Our expert adult book club facilitators did a bang-up job of hosting a Friday morning session this week to discuss The Thirteenth Tale. Can I just say, if you haven't read it, you are really missing out on a good story.

Now it's back to reading my Young Adult books. Down the Rabbit Hole is our next selection. I wish my crystal ball could tell me if anyone will show up.

If you know who I am, you can check my Facebook page for a photo of me with one of my co-workers. She bought yarn and I knitted up a scarf and fingerless mitts for her. So of course spring is here and it's too warm for them.

Exploration 9--the end

Reflections on my explorations:

I started on regiscopes and card catalogs in book format and here I am today, 25 years later, writing a journal on the internet, twittering, and trying to find old friends on facebook. None of what we were asked to do was particularly difficult. Most internet stuff today is fairly user friendly.

I didn't try to hide who I was on my blog although I didn't use my name. How many still don't know who "Knitternana" is?

Twitter was fun but do I need to know who is hungry and who is tired? Now the fact that it's snowing at one of the northern branches will be very interesting when we start getting some serious snow.

Facebook --well, I'm glad I know all about it but I'm not going to be doing much more with it for now.

Between Librarything and GoodReads I ended up liking GoodReads better and am trying to keep up with that. I could see one of these being used to keep track of all the new Y books and sharing that with my teen book club.

I'm looking forward to our new homepage and seeing how we put to use the new technology to make searching easier and to keep the public better informed about library programs with a more interactive calendar of events.

This is by no means the end of learning about new technology. I can't wait for my first automated call from alerts.com! (I've got to make sure my cell phone is charged before a storm hits!)

25th anniversary

I Twittered and commented on Facebook yesterday but never got around to posting on my blog. November 16th was my 25th anniversary as career staff. I really started back in 1974.

YRead

I attended the YRead Conference in Carroll Co. this weekend. I don't remember knowing about the first YRead held in 2006 but this is planned to alternate years with Books for the Beast.

The facility was great--nice auditorium, one book group per classroom--not as crowded as it can get at the Roland Park facility.

I chose the Adventure genre because the featured speaker, Terry Trueman, had a book in this group and I wanted to read Peak by Roland Smith. Peak turned out to be my favorite, and I highly recommend the sound recording. Hurricane by Trueman was ok and could easily be recommended to high level J readers. Zane's Trace by Allan Wolf and The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean were challenging in their own ways. I will write more detailed reviews on GoodReads.

Exploration 7: Wikis

If only I could watch the little video on Wikis from my work computer. Alas, it won't work here so I will make the time to watch it at home.

Granddaughters in matching sweaters

See why I would rather knit. Aren't they cute in their matching sweaters?

Peyton's sweater

I knit this sweater for my 3 year old granddaughter. Isn't it cute?!

Facebook and Twitter

Those of you on Facebook know who I am and we've had some fun with some of the features like SuperPoke etc.

As far as using Facebook for library work, I haven't figured that out yet. It's been nice getting to know some staff members a little better but I don't think I am going to keep up with it.

Now Twitter is another story. That has been amusing but also I can see it have a purpose in our work. Twitter has kept us in the loop with what it going on in some other branches and with other staff members. I heard about Oragerful's new job way before the announcement came out. Other branch staff helped me out with my teen book discussion.

A big feature, for me, of both Facebook and Twitter is that I can keep up with what is going on at work from home. Being a JS I get nosy about what's going on when I'm not at work. I guess that's my problem with all of this--I like to read it but I don't like to contribute to it.

Zoho

I tried again today and still can't get my Zoho document to transfer to my blog. I suspect that there is a simple explanation but I have no clue. I just don't see why I would ever write something in Zoho to trasfer to my blog instead of just writing it on the blog directly.

Web 2.0 Exploration 6 Online Office Tools

I was just getting ready to post before lunch that I didn't see the point in using Zoho for work when it won't send by email but now after lunch my emailed document has arrived to my supervisor. So I will amend my opinion in favor of using on line office tools to share documents.

One thing I observed in creating my document was that there didn't seem to be any indication of typos/misspelling errors like you get in a Word document. I wonder what's up with that. I'll go back later and try some editing tools.

I have tried to publish my document straight from Zoho to this blog and was not successful. I'll try again later.

In theory these tools should be useful in doing documents that can be created and edited by several people. I would want to see a faster delivery via email before I could give this a thumbs up.

Don't you know that I've not had a single patron ask for Excel or PowerPoint since I discovered that you can use these on-line tools. Maybe the public was already up on this technology before I was?!

Twilight Teen Book Discussion

You can read my thoughts on our recent Teen Book Discussion on the programming blog. We were thrilled to death (no pun intended) by the turnout. Eight girls all raring to discuss all aspects of this four book series. Who knew it would take vampires, werewolves and a klutzy teenage girl to get the kids to participate in a book discussion. Believe me 8 was a triumph.

We're going to capitalize on their enthusiasm and revisit Twilight in January 2009 and compare the book to the movie.

Meanwhile we have a Teen Book Discussion scheduled for October for Teen Read Week. Teens are invited to bring their favorite book and campaign for it to be voted most popular. We thought we would have some other categories to vote on. I'm looking for suggestions for favorite first line in a Young Adult book. If anyone reads anything unusual or knows of any catchy first lines I'd love to hear from you.

This is what I do on my own time

You may be seeing me wear this at work.

Solved LibraryThing widget issue

My previous issue with the LibraryThing widget not looking the way I planned it was a problem with my template. Changed template and voila--widget obeys me.

Zoho document and work email

I was learning Zoho and created an outline for my Twilight book discussion and shared it by email with my partner for the book discussion via our system email. I sent it to myself and to my supervisor just for fun. No one got it. So I sent it to my home email. No problem, there it was instantly.

Has anyone else tried this? Do we have a firewall issue here blocking Zoho documents?

Twilight

Calling on all Twilight readers. What did you like about the book?

The boss and I are leading a teen book discussion on 8/19. Would love to hear positive ideas about the series.

So far no one has asked to sign up but it's early yet for teens to commit.

Catching Up

Ok, as you can see I accomplished the task of creating a blog, adding photos from flickr, adding an avatar (that was my idea), setting up RSS feeds, and last, but not least, creating a widget from my Library Thing site.

I had fun doing most of this but this Library Thing widget is driving me nuts. I've followed the directions, set up for small covers, no text, style 5, yada, yada, yada, and copied and pasted the code. Every single time it comes out in a vertical line instead of the little rectangle of book covers that was showing in the set up. I even deleted the whole thing and tried again. Now I could just pretend like my widget looks exactly the way I wanted it to and no one would be the wiser but that would be too easy. I'm nothing if not tenacious and I will conquer this demon widget someday. But not today.

How soon I can forget!

It's been busy since my last post. The health insurance mess distracted me for quite a while and most of my work time was taken up getting my branch's magazine order finished and keeping up with SRC data entries. I almost forgot my login name and even how to get on my blog.

LibraryThing

My LibraryThing account is set up with added titles and put a the widget on my blog. I still need refine things a little. I really want my books all in a little rectangle and not in a vertical line.

I had a patron earlier who wanted a list of all the books he had ever checked out. So I showed him Libary Thing and suggested that he use something like this to keep track of his reading.

Adding to blog

I added a photo but need to learn how to fix the size.

Web 2.0

This is my first post as part of our Web 2.0 assignment.

I figured out how to add the avatar but I'm not sure I have it where I want it.