Kissimmee Crackers Softball

I'd really looking for information on a woman's fastpitch softball team named the Kissimmee Crackers. I believe they played inthe 50s. Some of the girls also played a team sponsored by West Coast Title, 1959 champions.
Are you all still out there somewhere?

Rollyo

Yes, I like combining my search for young adult reading material on Rollyo. I feel more in control even than receiving rss feeds or participating in listservs. Rollyo allows me to focus quickly on my specific search under the broad subject.

Select...YA BIBSSearch The Web

Production Era Tools

iGoogle was the online productivity page I chose on which to hang on-line productivity tools. The page was chosen for ease of use and manipulation. Combining productivity tools on one page is efficient use of a search page. If I were a student, independent contractor, small business owner, or volunteer or working from home in general, I would be inclined to use iGoogle as an organization tool.

Some good features of the page were the ability to minimize gadgets, email from a to-do list, and receive rss feeds. The ability to add time waster gadgets is of course, ever present.

Productivity tools are excellent business tools; however, I prefer to keep my personal calendar by hand, the light reflecting the events on the page.

LibraryThing

Now I feel at home; this is something I understand. First entry of course is A Voice of Her own (echos of A Room of One's Own). This is the voice I want to hear from myself. List of books and review of books on the list is a stark description of the voice that LibraryThing allows me. Writing, choosing, shining a light on, all the missing links to literature in a life of busi-ness.
Thank you LibraryThing.

JAM SESSION

Does a good Wiki jam or does it follow the rules, have all the proper experts and sound the same every time? Instead, does it take on a life of its own, sometimes one strain leading; sometimes another? Yes, it jams.

Remember the days (1990s) when we used on-line communication for sharing research or co-authoring and editing books, manuals, and policy and procedure. Remember the heartache of lost disks, computer down time, mismatched soft-ware, the angst of faxed and Fed Exed bundles, and midnight trips to the airport post office -- all to be erased in the next few decades by a wiki.

Note: Include Wikis when teaching research. Compare and contrast resources, slant, experts, open content, proof... Think about including them in teaching business use of the media and other communication tools. Question authority, but question open-content too.

By the way, I'm afraid my Core Competencies for 2.0 have shifted to Core Complacencies. Thoughtful examination of the "things" has become a lick and a promise lately.

News Flash

News update! (updated news) Social media is a productivity enhancing tool; essentially an updated newspaper. As a lifetime lover of newspapers, I feel right at home with social media. I don't have to play unless I want to, but I can still get current news coverage on so many issues and events.

I remember when the public and media were responsive to each other on a fairly personal basis. The social aspect of online news sites is more than expansion of a newspaper format. The online media components allow a familiar feeling of writing and interacting with a newspaper, a feeling that has been lost with exonential population growth and the diverse interests newspapers must serve.

Newsvine is my choice of the social media sites that I visited. The format is pleasing and easy on the eyes, the pages are easy to manipulate and the coverage is good. Just like a good news provider should be!

Tagging

In addition to allowing access to information, tags allow the authors who use obscure post titles (chapter titles) to determine what in the world they were trying to discuss. Like cataloging, I also love tags for written communication and added them liberally to my blog posts. Like subject headings, it remains to be seen if the descriptive words efficiently aid searching.

Tags for pictures are more problematic to me, since personally all pictures seem obscure, mysterious and inately subjective. I'll put up with the author's title, but don't want much more information. Pretty subjective opinion, and somewhat closed minded, since it precludes learning the history, period, or style of the piece.

And Delicious. It's a good filing (and retrieval) system; versatile. It may also be a pretty good way to research, or share research or reference. And portable! one of the best parts of the web. The "best tags" seems more akin to searching popular magazines than professional journals. That is, current popular trends. So, I would think would be used as an first step in researching.

Publish!

SlideShare would have saved me anxiety many times when I worried over accessing files,losing discs (when we used discs), or not being able to get an emailed presentation. Note! Just post it on SlideShare.

Haven't posted personal pics yet but did post two presentations for resume workshops.
In addition to using them at the local high school, they could have been accessed by students for review or students who did not attend the workshop. Look for them at:
http://www.slideshare.net/lucyritchie23


I always wanted to "publish" and it's a thrill to hit that (publish anything)button.

Skipping Ahead

Again, I received personal help with a "thing" and it was great! A library page came to give a workshop on augmenting MySpace pages and I learned more than the teens who attended! (I had more to learn.) Library MySpace pages are good for sharing material and programs. If they are not static, they are good for looking good. They are good for getting responses from patrons. However, having no stats,I am not convinced they are often accessed. The social networking spaces the kids shared with me and each other were mostly music, photos and friends -- just like their other spaces (bedrooms, etc.). Intimate, and covertly informative.

Good to have library MySpace pages and be a safe place on the web. But I'm not sure safe is where the crowd is heading.

The Return of the Native

Text messaging, as taught to me by our Library Intern, is simple. Learning face to face, or sound to ear (instead of screen to eye) was so much easier. Unfortunately, while I now know how to view my text messages, I find texting with such small keys and print, tedious. As the owner of a 35+ year old washer and lawn mower, I certainly will not replace my phone until it gives up completely. I do think I would prefer texting to leaving a voice message though, since writing is my preferred method of communication.

Communicating through library e-mail is a time saver. Not being tied to taking or returning phone calls allows frees the researcher to an answer or act on a request before responding. E-mail documents time and date of requests or instructions (and the instructions themselves). Also, everyone is able to receive the same message. E-mail connects and informs a whole library district at the same time. Can't find anything wrong with library e-mail. Other on-line communication also documents and allows freedom of time to research and respond.

On-line reference using e-mail or chat - as used through Ask-a-Librarian - is a convenient service: professional, fast, and inclusive. Responding in anonynimity can allow the librarian to relax. Sometimes not seeing non-verbal clues but carefully "listening" to what is written can be freeing.

And speaking of listening, webinars are cost efficient. They allow broadly scattered participants to share ideas and understanding with each other without the stress of time consuming travel. They usually document the discussion as well as the presentation. Drawbacks include equipment failure and registered participants who don't show. Also, you miss that "time consuming travel" that allows you to visit a different city or meet new folks face to face.

I enrolled in Yahoo messenger and am ready for my first IM on Friday, the day aroudn here when more than one person has time to IM.

BILLBOARD IMAGE PROMOTES TEEN PROGRAMS

Image generator, Big Hugh Labs, is great for the graphically challenged and quick for creating posters, fliers and other handouts. Just think how you could publicize teen programs with this billboard on the main drag! Next best -- It can go up in the main hall at the high school.
Image generators would be a step out from Workflows programs and more fun for our teen Library Intern to learn to create promotional materials.

New tools for old games Flickr Puzzle

Created at http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/jigsaw.php

Mashups are fun because the applications are so varied. There are combined applications that make the first application useful to artists, teachers, players, and general learners. Since my first Flickr posts were professional, the mashups I chose were for that use also. Among other uses, I can see that Flickr Speller, Color, and Puzzles could be used for display and games for youth programs. The photos displayed here are a few from the Hawthorne Branch Library Summer Reading Program 2008. The kids are World Wide Readers who had their photos taken in the photo board after reading ten books. A puzzle picture would make a great incentive or we could enlarge and display with the caption "where are you?" Flickr Speller would make great captions.

Note to self: Try a mosaic. Learn how to eliminate glare.

Silent Protest

UPDATE 2/25/09 Erik requested payment (rightly I believe.) Old Library photo removed.

Downloaded in a fit of nostalgia and desire for a lost country. A bit deluded since I never reached the destination.

I notified Erik for use of the photo, suggested he notify me if there was a problem, and then went ahead and posted. He is now aware of "23 things", NEFLIN and Mecklenburg/Carlotte Public Library, through that communication; therefore, adding to that strand of information in the web.

At Flicker I have also posted Hawthorne Library Summer Reading Program photos from 2008, tagged Worldwide Readers and Hawthorne Library and reading.

RSS Feed

RSS Feed is set up with partial success. I feel like an amateur newspaper clerk -- learning to receive a wire of news. The equipment (or program) looks simple, but I am not completely successful in acquiring the news I desire. So, although this post is going out, Thing 4 must be revisited because RSS Feed is worth the effort, rather like receiving the local and world news on your front porch but getting getting other special reading goodies there too.

Questions still to be answered include: Why does it look like I subscribe because the link is listed, but for some no news is forthcoming (updates do not appear?) Why do I think I've subscribed, but the link does not appear on Bloglines. Can I make the feeds show on 23 Wings blog links. Right now they are static, not giving daily updates.

Aside: At first I rejected Bloglines because I was offended by the informality and poor grammar of the welcome. Then I threw that consideration aside and returned because it has simplicity and is easy to use. So, in this case, I am quite content to select the service for expediency.
Note to self: Save formality and good grammar for the gan you will never write. (because you let f and gg be stumbling blocks?)

Compare and Contrast 2.0

Characteristics of Technorati, with an adequate blog search format, lead to a wide variety of news and information and fair results, while characterisics of Google Blog, with an excellent search format, result in links to excellent and relevant blogs. The intention of a blog search will determine the blog search engine to be used.

Technorati is a fully constructed news and information delivery tool that includes a recognizable searching format for information produced in blogs. Search tags do not match my experience of key search terms, but will take practice to find; meaning that the search tools look like library world search tools, but I have not yet made a transition real world tags. This produced an impatient struggle to get blogs on my subject to appear. The searches seem literal, not cross referenced; I have been spoiled and need more practice.

Although I am not ready to research popular culture products and buzz through blogs, I can appreciate the opportunity that Technorati offers to do just that in "one stop shopping". Animated ads, like infomercials, are still distracting. When did I stop "seeing" specific blocks of print in newspapers, selectively sighting the most desired articles, picking up key words in headings and reading them also, but blocking ads and unwanted news and information? When will I learn to do it online?

Others: I briefly investigated several other blog search engines, including Bloglines, Sphere and LJ, to no satisfaction. That is, although I recognized their good links and news opportunities, I was not able to achieve easy access to the blog search. In the case of Sphere, the site seemed to be circular; primarily containing articles about Sphere.

So, I fell back on Google Blog. As with Technorati, Google Blog has recognizable and fairly comprehensive blog search tools, which gave me a short learning curve. As a plus, the page is clean, with no pop-up or animated ads, and the link selections and directory are discreetly placed. I felt no pressure to perform or grasp, but could focus on my intended search and received good results with links to sound blogs.

Note: For the elegant use of tools, intention determines the tool to be used. Skill comes through practice but ease comes from understanding the appropriate use and tool to be used.

Reflective participation or reactive defense?

Three out of four sample uses of Library 2.0 recommended by Stephen Abrams involve history, or memory: Western Trails-Wyoming; American Memory; Ancestors in Your Cupboard. The fourth site supports the recent tradition of pleasure. It seems that the ground floor of Library 2.0, as with literature, is the entertainment and enlightenment of the continually expanding "reader". This may be reassuring to alarmists equating new technology or methods of communication with the isolation of individuals and dehumanization of society.

Bly refers to Shera's assertion that Society ultimately shapes the library and Abrams recommends that we use the adult learning tool of relfection.

Society's most elegant tools and skills write our history and understanding of the world. Could it be that Web 2.0 is an adult reflection of a grass roots shift from a system of hierarchy to collaboration, a move toward an expanded collective culture. Library 2.0 then can be reactive, to control or usurp the movement, or it can be reflective, to achieve dynamic and lasting participation.

Lift Off

Best part of a blog - Writing

First most difficult: Getting around a forgotten Google account was the most difficult step of creating the blog. That it was forgotten is indicative of my start and stop process in trying to learn 2.0 previously -- starting to learn a "Thing" / stopping because of confusion, or panic, or difficulty, or time, or the after school crowd has arrived!
Solution: Learning 2.0 through 23 Things, one at a time, with backup.

Second most difficult? Giving the blog a title.
Solution: don't take it so seriously -- it's about the "Things" not about me.