Bad blogger!

Well, it's now official - I am a terrible blogger! How do people find the time?

I did think the photo above was worth blogging about. Stuart & I saw the Burton Cummings concert at the River Rock Casino. I brought along my pictures from when I interviewed Burton in 1978 at UBC. I showed them to the manager and he added our name to the "meet and greet" list for after the concert. Burton is holding one of my old pictures. I will have to get them scanned and online. Thirty-one years ago we were both quite beautiful!

Burton put on a great concert. It was a lot of fun to hear (and sing along with) all his old hits.

Gabriola Island

Stuart & I spend a few days camping last week on Gabriola Island. We were very impressed. It's a lovely island with nice beaches and incredible sandstone formations. The photo above (not taken by us, unfortunately) is of "The Gabriola Galleries."
Ian stayed at home, and in his typical fashion, invited his friends to a big birthday party, at which a wonderful time was had by all! But, much to our relief, the house is still standing.

Grad 2009!

Here is a quick slideshow of the event of the year - Ian's grad!

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Finished the playground

Perhaps this is going to be a bit of cheating, but I took a look at podcasts and audiobooks, and already know some I'm going to download - when I get my MP3 player!!!(Hint, hint, Jacquie!)
I already download songs from iTunes to my iPod, so I figure the procedure can't be any more complicated than that.
Some podcasts I'm looking forward to downloading are Russell Peters and Flight of the Conchords. If you don't know about Flight of the Conchords, check out the DVD's the library has of their HBO television series. So funny!!!! You'll never think of New Zealand the same way again.

Yay!!! I'm finished!!!!

A Wookie, not a wiki

I am now determined to finish the playground! I looked back at what I had to do, and really I have now had some experience with all of these things.
Technorati - well, if I want to search blogs, this is the tool I would use. But I can't say it is something I use on a regular basis.
Social Networking - I guess I live in my own little world. If I want to get in touch with my friends, I phone or email them. I have asked lots of people, especially young ones, if they are on Facebook or whatever and a lot of them say it's just too time consuming. One person said, on Facebook, it's not the quality of friends you have but the quantity. I agree with this! However, having said that, I have watched Elizabeth pull up pictures of her distant relatives' wedding in Nassau from Facebook and was most impressed.
Wikis - who hasn't used Wikipedia? It is my first go-to source for an overview of just about anything. A wonderful use of the concept.
YouTube - I have wasted many an hour watching YouTube videos.

Ok, covered off 4 topics! Yeah! Now I just have podcasting and audiobooks to summarize.

BCLA Conference Report

I attended three sessions at the BCLA Conference on Friday, Apr 17.

Living Library

Two speakers, Hazel Postmas from Douglas College and Rhian Piprell from Coquitlam Public Library, spoke about their implementation of this program. The Living Library uses people (who are called "books") who have chosen to be a public representative of a certain group, and users can "check them out" to have a conversation with them and ask questions. The library finds people in their community who are willing to be "books", and typically is the coordinator of an event/events where several "books" gather to be available to be "checked out" in half-hour increments. Coquitlam and Douglas held such an event at their local Chapters. Their mayor came and was a very popular "book". The program's aim is to promote tolerance and understanding in the community. Go to: www.living-library.org for more information. From the website, I found that Calgary Public Library recently launched this program and theirs is the most ambititous for a single local organizer in the nine year history of the Living Library.

Seeking Synchronicity – Viewpoints of VRS Users, Librarians, and Non-Users on Live Chat Reference
This session was an overview of a survey undertaken by Marie Radford, Associate professor at Rutgers in New Jersey. Although survey results can be rather dry, Radford was an entertaining speaker and her talk highlighted some interesting viewpoints of users (and non-users) of live chat reference services (eg Askaway). For example, users of live chat reference, although they liked the convenience and hours of live chat, also said they were intimidated by "face-to-face" interaction with a librarian. However, non-users of live chat said they preferred the personal contact of face-to-face and would even go so far as to seek out a specific librarian! Another rather astonishing result was that the majority of both users and non-users of chat reference had never used (and were unaware of) phone reference and/or email reference. Radford recommended that libraries market the range of reference options to users, and when promoting live chat, emphasize convenience, safety (ie reference chat is not a chat room) and personal service.
For more information on the survey, go to: http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/synchronicity/reports/20080626-final.pdf

The Google Toolkit
Presenters: Kay Cahill and Michele Pye, both from VPL. This session took a look at some Google Tools, of which there are quite a number. One example was Google Trends, which allows the user to see, in a graph form, how often a specific term (input by the user) has been searched on Google. From these results, users can see when topics were in the news, or results can be used for market research. Cahill and Pye also went over such Google tools as: dictionary, calculator, currency conversion, stock ticker, weather, flight data, parcel tracker and Google 411 (business phone directory) All of the features they presented can be found here I very much enjoyed attending the conference and thank NVDPL for the financial support.

not about the playground

Well, after my last burst of activity in the Playground, I have found my attention wandering. I attended the BCLA Conference yesterday and went to three good sessions. However, instead of writing about them, I want to tell everyone to check out the website, "Mary Evans Picture Library" (just search that on Google). It is full of the most charming pictures of whatever you can think of. I searched for "flapper" and the image above was one of the results.