23 Things Finale -- Podcasts

The final assignment for 23 Things is podcasts. I've listened to several podcasts over the years and they can be a lot of fun. I'm glad to see the VHS has also embraced this medium. With all the lectures that take place here, putting them up in digital form is a natural extension for us. We need to make sure the podcasts we create are picked up by the major podcast indexers, however. I tried to find some examples of our podcasts through podcastalley and podcast.com and didn't get a single hit for the VHS.

Some people have said they'd like to see audio podcasts of tours up. I would go further -- we need video podcasts. We should have our own channel on YouTube with a collection of short (10 minutes or so) tours of the Silver collection, the Mural Gallery, and on each section of The Story of Virginia and for Virginians at work. The curators could write the scripts and Bob could narrate them (the voice of the VHS ). The Education department has been struggling to extend services to more schools and students. Video-casting the tours and lessons would be a great way to do this. Unlike a traditional tour, they could also highlight rare and fragile items that aren't on display. We could show off all kinds of treasures. Some people might this this would discourage people from actually coming to the VHS, but I think the reverse is true. I think seeing what we have might encourage people to come if they have a chance to come to Richmond (or live here). And there's a huge audience that's interested in our collections, but live across the country and will probably never set foot in Virginia. That's an audience too, and one that can only be served digitally.

And thus endeth the lesson .

Google Docs

Google Docs looks interesting. It's certainly a boon for people who work from different locations and need to share documents. It's much easier to maintain a single document on a single site than emailing a document around to a group. I was program chair for a regional meeting a few years ago and something like this would have been handy to have.

I'm not sure how much use we'd have for this at the VHS, though. With the departmental folders on the open drive, we've taken care of this need in house. However, if we did more telecommuting, something like this would be a good option for people.

Wiki Power

Wiki's are a useful tool that can allow a resource to be built up very quickly. The VHS wiki is a great example of that. Within a week, a wonderfully rich document was created. It has the capability of being widely used and maintained, which the old intranet never was. My only complaint when I edited the STAR tips section, was it insisted it knew how the information should be formatted, and I had to wrestle with it to add the information in the way I wanted. In the end, we compromised :-) .

The most famous wiki site is, of course, Wikipedia. A lot of librarians don't care for it, but I love it. When I want quick encyclopedic information, that's my first choice now, rather than doing a Google search. I'm rarely disappointed. Wikipedia is at its best with popular culture and genealogy. I've found links to people I never expected to locate. Wikipedia is my favorite source.

Catching up is hard to do

Before I wind up being 3 weeks behind, I made myself sit down and go over the assignments for weeks 5-6.

Week 5

Delicious -- I'd heard of it before from conferences and can definitely see the appeal if you travel a lot or use lots of mobile devices. And the tagging feature that instantly groups your bookmarks looks interesting and would be handy if you have lots of bookmarks. But you do have to take the effort and tag them. Having seen the amount of unorganized bookmarks around here, I wonder how many of their users bother that much?

Technorati -- Seemed like a good way to search blogs, although Google also picks up blogs. However, I do wonder how its search engine operates. I used a topic for my test search that I knew was used in four blogs by a particular blogger, but only two of them showed up. I also thought the design of the site was very busy and distracting.

Week 6

MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I freely admit it -- I don't see the attraction. It seems like they are nothing but chatter, chatter, chatter. When I talk/email my friends, I'm talking to them; I'm not interested in talking to all and sundry. That said, I thought MySpace had a very cluttered design, Facebook was cleaner looking (but required a login, so I didn't see more than the front page), and LinkedIn also had a clean design and was very easy to use.

Since I didn't sign up for any of them (I said before, I don't want to sign up for any service I have no intention of using), I also looked at Meebo.com. Again, it seemed like there was nothing but IM chatter.

I read recently that as people get older, they start gravitating to social networking sites that are specifically geared to their interests, like "MountainClimbingSpace.com" (I made that one up, although I'm sure there's something like that out there.) Maybe we need to look for a social network that's geared to history and join that.

Time in a Bottle

I meant to do the assignment in Week 4 -- honestly, I did. I actually looked at all of the options in 9-14 (opened and looked, but I didn't join anything). Then my job got in the way. :-)

But as I looked at the different sites, I thought that while some of them were kind of interesting (especially livemocha.com), who actually has the time to follow through? Which I guess is my feeling about social networks in general. Don't get me wrong -- I love to talk, share opinions, and discuss issues. I've been doing that on discussion lists for years. But I feel that time has become a very precious commodity for me. I like to choose what I get involved in and I don't have time to join everything.

Is this a sign I'm getting old? I hope not. :-)

RSS -- sssssssss

I have to confess, I did not complete the assignment by actually setting up an RSS aggregator and attaching feeds for two reasons -- I didn't have the time and I didn't want another thing out there that I wasn't going to use with my name and account on it. I did, however, look at Topix.net and Syndic8. I preferred Syndic8 to Topix; Topix tried to "help" me more than I wanted and I wasn't successful in searching it. Syndic8 was easier to just dive in and use.

So instead of actually setting up an RSS feed, I'll just talk about their usefulness in institutions. They can be a great tool for pushing information to your patron (and thus reminding them of you) -- provided you have pertinent information that is updated frequently. News organizations are making heavy use of RSS feeds. For Libraries and Museums, the most common use appears to be for regularly updated lists (new materials, exhibit schedules, press release items, etc.) However, this information has to be useful and timely (i.e. updated at least weekly) or you'll become irrelevant to your user. But if you have such information, RSS feeds can be a very useful tool in reaching your audiences.

Flickering Flickr

Our assignment this week was to look at Flickr. I've looked at it before. It's a fun tool for individuals to post their photographs around to their friends and share them easily. But I'm not sold on its usefulness for institutions.

The Library of Congress, Library of Virginia and a handful of others have signed up and posted collections. But I feel that we're just throwing things out the door, hoping someone will want to pick something up. It's certainly one approach, but I'm not sure it's the most effective one for institutions that are short on time and money.

Rather than spend time uploading images to the Flickr server, I'd rather see us upload our Museum and Manuscript records to OCLC. OCLC is a partner of Google and other search engines and provides portions of their database to add to the search engine's databases. Then all that material will be available for searching through search engines. If there's a hit, they'll see the record and any image we've digitized.

Now that Cross database searching is up (yippee!), we'll soon be launching a list of digital collections. Because the main page will be hosted on the VHS web site, the search engines will crawl the collection titles, and because it launches a predefined search through STAR, new images will be added to each collection as created. Everyone who's seen it thinks it's very cool.

So while Flickr serves a purpose for individuals, I'm not sure it provides good solutions for institututions wanting to get their collections out.

Ta-Dah!

After 11 years of work, we have finally made cross database searching available. This means so much to me. This is the project I was brought here to work on -- install the system, help everyone get the data on it, make the online catalog work, have searching work across databases, and oh yes, let people see the images when something is digitized. We have successfully accomplished all of this. There are very few institutions who have pulled this off and we should be proud of what we've done.

Happy dance!

Why E-Luddite

I decided to call this blog "Views from an E-Luddite" because while I work with technology for a living, I prefer not to be on the cutting edge. One of my favorite tech columns was called "The Trailing Edge," and that's really my comfort zone. Let other people be on the cutting edge and bleed -- I prefer less painful advances in technology.

Regarding Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Whatever 2.0, there are a lot of useful things there for a museum/library/historical society -- and some things I have to wonder whether they'd ever be worth doing. So, as this exercise progresses, I'll be giving my opinions and feelings on each aspect. If you care, you can read my blog, if not, don't.

This is way more fun than I thought it was going to be.