A World in a Grain of Sand

Final Project for ILS 599 – Technology Trends in Libraries (Summer 2008), by Rose Myers

Project: Create a wiki showing themes, both literary and topical, along with related children’s picture books. The wiki will be used in conjunction with a library program looking at themes in children’s picture books at the Fairfield Woods Branch of the town public library, but it can also operate as a stand-alone online resource. It will also use the resources of LibraryThing to provide tags, recommended books, and book reviews.

2. Purpose/justification:

3. Technology and other requirements:

4. Step by step implementation:

I’ve been having computer fun recently: I made a wiki. Of course I needed a logo for it. This is where the “fun” starts. Yes, there are other terms for this: wasting time, fooling around, getting bogged down in details…

I searched through all the photos I’ve uploaded to flickr for a picture of books. Of course while I was there I renamed, changed permissions, and added tags to a bunch of other photos and created a new set, called Libraries, for the pictures I take while travelling. My husband collects colleges; I collect libraries.

When I found a suitable picture,

I cropped it with a picnik tool to get what I thought would be a good image across the top of my wiki. I like it. Alas, I didn’t realize at that point that the logo that wikispaces.com wants is a square. And not only a square, but one that is less than 150 x 150 pixels.

Here is my first crack at a logo. Feel free to use it:

Finally, I ended up with this:

It’s very abstract, while hinting of books, and has nice colors, albeit a little dark.

After all this, it seems that my wiki has no title. The only way I’ve figured out how to include on is to put it at the top of each page. Weh.

Ignore this post. I wanted to see if I could put posts on a new “Books” page; but after reading about static front pages, I think I can’t and that what I need to do is use categories to differentiate different types of stuff. So I’ve added a Book Reviews category and I may use it for random blog postings.

What I posted to our course blog originally:

Rose Says:
June 15, 2008 at 11:46 pm

I uploaded lots of pictures to flickr and made some of them public. One of them I made into a jigsaw puzzle and then added some text meant to encourage reading. It should be at this site:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/raizel48/2582175821/?addedcomment=1#comment72157605633037636

My flickr account is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/raizel48/
I think. I’m curious to know what other people see since I see many pictures that only I should be able to see.

Rose

Additional musings (June 25, 2008):

I played around with other tools at fd’s Flickr Toys (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/).

One of them is Sunset (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/sunset.php). It lets you zoom into any location on earth (down to house size) and then remembers sunrise and sunset times for you on its site. I can’t figure out, however, how to show sunset for today on another site.

Meanwhile I found out about a Mozilla Extension, HCalendar, that shows up on the right side of the bottom toolbar of the Mozilla browser window. Moving a mouse over its current text (the Jewish weekday and date) gives sunrise and sunset times, the secular day and date, and this week’s Torah reading. Right clicking there gives even more cool options.

Normally, I would have read about it on a listserv for Jewish libraries and flagged the message. This course has made me indulge in riskier behavior.

For our course, I signed up on Meebo, a web 2.0 service that lets you chat via several different systems. I felt uncomfortable with giving them the password for my primary email account and decided to get a Google account specifically to chat through it. I now have a new email—gmail—address and have started to play with Google docs. I think I’m in love.

I tried to change my avatar on Meebo. Some people say that insanity is doing the same thing many times and expecting to get a different result. I claim that’s how you use computers. In this case, I never succeeded. I still don’t really know how to sign out of Meebo; I click away from the page and agree with the message in the box. Of course, I’m still a bit vague about how to hang up on my new cell phone; I’ve stopped turning it off and just worry instead.

Over the week, I looked in on our chat room several times and no one was in it. Finally, on Saturday night, I saw that someone else was in the chat room and a few minutes later she answered my “hello.” It took me a while to realize this, because I was working in another window. I had thought that I had set my options so that a sound would be make if someone talked to me; instead I hear a noise whenever I send a message. (Silly, because I don’t need to be notified about what I just did.)

We had a nice talk and learned / was reminded of terms like “cross posting” (seeing the reply to a post sent several messages ago) and “seeding the web” (when creating a wiki so others are not faced with a tabula rasa.) I learned that I don’t have the patience for chat rooms. I find them frustrating. My son explained that you can do multiple things and talk to multiple people at the same time when chatting. I think it’s rude. I also don’t use call waiting on my telephone. Maybe it’s a generational thing.

Speaking of generations, I noticed that neither of us used any acronyms, like TTFN or RTFM. I learned years ago in a tech support chat room that the latter term means “read the manual” or words to that effect.

I like the idea that a log is automatically kept and that it is easy to send links to someone. But personally, I prefer email.

For part one of our assignment about Meebo/IMing, I asked reference librarians a question two different ways—IMing at the New York City Public Library and chatting in person at Fairfield University’s DiMenna-Nyselius Library. In brief, talking to a person and looking into her suggestions took me further on the path to an answer than IMing did. Neither of them answered my question conclusively; my next step is to ask a friend who knows a lot about kings and queens. The virtual librarian used a virtual source, Wikipedia, while the real librarian used print material, albeit accessed via an online catalog.

While I was able to wait until the two people before me finished their business with the real librarian, I could not see how busy the virtual librarian was. Perhaps if he had more time, he might have done additional research.

Here is part of the transcript of my NYPL session:
[Rose Myers 12:38:41]: Hi. Do you know where Henry VIII is buried?
[Rose Myers 12:39:11]: My husband thinks that he was dug up by supporters of Mary.
[Librarian 12:39:17]: I’ll try my best. That is a hard one. This will take several minutes. Please be patient.
[Rose Myers 12:40:10]: Many thanks.
[Librarian 12:45:06]: Henry VIII is buried in St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. I find nothing to indicate he was later dug up by supporters of Mary. See this article in Wikopedia:                            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII_of_England#Death_and_succession
[Librarian 12:45:22]: Any other question?

As you can see, it took six minutes for him to find the answer. I don’t know how many other questions he was juggling at the time, but he warned me upfront that I would have to wait. So I had the option of politely leaving. It’s probably easier to “walk away” online than in person. I’m glad he gave me the source of his information and not just the answer. I found it interesting that the source he gave me was Wikipedia, in spite of all I hear about how unreliable it is and libraries are so much more authoritative and all those people who think they just have to Google something and the answer will magically appear don’t appreciate the value of librarians….

On the other hand, the reference librarian at Fairfield University looked up Henry VIII in the library’s catalog. We walked over to the reference stacks and found an article about him in a many-volumed encyclopedia; it said the same thing that Wikipedia did. We also looked in other books in the same area and found nothing further. We discussed the fact that finding nothing about Henry’s body being exhumed does not absolutely prove that it did not happen; whereas finding an authoritative record of the event does prove that it did happen. It seems to me that if it happened, the people who did it would have wanted it known. (Sorry for the muddle. I’m getting at the idea that it’s easier to prove something exists than that it doesn’t. This has to do with mathematical proofs. I guess the way you prove something doesn’t exist is to assume that it does and show that this leads to a logical impossibility. Anyway….)  She then found where books on the Tudors would be in the non-reference part of the library and sent me off to peruse them. I found, in the Introduction to a book called Great Harry by Carolly Erickson, that there was a story that in the time of his daughter, Queen Mary, Henry’s body was taken from his tomb and burned. There seemed to be nothing further in the book or in any of the books about Queen Mary’s reign about this. So I still don’t know if it happened.

Because I’m taking a course in Web 2.0, I’m paying attention to all sorts of sites and signing up not only for course requirements like flikr, del.icio.us, edublogs, wikispaces, and meebo, but also widgets, LibraryThing, LibraryElf, and Google.

Actually I signed up for Google because I wanted to find the date of the second Thursday in July and Google’s calendar showed up near the top of my Google search (surprise, surprise). It seemed as if I had to subscribe in order to look at a calendar. Normally I’d just try another site (I was in a room without a calendar and the “adjust date/time” option from Window’s Start taskbar was locked); but this course has made me “plucky and adventury” (apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan). Before I finished signing up, a calendar appeared.

I’ve uploaded hundreds of photos to flickr and maybe can now clean up my hard drive enough to optimize it. I’ve started adding books from my virtual library (what I own, use, have read, or want to read) and tags and reviews to LibraryThing and posted a question about its usefulness for my school. And checking out the libraries and profiles of others who share my interests.

Of course, all of this is only marginally relevant to what I should be doing for this course, but that seems to be the beauty of the Internet—getting distracted and discovering things you never would have otherwise.

I am quoting from William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence (http://www.bartleby.com/236/60.html):

and hope I am not infringing on anyone’s copyright.

I picked this quote because I like finding deep meaning in apparently trivial things, especially children’s picture books.

I also like fractals, with their repeating patterns at every magnification of the object (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal) and recursion.

I selected Roy Tenant’s blog, TechEssence.Info, http://techessence.info/ (accessed June 1, 2008). I first heard of Roy Tenant in one of our introductory ILS courses and he seems to write interesting, provocative articles. I found it by searching Google for blogs about libraries.

• What is the main topic or purpose of the blog?
  • The About page gives brief descriptions of the authors of the blog. The first blurb, about Roy Tenant, explains that he started this blog to provide clear explanations of information technology and how libraries can use it.
• Is it personal, professional, or mixed?
  • The blog is primarily professional. Personal opinions and shared life experiences are about professional issues.
• Is it authored by one person or several?
  • It is authored by eight people, including Roy Tennant, who started the blog.
• How often does the author(s) post?
  • Postings seem to be about one per month or even less frequently.
• What is the audience (fellow professionals, library patrons, kids, etc.)?
  • The audience is fellow professionals.
• Any other comments you have about the blog, for instance, about the visual aspects.
  • The header has what I guess is a blog avatar, a sunburst, which is used in each title of a posting. This makes it easier to find the beginning of each post. The posts are very short but frequently link to longer articles.
  • It has two columns, a narrow left column and wide right column with the postings, including a title, date, and tag. Clicking on the tag sends you to a page with all the posts for that tag.
  • Having worked some on creating my own blog, I’m beginning to pay attention to webpage structure in ways I never did before. Two columns feels uncluttered