Thing 8: Tabbed Browsing and Add-Ons in Firefox

Firefox is a free-ware browser for the Internet. Currently in its third version, this program can be used not only to navigate the Internet but also to organize your searches. Let’s start with a video to give a little background on some of the things Firefox can do for us. It’s a quick introduction, don’t worry if you don’t get everything. It's called Why Firefox 3 is Awesome and How to Make it Better.

In that video, Jimmy refers to Tab Mix Plus. This is an add-on that, as you saw in the video, is pretty cool. To get to that add-on, follow this link and PLAY!

The next two videos tell us more specifics on the current version of Firefox: 3.6. I especially like the recalling sites features that work by typing in just a little bit of the site name or by going to History in your toolbar and clicking on "recently closed tabs." Wow, that's saved me several times just putting this module together! :-) Once I downloaded the Tab Mix Plus, however, I found I could add an icon for recently closed Windows right onto my navigation bar which really is not saving me a lot of time!

Add-Ons: Besides being a general gateway to the Internet, Firefox allows us to customize our browsing to best suit our needs. 'Tab browsing" and using Add-ons help to keep us moving through the Internet quickly and efficiently. The "Tab Mix Plus" extension discussed in the first video is one add-on you can use to help in your searching. Add-Ons are ways of customizing your browser to add specific features or to make your browsing easier for you. As we saw above, the Tab Mix Plus is an add-on that customizes the way we view Internet sites. There are literally thousands of add-ons so it is impossible to list them all here. Go to the Firefox site for a full list of add-ons.

Some Add-Ons of particular interest to youth services librarians:

• Zotero (an organizer for bibliographic citations)
• and Converter (converts units of measurement, e.g. Celsius/Fahrenheit, pounds/kilos, inches/meters, etc.)

Some thoughts:

• So what's your preference? Internet Explorer or Firefox and why?
• Are you the kind of person who likes to customize everything, like Firefox allows you to, or does it even matter to you?

Thing 7: Wikis

Plays well with others

picture this scenario: you're working on a team with lots of ideas blipping back and forth between group members in the form of conversations, comments, documents, and revisions. Now imagine an online work space where team members can share and edit documents together while maintaining continuous communication. Sounds like a great way to tackle a team project, right? Many people are discovering that wikis are an efficient and rewarding technology platform that enables collaborative work environments. Wikipedia is probably the most famous wiki workspace, but wiki platforms are versatile and powerful enough to adapt to large and small-scale projects. For youth services librarians, wikis provide a number of features that can be used to share ideas, generate content, facilitate feedback, lead discussions, and bring peer production & learning into one localized web space. As you all have figured out by now, this 21 Things For 21st Century Kid Libs program is using a wiki format (in conjunction with the blog) as our means of communication among the participants.

So what exactly is a wiki? Essentially, it is a simple website that allows multiple participants to easily edit and contribute content. The word "wiki" means "fast" in Hawaiian, and the developer of the first wiki, Ward Cunningham, borrowed the name from the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle Bus" at Honolulu International Airport. It is a great mental metaphor for the technology since a wiki is like a speedy and simple form of transport that connects people together with ideas. Since that first WikiWikiWeb launch in 1995, numerous wiki-hosting platforms have become available that allow users to create free, collaborative web-spaces that do not require technical skills. PBWorks, Wikia, and WikiSpaces are some popular ones that will let you get your wiki on in just a few clicks.

Starting a wiki can be as easy as:

1. Providing an email address to a wiki hosting site
2. Signing up as an administrator
3. Inviting people to your space

It is also a good idea to spend some time planning out a simple structure for your wiki content.Wikis that are successful at generating community contributions are also ones in which users can easily navigate between topics and conversations. The Front Page of a wiki is often used for visitors to orient themselves by providing a description, context, and a list of sub-topics.

Many wikis focus around a specified topic, a community group, or a collaborative project. As with any group project, a little bit of structure goes a long way to create an environment for success. Don't worry - as children's librarians, this is an area where your planning and organizing skills can really shine.

Here's a short video from Common Craft to get started:

Some wikis to explore
Since they are so easy to use, wiki platforms lend themselves to many creative uses. As mentioned above, librarians and others have been taking advantage of the collaborative possibilities to provide rich resources for those who serve youth audiences. Check out these "wiki-tastic" examples:

• The ALSC Wiki is a great resource to discuss different topics within children's library services with peers across the country. In addition to being a portal to the array of ALSC interest group wikis, there is a range of topics to refer and contribute to.
• The Child Lit Wiki describes itself as "a resource for recommending books to children, based on the books they have already enjoyed."
• Library Success: a Best Practices Wiki is a great example of a community wiki geared towards - you guessed it - librarians. Created by Meredith Farkas, author of the blog "Information Wants to be Free," the Library Success wiki is home to posts about management, leadership, reader's advisory, programming for kids and teens, gaming, and much more.
• Teacher Librarian Wiki focuses on topics to support school librarians, and is moderated by Joyce Valenza.
• The New Mexico State Library website has a comprehensive list of blog, wiki, and listserv resources for youth services librarians.

Now it's time for you to get your wiki on! Create a wiki of your own. This can be done by visiting one of the free wiki platforms: PBWorks, Wikia, or WikiSpaces or a another one of your own choice. We want you to get a feel for the navigation and layout of a wiki so go ahead and pick any topic that sounds fun, silly, strange, super, or wacky. It could be as simple as planning a menu for your next summer BBQ, talking about some books you've read, or sharing a list of movies you want to see. Invite a few people (some of the CATC committee members or other participanats!) to your wiki to add, edit, or comment on a post. Use the sidebar and front page as a way to display a hyper-linked table of contents to your pages.

If you need more of a challenge, or already have an existing wiki, try changing the visual theme of your site. You can also use the opportunity to embed a video, or post some images, and add multimedia content.

Most importantly, have fun and don't forget to blog about your new-found wiki wisdom! Some questions to ponder to get your brain moving:

• How could your library use a wiki?
• Did you find using the wiki difficult or pretty intuitive? Would training staff or the public to use a wiki present challenges?
• Keep wikis in mind for Week 8 when we talk about Google Docs - there are some interesting similarities and differences to note.

Week 3

Welcome to Week 3! How's it going? Have you cracked up at yourself yet? Messing around with some of these tools can sometimes cause some hilarious self-reflection. When I participated in one we did here in my county, I had quite a time trying to figure out our downloadables and e-audio. Which, by the way, I never could figure out! But I hope there's some fun and laughter mixed in with your learning!

This week, we're looking at wikis (the word wiki comes from the Hawaiian word for quick!) and Firefox which may be a new browser to some of you. These two tools offer some great shortcuts for things we do as children's librarians every day!

Set aside some time to blog about your experiences this week and be in touch with your mentors if you need help or have any questions! We are happy to provide guidance!

Thing 6: Tracking Your Library

Before we even try to track anything, let's define what Google Alerts, Social Mention and Addictomatic are and how to get them:

• Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:
• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on an industry
• getting the latest on an event
• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams, librarians, politicians, authors and more.
• Social Mention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about your library, your school, your newest additions to your collection, or any topic across the web's social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
• And Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It's the perfect tool to keep your patrons up with the hottest topics at your school library.

Now, let's sign up for a Google Alerts which is the same as creating an alert to follow. Head over to Google Alerts to create or follow a Google Alert. You'll need to sign-in to your google account; if you do not have one, create one. Google accounts are free and can be accessed from any computer. Once you have signed in, this is the page that you will see:

You can enter a specific search term, such as Chicago Public Library. The screen looks like:

You can edit the way you receive information about Chicago Public Library; each area has a pull-down menu with the following options:

• Type includes: News, Blogs, Videos, Discussions and Everything.
• Frequency is either Once a day or Once a week
• Email length is Up to 20 results or Up to 50 results
• Deliver to: Email or Feed

The Chicago Public Library Google Alert appears in your mailbox and looks like this:

Now, how do you use Social Mention? Let's sign up for an account which is exactly like Google Alerts but for social media. Head over to Social Mention to the home screen which looks like this

You need to choose either to Create an alert or Get the widget. If you choose an alert, the following screen is what appears:

As you can see, the type of feed you receive ranges Blogs to Q&A to All. If you want to add a widget to your site or blog, the screen that appears is:

Adding a widget is easy too, just follow the simple directions.

And finally, Addictomatic which instantly creates a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic. You can follow your library and the page that is created looks like:

If you don't like how the page is displayed, you can customize it. Bookmark it and you're done.

Some things to think about:

• Could this type of tracking affect grants libraries might apply for?
• How could these kinds of statistics inform new library services or marketing approaches?
• Could these sites be included in a library staff member's job description?

Thing 5: Delicious

And here we are at Thing 5 already! And it's Delicious! Delicious is a social bookmarking site that allows you to store all your bookmarks in one place – accessible from any computer or device with internet access. It also allows you to tag your bookmarks and share sites with others on Delicious. Many of us are still saving our bookmarks via the browser which means they reside on the computer you are using at the time. But bookmarking through Delicious allows you to access your bookmarks regardless of the computer you are using. Tagging allows you to organize your bookmarks in a more accessible and more relevant manner than folders. And sharing bookmarks with others allows for project collaboration, networking and mentoring.

To really get a glimpse of the power of Delicious in a library setting, read Making Your Library More Delicious by Ellie Dworak and Social Bookmarking and Tagging Boost Participation by By Melissa L. Rethlefsen.

Commoncraft does a great job of explaining in simple terms what it's all about (note that the current delicious website is delicious.com)


Here's a great overview and how-to register and use Delicious (though this is an older video, it's still a very helpful overview of how to use this great tool!)


Two examples of Delicious accounts relevant to library services for children:

• La Grange Park Library
• Holdrege Library Kids

Now it’s time to create your own Delicious account. Start saving some websites you visit frequently via Delicious. Try importing bookmarks from your browser.

Some questions to ponder:

• How might you use Delicious in your daily work activities?
• How can you use Delicious to collaborate with colleagues?
• How could Delicious help students who use your library?
• How can they use it for homework?
• What about parents and teachers?
• What about for recreational purposes?
• How can students use Delicious for group projects or social networking?

Thing 4: Sign up for Google Reader and Learn about RSS!

Congratulations, bloggers - now that you've got your own blogs up and running, it's time to learn about RSS and sign up for Google Reader. You've heard about it, right? As you begin reading more blogs (and you will!) you may find it difficult to keep up with all the new posts. Or, perhaps your staff or library starts blogging — how will you manage to visit so many different blogs on a daily basis? Fortunately, there is another tool that has changed the way we receive new online content (not just from blogs). It’s called RSS. Wikipedia says it stands for real simple syndication and it's a cool tool that you need to be using.

This week we’ll look at subscribing to blogs and websites and using an aggregator to manage those subscriptions. After setting up an RSS account, you will subscribe to your favorite blogs and other sites that publish new content on a regular basis (like news headlines). You could subscribe to as many blogs as you like – even hundreds – but all you'll have to do is visit one site and be instantly updated on all that is new on all your favorite blogs.

Watch this video (another from the great CommonCraft Team) to understand more about how RSS works.



There are a number of RSS services, Newsgator, Bloglines, RSS Bandit, and more. But with Google Reader, there are so many options to share, play, and favorite certain feeds. Watch the video below to find out how to get started.

Now go out into the big world wide web and get your Google Reader started!

When you set up your blog, we recommended a few cool blogs - you can subscribe to those, your own favorites, or try one of these:

• Bees Knees Reads (a whole blog about great picture books)
• A Chair, A Fireplace and a Tea Cozy (another book, music and movie blog written by a witty and passionate librarian)
• The ALSC blog (if you didn't know about it already)
• Away to Garden (fun and informative gardening blog)
• David Lee King (digital services librarian in Kansas who's got loads of ideas about the changing role of libraries)
• Tame the Web (Michael Stephens' fun library blog about technology)

Additionally, most non-blog websites now offer RSS capability too like the NYtimes where you can subscribe to particular sections of the paper and CNN as well as libraries, like Multnomah County Public Library's Catalog (captured in this photo) where you can subscribe to your personal interests as formats are added to the catalog. I actually subscribe to several of these just to stay on top of new books!

You can, of course, subscribe to this blog and since we have a slew of people participating in this national 23 Things project, but most importantly, we'd like you to subscribe to some of your fellow participants' blogs. We'll be emailing you a list of all the participants' blogs when we get them.

Need more of a challenge? If you're already using an RSS Reader or are just one of those types, try creating folders and organizing some of your feeds. I have folders for technology, children's literacy and books, cooking, gardening and so on.

Don't forget to blog about your experience with each thing! Some questions to ponder:

• Did you run into any speed bumps setting up your account?
• How do you feel about this new approach to customizing your news and information?
• It's easy to feel overwhelmed, how do you handle info-overload when you're feeling bogged down?
• Do you think RSS may help with that feeling?

Week 2

So, how was your first week? Some of this stuff can get overwhelming, but it has major potential for F-U-N too! We have quite a list of Things for you during this 2nd week of activity. Don't panic! We are asking you to sign up for Google Reader and Delicious accounts (they're both delicious really!) and learn about tracking your library online. These 3 tools are powerful and have the potential to change the way you work and live! So enjoy!

Be sure to post about your experiences with each thing and be in touch with your mentor if you have trouble or any questions! We're here for you!