Michigan Library Wiki, Ohio U's Alden Library Video

Check it out: Michigan Library Consortium has a Michigan Libraries Wiki open to staff, trustees, and friends. Here is the link: http://www.mlcnet.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page I'm a fan Of MeL, the Michigan Electronic Library, so am always on the lookout for anything they're doing up north.
Also, Alden Library at O.U. has a pretty neat video, all about what it has to offer. Here's the link to it their website, which contains the YouTube.

My point is that a lot of libraries are making good use of new technology, and I'm hoping my library readers like to see what others are doing.

More about accessibility

Sometimes people tell me things. Today, someone mentioned an elderly relative who uses a walker not liking a particular library location in his town for several reasons. I've heard variations on this theme several times before, and thought I'd share some of these things plus a thought or two of my own. Back to the things I've heard: frequently, those who use walkers, crutches, or have orthopedic problems happen also to be elderly, and make use of things such as large print books. They do not want to have to go to the back of a large building to get to them,
and good lighting and a chair are nice when they arrive. And it's even better if they are not right next to the teen or toddler area. Granted, everything in a building can't be five feet from the entrance, but thoughtful placement is important. And floor surfaces that don't echo with every step are nice for everyone, with a nice even surface for canes and wheelchairs, and baby strollers, and book trucks, too. And as you may or may not know, some impairments are invisible; accessible parking places are often NOT very close to an entrance, which may be a short distance for someone in a wheelchair, but might be impossibly far for someone with COPD (chronic obstrucitve pulmonary disease, or "breathing trouble" for civilians).

Now, I don't think anyone ever purposely designs things in an impractical manner, or maliciously makes navigation difficult, but I do think there are a lot of people who, through no fault of their own, are oblivious to these types of concerns. With the whole world competing for one's limited attention, it may be the case that someone has never had any type of disability, temporary or permanent, and has not closely associated with others who have or do. Hence, no real awareness of accessibility is needed. We all routinely filter out information we don't need, otherwise we'd be overloaded. But there aren't many of us who at a later time haven't looked back and wished we'd paid more attention to something that seemed irrelevant at the time.

Signing Time! on PBS

Look above to see a YouTube of the children's book Click, Clack, Moo Cows that Type by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin. I was actually in search of an animated avatar with a disability when I stumbled across this, and had to post it.

Then I found footage of Signing Time! from PBS http://www.signingtime.com/and thought it deserves a mention. If you've been following my blog at all, you are already aware that Odiogo will read the entries aloud.

I like to play and am particularly interested in assistive technology of all kinds and plan to mention more of it here.

Not Exactly What I'd Planned . . . .

Hannah from Oddcast (thanks!) commented on my last post, and directed me to Voki.com, where I was able to successfully create and embed my character. You may have to pause the music from my Playlist to hear her speak.

Tourguides, anyone?

I think having a tourguide option on our website would make it warmer and easier for patrons to navigate, though I know some people detest this sort of thing. It could be optional, as many .com sites have it. Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego has a live, not animated version of this. Scenes always revert back to "the Chief" who speaks directly into the camera to the user; kids love it!

At Sitepal.com, I created a few free talking animated characters, which I'd hoped to embed right here for you to see, but that feature of Sitepal is not available at the moment, and a link asks for my login info, so I guess you'll just have to go to www.sitepal.com and create your own (2 are free)
In case you've never heard of Carmen Sandiego, click here for more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Sandiego

Stuck in the 80's (Musically)

See my playlist from http://www.projectplaylist.com/ Definitely fun.

Squidoo

This has nothing to do with books and reading, but what a neat site:
http://www.squidoo.com/soundtoys/

It's all about music "Museum of Sound Toys - Online Virtual Instruments, Interactive Music Guides, and Digital Media Artworks". I was actually looking for a fun interactive music widget to add to my blog when I found this, and decided it is better to add the link itself because it leads to so many good things.

Alter Egos and Avatars

I had a lot of fun creating my avatar at www.Meez.com, I can see why every Playstation, Gamecube and computer game my youngest nephew has gives the option to make your own wrestler, car, action hero, etc. Especially when you get to be "lord of all things" and choose all the characters, like in the Sims. . . .Then I saw Her Mind Disturbed Her's talking avatar from Sitepal and was (momentarily) jealous. But I know I'll be creating yet another account soon.

Pondering whether the main difference between a blog and a MySpace or other social network account is the listing of the friends and the posting of comments w/picture. It seems to me that it's equally easy to add content and change the layout.

Don't harsh my mellow

Back from vacation and just had to add the new catch phrase I picked up from reality T.V., which I basically can't stand and virtually never watch. But I do like the phrase. Hoping to find time this week to check out some more tools I've been reading about in other blogs.

Not impressed. . .

Well, the niece and nephew (ages 19 and 20) are not impressed by text to speech, and wondered why I "chose" the male voice. They've been playing around with various versions of it on their computers for years, and it's old news to them to make the slightly robotic-sounding voice say funny things. I know it's not that new, but I think the ease with which it can be installed is a bit new, so I'm still a bit thrilled about it. And it sure wouldn't be the first time they've rolled their eyes and indicated I'm a little lame.

Wow! It worked!

and it also was pretty easy to install.

Text to Speech

I just signed up for a free account at odiogo.com that is supposed to convert my blog to speech. Any of you who know me personally know that I am interesed in accessibility issues, so I'm anxious to see if this works. I have played a bit with other text-to-speech tools, but this is the first one I've heard of where a blog can be converted. If you listen to this please post a comment so I'll know.

Open Library

Both Boing Boing and Slashdot have stroies this morning on Open Library http://demo.openlibrary.org/, a "giant books wiki" which may have half a million books eventually. Sounds like it would bring together online book content from anywhere, such as Project Gutenberg, Electronic Text Center, Digital Library SunSITE, etc. Will have to read more about it. . . .

Learning from each other

Several people have told me they've learned a few things from my blog. I'm flattered that anyone is reading it and glad some are finding it useful. I am also learning things from reading what others post, for instance roboform for accounts & passwords from Jesse's blog. Part of the whole point of us all exploring things together is to work together and help each other out. It makes it more fun, too, than struggling alone with the not-always-simple directions that sometimes seem too tedious to bother with, except for those few people with unlimited patience. (I am not among them. . . .)
An added benefit of doing Library 2.0 that I don't know if anyone anticipated is that we learn more about each other, not only the fun social things i.e. grandchildren and pets, but also useful information such as that someone knows sign language, or is a movie buff, dog expert, nutritionist, whatever. It's always nice to know someone personally who might answer a question or two.

Changing the subject, watch WYTV 33 tonight to see one of our patrons answer Len Rome's "Question of the Day". We don't know his name, but he said he'd be back to sign autographs ; )

The photo things really are fun. From reading other people's blogs, I decided to play with Dumpr.net, which couldn't be easier. I only have a few pix in flicker to work with right now, but made them both into sketches and antiqued them, also tried the distorting circle feature and the Easter egg. Silly! And it's a lot of fun to browse through the creative photos on Flickr. I have some saved into my favorites http://www.flickr.com/photos/99416963@N00/favorites/, mostly book related but there's a pumpkin one for Linda.

Thing 23 reflections

This is an easy task, because a few of the "things" stand out as favorites. I particularly enjoyed Technorati because I like just popping in or browsing a tag (i.e., "funny") and being able to immediately have the choice of blogs, videos, music, pictures, etc. And it all loads fast and easily. And if you've been reading my other blog entries, you already know I'm very fond of the RSS feeds, and yesterday I discovered podcasts can be added to them. Zoho also has intrigued me a bit, because I noticed it has several features that Word does not have, and it also is easy to use.

I don't particularly like having about 50-100 different logins and passwords for all my accounts, but someone is probably hard at work to fix that inconvenience.
And there are a few things I probably won't use again, but I still like the idea of knowing what they are if they come up in conversation.

As for more programs like this, I read in Library Hotline that 2.1 is in the works!

Podcasting

I was all set to make this post an actual podcast but www.audioblogger.com is not accepting new accounts, so I'll have to look for another source and play with it later. I used Podcast Alley to find a few podcasts that I added to my RSS feeds at bloglines. One is library news, called LibVibe, and the other is a music one called NextBig Thing. There were also a couple thousand listed in the comedy category which I plan to check out a bit when I have more time. I don't know about you, but I need all the laughs I can get!

The more the merrier

This will all be a lot more fun now that we'll be doing it library-wide, I think.

YackPack and YouTube

I added YouTube section to my page elements on this blog, but didn't bother investigating enough to find out if the choices will change or not. Will watch and see. . . Found out about YackPack, a push-button walkie-talkie widget, which I added to the WickAvenue Wiki, but since most of our computers do not have microphones, will have to find out a few more details and try the terminal in the TRC that has a mike. Sound like your computer becomes an intercom with some kind of voice-over-i.p.
There are so many new things, I'm already re-evaluating whether Ning is going to be as useful as I thought it might. I think it's like any set of tools, i.e., it's good to know the difference between a hammer and a screwdriver, or a toaster and a whisk, and why you'd want to use each tool. But there is no way everyone can possibly learn more than a little bit about the things they never use or have no desire to use, so figuring out what you want to do in the first place is pretty important. Like, do I want to make a sweater? build a treehouse? cook Thanksgiving dinner? groom a horse? paint a picture? These activities alll require special tools, i.e., knitting needles, saws & hammers & nails, pots & pans, brushes, brushes. But there are many variations on each, and who has the time to learn more than the most cursory overview of those that do not appley to one's life?

Bloglines.com and Second Life

It's been a busy month but I have still been exploring. One of my new favorite things to use almost every day is my R.S.S. feed at Bloglines.com. It makes it super quick and easy to scan all my favorite websites at once. I have 17 "feeds" right now, which basically mean the new content from all 17 of my (current) favorite sites is one click away. Here's what I have been reading lately: 17 feeds
A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette (0) (0)
Annoyed Librarian (0) (0)
Arts & Letters Daily (0) (0)
Bloglines News (0) (0)
Boing Boing (11) (0)
Comedy Central Videos (6) (0)
Diggnation (Mp3) (0) (0)
Fool.com Headlines (36) (0)
iTunes Top 25 Songs (5) (0)
LibrarianInBlack (0) (0)
Library Garden (0) (0)
Official Google Blog (0) (0)
The Shifted Librarian (1) (0)
Slashdot (9) (0)
Unshelved (0) (0) [!]
WEB2RSS: Doonesbury@Slate-35th Anniversary-- (0) (0)
Wired Top Stories (0) (0)

I also signed up for Second Life after touring "Information Island", and created an avatar. However, this has been a little confusing so far and I haven't really been able to do much with it. They have mentors available, though, so when I get some time will look into that more. I'm not much of a gamer, but know lots of people who are, so thought I should check it out. Plus it's fun to have an alias or two.

Librarian social networking at Ning.com

Now I have found a really neat place to meet librarians and others interested in Library 2.0. It's a social network on www.ning.com. It just takes a few minutes to sign up and create a profile, the other people are really cordial, and are from all over the country and world. Bill Drew started it. Check out my profile under "Barbrarian."

Editing practice

MySpace image generator

Since I already have a MySpace profile, I think I will play around with the image generator feature of it, and report back. People have fun doing things like adding things to photos that weren't really there, such as a hat the person was not actually wearing. Think Michael Jackson morph video.
On to Rollyo. I've been wondering what that was, and now I'm finding out. From their website:

Rollyo is the fast, easy way to create personal search engines using only the sources you trust.
Are you tired of wading though thousands of irrelevant search results to get to the information you want? Ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust? With Rollyo, you can easily create your own custom search engines - we call them Searchrolls - and explore, save, and personalize those created by others.

Cooltext

You may have noticed by now that I am not doing all 23 things in sequential order. That is partly because I have tried some of them before, and partly because I think the sequence is somewhat random, anyway. Right now I just made a new logo at Cooltext.com, and image generator that I have tried before and like. Let me see if I can insert the image right into my blog here. Well, I see I was able to insert the image, but not the exact spot intended, and am not sure why it copied seven times! But I did figure out how to edit that.

LibraryThing.com

Back in July, while I was working with genealogy materials on the third floor, I discovered LibraryThing, which lets you catalog your own personal collection, (up to 200 items) free. Since my personal book collection is way too unorganized and I'm way too lazy to organize it in even a vaguely library-like way, I gave LibraryThing a try with some of the uncatalogued items I came across on the third floor. Everything wasn't listed, but a surprising amount of items were, and it is easy to use. Here's the link:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php
In case it won't let you in, the user name and password are both "isgen".

R.S.S. (Real Simple Syndication)

The other day I got around to setting up an R.S.S. feed at Bloglines.com. It really is a convenient way to keep track of your favorite websites quickly; they are all right there in front of you at once. A little disappointed to find that a few comics I like don't have R.S.S. feeds yet, but guess I can still read them in the paper. Some of my choices are: Shifted Librarian, Wired, i-tunes top 25, and Slashdot. Will need to spend a little more time knowing today's top 25 i-tunes, a little embarrassed that I haven't even heard of most of them (but at least I've heard of the musicians.)

Family trees and albums

Our last few genealogy group meetings have included things made with Flip Album, and other scrapbooking software, and photo collages. This got me to investigating a little more, and I found the Ohio Memory project's section where one can save images to a personal scrapbook, (which I did) and then Scrapbookflair.com, a FREE (one of my favorite words) site where I can create my own scrapbook with images I upload. My sister is the official family paper scrapbooker with the artistic flair, but I see real possibilities with the online versions.
Diverging a little here, I easily now have in the neighborhood of thirty different online accounts complete with passwords for various things . . . and the number increases daily!
To view my Ohio Memory images, go to:
http://worlddmc.ohiolink.edu/OMP/YourScrapbook?scrapid=35756

Pictures

I know people who use Photobucket, Kodak EasyShare, etc., and have tried the latter myself. Does anyone have a preference for Flickr vs. another photo-upload utility, and why? I haven't done a podcast or streaming video yet, although have found a few really neat ones that other people have done. Am thinking it could be kind of neat to have our own library version of MySpace, where our photo comes up with our posts We have a lot of new people whose names I barely know, and the "friends of friends" aspect of it could be useful too for library-specific networking.

43 THINGS

Now I registered on "43 Things" to set some goals and keep track of my progress on the 23 things.

Flickr

It's been fun playing with Flickr. My niece took a cell phone picture of me that I saved and will try to post as part of my profile here. Right now it's in a file, but not an URL that I want to make public.
As for comments on the "7 habits" of life-long learners, probably the one I have the most difficulty with is having a "learning toolbox". I'm not sure my approach is that organized! The easiest is "playing", because who doesn't like to play?

This was even easier to set up than my MySpace profile. Now that I have an official, work-related blog, I hope I'll have interesting, relative things to post! Don't want to bore anyone.