Thing 7

It was interesting to look at the various tools to help find blogs to subscribe to. I've always just relied on plain dumb luck to find blogs I was interested in. I didn't add any today as I already get more feeds than I can keep up with. Who has time to read all this stuff and still work? At what point to do we reach info overload? There is some really good stuff out there but my Bloglines account is starting to look like that pile of professional journals I keep meaning to read and never get to. ;P

We do need to know these kinds of things because this is how many in the world get their information now. And if libraries are going to the curve or even be ahead of the curve, we need to be in the know. What was confusing about this? The search tools homepages seemed "busy" and you really had to be committed to searching through them. I'm somewhat surprised by this when you think about the "clean" look of Google, and we know how successful Google is!

Thing 6

I already had a bloglines account set up but have let the feeds acquire over the past many months. As part of Thing 6, I opened it up and found I had something like 4000 feeds I had not yet read!
So - how can libraries utilize RSS? Well for starters make everything on your library website a feed that your customers can subscribe to. Example: Parents can subscribe to the updates about children's programs. That way the onus isn't on them to check the library website everyday -- instead we put the information easily in front of them - yeah! You could do the same with new books, adult programming, or any other aspect of your website you update regularly.
In my personal life? It's a great way to bring the info to me without me having to do any work. Love that!

Thing 5 - Instant Messaging

I spent some time today IM-ing with Ms. Allana at the NLC (Hi Allana!). I had no idea GoogleTalk existed -- is there anything Google isn't involved in?

To me, IM is the precursor to texting. Same type of thing -- short messages with abbreviations to communicate in sound bytes rather than in paragraphs. I think this is great when sending an entire e-mail will take too long or isn't necessary. The drawback is the other person has to be online. This is not true with e-mail or texting.

I don't use IM in my personal life, texting is much more convenient. I can see using IM at work with a group of people stuck in various offices. It is probably a good option for people contacting the library with questions, but I think text is an even better option because the customer isn't tied to a computer.

Begin with end in mind

Perhaps the hardest thing for me in this process will be to begin with the end in mind. I'm not entirely sure what my personal goal is for this adventure. Becoming more aware and better able to help library customers - sure. Perhaps a focus of mine on this journey will be being mindful at each step of how I can use this as I work with library customers.