Presidents Day

Good things about Presidents Day (For those wondering if it is President's Day, Presidents' Day or Presidents Day, check Apostrophe Ambiguity.)

• Blue sky (at least in Rochester)
• A day when the SELCO office is closed
• Wandering through Barnes & Noble after lunch
• Picking up The Crown of Valencia (Yes, I could have checked it out of the library but much prefer to have a personal copy of the latest publication of a local author and former SELCO/SELS Board member, Catherine Friend)
• Catching up on all the 23 Things blog posts (There are over 100 - 23 Things blogs registered in SELCO/SELS with the rush before the official registration deadline)
  

Thing #6 - Chinese characters

Not because I can read Chinese but because there is such a thing as a Chinese character generator.

Richard pronounced: lǐ shā dé

Thing #6 - Chocolate

There's always chocolate in the SELCO office! And now there is a virtual cocoa version of 23 Things sans stick!

participation and progress

The list of 23 Things participants continues to grow! Aurora (who helped write a portion of the 23 Things curriculum) IM'd me this afternoon to announce 83 blogs were registered from around the region including 17 SELCO staff members. And, as of 6:12 PM, there are 697 registered statewide.

Our 23 Things experimentation ranges from slightly hesitant to wildly creative. Some of the highlights I've found include:

• 23 Enigma post with a Flickr collection of photos shot by a 4-year old in the library. This child has talent!

• 23thingsinAustin's dreams for a new ILS

• Here's the Thing started with Thing #7, then went on to #6, #11, and #20. Very free spirited.

• Links from one blog, It's My Life, to other neat blogs in the region like LibraryTree

And that only takes me through "I."

Thing #18 - Librarian Song

And thanks to Michael Golrick (now library director in my home town) for sharing a little library humor! (Does embedding a YouTube video count for #18?)

Thing #5

Not every day is a "nose to the grindstone" kind of day as we enjoy visits from SELCO's treat-or-treaters!



For all the fun: Halloween Presentation

Thing #4 – Flickr

The organizational options in Flickr are plentiful but like the current discussion about tags versus subject headings in the world of library catalogs, the organizer in me would love more consistency --- at least for SELCO’s photo array!

Our Flickr account keeps growing with over 461 pix today. We do an okay job tagging but the terms vary and 62 were blank, although I fixed 22 while working on this blog posting. (Maybe the other orphan pix will get tagged on another cloudy Saturday.)

Flickr makes it easy to create sets and insert a web link to a small selection of pix on the same topic. So a news item or a blog post on Rural Sustainability connects directly to our LSTA program photos. We also have sets for each type of library:

• Academic (6)

• Public (136)

• School (70)

• Special (13)

Thing #3 – RSS

Like so many others, I initially thought, I’ll just bookmark my favorite sites and check them periodically for anything new ---sort of like choosing when to pick up the newspaper. But unlike the newspaper that comes at the same time every day (or something close) bloggers post at all hours, they may post several times in one day, or be quiet for days. I was quickly converted to the advantages of RSS - Real Simple Syndication and have had a Bloglines account ever since Barbara Misselt (now at ECRL) shared this cool tool. I've even blogged about Bloglines!

So having subscribed earlier, my 23 Things activities for today included:

• Adding a Bloglines button to my toolbar
• Aggregating all the SELCO staff blogs in a Bloglines folder – energetic postings out there!