Crazy Times "Up North"

Finally! I am so happy to be able to share with you all Oliver's adventure in Wisconsin. We started out early, he slept most of the day since it's not exactly legal for monkeys to drive cars. For the first day of driving (yeah, that's right, first day) he didn't miss much. We drove out of Texas, then through Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri (just the corner of it), and Iowa. We stopped for the night in St. Paul, Minnesota. Here's a picture of Oliver in Iowa:

...not much to it (sorry if you're from Iowa). On the second day of driving, we passed along through the rest of Minnesota and up through most of Wisconsin to end up at our destination: St. Germain!

We stayed on one of the many lakes up there, did some playing around, shopping, and a whole lot of relaxing! Here is the link to my Flickr, where I post many Oliver pics:


http://www.flickr.com/photos/liliada/sets/

One last thing about Wisconsin is that Oliver's eye patch died. I'm currently on the lookout for a replacement. More stories will come, but not today, I started library school today and my brain is pretty fried. Here is my fav Oliver Wisconsin pic:

Oliver is coming back!

Sorry I haven't been able to share about him! I promise, promise, promise that we'll be back in action soon, including stories from Wisconsin and getting ready for the next couple of exciting trips, including Chicago and Austin!

Coming Soon. . .

Now that I've completed 23 Things, I just wanted to let the followers know that Oliver will be returning to the blog in the next couple of days.

He hasn't forgotten you. . .he's just let me take center on the blog to finish posting about the 23 Things project. :)

Thing 23: Reflection

Woo! Last Thing!!

This has truly been an interesting experience. I learned that I have a hard time randomly blogging about each thing and had to truly stop and think about what I wanted to say about each thing. When I started this project, a friend said blogging gets easier the more you do it. . . .I think it'll just be one of those things I'll always struggle with.

I think my favorite thing had to be finally getting on Twitter. I think that if I use it more and more, it'll help me develop my blogging skills. :) My least favorite was RSS feeds. I still think they're a great idea, just truly not for me. I'd rather have hard copies of items or go to each site I want to view. I think I just get way overwhelmed at the amount of information provided.

I think I did learn a lot about many of the things. As I mentioned in an earlier post, our library has already started a Twitter. I think as we become more aware of what our patrons view in their leisure time that we may explore other online methods of getting our information out to them.

Overall, I'm so glad I participated in this project and feel like I've learned so much about the different Web 2.0 resources available out there. :)

Thing 22: 23 Things at My Library

From my library, four staff members that I know of participated in this program. I think the concept of a 23 Things project is wonderful and can help increase so much staff awareness of what the public is viewing in our building (and out of it, too). I think this program, with some tweaks and changes to some of the things would be a great training tool at my library. I see it as a great staff development project that will help people be more comfortable assisting the public at our internet stations.

I'd like to go a step further and throw this idea out there: wouldn't it be great if public libraries could somehow get a community-wide 23 Things going on as a way for parents to know what their teens are doing online, as a way for teens to find new fun social networking sites, as a way for non-computer literate patrons to know what possibilities are out there as a way of keeping in touch with long lost friends and relatives?

I think it'd be worth looking into. . . .perhaps in a long while. . . after staff members have had an opportunity to explore and grow comfortable with these 23 Things.

;)

Thing 21: Podcasts

Since I have started to work more closely with teens at my library, I decided to listen to a couple of teen-oriented podcasts. The first one was a public library podcast featuring a teen reading her 3^rd place winning short story from a contest the library held. I thought the audio quality was good, she was careful in her reading and I thought it came across very well. I did not see a way to subscribe to this library's podcast, but I personally would not if the opportunity presented itself. I think if I was a patron interested in what activities and events were going on, then I would definitely subscribe in order to keep in touch with what is going on. The second podcast I listened to a speaker from InfoPeople talk about teens and poetry. The audio quality was excellent. I think if I had more time to listen to podcasts, I might possibly subscribe to this one.

I think some podcasts might be of interest or use to our patrons. Although we have a lot going on in the line of programming, I think at this point we don't have quite enough to qualify starting a podcast. We've recently started a Twitter, and I think that is currently grabbing the attention of a pretty large audience. The only downside to podcasting is finding the time to listen to them and download them.

Out of curiosity, I decided to search iTunes for public library podcasts. I was surprised at the results that came back. And I noted that a great majority of them were targeting teens or created by teen groups at public libraries. This is a subject that might need to be brought up to our teens to gauge their interest in podcasting to see if it would be something we might want to explore.

Thing 20: YouTube

I am amazed at the number of public libraries using YouTube! I think they each achieved their goal of reaching a diverse audience. I think they wanted to reach those who don't watch tv often, have no cable access, and who like to support and follow their library online. I did notice that some things were targeted specifically to different age groups, and thought that was nice too.

I think that videos posted online would be a great tool to use for encouraging teens and adults to participate in library programs. I also think if they're updated regularly that this would be a great place to post information about upcoming progrms on your library's channel.

I certainly hope that this is a tool we can somehow utilize at our library in the future.