Thing 23-Done!

I never thought I would actually finish Learn and Play, especially during those weeks I was 9-10 things behind. Amazingly, I am finishing early! I enjoyed some of the exercises very much and some not so much. The exercise with Flickr was easy and convinced me to use another service Snapfish to create calendars for my parents and in-laws for Christmas. I probably wouldn't have tried before I learned it was painless and easy. I also had fun making the images with the Read posters. The exercise in general was informative in learning more about what Library 2.0/Web 2.0 means. Before, these terms were basically jargon that had no meaning to me. I will be able to understand a little more when a customer talks about these items, however without consistent practice, I wonder how much of this will stick with me. I will keep up with librarything as a journal of teen literature that I have read, so I will have a RA tool at my fingertips. I'm not so sure that I will keep up with Bloglines; as I have mentioned I'm not big on getting all my info from a screen, although it does help to keep up with the news. Sharing information and making it available and accesssible to all is a great thing, but I will always be concerned about content--thank goodness for library workers and people with common sense who can filter things and take/find the good stuff out there.

MOLDI

MOLDI provides a terrific service for customers wanting to download audio books, ebooks, etc. from the comforts of their own PC. Allowing customers to download software they need increases the convenience of this service. I enjoyed browsing the fiction areas and reading the blurbs. You can even get a recipe or two from the cookbooks without even downloading the book! I do enjoy audio books, but I use them in the car and I don't have any portable devices--I know this is probably unheard of--so I still need/use CD's. I also am some one who prefers to read the paper book and not a screen, so the ebooks are not something I'm terribly interested in, although I understand why people like them.

Podcasts

Podcasts are an interesting way to share information. I talked with a couple of people at the branch while doing this exercise and they shared their opinion that podcasts were outdated; there are better ways to do this. Not being technically savy, I'll take their word for it. I found the directories a bit clunky, because they never quite took me in the direction I wanted to go to find things. It could be I expect too much. While looking for library related items, I came up with zero several times. I finally found something worth adding to bloglines through Amazon, which is a weekly 7 minute presentation of new audio books. This is probably a good way for libraries to use podcasts on their own website--sharing titles to interest customers or maybe using it to share information about Ready to Read skills--demonstrating those skills and sharing title; booktalks for teens could be another way to use podcasting on the website.