Thing 5

What I'm staring at right now is a



I need to finish ordering the materials for this fiscal year within the next two weeks, and I fear the final days will be excruciating, as I am now down the pile of things I set aside, saying, "Hmm, don't know what that is or where to buy it..."

So I'm happy to have found this pictorial way to express my anxiety, thanks to Spell with Flickr! Copying and pasting the html seemed like magic!

Cross-Country

Cross-Country
Originally uploaded by aremac

Here I am exploring Flickr. Finally found the "Blog this" button (I use a Mac at home--could that be the problem?). I found this photo by clicking on "germany" in the tag cloud, and then "most interesting." This scene looks like paradise to me! Especially if I have a little knapsack with cheese and bread and a few sun-warmed tomatoes...

Now I wonder what other users do besides just clicking on pictures that catch their eye. I guess I should explore the Organize tab, because I assume there's some way to gather the photos you like best into one place...on Flickr. But can you take them away?

This makes me think of my first experience with online photo sharing--Webshots. I always felt a little guilty downloading hundreds of photos onto my work computer (previous job :) but that little "Daily Photo" icon in the corner of my screen was too tempting.

Thing 4: Flickr-ing

"And you're done." This slogan appears daily in my cubicle, stamped on the side of boxes of every shape and size delivered from Amazon.com. And while ordering from Amazon does have its rough edges, the promise of simplicity in that slogan generally comes true. I can quickly find the books I need, order them with a few clicks, and wait confidently on the receipt of a smiling brown box just a few days later. The unbeatable discounts and the swift delivery are the two reasons I do most of my ordering for the library through Amazon.

The phrase "and you're done" popped into my head again today as I realized that with very little effort, I had posted, tagged, and described a photo on Flickr. I really appreciate how easy it was to do this. I had actually planned to take some pictures of my workspace, so the timing of this was great for me personally. But I don't yet see a work-related connection use for Flickr.

Thing 3: RSS Feed, or Stuffing My Face?

So I set up my RSS feeds a few days ago, and I have mixed feelings. I think it's extremely helpful for blogs to which the blogger posts infrequently. I really dislike checking a blog over and over, hoping to catch any new crumb that falls. But for blogs that are frequently updated, I find it kind of distressing to see them in the RSS feed. Seeing the many many posts that I haven't viewed all lined up on the page really makes the words introducing the CNET video ring true: I am confronted with "more news from more sources than you could ever possibly read."

On the plus side, in the process of writing this post I learned how to embed a link. I never even really thought about how those handy clickable words came to be.

Thing 2

I just viewed Stephen Abram's video, and here's what I think: I like and totally agree with what he says about learning through experience. I feel like I'm in a split generation, younger than those for whom creating a Facebook page is laughable, but older than those for whom it's an unquestioned necessity. If I hadn't started working in a library last year, I wouldn't even be as familiar as I am now with the existence of various online tools. But knowing they exist is a long way from using them, and that's why as I've begun to hear about Library 2.0 tools, it has felt like hearing about the lifestyle of people in a foreign country--interesting, but far removed from my everyday. So digging in and using the tools is like getting to know another culture. 

I'll take the "culture" metaphor a little further--for me to think about how to apply these tools to libraries is a little like starting a new career in a foreign country, because it's still a new thing for me to think about library services from the perspective of the provider rather than the user. I hear the alarm among (some) librarians about how changing technology threatens the relevance of libraries, but my idea of the mission of libraries is still fuzzy. One of the posts we read says that we need to figure out how to "make the library a destination, not an afterthought." As a user, libraries were an afterthought to me--a very pleasant afterthought, and one I was grateful for--but they were never the destination.  So as I continue to work through these Things, I hope that my own sense of the library's mission will become clearer as well.