join.me infinity

I tried out join.me, a free web conferencing and screensharing tool today, and thought I’d see what it would like like to share my screen with myself. Voila, join.me to infinity!

Chilly Philly

I attended the ACRL conference in Philadelphia recently, and had the best tour guide in the world. I stayed with a fellow business librarian who lives and works in Philadelphia, and we giggled our way through Philadelphia with my colleague and co-presenter (poster session) from Oregon. In addition to attending the conference, we had some quality networking meals, did a little sight-seeing, and visited the best secondhand shopping establishments in the city.

Our poster session was the morning of April Fool’s Day. Our lovely, colorful poster was on the topic of assessment, dealing with the issue of competence vs. confidence. We shared the results of an information literacy assessment project we’d conducted, which included a question for the students to rate their own research skills. As a sidenote to our assessment project, we noticed that there was no correlation between the students’ quiz score and their skills self-assessment.

Our poster is online at slideshare.

And we have an online handout.

Email List Management

Our monthly library newsletter has many subscribers, but the editor currently updates the subscription list manually. She’d like a list management tool, and I’m trying to decide between the following:

http://www.mailchimp.com
http://www.phplist.com
http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.html
http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Internet/Servers/Mail/List_Management: List!

 

Scheduling & Calendaring & Conferencing

I’m exploring different options to let students schedule research appointments with reference librarians. I use WhenIsGood.net quite a bit, which sets up possible times for a meeting and lets the attendees chime in on their availability. But I want something that will let individuals choose specific times for their own appointments, so I started looking around for something to fit the bill. Here are some options I started looking at (not all of them fit the scheduling category, however).

http://youcanbook.me: WhenIsGood’s little sister. Lets you link your google calendar to a scheduling tool to book appointments. Does exactly what I want, but doesn’t work with our library’s non-@gmail google account. I don’t want to have to create another google account just for this tool.

https://join.me: Not a scheduling tool, but an online screen-sharing/conferencing tool that has been advertised like crazy on train billboards during my daily commute. Looks interesting.

http://www.doodle.com: Seems to do the same thing as WhenIsGood, to schedule a meeting with several people.

http://www.tungle.me: Scheduling tool that syncs with multiple types of calendering software. Doesn’t seem to fit my need for multiple, individual appointment bookings.

http://www.timebridge.com: Another scheduling tool to gather several people during one time. Also boasts the ability to ‘make meetings great” somehow.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20000734-248.html: Article about Google Calendar option to reschedule meetings with participants if calendars are shared. Doesn’t allow participant input or feedback to choose times, though.

And of course, http://whenisgood.net

 

So, out of these options, it looks like YouCanBookMe is the only one that does what I need. I guess I’ll have to create a new google calendar account to match up with it. Hopefully not!

Daily commute

I love BART’s graphics!

Commute

Münchenland

For the last two weeks of July I took a trip to Germany, and visited Berlin and Munich for one week each. I hadn’t planned far in advance to vacation in Germany, but circumstances arose (I had a friend I could stay with for free!) that made it appealing.

Mural on Berlin Wall, part of East Side Gallery

It was quite easy for a mono-lingual American such as myself to travel throughout Germany, particularly because I stuck to the city areas most of the time. I managed to pick up some rudimentary vocabulary words so I could read signs and understand public transportation announcements, but I could usually just ask for assistance from someone nearby and get a direct, if sometimes blunt answer (people’s personal communication style reminded me of being on the East Coast of the US).

Reichstag (German Parliament) + My Face

My limited experience was confined to only two locales, but I enjoyed my time in both Berlin and Munich, where I brushed up on my history of the Berlin Wall and World War II. Not only did the Germans and other Europeans I encountered speak excellent English, they also had an impressive grasp of American history, which I couldn’t claim for their countries. For instance, one evening we spent a period of conversation listing American Presidents backwards, and the German citizens could remember just as well as myself and my American friend.

A restaurant with (almost) my name!

My time in Berlin included lots of trips on the S-Bahn and U-Bahn, which was perhaps my favorite part since I love public transportation. I visited several of the tourist shrines, such as the Reichstag, Brandenburg gate, Checkpoint Charlie, East Side Gallery (remains of the Berlin Wall), the Holocaust Memorial site, Charlottenburg Palace, and a lovely boat trip down the Spree, complete with tourguide commentary in German.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

After touring Berlin for a week, I took a train to Munich. Although there is a stereotype about German trains, in this case it was inaccurate and my train was an hour late, turning a 6-hour trip into 7 hours. Luckily my friend was patient and was still waiting for me on the platform when my train finally arrived (thanks, Kerre!).

Enjoying the oom pah pah at the Hofbräuhaus

Munich also provided many historical learning opportunities for me, being the seat of the Bavarian region and the “birthplace” of National Socialism. My experiences there varied wildly, from the delight of purchasing and wearing my very own dirndl to visiting the sobering site of the Dachau concentration camp. I also visited the famous Hofbräuhaus, Nymphenburg Palace, a toy museum exhibit, took a lovely hike in the countryside, and ate plenty of sausage, sauerkraut and pretzels. I thoroughly enjoyed the Münchner Stadtmuseum, where I stayed for hours taking refuge from the rain, meandering through an exhibit on the history of Bavaria, another on the history of Oktoberfest, and my favorite exhibit about puppets and circus contraptions.

Robots in the Spielzeugmuseum

Traveling outside of the United States is always good for me to re-set my perspective on my life and world events. I like to get out of my comfort zone, stretch my experience, and examine my expectations and assumptions. This trip was great, but it’s always nice to come home.

Pork knuckle and potato salad with a pretzel topper

Look ma! No books!

I’ve been seeing an increase in the reports on “bookless” libraries lately, so I’m just going to slap a list of links in this post. What’s new?

I enjoyed this article in American Libraries about the topic, from the perspective of a real live librarian. The other links are from the perspective of journalists and administrators, for the most part. They don’t seem to feel the need to interview to many librarians, for some reason.

The Darling Cushing Academy: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/gallery/090409_cushing_library/

And their reponse: http://www.cushing.org/podium/default.aspx?t=125628

Syracuse faculty in a fury: http://chronicle.com/article/In-Face-of-Professors-Fur/49133/

Stanford: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_15112885?nclick_check=1

Harvard: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2010/05/24/for_harvards_library_an_arduous_digital_shift/

It’s a book

Does it Tweet? Can it WiFi? Do you need a password?

No. It’s a book.

Lala, where music plays no more

In yet another example of the fleeting nature of the Internet, streaming music website Lala is going to disappear at the end of the month. This is what I saw when I tried to satiate my thirst for Santigold this morning:

Of course, this is the one online service where I don’t have an account, so I couldn’t log in. There are some bloggy posts out there about Apple shutting down the service and what that might mean for the future.

I had to turn elsewhere, and I found some new-to-me sources to stream specific songs, instead of similar songs in a radio station format like last.fm or Pandora. Grooveshark fulfilled my needs, but it looks like a streaming version of the Napster (now a BestBuy company!) of my college dorm days or LimeWire databases: dirty data. It hurts my head as a librarian when I look at a database with no effort at authority control. Ack! Oh, well. At least I can listen to my “gettin’ work done” music now, and get some work done.

Blogs into books, Tweets into TV

So we’ve all seen the bloggers who get book deals (and then movies). This has even spawned a DIY vanity press industry. Lulu, Blog2Print, Blurb, etc.

And now, Twits are getting television deals! Apparently, CBS is going to make a sitcom based on Shit my Dad Says, the Twitter account of Justin Halpern. He also got a book deal out of his Twitter shenanigans. And the best part:

Wait for it…

William Shatner plays the dad! Yesss!!!

Oh, yeah. And YouTube turned 5.