Youtube

I watched a few library clips.

Okay, as much as I like Mr. Bean I couldn't watch the whole thing. I found the episode of him accidentally marking up an illuminated manuscript far too disturbing.

I liked "Interval Library" watching compact shelving move. Who knows, someone may make a video of our compact shelving someday.

"Installing Ubuntu" was fun too.

Of course, I watched a few of these at home since I can't used sound on my work pc. (My pc is in the public area so sound is a no-no).

I liked the search interface for Dabble the best. MetaCafe, yahoo video etc. interface wasn't as streamlined. I prefered youtube and dabble's UI because it was simple and gave me a synopsis about each clip.

Firefox extensions

I tried to add Cruzcat to my search box and it turns out I already had it there. I can't figure out how to delete it. I'll keep working on that.

I don't recall when I added Cruzcat to the search box but I also added several other search engines, sites etc. at that time. As you can tell, I never use them. So no, they aren't very useful.

Zoho

I decided to explore Zoho since I've used Google docs. I wasn't that impressed with Google docs.

Zoho: I tried to import an excel file and found that file type isn't supported.

I felt unsure about providing my user name and password to my blog. I wasn't sure how secure the Zoho website is.

It worked fine exporting my test blog page from Zoho. I could see this would be an easier way to write a blog because the Zoho interface is a lot like using Word.

Update: I deleted my Zoho test blog post. I tried to edit the post so only a little of the text was posted but Blogger didn't like what I was doing with the html and told me there was an error. I didn't want to keep playing with it so I deleted the post.

Library 2.0

I thought all of the library 2.0 articles were thought provoking. The first two stuck with me the most.

I agree we need to tailor our user education to patrons; we can't expect them to conform to us for the most part. We still need to educate them about how to find things in our library but the "look and feel" does need to be more 2.0-ish. I think the new upload of the Cruzcat catalog does this.

Perhaps I'm becoming an old fogey but all I could think about in the first articles is "What happens when the power goes out?". Sure, disregard print material and focus on digital but remember, it won't do you any good when the power goes out. Think it can't happen? One good heat wave, fire or earthquake and we're down for a while. Whatcha gonna read then?

What does Library 2.0 mean to me? It means streamlining and making finding information simple. It also means customization so if you are a novice user it is still easy to find things and if you are an advanced user you can find even more.