THING 23 - FINAL THOUGHTS

My first post was 'Thing 1 - What a good looking group! Hope you enjoy our blog.' I have learned a lot from these exercises, some I will use and many I will not use. While it is good to have knowledge of the things that we explored, considering our library's current staff shortage it is hard to imagine how we can assist patrons with such involved tasks. While it has been fun at times, I am glad we are done with 23 Things. Thank you for your effort.

THING 22 - SURVEY

Survey completed! One more thing and I'm done.

THING 21 - SHOW US WHAT YOU KNOW

This is kind of a tall task in that you don't really know what the 'newbie' is going to want to do. But here goes.

One of the most frequent things people need to do, especially if they are submitting resumes, is to set up an e-mail account. I would suggest g-mail, hotmail or yahoo.com and show them how to get started setting up the account.

If a patron came in with pictures and they wanted to share them on the web, I would start them off scanning the pictures, creating a Photobucket or Flickr account and showing them how to upload the photos.

If a patron came in asking about where they could go to find job opportunities, I would direct them to something like Craiglist, jobs.com, monster.com and perhaps Linked in if someone was searching the job market. I would also assist them in posting their resume on these sites. To create a resume, I would recommend finding a good resume building site such as resumetemplates.org or tell them to book a librarian.

I would direct a patron who wanted to find out information on a particular medical disorder to the Mayo Clinic website or WebMd which has a plethora of information and is easy to navigate.

If a patron wanted to view on-line videos, I would recommend YouTube as a good source of a variety of videos. I would also recommend eHow.com for how to videos.

For most needs, I would suggest the old standby (which I use all the time), Google.com. I google everything and that would be my first suggestion to patrons doing any kind of research.

THING 20 - MORE FUN WITH GOOGLE

I chose to investigate Google Translate, it was beaucoup de plaisir (lots of fun). I also chose Google Images. Both of these would be beneficial to the general public, translate for obvious reasons and I use google images frequently to find images for a variety of applications. I set up my iGoogle page selecting U2 as my theme, and added gadgets Hamster, Hangman and Todays horoscope to customize my page. Since I was already logged in to my blog page, it automatically saved my iGoogle page. It was fun setting it up and selecting the gadgets and theme.

THING 19 - BEST OF THE WEB

Mayo Clinic and Sports Reference were two of the ones I liked from the 2010 list. From the 2004 list, I liked eHow.com, lots of interesting how to information on that site. I also visited wordswithoutborders.com, very strange and interesting. I found it interesting that one of the sites listed in 2004 was craigslist, which is huge now.

THING 18 - MORE SOCIAL NETWORKS

I visited the sites for children's social networks. I do not believe in social networking for children. I visited sites such as Togetherville and What's What and even though these sites say they are secure for children, I do not believe it. Sure parents can direct their children to sites such as this, but they cannot restrict them from getting on other sites when they are in other places, such as friends homes, school, etc. I know this is true with anything when it comes to kids, they will find a way if they want to, but I do not believe they should even be exposed to social networking on the computer. I believe social networking for children should be such be things such as lunchtime, recess, and just hanging out with friends - not on the computer.

Linked In seems like a good resource for business and help finding jobs. I did enjoy Webjunction and found there are a few classes that might be helpful, in particular the ones dealing with handling difficult and angry patrons. I found it very interesting and easy to navigate. I will explore this site further when time permits.

Thing 23

Looking back at my first post, I didn't realize all that the 23 things would be. I remember I was excited and a little apprehensive. As we went along, the apprehension lessened and my appreciation increased. I enjoyed the 23 things and I believe that this exercise has increased my confidence and abilities and has given me more to offer our patrons.