to have her embalmed and turn her into an attraction to draw more customers. His teacher of surgery and anatomy Dr. William Hunter and Dr. William Cruikshank agreed to do the job and injected the body with preservatives and color additives that gave a glow to the corpse's cheeks, replaced her eyes with glass eyes and dressed her in a fine lace gown. The body was then embedded in a layer of plaster of Paris in a glass-topped coffin.

When he remarried, his new wife wasnt fond of it, and it went to a museum where it was destroyed in a bombing raid in WW2.

I wish I could go back to London and do a Shady Old Lady tour!

Thing #7 : Flicker is fab

I have visited flickr numerous times to see my friends’ photos, but this is the first time I have ever actually taken the time to explore flickr in more depth and it completely sucked me in! There is some truly astounding photography to be found there. I love the search options available through explore, especially the interestingness and world map option.

I did two searches, one for seashells and one for pictures of Brazil. It was hard to find a really nice picture that I could also copy into my blog, but I did find this picture of an old shell by Thomieh. I love shells that are all beaten and worn like this one.

I also browsed Alexandre Tinoco’s photos. He is a Brazilian photographer living in Paris and has photos posted from his travels around the world, including these flawless pics taken in Minas Gerais, Brazil:
menina
fofoqueira

Thing #6 (Technorati=Feh!)

As lukewarm as I have been about google reader, in the end it appears to be more useful and cleaner to use than Technorati. It seemed to take me a long time to find what I was searching for through their page. And though I’ve been playing with it off and on over the last week, the whole set-up is still a little tedious to me.

Here are some discoveries:

The Seattle Public Library blog, Shelf Talk, which I discovered through Technorati, has a has a great piece about librarian authored/themed memoirs and fiction. So go release your inner librarian. I also found a fascinating entry there on random books being read on the local Seattle Buses.

For those of us who don’t get Facebook—an Idiots of Ants interpretation found via Library Garden.

And best of all... look out for the Library Ninja!
Because sometimes books are better.

Of Things (see below for Thing #5)

Apparently we are supposed to be referencing the number of the thing we are covering in the title of our blog entry in order to make it easier to determine what has been completed. This makes sense to me, but I have not been doing it. Therefore let it be known that the below entry "Fear of Change" is Thing #5.

Fear of Change

As a neophyte blogger it seems to take me sloth-like amounts of time to figure out how to do even the simplest things on this blog! Grrrr. But I am tweaking here and there and I have managed to add links to the blogs of some of my MCPL “peeps” and to share some interesting bits (including one about disgruntled employees pacified with free pizza!) via my google reader feeds.

Ahh, google reader.

I have only recently begun experimenting with google reader and rss feeds. And though in theory I can see the practicality of it, I haven’t been won over yet. Maybe I just fear change? Yes, I am sure it could save time, especially for people who have huge amounts of blogs to keep track of. And for those blogs that are only updated every 4 months, I can appreciate its usefulness. I know the disappointment that comes with checking a favorite blog/fotolog/flickr account to see what’s new, only to find that it’s the same post that was up a month ago. Otherwise, I think I prefer the old way. It could grow on me I suppose. I don't like the fact that I can't read/leave comments through the reader. I really enjoy interacting with the the actual pages themselves, so I usually end up just going there anyway if I am interested. In the end, what I've noticed is that it basically doesn't save me that much time. And if that's not the point, then what is?

Voilà le blog

So, here it is...

Though I am a longtime blog reader, I am a novice blogger. I have contemplated blogging before but never quite took the plunge, so this should be a great introduction for me. I've been a bit apprehensive about the whole process but now that I've started, it seems like it could be fun!