Picasa and the Agawam Library

Yesterday, I persuaded the Adult Services Librarian who is in charge of all the art displays to create an Agawam Library gmail account so we can have photo albums of our displays each month. Right now, she e-mails me the photos and I save them to the website, then paste them to the page. It is very tedious. I am curious to try out the Picasa album feature next month.

Thing 20 Reference Chat

Yesterday, I had a nice chat with our teacher, Jennifer. One of the things we talked about was reference chat. I had used it at the Lansing, IL Public Library at the beginning of our class. I wanted to know how they set it up. I was referred to Kelli Staley in the IT Department. She e-mailed me back. I found out they use Meebo.com to create the (free) meebo widget placed on their website. They had used Trillan software in the past. Their chat interface is only available when the teen librarian is at work and online. Next week, the are abandoning it, as they have joined their statewide 24/7 virtual reference service AskAway Illinois (using questionpoint). She also referred to me to this website Library Success Wiki which lists a lot of Instant Messaging libraries (IM) and the software they use:
http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Online_Reference.

Thing 18 Wiki Book Review

Yesterday, I posted the book review of An Unquiet Mind by Kay R. Jamison to the BPL Booklist.

Thing 19: Clip, Clip, Clip Social Bookmarking

Some day I plan on owning two llamas. So, I decided to check out the bookmarks on llamas on delicious. This is the link to the first page. I had to go through to the tenth page to find some good info. on llama care on these two sites: Llamapaedia and Llama Training. For fun though, check out these two llama videos from YouTube that I found on through Delicious. One is includes real video footage of llamas with the funny audio of the llama song in the background, and one is the real funny llama song video.

Thing 17.2 Harvesting the Bounty

After the last assisgnment, I was ready for a little fun, and found it with Susan V.'s online shopping site LuckyScent, a perfumerie. My favorite perfume is from Penhaligons, Lavandula, a lavender based perfume. I have tried, but have not found anything as good as this. The only thing that comes close was a homemade lavender perfume I bought in Seattle, but the scent didn't last that long. My last bottle broke a while ago, and I am almost out of their hand and body lotion, which is almost as good. I leaped with excitement when I saw I could purchase two samples for $4.oo each, $3.00 shipping and handling instead of a bottle for $125! Well, I purchased those two samples right away. Thank you Susan for sharing this fun site. I certainly benefited from it.

Thing 17 Online Learning

Well, I have thought and thought and thought...The obivious answer for our library would be do online computer training: e-mail, Internet searching, Word, databases, etc. We currently do not offer any formal computer classes because of lack of staff resources and lack of available computers. While we still would have to address who would teach the courses (perhaps someone from the outside), we are thinking of purchasing wireless laptops specifically for the class, and because we are not limited to space, we could open it up to anyone with a computer at his/her home or office. Another possible use for us would our English as a Second Language Class. That also could be opened up to anybody with a computer. I looked through the websites in Thing 17 and noticed that was not listed. A third thing I thought of would be an online book discussion group. We could have people come in person and others could join us online. Or, we could have one book club in person, and one virtual. My last idea, is to take all the adult programs/lectures each year and have them available online in podcast or YouTube so everybody could partake in them. These the only ideas I could come up with.

Thing 16 Documents

I decideded to do a spreadsheet. However, I found it more difficult than using Excel. Sometimes a formula would work such as substracting two columns together, and sometimes it would not. I would get value error messages. Also, when dividing the value of two columns, I noticed sometimes it worked, and sometimes I just got the text c42/c14. I saved and closed the document yesterday and went to work on it today. Suprisingly, all the oddities had disappeared, and the formulas were working. For spreadsheets, I think I will still rely on Excel. Here is my spreadsheet.