Trying to Clip a Video

clipped from www.youtube.com

Dragon lore from www.strangescience.net

first time clipping

clipped from www.strangescience.net Despised in the West and revered in the East, dragons have a long history in human mythology. How did the myth start? No one knows the exact answer, but some "dragon" bones probably belonged to animals long extinct — in some cases dinosaurs, in others, fossil mammals. Starting in the early 19th century, scientists began to find a new kind of monster, one that had gone extinct tens of millions of years before the first humans evolved. Because the first fragments found looked lizard-like, paleontologists assumed they had found giant lizards, but more bones revealed animals like nothing on earth today. Did these terrible lizards ever coexist with people? No. Although some creationists claim that medieval dragons were really dinosaurs that survived into modern times, this notion enjoys no support from any credible scientist

Thing 51

I’ve recently read articles for and against having libraries join social networks on the web--librarians all for it while some non-librarians (but hopefully library patrons) are against it. One article I read was in Computers in Libraries (November/December 2007 vol. 27 no. 10 issue). For myself, I’m all for it.

Libraries & Librarians already do physical outreach driving to preschools, etc. Social Networking on the Web just means extending our outreach into the Internet. I really liked what I read in the sites linked to from this assignment. In searching the web for more examples of what other libraries have done, I found some other great sites:

http://www.webjunction.org/do/DisplayContent?id=17981 has a really great article about how a library can set up a social network on the web

http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Social_Networking_Software is a great wiki with examples of libraries social networking on the web

Meredith Farkas' Informations Wants to be Free Blog has a great blog entry pro/con about libraries social networking

TameTheWeb.com has a couple relevant entries for this topic:
http://tametheweb.com/2008/02/25/links-in-the-hyperlinked-library-2008/
http://tametheweb.com/2007/04/the_social_library.html

These were just a few sites I found doing a simple search for Libraries and Social Networking. So much more came up, pointing out that many libraries & librarians are thinking about this and actually doing it. It is so great to see what other libraries are already doing. I just hope that my library will someday be doing those things as well.

Thing 50

Ok assignment. It was somewhat fun to look for something odd to cook or to watch a famous actor that I like cooking. I’m not really into cooking, so didn’t find anything I would actually want to make. I would recommend imcooked.com to any patrons into both cooking and computers, though--especially if they enjoy watching cooking shows on TV.

Thing 49

Great assignment for work. I really like Soundsnaps sound effects—I browsed by category under Animals, then Insects. There are great Insect sound effects to download for bees, crickets, etc. I can see adding that sound to our library web pages for Summer Reading this year—have insect sounds playing in the background as people read about our many fun programs for the theme Catch the Reading Bug @ Your Library. For other times of year, I can see just picking a sound to add to the website to identify that month. October Halloween spooky sounds would certainly be lots of fun to add.




I must say Musigy looks neat. I would definitely recommend it to any musicians I know.

Thing 48

It was fun to look for free songs to download. I like that you can play all of them for free at Music.download.com, even if you can’t download them for free. Easy to find the free songs--when you click on the yellow ###### beside words free MP3, it automatically brings up the free MP3s. However, once you change how the songs are sorted, the songs that now show up are not all downloadable free MP3s. It took me a while to find one that I liked which I could download for free.

The downloading was easy as well—just like downloading anything from the internet, Of course, you always want to keep track of where you are saving your download and what name you saved it as so you can find it afterwards.

I think this site would be really easy for patrons to use.

Thing 47

This exercise was a lot of fun. Even me, who is not instrumentally inclined--I can sing, but not play an instrument--could make music at Jamstudio. I emailed my song and you can try hearing it here.

Thing 46 Updates

Well, I didn't really need to do this exercise. Since our library system didn't start Library 2.0 until July 2007, most of the updates PLCMC has discovered to Blogger, Flickr & Mashups, Bloglines, Finding RSS, The Generator, LibraryThing, Rollyo, Del.icio.us, and Technorati were already in place. Obviously, The Generator blog is always updating, reporting new image generators out there. I have discovered that those image generators that I've used to add items to my blog don't always continue to work. And really, that's all I can say. In another year (or less), there undoubtedly will be changes that are new for those of us at PLYMC.

Thing 45

This lesson was interesting. I visited all the sites:

Gliffy
Bubbl.us
Flowchart.com
Mindmeister

I even made 2 practice charts which I posted. I don't have much of a need to use it for myself or for my job. However, I can see how these would be valuable web sites to recommend to anyone in administrative, managment, and business. People applying for grants or other forms of financial aid, for their business or non-profit, could certainly use these to make informative charts to add to their application. I did find most of the sites fairly easy to use, too, another big plus to them. My favorite would be Bubbl.us. But they all seemed like good choices.

Bubbl.us Practice

My Practice Gliffy Flowchart

Thing 44

This was a fairly easy assignment. I find Jott interesting. I'm not sure if I'll use it much, though, since I rarely use my cell phone and don't tend to think of calling myself with a To Do List. I think it's easier to write a list on paper. Also, it doesn't seem to work very well on my computer--maybe it's a software issue, but you can't listen to the Jott messages, just read what it transcribed.

I did use Jott with Twitter & Blogger. I even added a Jott widget to my sidebar. Then, since I didn't like it, I deleted the Jott posts and widget.

The only library application I can think of would be to link a library cell phone with Jott and post announcements to an official library blog. For example, if we had a blog with daily announcments on it--you could just call Jott to add your newest announcement--say it's to announce the Library closed due to weather, the person with the cell phone could call that in.

Thing 43

This is the only assignment I’ve come across that absolutely requires downloading and installing software—not something I could recommend for our library computers as installing on public computers requires an administrative logon. For home use, I can see the possibilities—particularly for any musicians or other musically oriented people. The sheet music application would also be a big plus for them. They should add in the assignment instructions that you will also need to download winzip to unzip and install the jazz sequencer program. At least they do have a link to the winzip download on the same page as the sequencer download. Really, this is something I'll think about using on my home computer once I have high speed internet access--looks like it could be a lot of fun making my own version of some song.

Thing 42

Neat, this lesson showed that something that was around before WWW is still here today and still in use. Harley Hahn does give a great, fact-filled tutorial about usenet.

I visited the Library usenet group: soc.libraries.talk. Not a lot of activity—Activity Low--only 20 recent authors. Much as it says its all things library related, I found an obvious spam posting that made it into the group. It was most used in 1996 and 1997, actually, there was lots of usage from 1994 through first months of 2000, then it really drops off, hardly ever getting up to 100 posts per month after that.

Since you have to pay to access Harley Hahn's Internet Yellow Pages, Google Groups is a great free way to find usenet groups. I had a lot of fun as you can search for groups on anything—vampires, authors, movies, cars (I searched my car make & model), etc. Main thing to keep in mind is that all the information is informal, undocumented, opinions. As groups also have RSS feeds, Usenet seems to be very similar to the news groups/social marketing sites we learned about in Library 2.0: Bloglines, Technorati, Topix, etc.

Thing 41

I am so glad to finally reach this assigment. Live Mocha is a great language learning site--best of all its free!!!

I have signed up for a French class to remind myself what I’ve lost in the 15 years since I last took French in college. This is something that I’ve wanted to do. If this site really works at helping me relearn my French, I plan to try other languages in the future.

This would be very useful for all of us in learning new languages to speak with our visitors and immigrants from other lands--improve library communications and improve library relations with our public.