Cycho Librarian

This morning I had another of those "small world" moments that seem to come so frequently in our hyper-connected world. I'm involved in a public art project for Columbus's bicentennial next year to create original pieces for the carillon bells at my church, and one of the composers who I've shown around the tower friend requested me. Even though I had never met her before this project, I come to find out that she's already friends with two other friends of mine. This is the point where most people just laugh and make a joke about how Columbus is really a pretty small town. But I've thought about this before and I'm not sure that it's so much that Columbus is a small town, but that we are all connected a lot more than we think. Think about how many times this has happened to you: you're at a party, maybe not even in your hometown, and you fall into conversation with a stranger. That person happens to know someone where you're from or whe...

Yes, I know, I've been gone for far too long. It's been almost a year since my last serious post, and six months since my last abortive attempt to get started again. So where have I been? Here, mostly: Twitter Updates follow me on Twitter Why? I guess it's easier to be snarky in 140 characters or less. Or maybe I'm just lazy. I'll admit, a big part of it is that Twitter feels more like a conversation. The blog is more about self-centered navel-gazing, more or less. Okay, that's not fair. I'm a halfway decent writer. Maybe some people enjoy reading my rantings. OR at least it's another way for folks to keep up with what's on my mind. At any rate, we've rolled around to NaBloPoMo once again, and once again I'm going to try to use it to get myself in gear. What's different this time? Well, for one, over the summer I rehabbed an old laptop so now I don't have to run to the office to do my entry. And once again I need to write....

We have come to the end of the 23 Things , although hopefully not the end of Learn & Play @ CML . There's no question in my mind that this is one of the best things the library has done to train staff. Not only did it take much less time in the long run than it would have to bring every employee into a classroom to be spoon fed this information, it also brought so many staff across the system closer together. I constantly hear about how people felt like they got to know their co-workers better and felt closer to staff at other locations than they ever did before. Since CML has been battling some provincialism among the branches for years, this alone could have made the entire project worthwhile. I can't help feeling that there are a couple of things missing, though. Unfortunately, to get this project to work we couldn't make it mandatory. What sort of "play" experience is required? But staff who didn't participate have lost out in so many ways. Not...

After our video Thing , we come to our audio Thing : Podcasts. I don't know why, but for some reason podcasts make more sense to me than video blogging. Maybe it's because I was raised on NPR, so audio broadcast of information just clicks with me. I'm also used to listening to NPR while I'm doing other things, and podcasts let me do that as well. So I'm a big fan of podcasts, even though I've never used them in the truest sense of the term-- that is, automatically downloading them onto my iPod. Usually, I just stream them as I need them. Naturally, being raised on NPR, my most common source of podcasts is NPR . Not only can I hear articles that I missed and share articles that I especially enjoyed, NPR also offers other streams that I really like, especially their " Song of the Day ." This has helped me discover all sorts of new music that I might not have checked out otherwise. The other musical feature that I really enjoy is the full-length st...

YouTube is awesome. I know, a lot of people see YouTube as the next great time waster on the web-- people spending hours poking around for videos of bikini-clad exhibitionists or public brawls. But as with so many of the complaints about the Internet, the salacious anecdotes overshadow what's truly remarkable about this sort of website. Many of my views about sites like Flickr and Wikipedia and YouTube have been influenced by Clay Shirky's book " Here Comes Everybody ." The overall theme of the book and what links these sites together is a sort of economy of scale. Whereas in the past it took a great deal of energy to spread any sort of information, now it's easy for anyone to put any sort of information out into the public square. These sites are essentially information aggregators on a scale that has never been seen in human history. The scale is so vast that we tend to miss what it is accomplishing. In the past, it would have taken the few people who wer...

Yes, I need to apply myself. I've consistently been behind on my 23 Things , and now I have less than a week to complete them all! So I'm going to knock out Things 17 , 18 and 19 all in one post. Shocking, I know. But there is a consistent theme here: Apps. Especially with the iPhone we've all been hearing a lot about Apps lately, but what's most interesting to me is how the concept of apps has completely taken over computing. When I first started using computers, it was all about just running individual software. You bought the program, stuck the disk in the computer, and ran whatever program you wanted to run. Windows began the change away from this restricted view of what the computer was capable of. Suddenly you could run more than one program at once! What's funny is how much this seemingly simple change began to change how we thought of the computer. Computers stopped being tools that could only do one thing. They started being nexuses where many thi...

Things 15 and 16 bring us to "wikis." Once again, we have a term that's probably become so over-used that it will eventually be meaningless. But the concept behind it is brilliant. Everyone knows about the biggest wiki out there, Wikipedia. Wikipedia has generated plenty of controversy on its own, but one thing that seems to be constantly overlooked in the criticism is the fact that it's actually pretty effective. So why is Wikipedia effective? Surely if we turn the entire world loose to edit an encyclopedia however they see fit we'll have information anarchy! But as with all things Internet, the answer lies in the scale. For every vandal, there are hundreds of people who care enough about the entry to fix it. Basically, why would a vandal want to waste their time messing with an entry that will be reverted to its original form seconds after it was altered? In this large example there are several clues as to why wikis are a good idea generally. First, any...

It's that time of year, folks! Time to make the Internet explode! That's right, it's time for NaBloPoMo! Okay, I admit it, I just like saying that. National Blog Posting Month is another one of those Internet oddities that grew up seemingly out of nowhere, sort of like International Talk Like a Pirate day . A couple people get a crazy idea, a few more people like it, and next thing you know it's everywhere. I do remember, however, that's it's awfully hard to post something every single day. Fortunately, this year I have my 23 things to spur me along (since I have to finish by December 2nd). Flash drive here I come! In the meantime, I challenge all you Learners and Players itching for an even bigger challenge to join up with NaBloPoMo. C'mon, everyone else is doing it!

So for Thing 13 we're investigating the revolution that is tagging through del.icio.us . I remember when del.icio.us first came on the scene, and the extent of my thoughts at the time were "isn't that a clever way to use a .us domain name." I really didn't think anything of it until we were changing computers at work and I was worried I'd lose my bookmarks. So I created a del.icio.us account and moved all my work bookmarks in there. Turns out my bookmarks all transferred anyway, so I haven't really used my account since. Once again, this is largely a matter of convenience. Since I'm at the same computer at work each day and the same computer at home each day, I almost never have to access the bookmarks on one computer from another. So I never really had the need to use del.icio.us. I could see myself using it instead of bookmarks if Firefox has a del.icio.us add-on that functions like the bookmarks do, but until I need to access my bookmarks fr...

Now a month behind, we come to Thing 12 : Twitter . I honestly can't remember when I discovered Twitter, but the first time I tried playing with it was to see if I could find a way to quickly share information across the entire library system. Twitter seemed like an ideal way to do this. If we created location-specific Twitter accounts and then had everybody follow each other, then when we needed to share information quickly between locations we could just "tweet" it. Power goes down at some location? Our infoline tweets it and everyone knows. Staff member goes home sick and you need emergency coverage? Tweet it and someone who can spare a person rides to the rescue. You get the idea. The catch was that there needed to be a way to see the tweets other than on the Twitter website. The Twitter website doesn't automatically refresh, and it's not sitting on top of your desktop. So the whole "quick notice" idea kinda goes out the window. I played w...

Once again I'm behind in my 23 Things , but this time I think I have a decent excuse ... Thing 11 is to investigate Library Thing  (I know, that's an awful lot of things for one sentence).  Well, according to my profile I apparently first investigated Library Thing on July 24th, 2006.  I have a sneaking suspicion I found out about it in one of my graduate school classes.  Apparently I went in and cataloged seven books that I had read recently, and then abandoned it.  It's not that I didn't see how this could be useful, it just didn't grab me for some reason. As I'm looking at my account now, I think I know why that happened.  First of all, the interface is really complicated.  There's too much to do on the main page of your account, and no obvious way to isolate just your books, or just your friends.  It puts everything that you can do on the site out there at once.  The thing is, I'm not using this site for all those other things.  I'm using it to t...

A quick post today on image generators for Thing 10 . First, my lovely new logo courtesy of CoolText . Next, just like everyone else in the world I created my own manga avatar . But I'm so attached to my current Triplets of Belleville avatar that I couldn't bear to replace it. So here's an excuse to share the manga one (since it came out so well, IMHO). Moral of this post? There's so many ways to manipulate images and text online, why bother with the software?

On we plunge into the wild and wonderful world of RSS feeds! I first discovered RSS feeds about 4 years ago when I was recommending an online comic I had discovered to one of our tech folks at the library. I was looking for library-related cartoons for a PowerPoint presentation and stumbled across a fun and quirky daily cartoon about a library called Unshelved . It spread like wildfire through my branch, with several of the staff going back and making our way through three years of archives to get caught up on the misadventures of the Mallville Public Library staff. After shooting the ones that we found especially funny back and forth by e-mail for a while, I thought it would be cool to share it on our staff intranet, so I sent the information off to the person in charge of the intranet. She responded saying that it looked like we'd be able to embed the RSS feed into the intranet. I had no idea what that meant, so I poked around. Turns out RSS is a Really Simple way to Syndic...

Here we are at the end of week 3 , and I'm just getting around to posting now! In my defense, I've been a little busy since last week with getting my stepdaughter off to college. Conveniently, our task this week is to investigate and play with Flickr, which I was doing anyway in order to document the move in. I've been a little slow to get on board with the photo-sharing movement. Mainly that's because I don't normally have a lot of photos to share. I've been aware of Flickr for some time though, so when my brother and sister-in-law had their baby, I immediately went to Flickr in order to share the pictures from her christening. Since then I've mainly been using it to keep my family up-to-date on what's happening. So conveniently, here's what I've been busy with since last week: Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR . The only downside to Flickr is that there's a monthly limit on how much you can upload unless you pay. I suppose th...

I admit I've gotten a bit behind in the 23 Things . Technically I was supposed to blog about this last week, but I figure since the things for this week are to create and register my blog (which I've already done) that I can avoid any penalties. Our task for last week was to view a tutorial on lifelong learning. I'll be honest, I hate the term "Lifelong Learning." It's another one of those catchphrases that gets overused to the point where a lot of people start tuning out. That certainly doesn't mean I don't think it's important. I've always tried to live by a statement Socrates made in his last defense before the Athenians: This is usually translated as "the unexamined life is not worth living." But the Greek is actually much more interesting. The direct translation is more "the unexamined life is no life for a human." In other words, what it is to be human is to constantly explore and examine everything about the...

I know, I know, the whole "2.0" thing is way over the top at this point. It seems like just about anything new with the web has to be 2.0 or it's just not cool. Well, bear with me on this. My library has embraced the idea that if we don't get on board with all the innovations that the constantly changing online world provides us, we're going to get left behind. If you read back through some of my entries you'll see that I've been preaching this for a while. How we create, get, and interact with information is changing drastically, and if libraries are going to survive we need to adapt to this new world. So what are we doing about it? For the next 9 weeks staff at my library are encouraged to try all the different things that are available online that are changing the world of information. There are 23 things to do over these 9 weeks, and if you do them all you'll have a much better understanding of how the world is changing and how libraries can...

Web 2.0 has become one of those phrases that is used so much in so many different circumstances that it's almost become meaningless. This is unfortunate, because the concept it represents is probably the most important concept in our society today. The way the Internet has completely integrated into our lives is already changing everything about ourselves, our society, and our world. So in an effort to rescue "Web 2.0" from inanity, I'd like to share (in true Web 2.0 fashion) one of the simplest and best explanations of what it means I've ever come across. So link, tag, embed, and share, friends. The world is changing.

I've been really busy lately with all sorts of random family things, so I haven't had a chance to post anything substantial. So in lieu of substance, I give you clips. First, on the whole Bitter Barack Business. Y'know, I've lived in rural Pennsylvania, and frankly bitter people who cling to guns and God in response to miserable mess their lives have turned into as industry leaves and mass farms take over agriculture is a pretty good description. While the truth may hurt, at least Barack hasn't recanted. But as usual, Stewart has a great take on it: Favorite parts: How much more blatant can Hillary get in tailoring her message to be the polar opposite of Barack? And yes, if you don't think you're smarter than us, what the fuck are you doing running for president? Next, from the same show, yet another wonderful spotlight on the surreality of this administration's views of the war in Iraq: And finally, just for fun: I'll see you all with some more...

After hearing an interview with the author on this past week's "On the Media," I am now anxiously awaiting my copy of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody . The book discusses how the ease of access to information is lowering the bar for who contributes, and as a result there is more power in numbers online than any other force. In media like television and radio, the producers and advertisers call the shots. But online, no matter how much "official" outlets and advertisers may try to shape the direction things progress, ultimately it's people who make things happen. The interview has some interesting examples, but you can already see it in things like iTunes, YouTube, and even Wikipedia. Their prevalence is entirely due to the number of people who have hopped on board, thinking they're good ideas. I think the biggest proof is in Google. Page rank counts for everything in Google, and that's directly related to how many people are clicking t...

In July our then newest cat, a 1 year old kitten named Gandalf the Grey, suffered a severe asthma attack and died. I've owned a lot of cats in my life, and I can say without hesitation that he was the sweetest cat I have ever known. He is still sorely missed. Since then I discovered the joy that is lolcats . If you haven't seen these yet you're missing out. Some of them a pretty cheesy, but every so often there's one that is perfect. My wife snapped a priceless picture of Gandalf that was made for lolcats, so I turned it into a lolcat picture. Yes, he really was riding my bike.