Trials and Tribulations of Week 3 of MLA 2.0

I will admit that this week has not been fun at all in any sense. I enjoyed learning about blogs, RSS and wikis and even if my pages are not as indepth as others, at least I could see results. To answer the admin comments on my comments, yes I am using Internet Explorer and no I do not have Firefox...but neither does my hospital. I have spent about 12 hours on this assignment this week, not much fun for my family, and most of that rebooting my computer as Facebook continually kept freezing everything. I finally stopped trying to use my work email address and went to my yahoo one, at a public library to try it. (Facebook even froze that computer and had to reboot.) After another hour I had gone through the exercises. This week to finish I have been on four different computers, in four different locations trying just to do one assignment. Not much fun.
Yes, networking and sharing is part of our lives, but between Facebook, Linkedin, and MySpace, I would not give you a quarter for any. Linkedin, which my hospital will allow me to view, I find rather worthless and there are other job websites out there alot easier to use. MySpace is the best of the three, and that is sad in itself. I think of what we have learned in this course so far, I like the wikis to communicate within the library community. If you do not want to use your own email address, like yahoo, then tell everyone about your wiki.
So to the four questions at the end of the week:

• How can social networking be use by MLA to connect members - for upcoming events and changes in Mesh or such, yes it could be used. Should it be used with the three websites we were to explore, definitely not. Surely there can be a better way.
• Should your library have a Facebook or mySpace page? No, end of story.
• Are there privacy concerns for individuals when using social networking sites? Of course, there are privacy concerns for all of us. Being public servants our data is out there already. Just Google yourself and see what comes up. Try Ancestry.com and you may be surprised what is available.
• What did you like or not like about your experience with Facebook or MySpace. Well, I believe I have already answered that. It's all just a bad dream that I wish to forget.

The really sad part is that a few other of my colleagues have contacted me this week and are having as many problems as I have. One has even stated that she is also ready to quit also and so we may have started with over 700 of us, but how many will actually finish? Something to think about. We can only hope that the next weeks will be better.

Week 2 of MLA Web 2.0

Well, this has been different than the first week and I am not sure if I have accomplished everything as I have looked on the MLA Class pages of blogs and wikis and do not see myself added as I have seen others, so maybe I have not done everything, but I have tried. (Now is not this a long string of ideas put together in one sentence.) This week has been more of a trial as it has been Holy Week and my church commitments came first and so it slowed me down in getting this assignment done. I have enjoyed the mental exercises and can see a possibility in using wikis with my online catalog for the staff. I am thinking of adding it later, as I want to become more familiar with this resource, to the catalog page and then list directions for online searching, new arrivals of print and online books and serials, and leaving a place for others to add comments and ask questions.
I consider the blog my journal of activities and an information page. (Actually my hospital holds firewalls against my PubMed RSS feeds and so they cannot be searched unless I am at home, but you have heard of the firewall problems here on week 1.) The wiki is more like a bulletin board. It is in constant change and updating as information is added in. It is more for the quick look for the answer to a question than the blog where you read through a 'diary' of information that may not be pertinent to your needs. So on a blog I will be giving a more indepth explaination of a topic and the wiki will be the 'short and sweet' information to allow you to perform a function or get the information you need.

Activities at work and Week 1 of MLA Web 2.0

I must admit that when I started this week, I was not sure if I could finish this assignment for the MLA Web 2.0. At work they block YouTube and there are a number of firewalls that prohibit videos and other databases. One such database is MDConsult. Even though our hospital subscribes to this database, they have a firewall up so that off of our catalog, run by CyberToolsForLibraries, we cannot go out to MDConsult. This is very frustrating as CyberTools has put together a wonderful service to get us fulltext books and journals through their efforts in working with MDConsult, PubMed, and EBSCOhost. The support team at CyberTools is wonderful and stayed with me on the phone for over an hour helping me add this service to our catalog. Unfortunately when I actually tried it, the firewalls were up. I have then tried EBSCOhost and some of that does go through, but there is alot of work still to be done. I know CyberTools will be there with me to help until all of this is up and running. They are truly fabulous people!
As for learning how to set up a blog and add feeds to it, this is wonderful! I have had a good time in doing this and am anxious to show our staff that they also can do this. I think some of our doctors will go crazy in knowing they can do this from their offices and homes. This is what they truly want to do, get the information from their favorite journals as quickly and yet easily as possible.
I am speaking at Kent State University School of Library and Information Science at the class of Special Libraries in April and I am going to include blogging and RSS in my talk to show them how to do this and how this will make their lives easier, no matter what job position they will acquire.

Why I chose this title

I named this blog Phoenix Rising Librarian as it relates to the library I work in. It did not have a full time librarian and the librarian they brought in from another hospital came only once a week until her library stopped even that. She then had to call in all of her information to a volunteer, in his seventies, and he had to do all the work.
When I came three years ago the library still had a hand typed card catalog. Within three months, three other local hospital libraries and myself joined forces and with CyberToolsForLibraries created a union catalog for all of us. Since then we have been adding material, both book and journal, and also electronic links. The catalog has grown to add website/database pages, material request pages, and quick emails back to the librarian besides the print catalog. As the staff of the hospital is learning what is available, they are becoming more excited and are utilizing the library and its services more.
The Phoenix is rising and I hope in time will sing as the library becomes very much a part of the hospital staff services.