Thing 18: Vini, Vidi, Wiki?

I posted a review of Dennis Lehane's The Given Day to the BPL Booklist. We have a staff wiki related to our ILS operation and plans are currently underway to create a wiki for our storyhour programs. Our children's department hosts an infant/toddler storytime and will be creating a wiki of the songs, lyrics, movement activities and fingerplays as well as booklists and other resources that parents and caregivers can access from home. The children's staff is also in the process of creating a presentation to be shown on the wall during the storytimes so that adults can "follow the bouncing ball" and sing along.

Thing 15: Itsy Bitsy Etsy

I've ordered from CafePress, they have a great variety of library oriented merch. I wear there "I'm a Librarian, Don't Make Me Shush Your Ass" t-shirt when pitching for our town softball league--my pitching might not be intimidating, but my t-shirt is. I've never seen Zazzle before and I enjoyed browsing through the custom skateboards. I plan to share this site with my son. Here's a timely design. Spoonflower is a great site and I'll be sharing it with some quilter friends. The Punk Quilter shown above is one of the designs created by a contributor, Blue Nickel Studios. The sites I looked at encourage the artistic process without worrying about execution or production. The possibilities are endless for crafters and entrepreneurs.

Thing 14: Right in Your Own Backyard

I don't have a spooky event to post but it feels like something spooky just happened. I had never viewed AmericanTowns before. I clicked on the link in the assignment and it took me RIGHT to Weymouth. I didn't register, didn't search for Weymouth...how did it know???? Then I discover that there is an entry for Weymouth Public Libraries and the entry is pulled directly from the History of the Libraries on our web page. And they've pulled events information directly from the library's online calendar. I think that's great, but am still a little bewildered as to how they knew when I pulled up the page that I was in Weymouth. And the bonus is, they've done my discover activity for me by posting all upcoming library events! I had some problems with this site as I kept trying to change the location to my hometown of Duxbury and it kept bouncing back to Weymouth. Finally, with success I found an interesting event happening in Duxbury this weekend (sorry, I'm so behind that a scary event seemed way out of date) Artists and Books at the Art Complex Museum.

Thing 13: This thing, that thing, Library Thing

I 've been using GoodReads and just recently playing around Virtual Bookshelf on Facebook as I find more userfriendly to see what my facebook friends are reading and reviewing. I have to admit that I sporadically add to my list and never post a review, even though I enjoy reading other's reviews. I use it as a personal tool to manage my reading lists and for collection development purposes at my library. I have fooled around with LibraryThing, but I enjoyed taking the time to look at Library Thing for Libraries how Danbury is using it and plan on going back to see how other public libraries are incorporating it. I did return to LibraryThing and searched for scary books and since I'm reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, I searched for vampires. As an aside, there's a very interesting phenomemon taking place in my library that a lot of older women have become infatuated with Bella and Edward as a result all the buzz. I remember reading an article in Entertainment Weekly this summer about the Twilight craze and there was a sidebar article about Twilight Moms. Okay, I'm hooked. Of course there is Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire and Charlaine Harris' mystery series as well as Laurell Hamilton, but I also found Christopher Moore's Bloodsucking Fiends, described as "light, funny, and not at all hackneyed" as well as Elizabeth Kostreva's The Historian.

Thing 12: Can You Hear Me Now

I'm a huge fan of NPR's podcasts. It's a relief to know if I'm listening to something interesting in the car and can't hear the entire interview that I can pull it up later. In fact, that just happened Monday when I was on my way to a meeting and Robin Young was interviewing Tina Fey when I would be unable to listen. I was able to catch it later in its entirety. A few weeks ago I was listening to an interview and NRP announced that it had been edited for time restraints, but the entire two hour interview was available via podcast.

For this assignment, I tried out some of the recommended sites to visit and then searched surfing. It is my intent, when I retire, to surf the world (literally, with a real surfboard.) I was amazed at the number of sites offering podcasts. Some sights also cover skateboarding and snowboarding. My favorite of the bunch was Podsurf.tv at http://www.podsurf.tv/
It includes videos and podcasts of interviews with notable surfers, reports of the counterculture fashion and trends, underground music tracks, games, contests to win stuff etc. I listened to one of the podcasts called Storm Trackers where in this episode Ben Macartney, Head Forecaster at Coastalwatch sends Paul Morgan and Zahn Foxton down the south coast of Australia to track a big southerly swell. I plan on visiting this site again, optimistically hoping that the stock market rebounds and that my knees hold out so I can catch a tasty wave when I'm old.

And lo and behold, even NPR has a podcast for surf conditions--who knew?

You (Tube) Oughta be in Pictures

Here's an interesting video from the Cuyahoga County Public Library promoting their toy collection. It's entertaining with little Weeble guys but also provides instructional use of their online catalog and promotes other library services. I kept running into technical difficulties while trying to embed it so here's the link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPVTCoIDqvk

Cuyahoga has a great collection of videos on YouTube including presentations by Nancy Pearl and Geraldine Brooks, profiles of their homework and career centers and a great series of book trailers for teens. A great new way to book talk to this audience. The possibilities are endless in the use of YouTubes in libraries. We've dipped our toes into the water using a "canned" audio for this video promoting our summer reading program
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tALlMtrdWpc

We're now working on creating instructional videos on the use and operation of Playaways
http://www.weymouth.ma.us/library/news.asp?id=9203
and on how to use our Overdrive downloadable books.

Thing 10: What Do I See There

Okay, I'm terrible at directions, my eyes glaze over with number of traffic lights, bear rights vs. hard rights. I've used Google maps to supplement written directions by taking a test run of where I'm going. That way, I can note landmarks such as stores, strip malls, muncipal buildings to give me warning that I need to bear right in .07 miles.


Google maps has added the coolest thing on their home page, the journeys of Barack Obama and John McCain from their birthplaces to the White House which includes biographical information as signficant geographical locations in their lives are shown. There's also a feature that shows what states allow time off from work to vote. With so much emphasis on interactive maps during this campaign season, I found these to be creative ways to bring this practice to the individual user.



I pulled up my library on Google maps and discovered that there were comments about the playground in the park out in back of the library. The playground is not maintained by the library and there were some old criticisms. Even though we are not responsible for the maintenance of the playground, I remain proactive in reporting any problems as our patronsdassume we take care of it. Rather than shrug and reply, "It's not our job", the library staff is well trained to response to their concerns and to report any damage, trash issues, etc. The playground is major destination and we consider it a great asset as it gets folks into the library and we do outside activities there like storytimes in the summer, etc. The playground has recently been rehabbed so I've added a new photo. In addition, I've added some photos of the library itself since there was such an emphasis on the playground. I am thrilled that this was an assignment, otherwise, I might not have taken the time to evaluate the library's presence on Google Maps.