#23. Reflect on your experiences completing these 23 Things (week 13)

The 23 things were a great introduction to some new technology available on the web. The things that we explored could all be integral parts of the library in the future. I think that fun training programs like this are exactly what we need in libraries in order to "keep up with the times". I think that the bigger the effort we make to incorporate these things into the library here at UCSC, will directly correlate to the amount of usage that we receive from our patrons.

Not only can we entice patrons to use the library by incorporating some of the 23 things, but we can also make students live easier by providing them with certain tools that allow them to take full advantage of what the library and the internet have to offer.

We can also make our work more effective by incorporating some of the 23 things that allow us to make little shortcuts to get our work done more efficiently.

#22. Explore Web 2.0 Award winners (week 12)

I found a very cool website on the list of award winners. The website is called Lulu, and it's a self publishing website. You can write your own books, or whatever you want, and then make them available for people to purchase around the world. Leave it to the internet to make the world of book publishing available to every one. It is pretty amazing to think that I could write a book, post it online, and then sell it to people around the world.

This website could help us organize and house writing from professors on our campus. Maybe that's a stretch, but there has got to be a way to use a website like this to the campus' advantage in order to enhance our collection.

#21. Audio eBooks (week 12)

I found it very frustrating that I could not use itunes with the site listed. I wish that there weren't all of these content battles. That being said, I like the idea of using audio ebooks. I have used audio ebooks before, more specifically I used a site called audible.com. I was assigned the book "The World is Flat" instead of buying the book, I opted to go the audio route. It was great, I downloaded the book, put it on itunes, and then put it on my ipod. I finished listening to the book in like two days, it was great. It allowed me to get some "reading" done on the bus, which was nice, because reading books in moving vehicles makes me nauseas.

I think that it would be amazing if the library started offering audio ebooks. Just think, you would never have the unfortunate experience of trying to check out a book, only to find that it's already checked out and won't be returned for 6 months. This wouldn't work so well with books that you need for research purposes, but would be excellent for pleasure reading books.

#20. Podcasts (week 11)

I subscribed to a food podcast. It has recipes and general cooking tips. It's pretty interesting.

Podcasts are another good way to quickly get valuable information to wide audience. It is hard for me to commit to checking something like a podcast or a bloglines account regularly. I barely have time to check a couple of websites, when I group everything of interest together in one spot, it is great for organization purposes, but if i read it all I would never get any work done. Hence, my bloglines account is overflowing with interesting tidbits of news that I will probably never get to read. I have a feeling that the same thing will happen with my podcasts.

Podcasts are a great idea, but I think the only way that I could get into using them more is if I synced up the podcasts that I subscribe to with my ipod. That way I could listen to them on the go.

#19. YouTube (week 11)

I found that most of the interfaces for the video sites were pretty similar. Youtube is still my favorite, but that is mostly because I have used that one for the longest. One of my favorite things to use youtube for is music. Not only can you find original songs, but a lot of times there are instructional videos for learning to play songs too. I also looked up a few recipes.

Youtube could be used many different ways in the library. One of the articles I read for the 23 Things talked about librarians training the patron to use all of the services that the library offers in order to get the most out of their library experience. Well, we could make training videos and post them on youtube. This would allow patrons to train on their own time, and it would save the librarians loads of time, because they only have to do the training one time. I am mean we could even pair training videos with IMs so that if a patron has a question about the video it could be answered right away by a staff member.

#18. Firefox Add-ons and Extensions (week 10)

I had no problems adding the Cruzcat search to my tool bar. I was also pleased to see some of my favorite websites also had search bars, so I also added expedia, amazon, flickr, and imdb to my tool bar. I think that these little search bars make it very easy for the patron to quickly check to see if we have a book that they want to check out. This function makes it very easy for those outside of the library to check our holdings, again making the library more accessible. This is a great little add on, that I will likely use often. I have to do a lot of holdings checks and that search bar will make life a little easier.

#17. Online Applications & Tools (week 10)

Zoho writer was so easy to use. Everything was straight forward and everything worked the first time. I had absolutely no trouble uploading a large word document. I think that sometimes great technologies can be cheapened because they are difficult to use. This is not the case with Zoho. I wish that I had known about Zoho when I had classes that required peer reviewed papers, it would have made life so much easier.