Catching Up

I'm reading Everything is Miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder by David Weinberger (Joho the Blog) and I just finished reading Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide. Both books are fascinating reads.

I was tickled to find myself quoted in Stephen's Lighthouse while catching up on my Bloglines subscriptions last weekend. Stephen Abram's inspiring presentation at my library earlier this year sparked the enthusiasm felt by many of the kcls27things participants in my department and division.

I saw this item first reported by the excellent Librarian in Black a few days ago.

PLCMC has followed up their trend-setting Library 2.0 program with:

Learning 2.1: Explore...Discover...Play.

In the first Library 2.1 lesson I learned about a nifty file conversion utility called Zamzar. I used it to convert a .wma sound file I created to an .mp3 file in less than a minute.

I've fallen behind on my posting because I am learning how to set up wikis on pbwiki in my spare time. My goal is to eliminate up to half the paper clutter that surrounds my desk and go digital and miscellaneous!

Tagging is del.icio.us, Part 2

my del.icio.us tags-d032407
Originally uploaded by bright_eyed_girl.

This is a picture of my tag roll from del.icio.us, presented as a word cloud. Every tag I assigned to a website is displayed here. The tags I assigned most often are displayed with large fonts while the least used tags are displayed with small fonts.
One of my most frequently used tags is a bookmark I created for Featured websites. I used the link roll tool in del.icio.us to add the links to these sites in my kcls27things training blog. The links in the sidebar are updated as I add or remove this bookmark from sites that I tag in del.icio.us.

I am fascinated by tag clouds. I believe they reveal information about users themselves: their interests, preferences, and what informs their view of the world.

I would like to see user tagging in library catalogs, not to replace subject searching by any means, but as a way of opening up new channels of communication, or conversations, between libraries and users. I think this is a very exciting time to be a librarian!