Pea's 23

Staff Development Day Resource List

2008-06-03T15:41:00.001-04:00

Here is the list of resources I compiled for the Staff Development Day knitting class

Online Knitting Resources, and Bricks and Mortar LYS,

ravelry
an online knitting community where you can search for patterns, join groups, add your stash and your projects, keep up with knitting news
A MUST

knitty
an online magazine with free patterns and articles: the extensive pattern archive has a new more powerful search engine

elann
Canadian company with discontinued discounted yarns , books, and free patterns

knitpicks
online store with their own yarns, patterns (free and not), tutorials

KnittingHelp
whether you knit continental style or not this site provides video instruction on demand, tips, as well as free patterns

Lion Brand Yarn
patterns (many are free), their own yarns, and knitting and crochet tutorials

Knitting Pattern Central

lots and lots of free patterns

Online shopping

Flying Fingers

Yarnzilla

Purl

Patternworks

Kaleidoscope

Jimmy Beans Wool

YarnMarket

Local Yarn Shops

What's Needling You Toms River

Wooly Monmouth Red Bank

WoolBearers Mt. Holly

Island Knits Long Beach Island

Blogs

there are so many of these out there--just a few of the ones I like--knitting shops also have blogs I especially like the Purl blog

the purl bee

Yarn Harlot

Sheep in the City

Twisted Knitter

The Blue Blog

not quite ListenNJ

2008-05-16T15:55:00.006-04:00

Phew! I was finally able to download and upgrade security for Windows Media Player so that I could download and at least listen to a snippet of The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale. This is a full cast audio production and a marvelous story and the opening had me riveted soo hopefully I can go home and download to my home pc and begin listening? Or shall I just wait until I get my new listening device?
Thanks to my guru for helping me navigate the shoals.You know who you are.

23 Things done

2008-05-16T11:41:00.008-04:00

What a tremendous CONNECTOR this was. I had not felt this kind of OCL team spirit and solidarity in a while and that we also learned new skills and challenged ourselves while helping each other was icing on the cake. Personally, I really liked reading staff blogs. I have started using YouTube to enhance my lifelong learning toolbox. I feel less tentative about trying new things even if they have no immediate application. I am definitely feeling the paradigm shift from information professional behaving as a single searcher in the vastness and impersonality of cyberspace to social being relying on social networks and "groups" to help find, combine, evaluate and deliver information.
Web 2.0 is social network building and enhanced web content and apps.

Web 3.0 will be a "semantic-based" web. This new web will be restructured as a language I guess so that the computer can read it and process the information. The computer will be able to perform some of the mundane tasks of information gathering, finding and bundling that is currently done by people.

Hmmm
well I still play with (paper)paper dolls and I use the web to find them, print them, share them and play online with them. I can see that the image of librarians is changing thank goodness and our tools are evolving but we still need books and each other. Thank you OCL Webthings Challenge team. What a great effort for all of us!

ListenupNJ #22

2008-05-16T10:40:00.003-04:00

I tried twice on 2 different computers at work and was unsuccessful. I was able to download the initial software but then the computer would not download the audiobook I selected b/c my version of windows media player had not been updated and I did not have the credentials to do so. In the other instance I was unable to download the book because it was in 6 parts and each part took a minimum of 10 minutes to download and this on a computer without speakers! I browsed children's fiction looking for a short picture book but everything I found was already checked out. I love audio books and I am always listening to a book on CD in my car. I still have to get used to the idea that I will soon be an mp3 player owner and that I may just have to get over my aversion to sticking little things in my ear. I would be willing to download the software to my home computer once I get my player.
I love the idea of OCL offering this resource and I think once I get better at using it I can help patrons through the initial frustrating steps.

Thing #21-PeaPodcasts

2008-05-16T09:57:00.004-04:00

I journeyed to podcast.com and searched on "gardening" I was unsuccessful in further refining my search by typing in New Jersey or Zone 7 but since there were only 90 or so results I slogged through and selected one called Greenman Radio. I listened for a few minutes. It is a radio mail in show so the voice answered listener's questions. The greenman's voice was a little annoying but the info was good and directions thorough. I then wanted to get a sense of the range of podcasts available on the site b/c I was surprised there weren't more offerings on gardening so I went into podcast.com music folder and found something called Deadpod. These are radio shows (radio station from Columbus MO podcast a week ago)that feature sets from Grateful Dead concerts. The one I listened to was a concert the Dead did
August 29, 1980 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia. Having been a fan NOT a deadhead in the 70's this was music to my ear. This was a pleasure.

I then searched "knitting" and listened to a podcast from "Stash and Burn" wherein an addicted knitter talks herself through a 12 step program. Comforting.

Pod and vodcasting have such tremendous potential as training and teaching tools for OCL.

Like bloglines, I would not go to podcast.com to search for podcasts to subscribe to. If I found podcasts while surfing the Internet I would retrieve them that way.

YouTube glitch--#20

2008-05-08T14:27:00.002-04:00

I found that when you set up your blog to post videos from YouTube you lose a certain amount of control--For example, I tried to add tags to the post from the blog side and it messed up the code so that it would not post. Perhaps one needs to edit from the YouTube side before posting.

Pointed Pen Copperplate Calligraphy 08

2008-05-08T14:20:00.001-04:00

80 of 500 handdrawn posters

2008-05-08T14:12:00.001-04:00

My fascination with written letters led me to search YouTube just using the term "calligraphy" and I was rewarded handsomely. Here are 2 videos of 2 very different techniques--really almost 2 different philosophies on the craft of hand lettering. I was thrilled with the hand drawn posters, but I also want to put in a plug for the very precise method of copperplate calligraphy which I spent years trying to perfect and never did. Thank you YouTube--I am now learning to fold a duck with Robert Lang.

18-google docs

2008-04-29T14:33:00.003-04:00

I am a fan of shared documents stored on a server not my own for both works in-progress--great for committee reports--and articles I have found that I want to store and share at a later date. Also a good place to start that novel you just can't seem to get launched. Google docs can also function as a secret hiding place by keeping the status of your doc as private or "unpublished" I logged in and added my name to the playlist.

music food and web 2.0- 19

2008-04-26T14:44:00.005-04:00

How cool is it to be listening to my own radio station (Pandora) with Sandy Denny's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" followed by Nina Simone's "You Put a Spell on me" while surfing the top food sites according to listdump
a web 2.0 award winner for the category "lists and polls"

check out this blog

I looked at content and aggregator web sites and took a quick look at wufoo and thought a great project to initiate would be REF SAMPLING ala wufoo. Here is what wufoo does:
"Create forms for every survey you’d care to perform. From the daily “what to have for lunch” question to more in-depth questionnaires, Wufoo has a solution for most queries." Then these reports can be "aggregated" and statistics compiled!!!

sandbox sojourn-#17

2008-04-23T20:26:00.004-04:00

I did have to lock someone out to get into the sandbox--go ahead kick some sand in my face and then the same thing happened to me so there. I liked my time in pbwiki. I linked my blog and put in some of my favorite foods. Several months ago I set up a wiki in wikispaces to post "useful" booklists for children's librarians and members of NJLA's Children's Services Section. The wikispace is accessible to the public but editable by only a few members of CSS. It looks and behaves differently than pbwiki, but still a very useful way of sharing information. The wiki format is great for building alliances and bringing like-minded people to the space. Could our committees have wikis? Great way to keep current and keep communication dynamic.

Laser tagging

2008-04-23T18:03:00.001-04:00

IMG_0763, originally uploaded by urban_data.

After trying to resolve issues with technorati and changing my tag from oclwebthings to "tagging" I was led to a blog commenting on a Time article about "laser tagging."--a new form of techno graffitti. This is beautiful stuff!

wiki is not finicki-16

2008-04-22T19:15:00.004-04:00

I found this great site after going to Library Success-Best Practices wiki. Radical Reference takes on the LC subject headings! This post urges us all to propose cataloging changes to LC. Take a look at Sanford Berman's list of proposed and accepted LC subject headings here. This blog post encourages us to submit LC subject headings by April 27 and share those proposed changes on yup google docs, tag it for del.icio.us, fill out a proposal (if it is not on Sandy's list) use meebo or Skype on Sunday April 27 when it all goes down. Now who would have thunk that subject headings were such a hot zone of contention? Librarians that's who!!

A suggestion for the article on OCL--Please put the size of the collection (# of items)

library 2.0-the long reach of the long tail-15

2008-04-22T17:27:00.006-04:00

I am intrigued by this notion of the "long Tail" discussed on wikipedia and listed as one of the services library 2.0 would attempt to reach. As a librarian one of my biggest concerns is the "collection" Take a look at our staff question box. Some of the concerns are very real. What would a library 2.0 collection development policy look like? What would a collection look like and how would we "capture" it? Certainly our OPAC is very limited and at the moment unable to point to any of our valuable databases. Here is what Rick Anderson says
Building a comprehensive collection of materials that anticipates the user’s every need (without providing wastefully where no need exists) has always been problematic, but it was an approach that made sense when information was available only in print formats, and was therefore difficult, expensive and slow to distribute. But it no longer makes sense to collect information products as if they were hard to get. They aren’t. In fact, it may no longer make sense to “collect” in the traditional sense at all. In my library, we’ve seen a 55 percent drop in circulation rates over the past twelve years, making it harder and harder to justify the continued buildup of a large “just in case” print collection. As a Web 2.0 reality continues to emerge and develop, our patrons will expect access to everything – digital collections of journals, books, blogs, podcasts, etc. You think they can’t have everything? Think again. This may be our great opportunity.

Now the long tail which is hard to paraphrase, but I'll try. The market share for obscure (not Danielle Steel) items is greater than that of the popular items, or as one Amazon employee put so succintly "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday."[5] The long tail describes a potential market:

"products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough."

So how would library 2.0 reach the patron's long tail? (see lilac colored rectangle above)because I personally feel that's a market we must reach and I don't know how we do that other than by tracking how people search for things and by making the ILL/purchase for request process more fluid and built into a catalog search for example so that the form itself does not create a barrier.

Technorati makes me technoCRABBY--14

2008-04-21T14:41:00.009-04:00

I think I'm hitting overload. I registered with technorati and "claimed" my blog. Again I think a really really cool dissertation topic would be to examine the rhetoric of web 2.0 because language has really been affected by our "connecting" technologies-phone, video, Internet etc. I really found the visual "face" of technorati to be busy and hard to navigate. I searched popular blogs and found boing boing: a directory of wonderful things which I faved/hearted/whatever. I searched for blogs with learning 2.0 and found a blog called Musings from the Academy and added her to my del.icio.us network since she provided that on her sidebar. She describes herself as an Instructional Technology Specialist. Her tag cloud in d is voluminous (904) Education, English, History and Instructional Strategies, web 2.0., are some of the categories. The tag "graphicorganizers" appears to be the most "used." So what was the ? again. Oh now I'm trying to tag with technorati so I put html in my post--here goes
tagging
Now I am really at a loss since "ping" is what I need to aspire to. Is pinging what happens when your technorati tag and theirs shake hands? I am very unstrung....

Delicious 13

2008-04-18T15:01:00.005-04:00

I fired up a del.icio.us account under the peaisforpurl username (I now have to maintain a googledoc that lists all my accounts, user names, passwords and email affiliations.)and tagged some websites--I must say that the word "tag" is now "overdetermined" and since I have an endless fascination with words let's play with the "tagging" phenomenon. On my tool bar now is an icon that looks like a luggage tag. This is what I click on to let my d account know that the current website will be added to my bookmarks. I can also apply "tags" or descriptors to that bookmark to add to the cloudbursts of descriptors in my account as well as to the mushrooming cloud in the tag universe of del.icio.us. I can look at all of my bookmarks with a particular tag. I can look at all of my tags. Tagging also refers to what graffiti artists do which to me means making an individual identifying and identifiable mark on the landscape's skin for all to see. When you play a game of tag you are tapping or striking someone b/c they have been "caught" and are now tagged "it" The "it" has a new identity and becomes tagger. Tag=identity, tag=designator, tag=marker but it does not replace anything, it is just a means of identifying sort of the way a catalog card used to do and hey that looks like a kind of paper tag and also if you are a scrapbooker (the bricks and mortar kind) then you know about the tag rage among scrapbookers-- So much of what this technology is promulgating is a kind of "cut and paste" universe. No judgment just an observation.

NetLibrary and WorldCat

2008-04-15T15:04:00.004-04:00

I signed up for NetLibrary and browsed through some books--some I was very disappointed in and others I have marked as favorites to review at another time. It is still hard for me adjust to "reading a book" on screen. I read so much other information on screen but not "books" which means I am still very much bound by the conventions of the Gutenberg universe where books have pages I can smell and boards that get bent and pictures that get smeared if I touch them with greasy fingers. I can also flip through pages more quickly but at least some of the books have indices so I can enter the page number in the go to space and get there. For me the value of netlibrary is showing the patrons what the netlibrary refers to on a bib record and helping them sign on for an account.
WorldCat is a resource I am using more and more. I can't remember now the title I was searching but I did find a cite to a book review for it in Worldcat, but it was incorrect. I spent time in Ebscohost going through issue by issue of the source publication with no success. Worldcat is not flawless, but the patrons I have shown it to have been very impressed.I looked up "On Beauty" by Zadie Smith and 2 records appeared from OCL with 5 miles appearing as mileage from my current location. I was very pleased to see one can export to both RefWorks and EndNote as well as "cite this item" with correct citation form for APA, MLA, Chicago, and Turabian. You can also link to the Library of Congress bib record through "publisher description", I think this is a valuable tool especially for our college students so in it goes to my ever expanding toolbox.

Commercial Break

2008-04-10T10:03:00.004-04:00

One of my RSS feeds is Candy Addict and today I was just struck dumb with this new macho offering of jelly belly flavors. Bertie Botts MOVE ASIDE and let the big guys sweeten your bicuspids. I'll belly up to the bar and take a shot of Hot wings with a boobs and car part chaser.

Library Thing #11

2008-04-08T15:43:00.005-04:00

I have had a LT account for about a year. I have a small eclectic collection in my home library of books on scripts, history of the alphabet, calligraphy and books on books and reading. I added them to LibraryThing b/c I wanted to see how many people had similar titles and then I wanted to sneak into their libraries and wander around. I have since added some of my children's collection. My statistic for least and most shared books in my burgeoning catalog: Angela's Aliens (2), Harry Potter #7 18,092. One feature I had not explored before and I was delighted with is connecting with authors who have their libraries on LT and lo and behold the YA author John Green (author of Looking for Alaska--one of my favorite audio books) has his 1,023 item library here. I was shocked to discover that he is also a huge illustrator for Dover Books--coloring books etc.--He goes by "sparksflyup" I also checked out libraries that use LibraryThing. The Claremont Colleges (1 of which I attended in the early 70's) uses LibraryThing tags in their catalog--take a look
The Deschutes Public Library in Oregon looks like it catalogs using LibraryThing.
A Horizon Dynix Library in Colorado uses LT tags and Recommended titles.
Tagmash: I searched "children's fiction" and "faerie" and got the top 106 titles. I was pleased to see that LT also searched faeries and faery and fairies.

Thing #10- Technology rocks with paper and scissors

2008-04-07T11:42:00.005-04:00

For me technology is another play tool--a powerful one but a tool nonetheless. I am one of those who shakes her head everytime she sees a "connected" family on an outing-Dad and mom on cell phones. 1 child texting another gaming another ipod stricken. I worry about language and correct grammar and civility--yes manners are still important so is spelling, and that is what is so funny about technology and "social networking." We are indeed creating connections. We are bonding, but the quality of that bonding is inherently different. I used to curtsy whenever I met an adult. I wore white gloves and went to dancing school. I hated it all but it seems we had so much more "face" time not "facebook" time. Now I can learn to dance from YouTube. I do not "blame" technology but I want to ensure that our children know how to speak to one another and to others without that mediation.
End of "soapbox" rant.

So here is an example of how I "play" with technology: I logged on to OCL webthings challenge blog and accessed The 20 Things to Watch doc. I was intrigued by #5 Scrapbooking. I actually do the paper,scissors and glue stick kind. This refers to technology on the web that allows you to research across databases while it captures and stores full text and citations for use at a later date. I wanted to know more so I googled "scrapbooking technology" and yup that was not helpful. I happened to mention this to a colleague and she said oh yeah RefWorks does that. BINGO--face time!! My coworker told me it had some limitations so I decided to figure out what "category" of technology this kind of software fit in. BINGO wikipedia called RefWorks a "citation manager" and I was OFF like greased lightning. BUT before I launched myself I remember a technology colleague having emailed some time ago about some cool Firefox extension that did some of this "scrapbooking" so I went to my Outlook sorted by name and BINGO there it was ZOTERO. I went from A to Z didn't I? I got the answers--which was simply satisfying a curiosity- I was looking for and I HAD FUN!!!

Move over Sparks!

2008-04-02T19:10:00.002-04:00

If you double click on this image you can go for a wild ride AND if you mention "Prisquilla" and register for your own Meez I'll earn extra points to make my avatar even groovier than she already is!

ABC3D

2008-04-01T20:43:00.002-04:00

I searched "kidlit" on bloglines and wound my way through the tendrils and reeds of swaying blogtalk. I found a blog "big a little a" which I already subscribe to and she led me to the NYT blog that had this video. I love alphabets. I am entranced by script and handwriting and before I became a librarian I was a calligrapher so anything with "letters" is chocolate to my soul.

MAD Magazine Fold-ins

2008-04-01T17:57:00.003-04:00

I just had to share this cool interactive site I found when checking in on one of my new feeds--The New York Times Books. Even if you have never read a Mad Magazine in your life read the accompanying article about Al Jaffee the creator of the MAD fold-in--a fave feature that transforms a page into something quite different and funny!

Floglines #8

2008-03-31T12:42:00.002-04:00

I have had a Bloglines account for some time, BUT let's just say I have been negligent- an unattended patch of weeds in my cybergarden. So for thing #8 I am changing my learning style drastically and reading all the tutorials about RSS feeds and aggregators FIRST then I am tackling the challenge. I have been frustrated with creating playlists in bloglines b/c it is cumbersome and annoying. So I will read the manual first. I promise. Sigh***

Boning up on photo editors

2008-03-19T09:04:00.002-04:00

Here is Sasha edited using the photo editor Picnik. I found this editor much easier to use than the more sophisticated Splashup. While I was able to bring my image onto the Splashup canvas I couldn't make it do anything to my photo.

Sasha reading before the Edit

2008-03-18T18:38:00.003-04:00

As you can see this is my amazing pooch Sasha who seems to be sleeping through Jonathan(not Jack) London's Sled Dogs Run. I had this image stored on my work computer so I decided to share it first off and then I wanted to play with the different free photo editors suggested by our challenge.

Voila!

2008-03-17T12:26:00.002-04:00

A roundabout way of getting Flickr to behave is by linking to a post on a blog without the relational problems. I set up a second blog to chart this very process.

Flickr to Blogger broken

2008-03-17T11:52:00.003-04:00

Evidently this is a glitch that others are having. There are several discussions about the issue on Blogger Help Group, but I haven't yet seen a reolution. I was able to register with Wordpress where I have a partner blog.

#5 Is this what we mean by sketchy?

2008-03-17T09:43:00.006-04:00

I found this image on Flickr and tried the "blog this" button which takes you through a process of connecting Flickr and Google (blogger host) so that you can actually post the image to your blog BUT access was denied so I am bummed this image of Spitzer and his wife won't be immediately visible but check it out. I was so taken by the photos of this disgraced couple. I think this EtchASketch artist did an amazing job at capturing the rage, shame, shock, and bewilderment on the faces of the disgraced couple.

Crafty dolls

2008-03-13T14:22:00.004-04:00

I like to share quirky stuff so consider this a commercial break. I invite you to visit 2 friends Chloe and Louise- 2 9 year olds with varied interests. You can ask them questions if you'd like (just click on comments) or just ogle at their beauty. You may be surprised that Chloe's most checked out books are Nancy Drew mysteries. She loves movies with Grace Kelly. Remember this is not only a "commercial" post it also includes a helpful web 2.0 tip and that is "Leave comments."

The invisible made visible

2008-03-11T20:06:00.004-04:00

I solved my last problem by choosing a new template (son of Moto or something like that) which not only freed up space on my sidebar it inadvertantly showed me that the posting title is one color of your choosing and when you pass your cursor over it the hyperlink changes to whatever you designate as your "link hover color" so what I must have done wrong before is not designated a title color and when I clicked on the empty space the link color showed up!!

what up?

2008-03-11T19:46:00.003-04:00

What's up with the invisibility cloak on my posting title? My last post 3, 4 Don't Shut the Door is a specter yet when you click in the space above the post voila there it is! Is this a google glitch? kk has had similar problems with gmail so maybe the collective brain can help me with materializing spells.

2008-03-07T16:33:00.001-05:00

3, 4 Don't shut the door

2008-03-07T14:20:00.000-05:00

I have now created and registered my OCL web things challenge blog. I hope I will get some traffic coming and going my way. Blogger is very easy to set up, but design is not as flexible as I'd like. No complaints though about the varieties of "green" from pea to chartreuse and back again to moss and mold.

2008-03-07T11:10:00.001-05:00

Thing #1 and Thing #2

2008-03-07T10:48:00.000-05:00

I'm a playah! I'm taking on the OCL webthings challenge because I want to connect with my library community in new and creative ways. I also want to learn and play with the new and emerging social networking technologies that our profession appears to have embraced.

Of the sevenandahalf Habits of highly successful lifelong learners the one I find the most challenging:

#1 Begin with the end in mind

the least challenging or easiest?

#7.5 Play