I DON’T WANT IT TO END!! There are my final thoughts
I have really enjoyed this and I would like to keep going-Mara if you do a Pt. 2, or the next 46 things, please let me know. This has been a great learning experience and I wouldn’t change a thing. I love how it is self-directed, but definitely has a framework that you can use to give yourself some structure.
I love my Del.ic.ious account. I keep it open all the time on the left of my screen whenever I’m online. I have all my favorites on it plus my two weather updates-for Milton and for Barton, where our camp is.
Technorati was another great site-currently I am ODing on Politics-I need to shut it off sometimes!
My blog has been a lot of fun and I love having to organize my thoughts about what I have learned–it makes the learning that much more concrete.
I am on Facebook 2 or 3 times a day and am having a great time networking/visiting/bouncing ideas off of other librarians that I met at our DOL Collection Development Course.
The photo manipulation and storing sites are going to come in handy when my husband and I give a class on Digital Cameras/Photos for Beginners at MPL at the end of October. This has also helped us find other resources that we want to teach our students.
Shelfari/Library Thing was so much fun and I would like to create a bookmark or small brochure to promote that at our library.
The only “thing” I didn’t really get into (if I had to pick one) would be the RSS feeds. I didn’t really get into that one, I added all the sites I used frequently to my Del.icio.us page and that seemed to work well for me.
Again, I am going to miss posting to my blog I would LOVE to participate in a Pt. 2 and I am sure there would be a ton of new stuff in another 6 months or so to keep us busy! Thanks so much, Mara!

I had a lot of fun with this one, because I knew what podcasts were and had used them, but not to any large degree. So I played around on NPR and subscribed to my two favorite shows, Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me and Car Talk.
Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me
Car Talk

I checked out all the library sites as well and loved all the ideas that said to me, “the sky’s the limit” where podcasts are concerned in the library world!
We are doing a Digital Camera class in October already we have our full class and about 5 people on the waiting list. If we could do a podcast for the class, then at least the waiting list would have an audio recording of the class. Something to think about!

I love YouTube! This is definitely not the first time I have used it-I use it all the time for when i want to watch music videos or most recently, watch our babysitter who is a sophomore at BC and is in the band, do her halftime show at the football game! I find it so cool that we can see her and not have to be there!
Here is my favorite video, actually it’s my boys and my favorite video Tim Hawkin’s “Cletus Take The Reel”

I think the possibilities for YouTube in regards to a library are limitless. Anything that you want to provide instruction on, information about, or make a record of can be captured and stored on YouTube for others to log on and view. I see it as having limits only so far as your imagination can take you!
The only thing I would wonder about is the copyright technicalities. I will know more about that after I take my Copyright Workshop in October

For this “thing” I played around with a lot of the best of the best on the list of Web 2.0 favs. I spent a fair amount of time on the photo manipulation sites. My husband and I are teaching a Digital Photography course at the library at the end of October and I am researching what we are going to teach whomever signs up! I choose Picnik and had a lot of fun playing around with all the different things you can do to your photos to enhance them or fix them. Here is my creation:

Here I am in Google Docs-I found both of these word processing sites easy as anything to use. The hardest part (which wasn’t very hard!) was creating an account-I thought since I had an iGoogle page that I had a Google account-apparently they are not one and the same–who knew??
I have an idea that I would like to use one of these for-changing my (what I feel is kind of ineffective) class on Microsoft Word to just a Word Processing class and using one of these two sites to teach it. They all have similar mechanisms of working and also are so similar to MS Word and Word Perfect, that it would be easy to switch to using one of those as well. A problem that I have been running into the last couple of times that I taught the class was that all the students had different versions of MS Word-and they got so caught up in the “Well, mine does it this way” kind of thinking, that we lost so much time teaching and learning. If we used one of these, it would be uniform and we could collaborate and work on it online together~something to definitely think about!

I think these online productivity tools are incredibly cool!  We are not going to need Microsoft Office at all soon enough!!  I did this post using ZOHO and then I am going to try out Google next.

This was a great opportunity to get into the “behind the scenes” aspects of the wiki-world. I learned a lot about how they work and how to add and edit information on them. I added this blog to all of the listed wiki sites. It was incredibly easy and after doing the first one, i didn’t even need to read the instructions for the next two-they work pretty much the same way. I really like how the instructions for what page you are on are contained in a running ticker box on the right hand side of the screen-very helpful for first time users.
I ended up adding my two cents to the Favorite Hikes page. I am planning on going back to add to the Favorite Hobbies and talking up our Letterboxing Hobby-it’s worth spreading the word!

Wikis are the topic for this “thing”. This was not my first experience with a wiki, of course I have looked at, used, and bookmarked Wikipedia for when I need to know something about anything really quickly and succinctly. I have to say that I LOVE Wikipedia. I think it is a great idea put into amazing practice and…it works! Now, do I think that one should be allowed to cite it as a resource? No, I do not, but it may link you to other resources that you can cite or provide you with the knowhow to get to the info you need that you can cite.
Secondly, my 12 year old spent the Spring semester “wiki-ing” (is that the verb version we should be using, much like “blogging”?) with his classmates about what they were all reading in class and for pleasure. I loved that-it is a great example of “going to kids and finding them where they are”! Using the computer to get them to talk about books—brilliant!!!
I can come up with a number of uses for wikis in our library. Book groups are great resources for wikis. This comes back to the Library 2.0 concept and finding people in their environment-what they need. Maybe more people would join book groups if they didn’t have to commit to attending a physical get together and could do it “virtually” or online. That would be a perfect application for a wiki. In fact I think I am going to join one myself, as I never seem to have the time to go to ours at my library, even though I work there!
Another use I can come up with concerns the adult computer classes that I offer and teach. This would be a perfect forum for past, present, and future students of each of the three classes to experience, learn, practice and then teach others the concepts that are contained in the class. I think the most valuable idea of a wiki is the age old one of learning from your peers. It is a timeless concept which has come back in a new format~wikis.

Wow, what a lot of reading! A lot of what was said in the first 4 articles went over my head–but I soldiered on and after reading 6 more, found this quote that made it crystal clear:
“Library 2.0 simply means making your library’s space (virtual and physical) more interactive, collaborative, and driven by community needs. Examples of where to start include blogs, gaming nights for teens, and collaborative photo sites. The basic drive is to get people back into the library by making the library relevant to what they want and need in their daily lives…to make the library a destination and not an afterthought.” ~ Sarah Houghton
When you think of it in this relatively simple context-who couldn’t agree with it? I would like to see all VT libraries eventually participate in one OPAC (a new acronym that I had never heard of before), online-public-access-catalog. Imagine if a patron could come into (or access from their home) their home library and find out for themselves where any material that they want is available. It could be right where they are, or at another public library, or at one of the universities, or at a local historical society library, etc. That would be truly an example of “making the library relevant to what people want and need” and meeting people in their needs, not being a hindrance to them. To me that is the crux of the philosophy of Web 2.0 and thus Library 2.0

Technorati is something that I had actually heard about before I started 23 Things. But I hadn’t explored it fully until now. I browsed and played through most of the site and finally settled on the “100 Top Blogs”. Now that kept me busy for TWO hours! I clicked and browsed, clicked, browsed, and del.icio.us’ed the ones I liked. It was a lot of fun. I have to say the one I liked the most that I found was www.gizmoto.com. That was one I added to my del.icio.us list! What a cool site with all the cool gadgets, latest tech updates, and all blog news tech that you could ever want to read about-I love it and I turned my husband on to it too–I know what he will be bookmarking at work-ha-bookmarking-that’s soooo yesterday I am going to need to teach him about del.icio.us, too!!!
I claimed my blog and then checked to see if it “really” worked. I have to say it was a little thrilling to type in my tags that I attached to my blog and see it come up. I tried Google Blog search as well-which I never knew existed. It found my blog straight away-the interesting thing was that when the small thumbnail picture came up-it was an original photo that I had added when I first created my blog in June-I wonder how that works-why wouldn’t it update when my blog was updated? I liked the Top 100 of Technorati though and that will bring me back to it instead of the Google search.

This program has taught me more than I could ever have hoped for before I started it. I really don’t want it to end-could there be a follow up?