Extranet for Librarians

See what Hennepin County Library does for the library community:

http://www.hclib.org/extranet/

Welcome

Michael,
Glad to have you aboard.

PC Magazine's 100 Favorite Blogs

We probably all saw PC Magazine's Top 100 Undiscovered and Classic websites. As I was reading a blog, I came across a link to PC Magazine's 100 Favorite Blogs. Click on the link below.

PC Magazine 100 Favorite Blogs

New L2 Crew Member

I hope you all will help me welcome Michael Fagin as a new member to our L2 Crew group. Michael will be a great asset to our group and I look forward to working with him.

Welcome Michael!

Tech Tuesdays and RLCC

Sandi Lee has notified us that there will be Tech Tuesdays in March, April and May of 2008. She has asked for our (RLCC) assistance in developing classes that would coincide with the workshop being held on Tuesdays. Sandi has suggested that on the Tuesday before we teach the class in the RLCC, that the Tech Tuesday subject that day be on what we will cover during our class. Tech Tuesday will be just a brief introduction to that particular application and our class will go into more detail. For instance, on one Tuesday the subject of Tech Tuesday would be on YouTube. On the following Monday or Tuesday, the RLCC will teach a two hour class on YouTube. Janice asked me to get everyones input on what "Web 2.0" applications need to be covered during this time. There will be two Tech Tuesdays per month. I know we need to do Flickr, YouTube and Blogs. Is there anything else that could possibly be a good program and class to have for these dates? Possibly Wikis or Internet Radio?

BPL Digital Camera Clinic on blip.tv

The BPL Digital Camera Clinic is now on Blip.tv. Images from the PowerPoint were used and then narration was added using Microsoft Photo Story 3 . Since Photo Story 3 lends itself to visuals, a few more CC images were added as well.

Check out the videos:

BPL DCC Part 1: Introduction & getting to know the camera.

BPL DCC Part 2: Composition Techniques

BPL DCC Part 3: Downloading images to a PC

BPL DCC Part 4: Uploading images to Flickr

Linking Problem

Melinda and I ran into a problem yesterday when we tried to link BPL@Night in a blog entry. Blogger sees the @ symbol and assumes it's an e-mail address. When we tried to change the mail to: to http:, the URL was placed into the blog entry in the place of BPL@Night. We never could seem to tweak our way around the problem.

I hope this makes sense. I'm not so good at explaining technical problems. Any of you tech wizards have any suggestions? Kathy? Richard? Heeelp.

Photography Contest?

Sometimes I think that our staff gets wrapped up in what they are doing and forget to take photos.

To encourage people to take pictures at BPL, what do you think of a photography contest to choose the best pictures taken at BPL 2007 -2008. Photos might show displays, programs, candid shots of a staff member, or anything else at the library.

A selection committee may set up a few categories (like best staff shot, best display shot,...) or set it up as a best photo of the season (fall, winter, spring, summer). The top picks from the categories or season could be voted on by staff and the best picture award could be given at next year’s staff day.

In addition to recognition and adoration during staff day, maybe a small prize could be arranged for the best picture winner.

How to enter: post the photos on the Flickr upload account and tag them.

Photos judged on visual appeal, clarity & creativity?

Any ideas, opinions, or suggestions on this?

Cool tools for webmasters

I attended this session and there were wonderful links that we may be able to use. Thought I would share with you all.

Cool Tools for Library Webmasters - Internet Librarian 2007
Neat tools for library webmasters to help design, publish, code sites, share ideas, etc.

Need to copy a full webpage?

There is a great feature with Picnik.com where you can add an extension in Firefox (if you are lucky enough to have it loaded on your computer) and copy the full page of a webpage. Really cool and useful.

http://www.picnik.com/info/tools

Flickr Mashups

This looks like a good Flickr resource to bookmark:

http://www.programmableweb.com/api/flickr/mashups

Create stories online

I learned about this site at the Internet Librarian and thought it might be a fun way to create very short stories for children. It looks easy to use.

http://www.kerpoof.com/

Harper Lee blog post

Would someone like to volunteer to write a blog post about Harper Lee winning the Medal of Freedom with links to her book in the catalog and a mention about the entire county reading her book next year including a link to the JCLC Big Read info site?

http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2007/11/medal_of_freedom_goes_to_state.html

Screencast-O-Matic.com

Screencast-O-Matic is an interesting free online screen-casting website.

With the features it has, we could use it for many types of training tutorials. It records video from the computer screen and sound from a microphone. The tutorials can be up to 15 minutes long. Once created Screencast-O-Matic will host it for us or we can save it as a quick time file.

After experimenting with it I have found it works pretty well and I see a number of applications for this technology. Here is my first attempt of screencasting the Camera Clinic part 1 (of 4). http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/ciXnifHr . Parts 2-4 are almost finished as well.

What do you think? There is a little buzz in the background, but if a USB microphone is used this should be eliminated. There may also be some editing that can be done to the quick time files for a more polished video and sound.

I think that after a little more experience a variety of quick personalized tutorials could be made with this site.