For the folks at the South Dakota Library Training Institute, here are the links to the presentations:

Marketing

Library 2.0 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Thanks for a great day!

I’m here at the South Dakota State Library Training Institute, working with a group of librarians and talking about Library 2.0. They’ve just started shiny new blogs; take a look!

Karla’s Blog

Juanita

Kelly

Tammie

Dawn

Deb

Julie

Debbie

Anita

JoAnn

Laurel

LeAnn

Cyndie

Delight

Sue

I came late to the RSS party, but finally decided to check it out after hearing Michael Stephens talk about it on his Tame the North Tour.

I’m now a Bloglines addict.

I have 165 blogs in my feed, and that number could grow at any moment. I really am trying to restrain myself. But there are so many interesting blogs out there, and so many people writing about such interesting stuff….

Here’s a very small sample of the eclectic mix of blogs I visit via my beloved aggregator:

The Wednesday Chef - a mix of recipes from newspaper food columns.

The Shoebox Blog -a blog by the folks that bring you those funny Shoebox Hallmark cards.

38 different library blogs…

The Daily Coyote - a blog written by a woman living in Wyoming who adopted a 10-day old coyote puppy whose parents had been killed. Incredible photos.

Lifehacker - tips and tricks for getting things done. If you read one non-library blog, this should be it.

Cute Overload - because sometimes, you just need a moment of cute.

That’s just a sampling, of course. Go ahead, take the plunge and find your own fabulous blogs to aggregate. Check out Bloglines or Google Reader and add sites you find interesting. If you tire of them after a while, you can always remove them from your list. Believe me, you’ll wonder how you ever kept up with blogs without it.

So, part of Minnesota’s 23 Things is to upload an avatar to represent yourself. Now, I had a perfectly acceptable (to me) photo that I had artistically altered and used, but the program rules state it must be a Yahoo Avatar. Needless to say, it looks nothing like me…..but I’ll play along.

So pardon the avatar….we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled photo shortly.

I’ve just registered for “23 Things on a Stick.“

The multitype systems of Minnesota have decided to create a Learning 2.0 program, modeled on the now-famous program developed by PLCMC. Great idea.

Why the stick, you ask? Well, virtually every food item sold at the Minnesota State Fair is On A Stick. We even had Hot Dish On A Stick. (For the uninitiated, a hot dish is what other areas of the country call a casserole, and is a mainstay of Minnesota culture. The aforementioned Hot Dish On A Stick consisted of meatballs on a stick with Cream of Mushroom Soup dipping sauce. Brilliant.)

I’m delighted that the state is embracing the concept and is encouraging librarians statewide to participate. Those who complete the program get - what else? - a stick: a memory stick, that is.

I’ve already played with many of these things, but it will be fun to reintroduce myself to some of them and play further with others. And since it’s a whopping 2 degrees outside, this seems like as good a time as any to be inside playing!

Oh, now….this is just cool. The Library of Congress has started a Flickr page, and as you might imagine, the photos are amazing. The folks at C|Net blogged the story:

The good news is the Library of Congress is putting 3,000 images up at Flickr. The bad news is they’re relying on us to tag them all.

In a pilot project announced Wednesday, the government archive put the public-domain, copyright-free photos on the Library of Congress Flickr page. That’s just a small fraction of 14 million photos and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, according to the archive’s blog, but hey, it’s a pilot project.

If you’re like me, you recognize the value of tagged photos when you’re looking for a particular shot but can’t remember when or where you took it, or when you want to sift photos to zero in only those with something like “birthday” and “grandma.” But also if you’re like me, you probably tag your photos only intermittently.

So it’s a safe bet that the Library of Congress photos won’t immediately sport a huge range of highly descriptive tags. But I’m inclined to see the glass as well over half full: having the photos easily available is great, and I can’t imagine the government would pay on its own to fund some dedicated tagging effort.

It’s not only interesting that the Library has chosen to put their photos on Flickr, but are relying on tagging by viewers to classify them.

Originally posted on SELCO Librarian. 

It’s been two years now since I started this blogging journey.  I’ve spent a bit of time looking back over the things I’ve written, and there are a few posts I’m quite proud of.  Others are a bit mundane, but I suppose that’s the nature of the beast.

I started blogging because I felt I should.  I now blog because I enjoy it, though I’ve noticed that as life gets busy, the blog posts drop precipitously.  Probably not such a bad thing.  Over-stressed navel-gazing is not all that entertaining.

And so here we are, faced with another year.

It will be an interesting one, though hopefully not in the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” sense.  I know that I’m counting the hours until the Iowa primary is over, as I’m becoming increasingly irritated with all of the political ads.  (Rochester is close enough to the Iowa border that the local news covers southeastern Minnesota and Iowa, hence the plethora of earnest ads.)  It will be interesting to see who emerges from both parties as the final candidates.

Both DH and I turn 50 this year, which seems incomprehensible.  My knees tell me otherwise.  I’ve asked DH for a trip to Ireland for my 50th birthday, and being the wonderful husband that he is, he agreed.  Can’t wait.

I’m not sure how the world of libraries will change in the coming year - if at all.  It seems that we are one of those bastions of civilization that changes a bit to keep up with the times, but the fundamental purpose stays the same.  I’ve often posited that librarians and libraries have two main functions: 1) get stuff and 2) organize it so folks can find it.   You can pretty it up with fancy names and organize it in interesting ways, and you can use different tools and delivery systems, but the basics are just those two.  We get stuff, and we organize it so folks can find it.  We are the keepers of the information.  I can’t imagine that function will grow less important in the coming year.

So, Happy New Year to all.  Here’s to many more for all.

The folks at CommonCraft have created yet another terrific tutorial.  Check out Blogs in Plain English.

I love these guys.

As promised, some California photos….

Lighthouse on the Pacific Coast…

Brian (aka DH) on the cliffs…

Monterey Bay.

Aurora and I presented yesterday, and we were blogged by Kathy Dempsey of Information Today. Thanks, Kathy!