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Author Archives: Susan Knisely
A Social OPAC!
If Library 2.0 is all about encouraging patron collaboration, feedback, and
participation in library services, and fostering connections between people,
then Ann Arbor District Library’s newly-enhanced OPAC is a true embodiment of
this philosophy!
In a January
21 post to his blog, John Blyberg, System Administrator and Lead Developer
at the Ann Arbor District Library, writes about implementing "The SOPAC" (short
for Social OPAC) at his library. Blyberg describes the SOPAC as " a
set of social networking tools integrated into the AADL catalog. It gives
users the ability to rate, review, comment on, and tag items."
If you’d like to take a closer look at his innovation, Blyberg invites
readers to visit the AADL catalog.
Once you get there, scroll down the page to view the "Top Ten Tags," "10 Most
Recent Tags," "10 Random Tags," "Last 10 Reviews," and "10 Random Reviews."
You need an account to create content
(e.g., add tags, write reviews, etc.), but you don’t need to be a cardholder or
Ann Arbor resident to get one – just click on "My Account" and follow the
on-screen instructions. Then, look up a book you’ve recently read, and "[b]e
the first to write a review" or add a tag!
For fun, make sure you click on the "Card
catalog image" link associated with your title. If you’ve created an
account you can add marginalia to the card and save it to your "Personal Card
Catalog."
Is this cool, or what?
Posted in Books & Reading, General, Information Resources, Technology
Leave a comment
Learning to Flickr with Nancy Pearl
They say in order to learn a new technology you have to give yourself
permission to play. That can be hard to do when you’re swamped with
deadlines and ever-growing to-do lists. Luckily, around the holidays,
things sometimes slow down. Colleagues take vacation, phones stop ringing,
and emails are so far and few between you begin wondering if a server is down.
What a great time to experiment!
That’s just what several of us at the Nebraska Library Commission did the
Friday before Christmas. By 3:00 in the afternoon it was pretty dead
around our offices. Those who had places to go had already gone and the rest of
you weren’t calling in or emailing us–we felt sort of like the Maytag
repairman! That’s when we got out the digital camera and the Nancy Pearl
librarian action figure……
If you’ve been watching the NLC Announcements page and various mailing lists,
you know that the Network Services department is offering our first-ever Flickr training in
January and February. As you can imagine, that means we are
busily trying to familiarize ourselves with the ins and outs of the service.
In addition to setting up a
Nebraska Library
Commission Flickr Account back in August, we’ve created and administer two
Flickr groups–Nebraska
Libraries, where people can post pictures of Nebraska libraries, and
Pets of Nebraska
Librarians.
In our explorations of Flickr we’ve discovered libraries doing lots of
creative, fun, and innovative things with their Flickr accounts. We’ve
also discovered Flickr groups that are providing great forums for librarians to
share thoughts and ideas.
On the Friday before Christmas, however, we were looking for something a bit more whimsical and
distracting — and the Nancy
Pearl Librarian Action Figure group fit the bill!
So, as I mentioned above, armed with a digital camera and a Nancy Pearl
Librarian Action Figure, we set out to take some pictures that
we could add to the group. Our goal was to use Nancy as a prop to
highlight not only Nebraska Library Commission services and projects, but also
to promote Nebraska in general.
In total, we posted 12 "Nancy Pearl" photos to the Library Commission Flickr
account and to the Nancy Pearl Librarian Action Figure group. You can
check out our results
here. (If you do look, be sure to view the individual photo
pages–we’ve added "notes" to some of the pictures!)
So what did we learn? Well, I can only speak for myself, but I got to
go through the process of joining a public Flickr group. I also learned that taking photos and uploading them to Flickr
is easy compared to the creative challenge of writing captions and descriptions
and adding notes and tags. I
also saw first hand how adding photos to a group draws traffic to your Flickr
site and stimulates interaction. Soon after we added our photos to the
group they were viewed multiple times, and several librarians in the group made
us (the Nebraska Library Commission) a contact. Not bad for the Friday afternoon before Christmas!
P.S. If you’re interested in Flickr but won’t be able to attend one of the
currently scheduled training sessions, check out our
Flickr Information &
Training Resources web page!
P.P.S. If your library has a Flickr account you’d like to show off, consider sharing it with your fellow Nebraska librarians via a comment to this post! We’d love to see what you’re up to!
Posted in Technology
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