Don't forget the databases...

Oh lol - Librarians Do Gaga vid on youtube from the students and faculty of the University of Washington's Information School, to the tune of Lady Gaga's Poker Face:

The Great IM

This final session was a good one, because I've generally avoided Instant Messaging in all forms (apart from a few chat rooms) and thus hadn't even looked at Gmail's IM system. Fortunately I'm already fluent in chatspeak/netspeak, 133tspeak and all (and lolcat, which sadly wasn't needed!). Maybe it was just the slow internet connection, but I think we managed to break Google IM at about 9 people - certainly it's hard to keep track of the group's conversation with so many, anyway.

Neo(chat)logism: SFT (So Freakin' Tired). This is what happens when you get up at 5.30am...

Study like a scholar, scholar!

For those who haven't seen it yet, the Harold B. Lee Library (Brigham Young University) have posted a parody of the awesome Old Spice ad:



A bit like our new library, ne? (aspirationally, anyway!)

Wikis

Wikipedia is, of course, the most prominent example of crowd-sourcing. Many hands make light work, and even a couple of minutes out of a contributor's day adds up when you have hundreds or thousands of people working to spread the load.

I corrected some spelling on the Library wiki's Web 2.0 page (ironically, the word "collaboration"). Small stuff, but every edit (hopefully) makes the article better.

While Wikipedia is great for most topics, it has one drawback when it comes to in-depth exploration: notability. This requirement for a topic, person or character to be "notable" is particularly problematic for popular culture, which is why topic-specific wikis (such as the Muppet Wiki) can be far more fun to work with. My favourite wiki time-sink is TV Tropes, a wiki which is "a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction". It contains such topics as:
Spooky Silent Library;
The Library of Babel;
Scary Librarian;
Hot Librarian;
Magical Database; and
the Great Big Book of Everything.

But be warned! Tv Tropes is a Browser Narcotic; not only will it result in a tab explosion, but it will Ruin Your Life. Have fun :D.

RSS Feeds

I don't know why it's taken a Web 2.0 training class for me to start using RSS feeds - I already have access to Google Reader through my gmail, and it saves so much time! Here's a few of the sites I've subscribed to:

News and Current Affairs
ABC News. To be honest, I don't check online news that often (for natural disasters and pop culture news, I tend to find out first from the ripples of my flist on livejournal), but when I do it's always ABC's.


Recipes
There are many, many excellent food blogs out there; these three are a few that have stood me in good stead:

• David Lebovitz, who I looked up after reading his book of icecream recipes ('The Perfect Scoop').


• Rose Levy Berenbaum, the resource for baking - breads, cakes, buns, you name it.


• Chocolate & Zucchini, a blog kept by Parisian Clotilde Dusoulier. Her extensive archive of recipes (complete with tempting photos) is mouthwatering and easy to search or browse.

Travel
Something a little unusual, since I'm not planning any big trips: urban exploration. Urban exploration sets out to investigate little-seen areas of the urban/industrial environment, such as utility tunnels, abandoned buildings, sewers and catacombs.

• Scouting NY, a blog kept by a film location scout based in New York City. Fair warning, he takes extensive location photos and even one post can take a while to load.


• Telefunker, a blog for urban exploration in Europe.


• Long Exposure, "excursions in (mostly nocturnal) photography)". This is one of the more gorgeous and deliberately artsy of the urban exploration blogs I've found, since his focus is on the photography aspect rather than on documenting an adventure (although if there's one thing I've found in browsing urban exploration blogs, it's that it inspires a lot of amazing and unusual photographs).


• Undercity, "guerilla history and urban exploration". More gorgeous photography from an urban historian.


• No Promise of Safety, a blog by a small group of urban explorers documenting their adventures.

Other Stuff

• Daily Coyote, a daily photoblog of Charlie, a tame-ish coyote living in Wyoming.


• The blog of John Rogers, showrunner of Leverage (a con/heist show in the vein of Hustle, The A-Team and Mission: Impossible). Rogers' posts are irregular, due to his writing and show-running schedule, but he answers questions about each episode and interacts with his audience in a very proactive way.


• The blog of Mike Atherton (aka sizemore). Atherton wrote the sizzle reel for British science fiction show Slingers which went viral about 7 months ago ("the best scifi show that doesn't exist yet"); his blog is the best place to watch for updates as it goes through the long, slow road to creation.

The subscription folders in Google Reader are also useful for managing feeds - particularly when I started subscribing to some prolific Twitter users like Stephen Fry and Warren Ellis and wanted to detangle their tweets from everything else!

All in all, RSS feeds are so much nicer and quicker than the neurotic tour of blogs and other sites via bookmarks to see if anyone's updated :).

Cake Wrecks

Cake Wrecks*: a guilty pleasure and innocent delight rolled into one. There's a plethora of archived posts to trawl through, and I have literally laughed until I couldn't breathe reading some of these posts. Aside from classics like the carrot-riding naked mohawk babies and the USB cake, there are rants about trends such as cupcake cakes and also examples of genuinely gorgeous non-wrecks in Sunday Sweets.

When professional cakes go horribly, horribly wrong. Enjoy!


*(if this link doesn't work for you, try http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com)

NSW State Library blogs

Not every aspect of library operations needs to be blogged or tweeted or otherwise made available through Web 2.0 platforms, but when there are projects or departments which have something cool and interesting to say, it's nice to have them all gathered together in one place. That's what I like about the State Library of NSW's blogs page.

The HSC Legal Studies News Watch blog is interesting and regularly updated, but my favourite is the Holtermann collection digitisation project blog, which has a wealth of gorgeous glass plate images documenting the 1870s gold rush era in NSW and Victoria (many of these are also available on the library's Flickr account as part of The Commons).

Virtual shelf-browsing

I've been thinking about the new Library lately, and how having so much of the collection in the storage system will change browsing habits (even though the most-borrowed parts of the collection will still be on the shelves). There is something about the physicality of books that makes browsing shelves - whether in a bookstore or a library - an act of discovery and surprise, of serendipity. It's the same thing that makes second-hand book fairs so addictive: what if you find that one book you never knew you were looking for? When you don't know what, exactly, you're looking for, using the online catalogue becomes an arduous task of filtering results from possible keywords. But what if you don't know the right keywords? What if all you remember is "it was somewhere near the Milton shelves, and it had a cat on the cover"? (This is an actual example - I did find it, eventually, but only by chance!)

That's where I think a "virtual bookshelf" like zoomii could really help. Being able to browse actual book covers side-by-side allows for those serendipitous discoveries and vague recollections, which is why I was excited to see LibraryThing has made improvements to its Shelf Browse application in LibraryThing for Libraries. Its integration in the LibraryThing platform also means user-applied tag clouds and reviews are readily available, supplementing the information you can find in the regular library catalogue.

Of course, the virtual bookshelf can't replace the physical browsing needs of some researchers. But it bridges the divide between OPAC and shelf in a way that is intuitive to use and - better yet - brings the "physical" library shelf to the user, wherever and whenever they are.

Who you gonna call?

More serious examples of libraries on the web and interacting with clients in innovative ways later. For now, here's Improv Everywhere's Ghostbusters mission in the New York Public Library.

The New York Public Library is facing budget cuts of $37 million, and the Improv Everywhere incident was to raise awareness of the crisis, and remind people of the library not only as information repository but also a physical place to interact with people. While also being absolutely hilarious :).

Improv Everywhere is not strictly crowdsourcing; while for some missions they've operated on the same principle as flashmobs, their acts are generally "scripted" improvisation by a small number of agents. My favourite IE missions are the Anton Chekov author talk and book signing, the crowd frozen in Grand Central Station, and the Starbucks time moebius.

Web 2.0 training

So here it is! I haven't settled on what this blog will be "about", but for now I'll be posting some entries on Web 2.0 projects other libraries are involved with, and probably expanding into crowdsourcing in general. Doubtless there'll be some geekery along the way.