Filed under: 23 Things
The positives: I learned about some sites I had never heard of and had useful tutorials for many of them available to me.
The ones I will continue to use and will tell appropriate patrons about are Library Thing and RSS feeds. I will be updating my Bloglines account to be more useful to me than the sites “required” by the Thing.
Things I learned: Many of these sites give no internal directions. There’s just an assumption that you know what you are doing. I mentioned this several times within the blog.
It’s easy to “cheat” with blogs. I can edit a post and there is no indication of the date of the edit on the posted blog. So I could go back to an October post and predict the results of the November election. Makes it even more imperative to Not believe anythihng on a Blog. That makes using Technorati even more suspect.
Libraries are using some of these Things, but not keeping them up to date. Again, this was mentioned in many of my posts.
The negatives:
1. Since no one at CCLS at worked through these things, there was no clear indication of exactly how long things should take. This made it difficult to know how much time was reasonable to give to a part time staff member to do these.
2. Again, since no one had worked through these things, there were incomplete sentences and other errors. Yes, they were corrected when pointed out. The fact that the Learning Center files for Thing 2 didn’t open from the viewer should have been noted before the staff tried it. Yes, these may seem picky, but they impact the ambience of the project.
3. The Things assumed a level of comfort with Windows, Word, and other computer functions that not all staff members have. (The instructions about Permalinks assume you already know about cut and paste, for example.) The emphasis was on staff who already work with technology and patrons. I’d think a smaller project would be helpful–Things would include using the Y drive, replying to an email that went to a group but that you want to reply only to the sender, using webcc (for Chester County and Hankin staff) etc.
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