Sunday, April 13, 2008

Thing #7 -- Lib 2.0 tools -- April 13, 2008

We're already using some of the Lib 2.0 tools in our library. I had already adopted some of the productivity hints for dealing with email. I check my email about 3 times a day. I do have messages open in a tiny "ghosty" window when they arrive (don't know what that's called) so I take a second to delete many of them without much interference in what I'm working on. But I found years ago that if I stop to look at every email when it arrives, I'll never get anything else done. I've also gone to much shorter responses to people, esp. people at work. And I do find that for a lot of work topics, it's worth it to walk over and talk to the person, often with my calendar in hand. Yes, I still use a paper calendar as well as an on-line calendar. I find it frustrating that people always have to go to their offices to check their calendars on their computers.

We use Meebo for instant messaging for Ask a Librarian now, so I'm very familiar with it. As far as I know, people at work don't use IMing for work-related things (but maybe I'm just not on the receiving end :-). I've found that students don't use text-type abbreviations on our IM reference, for which I'm glad. I did learn that YMMV (which I thought was a pretty original response in a meeting by one of our more techy librarians!) means "your mileage may vary." Guess she wasn't as original as I thought, but of course I didn't know it at the time. TYVM, 23 Things!

We haven't tried texting a librarian. Would the reference desk have to have a cell phone? Or would librarians have to use their own cell phones? Not sure I'd like that.

I've attended many webinars from the comfort of my office. One distraction is that I tend to multi-task (as I imagine most participants are doing), which makes it more possible that YMMV for what you get out of a webinar. Now I'm multi-tasking while listening to Tom Peters on web conferencing software. I find it frustrating to just listen to things (podcasts, etc.) as I read so much faster than I can listen. It's hard for me to concentrate on listening when I feel the pressure of getting things done. Every day is too full of stuff to finish without spending unproductive time listening when I could be skimming and chunking information through reading.

So, I MUCH preferred the Blended Learning PDF document on web conferencing. I've attended several Blended Librarian online conferences, and like the format of having more than one person involved. A talking head is usually considered deadly on video -- how much more deadly it is on just audio. Nothing up on OPAL on a Sunday morning -- duh!

I set up a Twitter account, but couldn't find anyone I knew on the searches.




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