Wikis

I played in the wiki sandbox, and my topic was a group of raccoons that was padding around in the bushes by my apartment. Speaking of animals, a small dog visited the library alone today, and found his way into the staff area, unnoticed by those working within it. When the security guard walked in, he said, all calm and collected, "There's a dog in here."

Icebergs

Rick Anderson's article "Away from the icebergs" is written from his perspective as a director of resource acquisition at an academic library.

One of the three "icebergs" (traditional library aspects he thinks should be reconsidered) is the "just in case" collection (print collection), and he cites a 55-percent drop in circulation of the print collection at his library. I noticed a similar circulation trend when I returned to the University of Illinois for library school after a nine-year absence, but his statistic does not apply to public libraries.

Another iceberg mentioned is the "'come to us' model of library service.'" At Illinois last year, the students did most of their research in front of their laptops in dorms and apartments, and on-campus libraries that were teeming with students previously were nearly empty. It hurt the campus' atmosphere, and made for less walking and in-person interaction with other students and librarians.

Technorati

The first couple times I tried to get on Technorati, it was ironically down! I eventually got in, and claimed my blog, and favorited another librarian's blog, and added some tags to that librarian's blog. The "State of the Blogosphere" statistics on the Technorati site were interesting: 66% of global bloggers are male, and people who are 50+ represent 21% of the US bloggers, according to Technorati.

Delicious

My main general search tool has always been Yahoo...Delicious was a fun alternative. Looking at popular bookmarks, I found one on digital music trends, and it mentioned sites where you can mix popular music recordings, and add tracks. I've used the freely available recording/mixing program Audacity, which is good for personal leisurely recording, but editing a U2 song would be enjoyable, too.

When I looked at the recent bookmarks, I found Heroes Wiki. My sister loves the show, and has encouraged me to watch it, but I haven't. I clicked on "new user portal." Here's a quote from the first episode:

"Where does it come from—this quest, this need to solve life's mysteries when the simplest of questions can never be answered? Why are we here? What is the soul? Why do we dream? Perhaps we'd be better off not looking at all. Not delving, not yearning. But that's not human nature. Not the human heart. That is not why we are here."

I'm interested in seeing the show now.

Searches

I searched for my Blogger handle using Yahoo and Google. Here's what came up:

Yahoo

Google

Rollyo and Library Thing

I'm in the middle of making a 27 things comeback, after some time off that ended yesterday.

Rollyo was fun. I made a tennis search that searched a few different sports sites for information on Marcos Baghdatis, an animated pro tennis player from Cyprus. Speaking of tennis, I have an old LibraryThing account called Grosjean (named after the player Sebastian Grosjean) that I started a couple years ago:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Grosjean

When I was in library school, I cataloged the books I had to read for a young adult lit class, and it was neat to see all the members on LibraryThing who had the same books; they must have taken the same class.

Wordle

I threw my last blog post into Wordle, and it came out like this:



Putting the code from the Wordle site directly into the Blogger composer and having the image pop up was pretty cool. (I tried clicking "Edit Html" at first, and copying the code into there, but it didn't like that.)