You Never Know What You'll Find in a Library

I just read an account of the great Cow War in southeastern Iowa in 1931, an event I likely would never have known anything about had it not been for the 10 Things project, and my life would have been the poorer for not reading it. This was in a NetLibrary book titled Americans View Their Dust Bowl Experiences. The writing style is very amusing. Downloadable books are great things!

Google tools

This one is easy! My family has been using Google Calendar since the summer so that we all have access to the (supposedly) up-to-date family schedule wherever we are. It is slightly more time-consuming than a traditional paper calendar to populate, but it is extremely helpful in trying to keep track of four people, all with complicated schedules.

If we would all use our Outlook calendars at work and could somehow get the desk staff's calendars impoted into Outlook, we could greatly simplify the onerous task of scheduling meetings with people from more than one department. Same principle, different software.

Wikis

Community bulletin boards, online. Self-selected, self-policed, of variable usefulness. Many of these types of online applications are seeming to merge into each other. Maybe it's time to do something else for a little while!

Podcasts

I have to admit, I don't like Podcasts. As much as I enjoy music of many kinds, I am not an auditory learner, don't like talk radio, don't like listening to somebody talk without visuals of some kind. Webcasts are a little better because then at least you have the PowerPoint to look at, although those are usually lousy, too. I realize this is a completely personal thing. The only time I like to listen even to audiobooks is if I am the driver on a long car trip.

Social Bookmarking

We need more tags in order for the cloud to be particularly useful. This task led to many diversions--always a danger in cyberspace!

Flickr

There is naturally a great deal more we could do with our Flickr account. Like everything else, it's a matter of priorities and resources...Somebody has to take the photos, edit the photos, upload the photos, name the photos, tag the photos, organize the photos, make cool stuff with the photos, and so on and on.

daisies

daisies,
originally uploaded by theskokieten.

I think the cows would have a field day here!

Facebook

It seems kind of weird to make a Facebook page. It is exceedingly popular among the high school set--I have to chase my daughter off of it regularly. She was allowed to have a profile on the condition that I know the password and look at her profile regularly, and that she is never allowed to say anything negative about anyone on it. It does provide a chance to socialize when you aren't physically in the same place to talk with each other, and I've seen some interesting discussions take place among a number of kids. Not very many of my college or high-school classmates have pages--I know, we're too old for Facebook!

IM

It will be interesting to see how IM works in the library. I just can't bring myself to type without regular punctuation and capital letters and spelling and all of that. It seems so wrong, somehow.

RSS Feeds

At the moment, it feels like Google Reader is just one more thing to try to remember to look at. I did pick a variety of items, some work-related and some not. I am very much enjoying the feeds on the Library toolbar and have reserved several items because of them.