Librarian by Day

Looking for a free way to edit your photos online? There are lots of options but today one more joins they frey and it’s already got name recognition on it’s side. Adobe Photoshop Express allows you to load pictures from Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa. There are plenty of tools, but of course not everything that the paid version does, but still for a free tool, it’s pretty nice. Go check it out.

I’ve spent an hour or so playing with Facebook this morning.  MRRL has had a facebook page for awhile now, but I thought I’d create a group to see if that works better and/or attracts more fans.  One perk I noticed is I’m allowed to create officers and name them whatever I like, so far I’ve named myself Crown Princess and Robin Webgoddess   Does anyone have any experience with Page vs Groups? or just thoughts you’d like to share? 

On a slightly related note, have you seen TouchGraph?  It will create a visual map of keywords or URLs.  Very cool.  It also has a Facebook plugin which I used to make the graph below. 

One more follow up to Library Camp Kansas, Joshua M. Neff  was interviewed for LISNews.  As one of the attendees I was really interested to hear his post unconference take on things.  Take a listen!

Again thank you to Brenda, Josh, Erin and Jason for organizing this wonderful event!

Let me say upfront that Library Camp Kansas was a huge success! Everything went off a without a hitch and so many great ideas were exchanged!

If you’re wondering where my notes are from Session 2, I didn’t take any, it happened over lunch and it wasn’t convenient to be eating and typing.

Registration was from 9-10, at 10 the Unconference officially kicked off. Brenda Hough opened about a story on NPR Marketplace about an unconference where 80 people signed up and only 4 showed up. Lib Camp KS had about 100 people sign up and it looked like we were all there!

Brenda talked about what would make the day a success

• attendees
• no keynote speaker
• no expert
• particpants need to be generous with experience, listening, asking questions
• share!

A show of hands was taken to access which type of library we were from and there were attendees from all library types – Public, Special, Academic, School!

We agreed on a tag for blog posts, photos, video etc LibCampKS08.

Then it was time to decide the sessions. There would be three sessions during the day. People just shouted out what they wanted to talk about then that group was assigned a leader and room. This went so smoothly! Librarians are so civil!

Session One

• Library as place
• Library Instruction
• Customer Service
• Cheap & Free Options
• Outreach & Marketing
• Web 2.0
• Tech Training

Session Two & Lunch

• Web 2.0
• Staff Training/Professional development
• Programming
• Creative Commons
• Making Libraries Greener

Session Three

• Library Catalogs
• Future of Reference Services
• Library as a Place
• Mentoring programs
• Outreach/Library Programs
• Measuring the Success of your social networking
• Gaming

Then we all split up to attend our sessions. At 2:30 we met back in the main room for a review of the day, to exchange our thoughts. I kinda slacked off on my note taking at this point so check out what others have written.

My third session was Web 2.0, here are my notes.

Started with definition of Web2.0
collaboration
user centered
flexible

How is 2.0 used in Academic?
Virginia Tech has a blog that is comment cards from patrons then response from Lib

Duke University Ipods?

“we’re at library camp Kansas, we’re all big freaks” – david Lee King (this is my favorite quote from the conference. Via la freaks! )

bitch magazine, jezebel blog

class for grad students on becoming internet famous

Web metrics about success of blog, page hits, length of visit, google page rank

come on this stuff has been around for 2 or 3 years how are we supposed to determine success, we don’t do anything successful with our other stats, like circ, people coming in and just going to the bathroom

How do you promote your blog? If you spends lots of time and resources making a blog you need to go OUT INTO the community to promote your library and your blog

Cluster Maps

Go out into the community and present on what you can do with the website.

content created by patrons for patrons

creating content for portals like igoogle and netvibes

how to stream line workflow? rss feed from blog to facebook, myspace, etc

wikis
how are people using them?
departments, recipes, username and passwords, identities – who is staff in second life, facebook

David Lee King was also in this session and took some great notes of this and his other sessions.

My first session was Free & Cheap, the idea was to share free and cheap tools we’re using at our libraries or for ourselves. Someone (I can’t remember who) made a good point, there is a difference between free beer and free kittens, kittens take a bit more work. Some of these might require some work on your end. I think I got all of them.

• Windows Live Sky drive
• Survey Monkey
• Ccleaner
• Spybot search and destory
• adaware
• Hijackthis
• Firefox web developer extension
• IrfanView
• Rockyou.com
• slide.com
• slideshare
• Open Office
• wordpress
• mykansaslibrary.org
• audacity
• List Garden – generate RSS feed -
• Google calender sync
• zoho.com -
• Time tracking for public PCs -
• Password safe -
• 1password – for Macs, not free
• libstats – to track reference questions
• Meebome – IM reference services
• All the Firefox add ons
• Personal Ancestral File -
• Geni -
• opensourcemac.org – open source tools for mac users
• lifehacker
• koha
• vizu.
• libraryelf -
• libx
• Last but not least PC Magazine has an article on 157 best free software tools
  

If you know of a great Free or Cheap tool that isn’t on this list please let me know and I’ll edit and add them at the bottom!

I’m home from Library Camp Kansas, overall a huge success! Thank you and congratulations toeveryone who helped plan for such a fabulous idea. I promise to write a more comprehensive review of what I learned and my thought’s (I have notes!) on unconferences within the week. Since I just go home from driving 8 plus hours today, in addition to exchanging some great ideas, I’m going to go relax. In the mean time take a look at the blog posts and pictures everyone else has put up!