Booking it

I haven't used Good Reads in a while, so I will have to explore all the new features. I did find Mr. Joe Patron and recommended that he check out "A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" by Mr. James Joyce. Eventually, I will get around to finishing "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake" (I hope).

Next, I added the 'Business' RSS feed in BookLetters to good ol' Google Reader.

Novelist's new interface is much improved. I would like to think they were inspired by LFPL's Music Corner. While mucking around, I found a list of "Humorous Horror". This is really beneficial if a patrons requests a book recommendation in an area that I am not entirely familiar in. Fantastic Fiction is another good site for readers, as is Good Reads.

Finally, there are books that recommend books! One such one is "1001 books for every mood". Bustin' out the print resources!

Wiki(d) potential

For a while it seemed that "wikis" were a taboo subject in the library realm. I am not sure if it was a matter of ignorance on how to use the technology or the fear instilled by the occasional media report about out how Wikipedia was manipulated to show incorrect information. As the CommonCraft video demonstrates, wikis are far better at centralizing content development, when compared with e-mail. 

The use of internal wikis are a great way for a remote team members to coordinate efforts. For example, when researching the history of our Fairdale library branch, our team used a pbworks wiki to host our research and this meant fewer face-to-face meetings and final, quality product delivered in a matter of weeks (not months).

For the purpose of 23 Things, I chose to add Manchester United's logo to the favorite team and Junot Diaz, Ernest Hemingway and William Styron to the list of favorite authors.

Consumable Media

The coverage on YouTube of Japan's tsunami and earthquake wreckage would have been previously unfathomable. What you would have been reading about in tomorrow's newspapers is being documented right now by individuals using their cellphones (or other digital recording devices). One such example:

Unfortunately, individuals are now confronted with sifting through large quantities of information to determine what is and isn't relevant to them. Time is the restrictive factor and savvy consumers utilize tools like Google Reader to pool their content into a single portal,  capable of being accessed via a multitude of web-connected devices. 

The word "revolutionary" is applied to almost every new technology, but sometimes it is the simplest technology that turns out to be a game changer. Podcasts may have been considered a geeky fringe topic, but it seems that you can find a podcast for nearly any topic. Organizations, like NPR, take it a step further and even let you design a custom series of podcasts, based on a topic. Equally, the BBC has several podcasts that I have equally enjoyed.

It is on that note that we should acknowledge a portion of digital content that libraries often provide for free - downloadable audiobooks. NetLibrary certainly has it's quirks, but being able to heck out an audiobook and listen to it on the same web-connected device is a plus. I took a look at "A way with words: Writing, Rhetoric and the Art of Communication" by Michael Drout, which is a 7 hr and 8 min book that I hope to work my way through.

The powerful simplicity of RSS

RSS isn't a revolutionary concept: You update your page, I know (almost) immediately. However, we enjoy one-stop-shopping elsewhere, so why not in the way we consume news/blogs/info?

My RSS reader of choice has been Google Reader for the longest time and 23 Things has see me add two blogs for the purpose of the exercise. The first is "Hack A Day" and the other is the current Louisville Cartoonist Society blog.