Thing 15: Worldcat and OCLC: exploring 2.0

This picture has nothing to do with the rest of this post, but since I am thoroughly tired of winter and the snow that continues to fall, at least sporadically, I present this photo of tulips from last year's tulip festival in Skagit County! Within a month's time, this year's tulips should be in their glory!

And now, on to Web 2.0 and OCLC. For years, the library has had access to Worldcat through a pay-per-use subscription. Because it required typing in a user-name and password, which I could never remember without looking up, I used it very rarely. Then, a couple years ago, I started using the free access to Worldcat. The library still has the fee-based search service, which allows enhanced searching of additional databases, such as ERIC, MEDLINE, GPO and others, but, I really love being able to customize my options and search Worldcat through my personal account. I first found it, through Librarything, which gives you options when you find a book title, to search for ways to purchase or borrow the book through a library near you. The portal to the library is through Worldcat.

You can sign up for a personal account, which allows you to create lists of favorites, books you own, or want to own, and you can search for the nearest library which has the title you want to read. Even if you don't sign up for an account, by putting in your zip-code, the catalog will show libraries close by with mileage estimates for getting your book. For Spokane county residents, with quite a few different library systems close by, this makes it easy to tell if you are likely to have a longer or shorter wait for that Interlibrary Loan request. If you decide that you don't want to wait, if the book is in-print, or available through popular use-book sources such as Alibris or Abebooks, there is a sidebar with that search option available.

Worldcat also currently provides plug-ins for Facebook, Google and Firefox, which allow you to quickly search from those applications. There is also an application which works on the iPhone, which allows you to search and link to your home library anywhere you have access to your phone. Long gone are the days, when you could only make use of the library (and its card catalog) during the few hours the library was actually open!

While I do appreciate how convenient all of this is, I still feel that one of the most important services that the library provides is its physical presence and ambience. In her article, To A Temporary Place in Time..., Dr. Wendy Schultz discusses four levels of library service: Commodity, Product, Service and Experience. All are important, with Experience and how that comes across as something we must not forget as we plan for the future.

Thing 14: Not feeling so Technorati savvy today!

I've spent a frustrating hour or so trying to figure out Technorati. I was able to sign up and "claim" my blog quite easily, although I don't really know what the point of that is! Actually, if my blog was something that I was hoping to really get the word out for, this might be a useful thing. Since mine is a pretty amateurish effort, I don't think it makes much difference.

I watched the little video introduction to Technorati, which was made several years ago, and I suspect it's very out-of-date. I didn't see the colors or the topics anywhere on the signed out or signed in home pages, and also couldn't find the little hearts which are supposed to make it easy to "favorite" a blog.

I searched for some of my favorite blogs, and found them, with pages where I could write a review. I also found my own blog! However, in searching for my favorite blogs, most of what I found were posts by other bloggers, referring to those blogs.

One of the searches I did, was for The Yarn Harlot. My first search yielded nothing but references in other blogs to that blog, or the author of that blog. (It also provided some links to videos of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, who is The Yarn Harlot, and that is cool!) Trying to limit the search to blogs, instead of posts, gave me zero results. Then I remembered that probably the address for the blog had the word "yarnharlot" instead of words, "yarn" and "harlot." Of course that was the case, and I found the blog, which amazingly enough has no reviews on Technorati. This leads me to think that Technorati probably is more geared to technical or professional bloggers, than to hobby or arts blogs.

In the end, I've decided that Technorati is a good way to search for what bloggers are saying about other blogs. Kind of a big endless circle of a search... I don't think I'll be doing much with it!

Thing 13: Yummy! It's Delicious

I signed up for a Delicious account a year or two ago, and imported all the bookmarks from my personal computer to it, to get me started. I decided that would be a good way to save my favorites in case something ever happened to my computer. Before Delicious, I had set up my Yahoo home page with my personal bookmarks, which worked in a similar, though somewhat less efficient way. I could access it from any computer where I could log in to my Yahoo account. Over time, I became less happy with my Yahoo home page, and eventually switched to a Google home page, so accessing the bookmarks there became even more cumbersome.


Importing my bookmarks was easy, and the default for importing them was to keep them private. I've gone through and marked many as public, but there are also some that I am happy to keep private, such as my links to my hairdresser, doctor's office and so on.


At this time, I have over 300 bookmarks listed on Delicious. Most of them relate to my interests in yarn, cycling, fan fiction and cooking. I've tried to organize the tags, so that I don't have ten different ways of tagging the same sort of thing. If I find that I have tagged something incorrectly, or misspelled a tag, it's quite easy to globally change the tags, or change the one that is incorrect. Sometimes I will bookmark a site, and find that a lot of other people have also bookmarked it (or tagged it). Then it can be fun to look and see what those folks have additionally found, and go exploring that way. I try not to do that too much, as it can be a big time-suck (as so many of these social sites tend to be.)

Thing 12: Rollyo

I've spent some time with Rollyo, and looked at other people's search rolls, as well as creating a few of my own. It seems what this tool does, is turn your favorite bookmarks into a searchable entity. Of course mine all had to do with either knitting, or bicycles, my current passions. I then went back and tried to search for stuff that I knew to be available on the sites that I had "rolled." The results that came back were interfiled with a lot of "Sponsored Links," and the layout was not easy to follow. On my Mac, using Safari 3, the layout was particularly awkward. It looks better using Internet Explorer.

For the sort of searches that I typically do, I think Google is far superior, however, it might be a good way to manage the content of some favorite blogs, or sites with collections, such as recipes.

I suspect this will not be a "thing" that I will spend much time with, beyond this project!

Way Back Machine

Yesterday, I noticed that someone had commented on a picture of a hat that I uploaded to my Ravelry page last week, so I looked at the commenter's profile. She is a lady that knits a lot of hats in the UK, and she has made some really pretty things. One of the items really caught my eye, a scarf with a very intriguing woven pattern mixed with the knitting. Naturally, I checked the Ravelry database to see if I could find this pattern, and I did find. But, it was a pattern that had been removed from the internet, so no longer available. Very sad:

I clicked the link, just to make sure, and found this:

so, indeed it is gone. Then, I remembered The Wayback Machine. I found it, and copy/pasted the dead address into the search box, which gave me this:

Clicking on the purple dates gave me this:

Voila! The pattern, minus the pictures, but the important one was easily found on Flickr, by searching for the Blog author's photostream. So in the end, I got the pattern, and have added it to my queue of potential projects.

Oh, and the hat that started it all? This is what it looks like:

 

Thing 11: March Third

Two years ago today, I joined LibraryThing. I just checked my profile page, and was very surprised to see that it was on March 3, 2007. March 3rd seems to be a very significant date in my life, as I started working at Valley Library (as it was then known) on March 3, 1980. I suspect that is years before some of my present colleagues were even born, but I won't think about that too much! Another March 3rd, I successfully battled the big C with the help of some amazing surgeons. Today was a pretty ordinary day in comparison...

When I joined LibraryThing, I quickly became a crazy woman, trying to catalog every book in the house. They had a scanner for sale, but it was pretty expensive, so I did it by typing in ISBN numbers. I never did complete my collection, because my husband's collection is so large, and much of it is in boxes. For awhile after I joined, I had a very hard time weeding my personal collection, because I became obsessed with having the largest collection among my "friends" there. Now, I've got friends whose collections number in the thousands, so I've completely given up on that. I only have limited space, and don't relish the idea of my upstairs bookshelves crashing through the ceiling onto the main floor. Weeding is good!

What I love about LibraryThing is the ability to find people with similar interests; groups for people who also belong to Ravelry; Librarians who LibraryThing, Austenites, and so on. I like to read reviews by readers, and see who else has a book that I've got, or that I wish I had. I haven't really gotten involved with too many groups, because I'm more involved with the groups on Ravelry.

There are several other book oriented social sites out there; among them, Book Jetty, Books Well Read, Good Reads, and Shelfari. And of course there's WorldCat. I've been having fun with the I-Phone interface for WorldCat. I search for a title that I'm interested in, and because I've stored my zip code on my phone, it knows to look for the closest copy. I'm given the option of reserving the book from the two public libraries, the community colleges or various universities. When I choose which institution I'd like to borrow from, it opens a new window, for the catalog of the chosen institution, and I can reserve the book. I can do this from any coffee shop or rest stop on my travels, so anytime I feel the need to look up a book, with my trusty phone, I can do that. Worldcat lets you create lists, build bibliographies, and has a widget for a Facebook application. I will have to give that a try. I may try recreating my list of World War II fiction for children which I've been keeping since Library School, and see how that looks on Worldcat's Listmaker.

The last Library oriented program that I will mention is a piece of software that I have on my home computer, called Delicious Library. It lets me use the built-in camera on my computer to scan the barcode on books, cd's, dvd's, games, tools and electronics and searches out the information via the web, to put them into my library. I can tag and organize my stuff however I wish, and if I want to loan something out, simply drag the item to the appropriate entry in my address book, and it's checked out to that person. I could publish part or all of this catalog to my personal website, and if I did that, could access it from my iPhone as well. Delicious Library isn't as social, but it's more useful to me, because it functions as an inventory of all the hard to manage stuff I own. This is one of the coolest pieces of software I own, and I highly recommend it, but only if you have a Mac, as that's the only platform it works on.

There are so many ways to search for and organize your personal library, that there's hardly any time left over to actually read!