#20 I Tube, YouTube (part 1) - Video clip "CNN*YouTube Republican Debate"

#19 Discovering Web 2.0 Tools

Among the Web2.0 winners Backpack and Google calendar look interesting to me. I signed up and created accounts with both of them. After signing up at Backpack a personal website was created with my username in the domain name. It includes functions like Lists, Reminders, Notes, and WritingBoard; the simple version for free. The editing utilities of each tool are all easy and convenient to use. However, its calendar is a paid product. In library operation we need a calendar that has a sharing capability. Google calendar is such a one and free. Its sharing function is powerful and easy to use. Two fields to enter for sharing, one is the person's email address and the other is how to share, whether to See All Event Details, Make Changes AND Manage Sharing, Make Changes to Events, or See Free/busy information, but no details. The calendar also provides email or pop-up reminder service. For each event you can have more than one reminder; for instance, one is set "1 day before each event", the other can be "30 minutes before each event". Its Agenda function will send an email "Daily Agenda for (your name) as of 5:05 am", each day if any events are scheduled on that day. It's like a personal assistant giving you a warm reminder list early in the morning. That's great, isn't it? There are still more, Google calendar carries weather forecasts on four days so that you can plan ahead considering the weather conditions.

When a web-based calendar is shared in our working environment, I believe everyone would feel an added sense of responsibility for the library's proper operation. It is a work reminder for all sharing team members. Google calendar is a nice free tool for collaborating with our colleagues in order to improve management and working efficiency in general.

I also explored and created an account at Zoho, the online organizer and publisher. Zoho has 14 tools, but among them nine tools, Zoho Sheet (online spreadsheet), Zoho Meeting (Web Conferencing), Zoho Show (Online presentation), Zoo Writer (Online word processor), Zoho Notebook (Online Note Taker), Zoho Creator (Online web applications creator), Zoho Planner (Online organizing tool), Zoho Wiki (Online Wiki with public, private and group permissions), and Zoho Chat (Instant messaging and group chat tool), are for everybody; the rest of the 14 tools are useful for business management. I tried Zoho Planner and Zoho Wiki. They have one thing in common, that is, easy to use. The Planner for example, on the homepage you will find six things you can do: Description, To-do's, Notes, Appointments, Attachments, and Tags. If your list is not too long, all the six things can be shown on the same page. For most people are not as busy as the big-shots or executives, one page is quite enough for a few days. Zoho also has sharing capability. By entering your colleagues'/friends' email addresses into two fields, one for view (read) only, the other for view and edit (read and write), they will see the same things as you do.

Zoho's Wiki-type publication function is nice and simple. By wiki, it means your writing published can be edited or deleted right there. The Wiki editor is just as sophisticated as the word processor. I was assigned a Wiki domain name of my own, and more than one is allowed. There is also a commenting field for readers to leave messages.

While looking for better answers for this topic, I tried omnidrive.com, the online file storage ( works as if local hard drive) tools. I found that they are not as easy and intuitive to use as the ones I already know, and free storage only 1 GB, while in Google Documens or Google email you could save upto 2 GB free a year ago, and now there is no limit and you are encouraged not to delete anything. The good side of omnidrive.com is that it incorporates with the desktop functions of Zoho so that you can write and save right there. Another thing I had a look at was YUI (Yahoo!UI), I found that it is not for me, it is more advanced for Web/Internet developers.

To summarize Web 2.0 tools for library use, among the winners I found four of them that we can make use of to improve management and to enhance our library customer services:

1. LibraryThing (as discussed in #11) for collection development, whether for the whole library, for one individual librarian, or for customers. It is the easiest way to build up collections with bibliographic information of your own interests.

2. Google calendar for collaborating with your co-workers. It will increase working efficiency by sharing planning and management/customer service ideas.

3. Zoho Planner for organizing all activities, thoughts and observations.

4. Wiki Libsuccess.org for collective wisdom of library theory and practice to improve library services.

#18 Web-based Applications

I created an account a few months ago at Google Docs, but only copied and pasted a few documents over there as a trial. Today when I logged on again I found the docs are still there well kept, dated from February to August.

Googl docs contains three tools, Document, Spreadsheet, and Presentation. The Document has almost all the editing functions as MSFT Word, only missing some complicated Formatting functionalities. But it has some functions which Word does not have, such as exporting and saving as PDF files; also the Revisions that remembers all your changes you have made while creating the document. Google Doc automatically saving your writing every couple of minutes. Still better your creation can be published to your blog by one click on the Publish button, no need to copy and paste onto your blog to publish.

The Google Presentation ("Powerpoint" as called in MSFT office tools) is really easy to use. It also has the collaboration function with which you can share your Presentation file with your colleagues/friends. After clicking the Share button, just key in the email addresses to whom you wish to share with. That's it. Below is the simple Presentation file I created:

Google Presentation: It's Easy to Use

Ok Go On Treadmills (okgo.net) - Happy Thanksgiving!

# 17 1/2 Explore Facebook and Social Networking

To see how an application works the better way is to join it for experimenting and exploring. I set up an account on facebook.com and found that it was interesting and useful indeed for personal and business purpose as well. I see why the company expands so fast and worth so much in a just a few years (The wikipedia article on facebook cited that Microsoft spent over 300 million $ to buy 1.6% of Facebook!). I also added UIUC catalog, MyFlickr, and My Wiki applications to my facebook account. I found the UIUC catalog is good in searching for books only, for articles it is not for the public, asking for NetID ( the message on the page: "The resource you are trying to visit is restricted to UIUC students and employees".) My Wiki is fun. The widget includes seven features from Wikipedia, such as "Featured Article", "Picture of the Day", "In the News", "Do You Know". By clicking each radio button, the featured article or picture of the day will be presented.

Among the applications for librarians, the Books iRead is the closest to us. We in Queens Library can also make use of the networking features of the Facebook to improve our customer services. For a trial idea, for instance, we can start a "QL Friends" application, by which our customers can set up groups of author/book fans, a kind of book-reading and library-support social network. It can have contents like virtual book discussion groups to exchange ideas on books, recommending new books. Customers can set up virtual "Friends of the Queens Library" groups according to their own community areas, to comment on library services, submit constructive ideas/suggestions, and inviting and giving donations.

#17 Playing Around with Wikis

I tapped my head to get a topic to contribute to wikipedia, but the subject matters I could think of are all there posted well and beautiful. Then I thought of a very narrow topic on library work, Desk Schedule, how to make it serve customers better. I posted in wikipedia, but it does not appear when it is searched. I guess it is because the topic and content are too trivial and not up to their standard to be published. Then I posted the same short piece on Library Success, I succeeded this time, it showed up when a search is done on it. Library Success does care about library-related things, indeed. Thanks a million to Library Success. About a week later I added "How to Make Weekly Staff Schedule" in the same page.

The original texts are copied below:

Desk Schedule

From Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Information Desk Schedule in a library is the schedule on who is to sit at the Information Desk to answer customer/patron's questions and serve their various information needs. It sounds and looks like a extremely simple thing to do in the day-to-day running of library information services. It is not complicated indeed, but if you put some thoughts on it, it can make the customer services better and the library employees work with more efficiency as well. The following are things to be considered when making a good desk schedule.

1. The Information Desk should be covered full time, 100%, during the library public hours. No empty seat is allowed even during slows/slack time.
2. Desk Schedule should include Floor Schedule that indicates who should be walking on the floor area looking for service opportunities.
3. Librarian's specialty in knowledge and position should be considered in the schedule. Rotating is always necessary, but the library principle of "customer service first" should be the main factor to consider.
4. No "name only, no action" desk schedule is allowed. It is not for somebody to see, it is for real-time services.
5. Break time, lunch hour should be accurate to ensure fully covered all the time.
6. The supervisor should always keep an eye on the Information Desk activities. If there is a line, non-scheduled librarians should be available to offer help any time.
7. Use the Backpack or Google weekly calendar to share your scheduling with the staff, so that they are kept posted with every single change.

How to make Weekly Staff Schedule in a library is also important to insure excellent customer services all the time. Have you ever received telephone calls or emails from your sister/brother libraries for emergency staff help? The following factors must be in your mind when working on weekly schedules to avoid staff shortage problems:

1. When library programs is coordinated into the staff schedule, who is to present/monitor which program, day or night shift, be sure to have enough staff for desk and floor for normal operation.
2. Community needs should be considered in staffing red-letter days for your district.
3. Be very careful about the first opening day after holiday breaks. That is the time when staff might call sick and also it is the peak time for returning customers. To schedule more than normal number of staff on the day after holiday breaks is wise and necessary.
4. Staff special person business needs for certain days should be submitted beforehand, together with their vacations, all keyed into the official weekly/monthly schedules.
5. Any changes on the already posted schedules must follow the motto of "customer services first". Meanwhile effective scheduling must always be prepared for staff emergencies and traffic delays or any other unexpected human/natural factors for staff absence.
6. Have a yearly draft schedule book with you and for the staff to see. In it all factors considered, you make a yearly staff schedule. All changed throughout the year are made in this book; by the time of the actual weekly schedule is due, you and the staff are ready for the official one.
7. Use Backpack calendar or Google monthly calendar (free) to share your scheduling and ideas with the staff. By using the email sharing function of the calendar to keep in touch with your colleagues and you can get their feedback in good time.

Qlsherwood 06:36, 25 November 2007 (EST)

#16 Wiki Me This

The wiki idea and its web sites are awesome and great. It is like a democracy on collecting knowledge, creating and editing web pages on information of the universe. This collaboration of millions of people from all walks of life in the cause of generating information and entertainment on the Internet tools is called folksonomies, the best example of folksonomies is wikipedia. The truthfulness of the huge amount of information and knowledge posted on the wiki websites is under the sharp scrutiny of millions of authors, knowledge-holders, and critical eyes and minds. The readers/users are ready to edit your postings or simply delete them. The number of entries I used on the mother wiki site wikipedia are all very accurate and concise, rich in contents. I like it and use it. Sometimes I worry about improper editing or vandalism on excellent articles, but like democracy, the majority and the best always survive and prevail.

The wiki idea (infrastructure) can be applied to improve our customer services in two ways, one is internally for staff, the other is externally for the customers. For the library staff one, it can be a site like http://www.qlwiki.org/ that contains subject matters like collection development, cateloging, cyber center, customer services, training and staff development, YA, J-matters, shipping, black experiences, romances, science fiction, hotpicks, etc., or any topics the management would like collecting wisdom and ideas for the staff for. For the external wiki it will not be as easy as the internal one because it is hard to find common subjects/topics that are interesting and attractive enough to get our customers' attention so that they are willing to devote their time to contribute on them. The Book Lovers Wiki is for the Princeton area summer reading clubs and individuals. We had a summer reading website from the New York State for both 2006 and 2007, our customers could contribute book reviews, but it was not wiki, that is, others cannot comment or revise. What kind of wiki ideas can work with our customers and they can benefit from this new service? Let's brainstorm it together. Right now what I can think of is to wiki best seller authors, fiction and nonfiction, by writing reviews for other customers to read and edit.

Some people ask what are the differences between wiki and chat or newsgroup discussions. The wiki articles are more formal, they can be edited to become more satisfactory by other users. There will be a thing valuable as a final result produced by collective and collaborative work and wisdom. While chat and newsgroups do not automatically have that kind of results.

Let's Wiki; we work on it and we benefit from it.

#15 Library 2.0 Thoughts

We've heard and talked Library 2.0 for a while. After reading four posts on it recommended by QL L2.0, Where will the Next Generation Web Take Libraries? By Tom Storey, Away from Icebergs by Rich Anderson, Into a New world of Librarianship by Michael Stephens, and AL's Annoyed Librarian Anti-2.0 Manifesto, my idea on what is Lib 2.0 is now taking shape. The "principles of simplicity, rich interactivity, user participation, collective intelligence, self-service, novel and remixed contents" (Tom Storey) should be equally applicable to Library 2.0. This is just what Rich Anderson and Michael Stephens tried to explain, interpreter, and apply to the library environments.

Rich Anderson says, "In fact, it may no longer make sense to 'collect' in the traditional sense at all". His arguments is based on the changing behavior and ways of serving library patrons/customers and his experience in the university and advanced learning environment where he works. There are several factors that make his arguments not universally applicable. In colleges/universities the patrons/customers are averagely younger than their counterparts in public libraries; they are more educated, have easier access to computers and other high tech means of learning; and what they need from the library is more advanced and more current information. That's why the circulation of the printed materials at Anderson's university dropped 55% over the past 12 years. While in the public libraries we serve everybody, but the main body of our customers are very different from those in universities in terms of age, education, and actual needs from the community libraries. They ask for questions like the best doctors in medical practice in NYC, how to become a US citizen, biographies of the Saints, what are the prices of certain old coins or stamps, etc; we fulfill their more basic life and work needs and their entertainment necessities. Bestseller fictions and nonfictions are our custome' favorites. This is why the circulation of the Queens Public Library increased 30% in the same 12 years period as Rich Anderson used to calculate his university circulation.

Twelve years ago in 1995 the first HTML browsers, the Mosaic, then the Netscape, and fianlly the IE, came into being. That marked the beginning of massive transformation as to the ways and means by which knowledge and information are conveyed and accessed. In the past 12 years this has happened mainly in the academic world, among the younger generations and more educated people. For the older and less educated generations and communities, they have also benefited from this tech explosion, but more indirectly through the library and other information services, or from government and commercial services. In our daily service sometimes both the librarian and customers were thrilled by their miraculous findings through the Internet. For instance, in the recent months I found several medical articles by Google search quickly and accurately, they appeared on the very top (because of "popularity" in the Technorati's term.). In searching this kind of highly-demanded popular medical articles (with exact title and author) nowadays Google search is often more efficient in terms of searching time and accuracy than the traditional databases and databases are expensive; we may consider reduce the number of database subscriptions. When I told my experience to a new librarian who just came out of library school, she/he was surprised and puzzled because in her/his library school, they were taught how to use the more "academic" databases; while the popular web search engines were hinted as not for serious work. New techs gives us pleasure and convenience indeed. we all have seen the surprised and happy faces when we printed out driving directions and maps for our customers with mapquest or google maps or yahoo maps.

New techs are not "icebergs", they are better tools to access information and to get knowledge. It is common sense that different people use different tools. Professors, students, young guys with good eye sight, all love computers. Computers and programs for the blind are widely available now. But do you think a lady or gentleman of 60 or 70 years old would enjoy reading James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel, or Nicholas Sparks, Khaled Hosseini, on the computer screen? No way. It would not be a comfort nor a joy to stair at the screen for so long as to finish a novel within a few days. However, It is indeed a pleasure to read those lovely authors lying on a couch or lazy-boy beside the fireplace, or on the beach under the Florida sun in winter, or in the shade of Howard Beach trees in summer. Do they care about computers, google or yahoo, myspace or facebook, del.icio.us or wikipedia? Yes, but not as much as the professors or students. They may heard of them, but they do not like being forced to learn something that are not absolutely indispensable to them. Comfort and convenience are more important to this group of customers. "Simple" and "easy" are part of the Library 2.0 characteristics, these two qualities are also traditional features of Library 1.0. For the future as far as we can see, libraries of printed materials will not distinguish at all; they are not and will not be endangered species or careers in the 21st or 22nd century. Just imagine when both printed and electronic versions of the same contents are available for reading only, which version would you choose? The answer is obvious: the printed one for sure because it is convenient and easy to read. Collections of printed materials will still make sense in the future, no matter whether it is library 2.0 or 3.0.

Library 2.0 or Library 1.0? Which side are you one? My answer is they are both libraries, they are both essential and important now and in the future for serving varied community needs and both will continue growing, developing and expanding in their respective ways for different customers and to satisfy diversified demands from our valued customers/patrons. "Library is human", as Michael Stephens puts it, it serves individual human beings. The ways and formats of library services should be as varied as human beings are.

What we should avoid during the transformation processes is the final warning given by Al, the Annoyed Librarian, "Always change. Never think." Thank you, Al, but we will change and always think.

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#14 Technorati

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Technorati is totally new to me. I've visited its website several times and spent much time over there to understand it and find its specialty and how it differs from others and why it is useful. All the popular Web 2.0 tools use tags, so does Technoriati, let alone "favorites" and search widget. So I did some test drive on it and this is what I found:

1. Its "favorites" is not organized as the web browsers do with a pulldown list and folders. Technorati organizes them by tags. While you enter the URL of the sites you like, you also give them one or more tags as index by which you can locate them easily in different situations. In my experience, the next time when I signed in again, I saw headlines and summaries from my favorite homepage or blogs, including some of our queenslibrarylearning 2.0 participants in the sequence of publication time with the latest appearing at the head, one day ago, two days ago..... This feature is indeed a pleasant addition that give us a lot of convenience.

2. Its "search" like its "favorites" gives us much more than the conventional search engines. The results include the ranking number in popularity and authority as well as recent postings concerning the target site. I tried three sites, one is my own blog sherwoodlivinglibrary, one is queenslibrarylearning, the other is 1010wins.com. It is interesting to know that among the 110 million blogs sherwoodlivinglibrary ranks in the 4,446,976 that means there are quite a lot more bloggers newer or visited less than mine; and the authority is 1 that means "1 blog reaction to sherwoodlivinglibrary"; it is the learning team page mentioned it once 15 days ago. The qllearning team is about ten times more popular and higher in authority than sherwoodlivinglibrary; while 1010wins.com is about 10 thousand time more and higher than sherwoodlivinglibrary. The search results also include the search subject' homepage screen shot that is a big plus than the conventional search engines.

3. Its "tags" work together with "favorites". The posts of the top tag is displayed automatically when "favorites" is chosen. When any other tags are clicked, their linked web posts will be shown according to time sequence, the latest first.
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