Thing 23: Reflection

It has been some journey! Many times I felt frustrated and others I thought I couldn't go on.

The best compliment came when a young and computer savvy coworker asked me something about Wiki. I couldn't believe my ears! he was really asking me something and I was able to show him the little I knew!

Some of the Things were really of no use for me personally: like Facebook , Ning and Twitter (I have no plans to keep track of them) and naturally I would never consider having a personal YouTube account but said that... I think we can make good use of YouTube and Twitter at the library, if only we can get approval to have a direct link on our website. I would love to see a YouTube video showcasing our library and branches and some of the great programs we offer. We can also do a virtual tour of the Central library to show patrons where are the Large Print books, the Spanish section, the Teen Center, the Youth Library, Genealogy, Media, etc. Many patrons would appreciate that.

I am sure many patrons will appreciate also the Librarything site: they can organize their private libraries or the books they have already read, find other people with similar reading interests, read some book reviews and learn what is new and get suggestions based on their book preferences. We could advertise it as an RSS feeder, having a link to the video they can watch and learn how to use the site.

I loved the Flickr Mashups and Image Generators for the many possibilities to personalize your images and showcase photographs. Perhaps we can use it also to show attendance to the library events, special presentations and classes and why not?, we can even advertise our services using Flickr.

Delicious is certainly a delicious site to store all my favorite websites. Now I use it very often since I don't want to try to remember on which PC I store a particular site of interest. At the library I have 5 different PCs from where to work and, you guess it right, I don't have all my favorites on all of them! With Delicious I can just go there and find what I am looking for. It could be also very helpful for our patrons. We just need to have a link with instructions on how to use it on the library's website.

Instant Messaging... is so common now that I am pretty sure everyone doing the 23 Things has done it before. I like it better that talking by phone to receive instructions on how to fix my computer!

Google Docs, this was enlightening for me. I found it very useful and easy to use and I am sure our patrons will love it, provided we show them how to use it. We can add some computer classes on how to use several of the 23 Things, only if we can add hours to the day and staff to our library.

Thanks for offering this opportunity.
I truly learned many Things and some more about myself!