Thing 10

Downloadable eBooks and eAudiobooks…they haven’t quite caught on with me yet. I find electronic books to be too sterile; scrolling through text is just not the same to me as turning physical pages. I tried an eBook on my Palm a few years ago but I didn’t find it enjoyable at all. Also, while audio books may be handy for some, I find that I can’t immerse myself fully into an audio book if I am listening to them while driving or some other activity.

I tried some eAudiobook downloads from both of our digital sources; I found the download process a bit cumbersome and ran into a problem. While I successfully downloaded three children’s audio titles from the North Suburban Digital Consortium, I discovered that I had “insufficient privileges” to install the proprietary OverDrive software necessary to listen to them on my Library computer…bummer. I was able to download a few titles from NetLibrary without much of an issue, however. After creating an account, I was easily able to get the eAudiobooks downloaded and up and running on my computer with Windows Media Player. Not usable on iPods! That’s a shame. With iPod’s overwhelming market share, we are missing out on a lot of potential eDownloads.

As discussed in earlier postings, I think that there are several Things that we’ve learned in our technology training that could be incorporated into SPL’s virtual library branch – IM, podcasts, collaborative documents & blogs, and community driven wikis. Another idea that has intrigued me came after reading LibrarianInBlack’s blog suggestion about diversifying a library’s web presence by creating a MySpace account. How cool (and engaging) could that be for teens? Link a few appropriate Library resources which would then, hopefully, lure them into the virtual or physical Library.

Many thanks to the 10 Things team. I had a lot of fun with these exercises and learned a lot of cool new technology. It has prompted a lot of thought on how we can make the Library’s ever-changing web presence more dynamic and valuable to our patrons.

Thing 9

I have only used a handful of Google’s products prior to the 10 Things exercises – the web search tools (including photo and video), tool bar, maps, Earth – but those that I have used, I’ve used often. The mapping program has been extremely useful and has easily overtaken Mapquest as my favorite, especially with the addition of the satellite and street views. Over the last five weeks, the 10 Things experience has pretty much doubled my Google abilities with the addition of GMail, Blogger, Talk, Reader, and now Docs skills.

After playing around with a shared document (with 8 others) on Google Docs, I find I have mixed feelings about the tool. It is great being able to work together on a document, but I found the word processing power of Google Docs, at least in its current state, a bit too basic. I suppose that it could work well, however, for creating and editing a collaborative library blog.

More later.