Week 5, Thing 12

Rollyo -- well I have been avoiding this one. It just doesn't interest me that much. I am not sure I see the use of it. But maybe if I actually try it out I'll feel differently.

Well, I set up a simple Rollyo search for cooking -- searching both Epicurious and Vegetarian Times, the two sites I am most likely to search if I am looking for a recipe. The problem I had was first you had to enter the web address -- which means you have to find it, then copy and paste. Ugh --I'd rather use bookmarks and search each site myself. I usually know which site is more likely to have what I want.

Then when you perform a search you get lots of duplicated and plenty of ads sprinkled in your search results. It is worse than Google!

Obviously I am not a fan. Maybe if I was doing more public service I would want to use this but it seems like there are other ways to achieve the same thing that take less work.

Week 5, thing 11

LibraryThing


I've known about LibraryThing for a few years -- checked it out sporadically for various things. I have even recommended it for a small library for someone to use. And I have heard presentations on LibraryThing for Libraries. We have even discussed whether we should use it at OPL.


But, I have never had a LibraryThing account until this exercise. It was easy to set-up. I am not sure if I'll continue to add to it or not. It could be interesting but there are other ways I'd rather spend my time. And given I spend a certain amount at work cataloging and thinking about cataloging, not sure how much of that I want to do in my spare time.

I did a display for LibraryThing at the bottom of my blog. Interesting to find the widget in LibraryThing and then work out how to display it in Blogger. Definitely doing a lot of lifelong learning here!

I did, however, find the groups in LibraryThing pretty interesting. There are some interesting discussions there and I'd be interested to follow some of those. Not sure how much I'll participate. At ALA Annual (held in June ) Tim Spaulding, the creator of LibraryThing announced Open Shelves Classification – to build a system to replace the Dewey Decimal System – so far there are some interesting discussions going on.

The main things I have thought about contributing, in terms of books, are what I am reading currently (although that won't stay up-to-date), creating a list of desired reads, keep track of what my book club reads. And someone suggested this for my kids and their cousins (as they are all spread across the world) -- let them create libraries of what they like to read -- an interesting way for the cousins to connect. Not quite sure how I might orchestrate that one.

Week 5, thing 10

Catalog card generator from the Generator Blog.

How could I resist?

I have been using various things from the Generator Blog to play with images for posts for O! What a Geek posts. Some are fun. Some are not so great. I ended up using this image for my LibraryThing picture. Seemed appropriate.

Image generators make it easy to create images that are tailored for whatever you want. They can create a great impact for a variety of thing. But I also find myself getting a little jaded about them -- they make it too easy so after a while it doesn't seem that impressive.