L&P 8: Bloglines

Check it out to see my bloglines account:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/Aeolussurf

L&P 6: Flickr Mashups

Here's a link to a card.

Clearly I should have sued a photo that wouldn't pixelate so much. :-)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aeolussurf1/2867321899/

L&P # 5: Flickr

Please visit this link to see some Flickr work:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aeolussurf1/

Sorry for the brief posting!

L&P 23: The End (or is it the beginning?)

Learn & Play was a wonderful initiative; big props to all who organized it and fostered participation. I was please with how many of the items I had already tried or even used on a semi-regular basis (over half of them). I was dismayed at how little time I have to keep up with any of the trends. I have a Facebook page, for instance, that languishes, neglected. I had not logged into Fickr for over a year before this initiative made me go back--it wasn't easy to remember my account name and password. :-) I don't even answer gmail anymore. No doubt it is a matter of priorities: if I have an afternoon and the wind is blowing, however, there's no question to me that a day windsurfing is more important than a day web surfing, no matter how many social networking sites call. For me, this initiative was best for making me take the time to discover or re-discover. That said, I suspect I won't blog any more, now that the initiative is over. Why, when nobody reads what I write and my uninspired and hasty words merely sit as bits on some server somewhere? If I'm going to keep a private diary, it will remain private and is not (as in Wilde's joke) intended for publication.

Would I do another L&P initiative? Absolutely! It would make me find time to explore. Please don't do Twitter again. It makes me feel guilty for not taking time to follow it but without a portable device I simply don't have the time. The biggest complaint I've heard from staff, speaking of time, is that they simply don't have the time to keep up, given our branch's workload. We told them they could, encouraged them to, even alloted time in the schedule, but most felt a greater obligation to public service and made sure branch work was done. Commendable but not ideal for learning. Maybe it would be different had we been fully staffed.

Farewell, dear non-readers.

L@P # 22: MOLDI

I've been using MOLDI for some time and encouraging my college students to use it as well; a decent digital reading makes some classic texts, such as Dickens' Hard Times, more accessible for many undergrads for whom literature is not a passion.

It's very exciting that MOLDI will support IPODs now.

Digital downloads are the future of media; it will not be too long, I suspect, before the library has no discs and is offering several types of download, from music to movies on demand. User behavior will drive this trend, not technology. Several different vendors are already offering library databases to support this trend, some of which offer holdings as or more interesting than what we find on MOLDI. I hope that CML can trial and perhaps subscribe to some of them. So far, film offerings are a bit scanty but we can expect to see that change.

The ability to "check out" digital offerings and have them automatically "return" will offer customers the same ability to enjoy content that we now have with check out of physical items; the library can remain a source of enjoyment and instruction for those who wish to enjoy without the necessity of purchasing, enhancing public literacy and knowledge.