On Microblogging: I follow David Ramsey Maps of Cartographica Extrodinaire, someone from Nightline (ABC), John Wood, the guy who starts libraries, and a few from my SLIS cohort. I think I need more ‘active’ experience with this technology in order to more fully appreciate it’s potential.
Tagging and Social Bookmarking: Signed up for Diigo: downloaded digital toolbar and started a list of favorites/essentials and tagged each page.
A few days with Diigo and I love it! I’m tagging more confidantly and plugging in old finds into my new tool! I plan on taking it with me to the reference desk…when ‘they’ let me!
Images & Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenrol1/
Photo Fun: While this was a fun browse, I can’t quite see flickr taking the place of a jing tutorial. Photo Fun should be renamed Photo Frustration. I signed up for Pixlr and expected to easily save my project to my computer but couldn’t see how to get a specific location designated. Will recruit technical support. I stumbled through directions and created a few unique versions of my fb profile photo.
Several days later….ah, now I understand the difference between Flickr and picnik and pixlr! Here is my favorite ‘special effect’ photo. These tools are great for marketing strategies using images of one’s library; adding visual effects to demonstrate the magic we know is inside. Or, a lighthearted approach with chat icons to encourage contact with the librarian!
I read an article yesterday in a librarians’ blog, www.walkingpaper.org/1436 about libraries becoming a place to create content; not just find content. The creative process requires more than just one moment of inspiration; a series of nudges and serendipity moments need to follow the ‘aha’. We do that when we implement information fluency courses and grow those introductory sessions into translating fluency to creative original expressions (isn’t that what a book is, to some extent?).