second life

I made my Tektek avatar twice, but the picture won't transfer. Unlike certain of the teen librarian avatars, I was willing to go with gray hair.

I sampled the Second Life videos. I signed up for Second Life so I could look around but my email verification did not come through. I have not entered Second Life before but I think it would be interesting. It would take more time to really get involved and knowledgable.

online applications

Google had limited function. Zoho was difficult to use. The only good thing is it is free. It is hard enough to figure out one set of offfice tools. Don't need to do multiple sets.

Guess I wasn't persuaded.

search engines galore

goldfinch from flicker -ibm4381's photostream

I regularly use Yahoo because I am often looking for a publisher or business. Because they use a "tree system" for catagorizing their items, the businesses will pop up first.

I spend a fair amount of time on Google especially when I cannot find a title requested by a patron. I find it easier to find something specific like a title there. When I was selecting the International Collection, I occasionally used the translate function. It comes up with some really strange English phrases.

I used to use Ask.com a long time ago. It seemed to become less useful over time. I think now that it has been updated, I am willing to try it again.

Dogpile.com would be useful thing for those "I can't verify" titles. I tried searching Cairn terriers and got a wide variety things.

The American goldfinch picture above appealed to me because that is the look they give when the feeder is empty. I feel like they're saying "hey lady, what gives, where's our food".

podcasting

I looked at several public library podcast sites. Several had picturebooks being read. I listened to a book review of Tyson's Death by Black Hole at the Pierce County website. I am in the middle of this book so I found it interesting. Kankakee Public Library had recorded a presentation by Elizabeth Berg, a favorite author of mine.

I used the more general podcasting sites to look up items. I found Animal Wise and NPR Story of the Day and added these to my Google Reader.

I could see Sno-Isle using podcasts within the system to expand availability of training. The general public might be interest in reader's advisory by podcast. It would be important to keep the informaion fresh. I noticed several libraries had started podcasting but did not have any recent material.

image generators

So this is where all the for dummies signs came from.

I could spend hours goofing around with this kind of thing. Here is my monopoly card.

overdrive media

I have done the whole process of burning to a cd from home. I have talked a few patrons through the process when the patron was on the phone. It's hard to make sure you are talking about the same screens.

I like that the Listening Library items are available because I listen to a lot of my children's and teen titles during my commute. I wish there were more science fiction and fantasy but they are hard to find in talking book format.