#23 The Summary

Okay at long last I am finished. The favorites for me were flickr, the online image generators, Library Thing, rollyo, youtube, googledocs and audiobooks. I really liked the variety of resources that we looked at that I probably would not have looked at on my own. I definitely will be better able to help others with some of these resources and be better able to recommend some of these tools. The problems with broken or old links made things somewhat frustrating at times so I think the program should be updated with fresh links. I definitely would like to participate in something like this again- having it self-paced was great for me. I will say that it is definitely time consuming - I had to work on the entire thing at my own pace from home - I never would have had time or the quiet time to work on it at my branch and I think it is something I'm sure will impact some individuals from starting or finishing this program. Overall though I had a lot of fun experimenting with the different resources and would love to participate in more online training.

#22 Overdrive & NetLibrary

I created an account in Netlibrary and downloaded the audiobook Josephine which is a biography to my computer. I went onto Maryland's Digital eLibrary/Overdrive and downloaded a David Sedaris live recording to my ipod. I browsed the Project Gutenburg collection and found lots of classics and some out of print books so definitely something I will probably use and recommend to customers.

#21 Podcasts

I went on podcast.com and podcastalley.com and explored some book links. Since I'm a children's librarian I searched specifically for books for children and found children's video books on India which has this Becka and the Big Bubble series of animated books where she travels to India, San Diego, the North Pole, etc. I also found childrens book radio which has reviews of books and interviews with authors. I posted a link to both on my bloglines account. Looking at podcast information that has been posted by libraries those that I found had podcasts on the following subjects: an overview of resources at the library, events hosted by the library, book reviews, how to research a paper, etc. So it looks like there are plenty of practical uses for libraries.

#20 Youtube

I've known about youtube for quite some time and waste inordinate amounts of time there but anyway it's a pretty cool site because you can catch up on videos you haven't seen, parts of shows you missed, old time stuff and even friends who've posted video of their kids and that sort of thing. My oldest daughter is quite an addict herself - but some of her friends are into theatre and so we've been able to see some of their performances on youtube when we weren't able to attend. So I watched the new Lady Gaga video of her newest song "Bad Romance" because someone had told me it was pretty disturbing and she wouldn't let her daughter watch it. Mine has already watched it anyway so I had to see for myself. So yes it is a bit disturbing -not to ruin it for you but it involves corpses and electrocution. So I will embed it here as I'm sure no one else in libraryland will do so - think of it as my contribution to performance art.

#19 Web 2.0 Awards

Looked at a few of the book sites like Lulu which is for people who want to self publish - guess the literary salon types might be interested in that. Noticed that the books were pretty pricey though. Looked at second place biblio.com which will give you information about out of print or rare books and this could come in handy when a patron can't find a book that they want that is no longer in the system. Of course saw Craig's List and I've been on there before so no surprises there. Noticed google docs was there and this actually is helpful for those people who did not bring a flash drive to save their work on.

#18 Online Applications and Tools

I looked at Zoho but decided to go into google docs as I have a gmail account already set up. I am somewhat familiar with google docs as I volunteer at my child's elementary school and the volunteer calendar for one of the teachers is on google docs. It's a pretty cool tool allowing it to be shared with all of the volunteers. I created a calendar of my work schedule (programming) for the month of January. I think I probably need it more for my schedule at home and started to create a calendar of all the dr.'s appointments and activities for my family which everybody (my oldest, my husband) can access so we don't overbook.

#17 Maryland Libraries Sandbox

I created an account but couldn't get into the Maryland Libraries Sandbox- it kept telling me I didn't have access. So this ended up being an exercise in frustration. I decided after an hour to cut my losses and move on to the next thing.