Library Blogs

When I attended the 2.0-themed Northwestern Resource Sharing Conference in September, presenter Rachel Bridgewater mentioned feeding in Del.icio.us tags (from folks interested in the very same topics as you are) to one's own newsreader as a great way to get other people to do your research for you. I did not totally understand it at the time, but now I shall even receive her stuff via the Bloglines feed! Ha! I find the idea of glomming onto other researchers' results extremely appealing; nothing like having someone else, with perhaps a wee bit more time on their hands, do the digging for you...

Mashups

I enjoyed playing around with FLICKR'S Montager because it let me create a Resource Sharing mosaic. I think mashups are fun - but I just can't see myself having enough spare time to really utilize these APIs. I was unable to save, and subsequently post to this blog, the montage that was created... But here is the link to the ILL Montage which I made.

I also thought creating my own Trading Card was amusing. And it's true: we ILL types are so excited about sharing books, music, & movies from all around the U.S. that we even deliver via scooter!

Flickr: Halloween angst

Halloween cliché: existential angst meets pumpkin positivism head on
Originally uploaded by Barbara Rich

I chose this for my very first Halloweenie FLICKR post because it is one of my all-time favorite pics. Long before there were lots of choices for photo editing and/or sharing, by husband stuck his head onto this picture to create a screensaver that made me laugh every time I sat down at the computer.

RSS feeds/Newsreaders

I know my new Bloglines account can potentially save me lots of time in the not-too-distant future, as I will no longer pay daily or weekly visits to my favorite news sites, ILL sites, and book sites to keep current. However, there is just so much swell stuff out there that I can also see myself spending 24/7 reading all my feeds! I think the interlibrary loan feeds, however, will prove very valuable here at work. I found the search tool in Bloglines itself quite helpful, and Feedster and Technorati also brought up great blogs, wikis, and photos/videos. I do not have much in there yet, but my blogroll is publicly accessible at http://www.bloglines.com/public/aimless, for those of you who may be interested in the same weird stuff that I am.

Lifelong Learning

I have just viewed the Lifelong Learning tutorial; it is easy to identify which habit is the hardest one for me. Or am I the only one that has trouble viewing obstacles as mere challenges to be overcome?! The easiest lifelong learning habit for me is teaching others, since that is the very essence of what we do in the library.