Come to The Kentucky to save Lexington

On Saturday, March 29, there is going to be a meeting. Wake Up Lexington: An event to save our block will be held at the Kentucky Theatre. Come out to have some refreshments, listen to music, look at film and photos, and organize to keep Lexington's downtown a place where you'd like to be.

The Most Modern Library in the World

We've been having some discussion about the future of our service points at our library. I think the most important thing is that we make sure we make a real plan with concrete objectives that lead us toward well-thought-out goals.

The Shifted Librarian's Visiting the Most Modern Library in the World is an example of an innovated library that keeps user's needs foremost, as all libraries should. This is a public library, so it is different from ours, but it might inspire some innovative user-centered ideas.

Why are old habits so hard to break?

One thing we've been talking about in the Going Green Library Committee is encouraging employees to use their own cups at library functions rather than disposable ones. A few days after we first talked about this I went to a Blue 2.0 function, and as soon as I got there poured myself a drink in a disposable cup, even though my travel mug was downstairs. Today I went to the Hospitality Committee's hot dog lunch, and, again, poured myself a drink in a disposable cup. I didn't even think about my travel mug until it was time to go out on the desk.

I feel like stapling the mug to my sleeve to get me to remember to use it. I always take it with me to the library cafeteria, because that habit is firmly ingrained. How to I learn to make it a habit elsewhere?

Second Life and Twitter

I created my Second Life account about a year ago. I always advise anyone who is trying SL for the first time to take the time to go through Orientation Island throughly. I rushed through, and I missed some fun activities that I couldn't go back to once I'd left.

Second Life is definitely interesting, and I think in some ways it's the wave of the future. I predict that the Internet will eventually become a 3D universe like this one, but I don't think it will be SL itself, just something similar. My main problem with SL is that it's private. Linden Labs is a private company in San Fransisco and SL resides entirely on its servers. I've heard that SL will eventually become open source, and that will make me feel better about it.

For this assignment, I also signed up for Twitter. I was very familiar with the concept of micro-blogging, but I just hadn't tried it myself. I had been getting Twitter updates from some individuals for a while, since you can post your Twitter feed through Facebook.

Micro-blogging reminds me a lot of text messaging or status updates on Facebook. It's a way of sending a very quick message to people you're connected with. I think it would work best in a situation where time mattered. It seems like it would be useful at a conference or a political rally, for example. One thing I fear is being overwhelmed (or overwhelming others) with trivial posts. So far, my only two posts have been "I'm signing up for Twitter" and "wondering if the weather will be as bad as predicted." Too many posts like these, and maybe people will stop "following" me.

I love downtown Lexington!

It says in the title of this blog that of the things I write about is about is good places to visit in Kentucky. One very good place is downtown Lexington. This city has lost a whole lot of beautiful old buildings in the 30+ years that I've been connected with Lexington, but there are still a few left.

Preserve Lexington is a great site about a small area of downtown Lexington that is well-preserved and historically significant, but that is in grave danger of being razed. It's flabbergasting to me that the Fayette-Urban County government might allow this destruction to happen, but the rumor is that developers want to level this entire block and replace it with a huge luxury hotel. I'm not inherently opposed to the idea of a luxury hotel or new buildings per se, but I say put them on the sites that have already been destroyed, and keep what little of Lexington's history we have left.

Tagging, folksonomies, and online applications

This blog post comes from Google Docs, which I had used for the first time very recently in the spreadsheet format, which is a bit more difficult to manipulate than the word processor I'm using here. "Publish to Blog" worked fine too.

Using del.icio.us was a new experience for me. I'd actually signed up for a del.icio.us account when I'd first heard of it last year, but I'd never tagged any sites because I wasn't entirely sure what it was all about. I think the process of tagging is a little cumbersome if you don't use the "post to delicious button," which I didn't install because I'm on a work computer, and I didn't know if I'd have the correct permissions to install it. You can check out my del.icio.us bookmarks. (I've just realized one problem with this, which is that I have been trying to keep my last name off my blog, but it appears in this link.)

Does anyone else find typing "del.icio.us" with all the periods to be very tedious?

I have been using LibraryThing for about a year now. I don't tag the books I own, but the books I read so that I can remember what I've read recently. However, the librarian in me likes to keep my reading list private. I notice that the Blue 2.0 assignment makes LibraryThing optional, so luckily, you can just take my word for it.

RSS and wikis

I still haven't managed to get my road trip pictures uploaded, so a post on that will have to wait.

To meet my Blue 2.0 requirements, I need to make a post about my rss and wiki learning experience. I'd been doing Bloglines for almost a year now, so I didn't need to do anything new for that. I'd even already added Blue 2.o as one of my feeds.

My favorite non-library feed is boingboing, which is a website of strange and wonderful things. My favorite library feeds are The Uncommon Commons (written by my supervisor, so I am sometimes mentioned :-) ) and The Ubiquitous Librarian, also an Information Commons blog. I read a lot of others too.

Creating a wiki, however, was a new experience for me. Like pretty much everyone, I was familiar with reading wikis from looking at pop culture on Wikipedia, but I had never worked on one at all. My wiki is for my department: The Hub @ WT's Wiki.

Creating the basic wiki was easy. Just sign up for an account and you are given a framework of example templates attached to your new wiki. The only trouble with that was that I had to choose whether or not I wanted a "business" wiki. I chose this option since it is a wiki for my job, and now I am occasionally finding that I'm prompted for upgrades, that I bet I wouldn't get as an individual. Another small issue is that the default notifications seem to be to notify you every time someone makes a modification to the wiki, so at first I was getting an email every time I made a change to the wiki, which was really annoying before I changed it.

I am still having a little trouble navigating around my wiki. I've looked at the wiki several times now, and I just today discovered some pages that I didn't even realize were there. I've tried a few times to do the PB Wiki Tour, but the page had been down every time and just now I found it takes me to an internal "page not found" on the PB Wiki site. I'll need to explore further to get the hang of it.

Of course, the most important part about a wiki is the collaboration, and I have not yet invited anyone to edit the wiki. I wanted to have it be a little more formed before I did that, but maybe I should go ahead and let my colleagues take part because maybe they will have a better vision of the wiki than I do.