wikis

Wikipedia: it's the place you might surreptitiously check to get some very basic information on a topic you know absolutely nothing about so that you can have enough data to research more reliable sources. Wikipedia - information roulette. It MIGHT be right! Good enough to relieve a nagging piece of curiousity, not good enough to use for your research paper, as I find myself anxiously explaining to children in the library quite often.

I see that wikipedia has a built - in understanding of its own limitations. I read an article about the assassination of President Lincoln. The article itself was heavily cited and seemed to be fairly accurate on the surface. However, when I opened the tab on "discussion" I saw that it had at one time been on a list of "history good articles" and then got removed. Some of the information about John Wilkes Booth seems to be disputed, and has not be adaquately cited. Wikipedia states baldly in one place that it does not allow any original research, and in another place insists that ignorance of the rules should not in any way prevent a novice participant from editing an article.

Democracy in information is a messy place - that's one of the problems I am seeing with Twitter, too. At least with Wikipedia, if you post nonsense, somebody else is likely to call it nonsense and edit it. There's even a place where you can see all the revisions an article has gone through - and this is on a fairly serious article!

The discussion page on an article about Julie Andrews led to quite a lively argument about what was and was not appropriate source material for wikipedia.

I then went into Wet Paint and made a little page. I think I was lucky; by choosing a slightly off-kilter set of subtopics, I managed to avoid the subtopic duplication woes some other people had. I found the templates to be potentially intriguing. You can post meeting room schedules and the like.

Libworm, updated

I looked at libworm a little bit at home last night, since I am still completely unable to access it from work. I tried using a search term - "story time" and "story telling" to see what came up. I got some nice articles on story time programs being advertised for Summer Reading Club at various places around the nation and quite a number of articles about different books. Then I tried searching through the categories, settling on "humor" as the topic that most appealed to me at the moment, and ran into a blog that had me in stitches called "A Librarian's Guide to Ettiquette." Among the pearls of wisdom:

Labeling a shelf the "popular" reading shelf does not make it popular.
It is never appropriate to come to work in a Star Trek uniform.

I noticed that libworm also has places where library jobs may be researched, although I did not explore that last night. This looks like it might be quite an interesting work tool. Too bad I can't use it.

libworm

Well, nuts. This is one of the applications I am actually genuinely interested in, and think would be quite beneficial to me professionally, but every time I go in I get the message that the DNS server is down and it won't let me enter. I am beginning to wonder if it's barring the staff of my library system, or something of the sort. If I can remember to work on this at home, I may yet be able to finish, but this appears to be an impossible assignment at work, at least for the moment.

Librarything

Ah, Librarything. This little tool is helping me send my kids to a better school. You see, I got completely fed up with the horrific public schools in my area last year and my father introduced me to a tiny private school that needed somebody who could set up their school library. They had no budget for library automation whatsoever, but I discovered that I could inventory the books the school owned by using Librarything. Here's the link to the page I set up for the school.

http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=StPetersClassical

As you can see, we've got 878 books in our collection right now. I can instruct the teachers and students to open up "your library" and they will see a database that shows a shelflist they can manipulate. I've got the Dewey numbers in the comments section, and I've done a little half-hearted tagging; while tagging must serve as our subject search, for the moment, the collection is so small it's often easier just to go straight to the shelf, and I've focused my efforts on other things more. It's not the best possible catalog we can have, but it might be the best we can have for free. I find the recommended books to be tantalizing; sometimes I see books we could really use, but we rely most on donations from parents and I don't really have a book budget.

In terms of this Web 2.0 workshop - yes, I know Librarything really well. A little tidbit - don't rely on the Dewey call numbers that go with some of the book hits you get when you go to add a book. Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are vague at best or completely unreliable - that's when I have to go to WorldCat. Among the cool things - it's really interesting to see the author clouds to determine who we have the most of. It's also kind of interesting - albeit a little unsettling - to see which of my authors are living and which are dead.

Digg

My husband introduced me to Digg some months ago at the same time he introduced me to Reddit, so what I'm doing here is taking a little more focused look at something I'm already familiar with. The plus side of it is that it is useful in seeing what topics are generating buzz and what the hot topics of the moment are. The negative side of it is that it appears to put us into a situation where news deemed the most important and significant news stories of the day are determined by popular vote rather by, you know, whether they were actually important.

Plus side - I see that the Sims 3 will have a new expansion pack! And I can read about people who are both enthusiastic about sending their Sim to Egypt and disdainful about plunking down yet MORE money for this franchise. Hey, this is more important to me than Paula Abdul sulking about her American Idol salary and quitting. Entertainment information is not supposed to be earth-shattering.

Negative side - Star Wars vs. Star Trek: which is better? This is the fourth most important news topic in entertainment? Let's try World and Business instead...OK, the first three stories are about health care protesters, the murder of a Taliban leaders' wife, and a killer's racist diary. Story number four: Should BMW sell Ketchup? In the meantime, CNN reports that Squeaky Fromm is being released from jail, the Sotomayor confirmation hearings continue, and two journalists pardoned by North Korea after intervention from Clinton arrive home.

Ketchup, huh?

Digg is pretty amusing, and I can see why it's popular - it gives people a way to vent about the events they see around them; the watercooler has gone electric. I am a little wary about sites that proport to deliver news, but are not primarily written or vetted by journalists; I think we are headed more and more towards a world where all news of every kind is presented without any attempt at objectivity whatsoever. I first read Digg and Reddit at my husband's suggestion, and eventually put them mostly aside simply for being a bit too juvenile. I like my news a bit more thoughtful.

de.li.cious

This is a handy little tool I've been needing to learn for a very long time. There are three different places I use the computer - work, home, and at the desk of the little school library where I am helping them build a school library. There are a LOT of websites I use at all three places, most notably news sources and cataloging information, and that will be handy and save me from trying to make duplicate favorites lists everywhere I go. I suspect I'll be spending some time picking and choosing among my favorites at the three different places to make a final master list; what I've done today will just get me started for this exercise. I do see very definite practical library use for this; sometimes we are called upon to work at different computers, or at different branches, and our most important work-related websites can follow us. What you are seeing here are the downloaded favorites from my workstation.

Here's the link for my de.li.cious page with bookmarks.

http://delicious.com/fabergegg

OK, I've got feedback for the 23 Things program. Summer is an INSANE time to do this. I have not lost interest, I am not slacking off, I've just been overwhelmingly busy and I've been putting out fires left right and sideways for two weeks. Finally caught up enough to soldier on. I don't think there's any chance I'm going to finish this before the fifteenth, sorry.

Back to the matter at hand. I've found a genuine work-based use for twitter. Various civic organizations, work organizations and tourist places around town use twitter to promote their programs. So does the Fort Worth ISD. This makes twitter a potentially helpful way to keep up with community events. If your local neighborhood associations twitter, it might be a way to keep up with them. Ditto schools, youth programs, and the like. If twitter turns out to be a tool rather than a fad (and I think the jury is still very much out on this) and it becomes more ubiquitous, it may be a more powerful tool than the blog.