Sunday, April 13, 2008

Thing 22: Keeping Up

As I reach the end of the 23 Things on a Stick learning project I feel that I've been fairly negative in some of my posts about the Library 2.0 applications(especially social media and social networks). However, some of the tools have been fantastic and have really helped me at work, specifically, the Minitex webinars. I watched an older one on using Business Source Premier and learned about the country reports (which I wouldn't have intuited were there from the name of the database). That awareness allowed me to help a student find information on Eritrea. I can't wait to work my way through some of the other Minitex webinars on Academic Search Premier, podcasting, WorldCat; and to dig deeper into the Elm productivity tools. I'm now starting most days by checking my Google Reader for RSS feeds from the Shifted Librarian and librarian.net among others, thanks to this project. And I absolutely love Del.icio.us and learning about organizing websites with tagging rather than bookmarking on a single computer. I also intend to keep giving the social networks a chance and checking out more online games, despite my initial hesitation. I expect that work, like school, will require that I use the collaborative tools like wikis, document creators and slidesharing. I feel like I've just scratched the surface of learning about Web and Library 2.0 and look forward to returning to work on some of the challenges. I'm really intrigued by the idea of posting the new thing that I learn each day, or maybe each week. Who knows, maybe I'll even get a cell and starting texting and uploading photos to Flickr.

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