Greetings!
Well. Voice recognition software has certainly come a long way since the days of Dragon Dictate (or whatever it was called). Using Jott was amazingly simple. I spoke clearly and distinctly and didn't have a lot of background noise going on which may have helped, but it (she) understood the first time through. Very cool. Remember the Milk also work easily once I scrolled down the list of tasks far enough to find the ones ( I emailed twice because I couldn't see my email the first time) I had added. It would be a useful feature for the most recent addition to pop up at the top of the list-- especially if you were using this collaboratively. I like both of these websites because of their novelty. I'm not sure how much use they would be to me. I was an early user of PDAs and still find them useful and many of the options available online are also available in handhelds and phones. Being able to use Jott is a big plus so that you can just have your thoughts and capture them immediately. I hate to sound lilke Luddite here, but a pencil and piece of paper lets you do the same thing and doesn't cost you a phone call and you can still share those thoughts or ideas electronically later perhaps when you've had time to refine them a bit. I also worry, and perhaps this is because my understanding is shallow, when all my information is stored on-line. I know these servers are massive and there are many layers of built in redundency but still, what if there is a "fire sale" and the whole power grid goes down or just the bit that has my data stored on it? Data does occasionally get lost in cyberspace and I like to have things backed up locally in a couple of places (flash drive, hard drive) so that when power is restored, I still have the data. So, while I think these two things are groovy. I will probably stick with my pda and paper and pencil. Because as all us rats know, in desperate times paper can be an excellent snack food, while little packets of electronic data aren't.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Saturday, January 26, 2008
GoogleDocs the Neatest Thing Since ....
Greetings!
Having just taken a thorough tour of GoogleDocs I'd have to say that I'm totally convinced that this is a most excellent thing for public libraries. Being part of a shared automation system offers many benefits which often get forgotten in the frustrations generated by being part of a shared automation system. GoogleDocs helps eliminate a couple of those frustrations. Providing good customer service when we have been unable (until recently) to allow patrons to have access to word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software on the PAC terminals has been a very large frustration. Patrons have wanted to cut and paste information from PAC screens into various types of documents and have been unable to do so. Helping patrons set up GoogleDoc accounts would alleviate that frustration for both the patron and library staff. Using GoogleDocs also addresses the issue for library staff to access documents they are working on at home. This was especially an issue prior to flashdrives when one was dealing with a power point presentation that used spreadsheets and photos and took up more disk space than a HD floppy could handle. GoogleDocs would have been a very easy solution. And it still is. If one used GoogleDocs from work and home, you'd never have to worry about losing your flash drive -- you'd only have to worry that the entire power grid would go down and then that the backup generators would run out of fuel -- which, of course, a really good worrier can do without hardly thinking about it! --.
GoogleDocs also provides the ability to work collaboratively on documents which is a really big plus. It sure beats emailing red-lined changes back and forth to each other. The fact that you can go back and look at all the various versions is the biggest plus. I have lost too many documents in my life or overwritten a document that I would have like to extracted a piece from later, and it was too late. It apparently never is too late with GoogleDocs! That's my kind of redundancy!
Having just taken a thorough tour of GoogleDocs I'd have to say that I'm totally convinced that this is a most excellent thing for public libraries. Being part of a shared automation system offers many benefits which often get forgotten in the frustrations generated by being part of a shared automation system. GoogleDocs helps eliminate a couple of those frustrations. Providing good customer service when we have been unable (until recently) to allow patrons to have access to word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software on the PAC terminals has been a very large frustration. Patrons have wanted to cut and paste information from PAC screens into various types of documents and have been unable to do so. Helping patrons set up GoogleDoc accounts would alleviate that frustration for both the patron and library staff. Using GoogleDocs also addresses the issue for library staff to access documents they are working on at home. This was especially an issue prior to flashdrives when one was dealing with a power point presentation that used spreadsheets and photos and took up more disk space than a HD floppy could handle. GoogleDocs would have been a very easy solution. And it still is. If one used GoogleDocs from work and home, you'd never have to worry about losing your flash drive -- you'd only have to worry that the entire power grid would go down and then that the backup generators would run out of fuel -- which, of course, a really good worrier can do without hardly thinking about it! --.
GoogleDocs also provides the ability to work collaboratively on documents which is a really big plus. It sure beats emailing red-lined changes back and forth to each other. The fact that you can go back and look at all the various versions is the biggest plus. I have lost too many documents in my life or overwritten a document that I would have like to extracted a piece from later, and it was too late. It apparently never is too late with GoogleDocs! That's my kind of redundancy!
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
The Rat is Back!
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
It absolutely can not have been almost two -- count them 2-- months since last I blogged. I have a pile of excuses nearly as high as an elephant's eye. And I'll only bore you with a few of them. First there was Thanksgiving and I had to drive over to Mequon to visit my relatives. Then I had to recover from visiting my relatives and decorate the library for the next set of holidays that were coming at us. Then the holidays arrived and I had to go visit my relatives in Mequon for Christmas Eve, drive back and then go visit the other relatives in Lake in the Hills, Illinois. Then I had to recover from those visits. And while attempting to recover from Christmas 2007 go out and buy all the deeply discounted stuff for Christmas 2008. Then there was New Year's Eve and New Years Day -- which I won't go into at all (and not because I can't remember). I had a library board meeting to get ready for on January 3rd and since then I have been walking around saying --"Doesn't it seem like January's been going on forever?". Then of course there has been all the mandatory watching of football -- particularly THE PACKERS!!!!!! Go Pack Go!!!!! Boy, have I been enjoying this season including wearing my Brett Favre jersey on game day -- to which I attribute the Packs' winning season. Some of you may recall that I am a (sandhill) crane nut. And since one of my goals is to see cranes every month of the year, this involved a road trip in December (Cranes are smart you know. When there are 35 inches of snow on the ground, they leave town and head south.) to a place about 20 miles south of Valparaiso, Indiana (where there was no snow cover in December and about 15,000 cranes). Then since we are now in January and the Indiana cranes aren't likely to hang around very far into the month, I high-tailed it south just last Thursday to look for cranes once again. We actually managed to locate about 400 of them in the rain after nearly getting my little car stuck in the greasy gravel road. But now I'm back, and only have my on-line Frontpage 2003 class assignments and the dreaded (echo, reverb) Annual Report to deal with. And, the big news from Illinois at Christmas was that I'm going to be a Great Aunt! (My niece and her husband are expecting : Hoping for a boy so they can name him after my dearly departed brother) So, how'd I do on my list of excuses? Did I convince you? Yeah, I didn't convince myself either.
So now on to Project Play, as you can see I have added a Meebo widget to this blog. I shall be IMing project staff -- who are not yet online because I started doing this in the wee small hours of the morning. I think IM is really cool. I can see how it would be really useful for providing reference services -- especially ready reference type questions when the answer is pretty obvious and easy to find. As the podcast said, the world is IMing all the time and libraries need to provide service in as many formats as possible so that as many people as possible make use of their public library. In a world that is really into instant gratification, I don't see how you can go wrong offering service via instant messaging. (Unless of course none of your staff is ever on-line so that IM isn't a real option. Then you run the risk of disappointing and frustrating those you are trying to serve -- which is worse then not offering it. So I think there needs to be a real commitment to be on-line a lot of the time if you plan on offering IM.) End of sermon.
Glad to be back!
It absolutely can not have been almost two -- count them 2-- months since last I blogged. I have a pile of excuses nearly as high as an elephant's eye. And I'll only bore you with a few of them. First there was Thanksgiving and I had to drive over to Mequon to visit my relatives. Then I had to recover from visiting my relatives and decorate the library for the next set of holidays that were coming at us. Then the holidays arrived and I had to go visit my relatives in Mequon for Christmas Eve, drive back and then go visit the other relatives in Lake in the Hills, Illinois. Then I had to recover from those visits. And while attempting to recover from Christmas 2007 go out and buy all the deeply discounted stuff for Christmas 2008. Then there was New Year's Eve and New Years Day -- which I won't go into at all (and not because I can't remember). I had a library board meeting to get ready for on January 3rd and since then I have been walking around saying --"Doesn't it seem like January's been going on forever?". Then of course there has been all the mandatory watching of football -- particularly THE PACKERS!!!!!! Go Pack Go!!!!! Boy, have I been enjoying this season including wearing my Brett Favre jersey on game day -- to which I attribute the Packs' winning season. Some of you may recall that I am a (sandhill) crane nut. And since one of my goals is to see cranes every month of the year, this involved a road trip in December (Cranes are smart you know. When there are 35 inches of snow on the ground, they leave town and head south.) to a place about 20 miles south of Valparaiso, Indiana (where there was no snow cover in December and about 15,000 cranes). Then since we are now in January and the Indiana cranes aren't likely to hang around very far into the month, I high-tailed it south just last Thursday to look for cranes once again. We actually managed to locate about 400 of them in the rain after nearly getting my little car stuck in the greasy gravel road. But now I'm back, and only have my on-line Frontpage 2003 class assignments and the dreaded (echo, reverb) Annual Report to deal with. And, the big news from Illinois at Christmas was that I'm going to be a Great Aunt! (My niece and her husband are expecting : Hoping for a boy so they can name him after my dearly departed brother) So, how'd I do on my list of excuses? Did I convince you? Yeah, I didn't convince myself either.
So now on to Project Play, as you can see I have added a Meebo widget to this blog. I shall be IMing project staff -- who are not yet online because I started doing this in the wee small hours of the morning. I think IM is really cool. I can see how it would be really useful for providing reference services -- especially ready reference type questions when the answer is pretty obvious and easy to find. As the podcast said, the world is IMing all the time and libraries need to provide service in as many formats as possible so that as many people as possible make use of their public library. In a world that is really into instant gratification, I don't see how you can go wrong offering service via instant messaging. (Unless of course none of your staff is ever on-line so that IM isn't a real option. Then you run the risk of disappointing and frustrating those you are trying to serve -- which is worse then not offering it. So I think there needs to be a real commitment to be on-line a lot of the time if you plan on offering IM.) End of sermon.
Glad to be back!
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