Forewarned is forearmed?

I highly recommend Bloglining the weekly Carnival of the Infosciences for anyone looking to get a snapshot of what’s being written out there in library-related blogs. It’s a round-robin hosted compilation of favorite blog posts from the previous week, submitted by their authors. (I think I’ll add it as soon as I’m done here.)

The most recent issue includes Why Is Library 2.0 So Hard?, an interesting discussion of one possible pitfall of a library’s hosting its own flickr! site. It comes as I have been wondering what we might want to post on our site. In this instance I think the post is more a cautionary tale than a warning off, as you’ll see when you read it.

Ross

Meta (login + RSS)

I’ve added the “Meta” widget back to the bottom of the right sidebar – this gives us a link to the WordPress login screen as well as 2 RSS feed URLs to copy & paste into aggregators like Bloglines.

Dan

A beginning

In the line of “getting one’s feet wet” I added a link to a blogroll for Art.  Thank you Dan for help. 

I keep trying to figure out how our outreach audience might use blogs.  Links to favorite blogs are one thing (but you can do that with favorites/bookmarks) – but feeds should be interesting.

RW (Renee)

belaboring the obvious

I admit I half expected quite a flurry of initial activity in this space once we got it up and running — soft launch or not. The fact that it hasn’t yet made me wonder what might be slowing its roll out. Being crazy busy with other tasks was the most obvious answer. I knew it couldn’t be shyness, not from this crowd.

I wonder whether it’s an uncertainty how best to wield this new tool: “I can’t think of anything worth putting on the blog.”

Bear in mind that posts on the blog don’t have to be about the blog; they don’t have to be about Web/Library 2.0. They can be about any topic relevant to the work done in the museum’s libraries. Judging from the attendance at Monday’s meeting, there are ‘web moles’ in nearly every unit of the Watson Library and a goodly number of the independent libraries.

Think of this blog as a de facto WATSON-L. It will never be as immediate as sending an email to a colleague to ask a question or raise a concern. But when you want to reach out to or solicit feedback from a larger community, this is the place.

• Thinking of sending one of those blanket emails to all the library staff?
• Rolling out some new feature or policy?
• Need feedback on selecting or ceasing a reference or serial title?
• Find a really cool web site that might be valuable for reference or for staff professional development? (Here’s my most recent favorite: Making Time for Library 2.0, which I featured on my own blog.)
• Need to post a meeting reminder?

These are just my top of the head thoughts about ways to use the blog. It doesn’t come close to covering the full range of possibilities.

Ross (“again?!”)

A wrinkle in Bloglines

I wonder if anyone more familiar with Bloglines has a solution to this wrinkle:

One of the nice features of Bloglines is that it constantly updates (once an hour, evidently) the feeds you have selected and alerts you to new posts — by putting the feed name in boldface and adding the number of new posts after. When you are a ’solo’ user, everytime you check on a blog feed, it resets the ‘need to read’ to zero. A mockup of the display is below:

Watson Library Outreach 3 and Library 2.0 (2) (0)

(In this example it’s telling you there are two new posts and that you have saved none.)

 If we are collectively accessing the Bloglines account, each time one of us checks a feed, it will reset to zero. Any subsequent Bloglines user will be unaware that new posts have come in. In spite of mucking around our account, I can’t seem to find a way for the reset feature not to engage. I don’t think the programmers envisioned multiple users for a single account. Does anyone have any ideas how to ‘use the system’ to make this feature useful for all of us?

Ross

Sandbox “rules” (i.e. rules of the sandbox)

Since I was little Oleg, playing with something meant for me first off all seeing what that thing is made of and if it can be taken apart (did I ever mentioned I wasn’t very popular?).
Here is what I was able to take apart in this blog so far:

• Moved around elements on the page
• Deleted a post (my own) with a comment (someone else’s)
• Edited someone else’s post

I believe that even when we play we should play by a set of rules. I suggest some of us get together sooner rather than later to establish this set of rules.
OK (aka Oleg)

on transparency

Late yesterday afternoon Dan and I were having a telephone conversation (yes, telephone!) marvelling over what had been accomplished in one day and comparing notes about how WordPress works. We agreed that we had ‘done enough’ for one day and that maybe we were going too fast–at least too much on our own. We had each modified some aspect of the sidebars of the Watson blog.

On reflection I realized that while the blog is a learning tool that everyone should take advantage of–tinkering with various aspects of it in order to learn–it was critical that we shared our experiences tinkering.

For example, I added the “Recent Posts” and “Archives” portions of the right sidebar: the right top so that they would appear prominently when the page was brought up. I based this on … I guess my own taste and judgment. Basically, I selected the ‘My Dashboard’ tab on the blue bar on top of the page, clicked ‘Change your site’s look and theme’, and then when the page came up, dragged a ‘widget’ from an preset array at the bottom of the modifications page up to the upper right of the mock-up provided. Do I expect this to stay forever? Of course not. Should I tell you what I’m up to? Most definitely.

Dan, what did you do yesterday?

Ross

shall we link?

at some point I suppose we will count as a “blog consortium”…

http://newsgrist.typepad.com/robertgoldwaterlibrary

cheers!

Joy [RGL blog management]

Some bolts from a nut

• As anyone trying to write a post has no doubt already found out (read: me), WordPress passwords are case sensitive. The password for this should be all lower-case.
• I hope you’ll excuse me if it takes a while to learn everyones initials when posts show up here. Maybe for starters we might use fuller forms of names, especially since this is cooperatively created.
• And as we tinker around with this particular blog, I wonder whether we will come to have some ultimate arbiter to decide what goes on the sidebars, for instance. I think that during this period of experimentation we should both put up what we can and what works as well as respect the work of others editing the website. (BTW, are the authorizations for posting and those for administering the same or different?)

Enough for now, Ross (the only ‘Ross’ so far)

Ross,

Thank you for the points. I agree with you entirely. We should have a group of people deciding on content and rules for represinting it. I also beleive we should have individual accounts, even at this early stage, especially if it’s just a “sandbox” stage.

Oleg aka OK

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