My Leaderboard of Google Reader Shared Feeds July 31, 2008

I saw this on The MLxperience and since I’m a huge fan of Google Reader Shared Feeds I wanted to play copycat.

At Louis Gray’s prompt, Tech bloggers have been analyzing their Google Reader sharing trends.

From my 366 subscriptions, over the last 30 days I read 5,984 items, starred 22 items, shared 73 items, and emailed 30 items.

You can find my Google Reader shared items link blog here, or see them included in my FriendFeed.

Here are my top 40 shared sites, though as you can see, after the top 7 everyone is tied with just 1. The link takes you to the feed, the grey arrow to the site.

Subscription	# Shared
CRAFT Magazine	4
What I Learned Today…	3
Cute Overload	3
The Steampunk Workshop	2
library riot	2
strange maps	2
iLibrarian	2
Revealed	1
I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?	1
Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women	1
Words For Nerds	1
blogwithoutalibrary.net	1
Librarian Avengers	1
(EL) lauren’s library blog	1
Open Sesame	1
LibraryBytes	1
Deep Sea News	1
Yestoknow	1
misc.joy	1
Zooillogix	1
librarian.net	1
LibraryStream	1
Official Google Blog	1
The Distant Librarian	1
Jason Puckett.net	1
I Tumbld…	1
Infodoodads	1
Lifehacker	1
LibrarianInBlack	1
Blog on the Side – Darlene Fichter	1
Presentation Zen	1
60 Second Science Video Podcast	1
Engadget	1

LibGuides – RSS vs. Links July 28, 2008

Just a quick FYI for anyone who was following along. After playing with delicious and the native LibGuides linking button I decided to stick with the LibGuides method. It allows tracking of outbound clicks as well as allowing a star rating and the ability to reorder the links.

Friday Link Round Up July 25, 2008

Thank your System Administrator!

• Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day!

Free access to books for students with visual disabilities

• Accessibility of Google Books

Cool things other libraries are doing

• The Dead Ends Don’t Justify the Means – “So basically, Sean Robinson at ACPL added a purchase request form to the search results page of the catalog so that if the Library doesn’t own the title the patron is looking for, she can immediately submit a purchase request.”
• Bibliocommons Goes Live! – Homegrown public catalog

Photos

• 25 Free Stock Photo Sites
• 17+ Things to Do with your Online Photos

Friday – A day in the life of a librarian July 18, 2008

Today is going to be an incredibly short post because I’ll be weeding at another campus most of the day.

Get in, morning routine.

Staff meeting. With Starbucks! Yum. Really good meeting. We get to hear what we’re all up to and learn a lot about all the different areas. It’s circulation and reference and management and we all report in on what we’re up to on all our different teams and things we’ve heard from other campuses. Very valuable.

Compile and send out Friday link round up.

Head out to one of our other campuses to weed.

Friday Link Round Up July 18, 2008

Web Design

• web design & scent
• Homepage Preferences

Technology

• Why Firefox is Your Friend When You’re Entering Data via Web Forms
• Bug Shooting – Poor Man’s Snag-it
• 50 Ways to use Social Media to Improve Marketing

Thursday – A day in the life of a librarian July 17, 2008

In a little later than normal this morning due to a personal appointment. Get the tea going and start in on accumulated emails. Set a reminder to set up for the Chem class that is coming in later.

Set up for the Chem class. My campus doesn’t have a separate room for instruction, so this involves pulling out our smart board and media cart, hooking them all up and letting students know there will be a class in that area soon. The Chem classes all go through the same tutorial. I’m there to get them started, hand out topics, and answer questions along the way.

The Chem class went super smoothly. Lunchtime.

Make copies of all the Chem handouts since I stole my office mate’s and she has to do the same thing later this afternoon.

New ordering deadlines for next fiscal year are out. Copy them into my work calendar. Copy the general academic calendar over too.

Read through the American Libraries Direct newsletter. Found another book to add to the order list.

Take care of a few more emails and off to St. Ed’s.

Wednesday – A day in the life of a librarian July 16, 2008

Got in and chatted with co-workers. This is actually a rarity for me. I like my coworkers, so it’s not them. I’m just not good at being social, but I try to work on it.

Check my email, load my morning coffee, log into my work Meebo and the IM a librarian Meebo, check in on my favorites folder in my reader, realize I haven’t made tea yet – get on that.

The big piles are gone, so I’m on to my list of things I had decided I’d deal with once I was back from ALA. I decide I’ll tackle weeding first since we’re doing a big push for that recently. I had started reviewing my areas before I left for ALA, but I recently got an email from our collection development team with a spreadsheet of all the items past the recommended age of my collection. Nice gentle reminder At first I’m scared that there are so many more items in RTF that are really old than I had, until I realize they’re including all the actual movies. Ha!

Satisfied with my weeding lists for RTF I move on to the real task – American History. We have Innovative Millennium, so my process is to do a create list for my fund (designated by iCode) with any field I might want to sort by, then just start deleting things I don’t want to weed – anything that was purchased in the last 5-10 years or written in the last 10. I’ll sort by total checkouts and delete popular items where the age of the item doesn’t really matter. Eventually I’ll winnow down the list to items I want to actually go look at. Then I’ll schedule a trip to each campus and go around with a book cart pulling items off the shelf. History is a lot harder to work on solely in Excel than RTF since the publication date is a lot less useful.

Next I prep and print the spreadsheets of what I want to look at. I have as a goal for next year getting the librarian laptops configured to have wireless and the iii interface so we can do this with barcode scanners, but for now it’s still paper.

Lunch – Went home for lunch with my sweetie today. Scanned a magazine article he was in for him and played a game I got for my birthday. A nice break.

Back at work, go through new emails, make another pot of tea. Work on the My Gmail approach post. Scheduled a meeting with the staff development team.

Look at my calendar to try to figure out when I can visit campuses to weed while listening to backlog of 60 second science podcasts.

Weeding schedule sorted and campus head librarians notified. On to working on my LibGuides.

I’m having a huge debate with myself on how to set up my LibGuides links. I could use the LibGuides add a link feature, which is perfectly nice and convenient. I could use delicious. I hadn’t really seen any reason to use delicious over the LibGuides tool until I realized today that my custom search engines are set up to search all the links off of my current recommended websites pages. That feature won’t really work on LibGuides, or at least it will get muddied up with extra links to leave comments, go to other guides, etc. If I run it through delicious I might be able to keep it a little cleaner. Or would it be just as muddied from the tags being links? Maybe I’d use the RSS page in the search engine? Another question – does using delicious and RSS bring in all your links, or just the most recent? If you happen to have answers – please share!

Decide to throw some links into delicious to play around and compare.

My Gmail approach July 16, 2008

I get a few people every now and then who ask me how I’ve set up Gmail to manage all of my accounts.

It took me a day or two to get everything migrated and organized, and it does have a couple of drawbacks, but I do love it.

Cons:

• Google has all your stuff – this is questionable on both ethical and practical levels. To address the practical aspect – I do back it up to my computer via Thunderbird when I remember, but I should do it every day. [ETA - I now backup automatically by having all of my computers running Google Gears.]
• Sometimes the main account address will sneak through in the header depending on what email client the receiver uses. It makes me wish I had set this all up through my elliecollier account rather than the account with the funny name I set up to amuse my brother. But at this point I don’t feel like investing the effort to make the switch.

Pros:

• One (web-based!) ring account to rule them all
• Google’s search functionality
• All the Gmail goodies – including mobile Gmail that works on my phone, grouping conversations, etc.

How I did it:

Under settings->accounts I set up all the accounts I wanted to monitor, including the “send mail as” options.

For my work email I used About’s How to Import Mail from Mozilla Thunderbird in Gmail to get all my old email into Gmail. There might be better options out now.

Then I ran gobs of filters to get labels on as much as possible. Some of the filters I just used to get initial labels on, others I’ve kept permanently. I also use tons of labels. In my personal account I have a label for each person I email regularly. In my work account I have labels for teams, projects, list servs, etc.

I also use Better Gmail, which gives me the multiple signatures for the various emails as well as the Folders4Gmail feature. I use this to chunk out some of the accounts – my personal email, my work email, and my personal blog email. Look through that Better Gmail link for all the goodies there are if you’re not familiar with it.

Work email skips the main inbox and goes right to the ACC tab. This is so I can check my email from my phone away from work and not be inundated with work email. While I’m at work, I live in the ACC section.

I also have my work email as the default “from” address. It means that sometimes friends accidentally get emails from my work address, but stops me from accidentally sending work emails from my personal address.

As for items getting lost once they’re off the front page, I rarely have a second page to my inbox. I try to keep it as empty as possible. If I can answer an email relatively quickly I do. If it doesn’t require any action from me, I label it and remove the acc label so it’s out of my ACC inbox. I skim list serv items and delete or archive them. If I’m overwhelmed with list items I go into the list’s label, select all the unread ones and remove the acc label so they’re out of my ACC inbox. Then I can go back to them when I have time. Once I have the quick stuff dealt with I tend to work top down through my email tackling the bigger projects.

I think that covers the basics. Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll update this post with more info.

ETA – Migrate All Your Old Gmail to a New Gmail Address from LifeHacker

Tuesday – A day in the life of a librarian July 15, 2008

Forgot to mention yesterday that this is part of the “A day in the life of a librarian” meme.

Started up Firefox with my Tuesday tabs, which includes an extra Meebo tab since I’m on IM reference this morning. Also added WordPress to my morning coffee plug-in so my blog will open every day this week. I got sucked into email right away without starting my tea. Time to rinse out my tea cup and remedy that.

Had three more journals in my inbox this morning, so decide to browse through them and send them on their way to the next in line. Skip between that and emails. Post a new training to my professional development blog. Info on tuition vouchers came in – decided to sign up for beginning woodworking.

Found some more books to add to my purchase list in American History from browsing the journals. Bookmarked them on Amazon since we don’t have our carts set up yet. (We’re switching systems.)

Finished the journals – back to sorting through my desk and intermittently checking email. Go through (very small) pile of business cards from ALA and send out emails. Sadly put aside the two I didn’t write notes on since I don’t know who they are or why I have their card – always write notes! Found one of them on Facebook, remember who she is. Yay technology.

Lunch

Process some gift books and replacement requests. Made a note to order replacements for a few damaged books when the funds reset. Sent some nice textbook donations to technical services for processing. Desk is finally started to look decent. Bookmarked another book that I’d gotten an advanced uncorrected proof of at ALA. Set the proof out on our freebies table along with some more bookmarks advertising our IM reference.

Found out I have to apply to ACC, submit my transcripts and meet with an adviser before I can register for classes. Unofficial copies are OK, but neither of my schools offer those online. I’ll have to check my files at home.

Coordinate the staff development committee’s selection of our team leader and schedule a face to face to hammer out our goals for the upcoming year.

File away a few more things lying around that don’t need to be out and about.

Decide to read as much of my little pile of “to read” paper items as I can before it’s time to head out.

Tonight I work my night job – hourly reference at St. Edward’s University. If I’m not helping students, I catch up on library blogs or articles and select the items for the weekly link round up that I send out as part of my Staff Development activities at ACC.

Monday – A day in the life of a librarian July 14, 2008

Get in, turn on my computer and go start water for tea. Open Firefox and Twirl. Load my Morning Coffee (a Firefox add on that lets you choose pages to open on a given day). For Monday that means my college’s homepage, Gmail (I run all my accounts through Gmail), my work calendar, Meebo, and Pandora. Those are every day. On days I’m on IM duty two Meebo pages open and on Friday Wired’s Geekapedia opens for some fun reading.

Check my calendar to see I have a meeting at 10am at another campus, set a reminder to ping me at 9:15 so I have time to double check the best scooter route over there. (I love Google maps’ drag and drop route and street view for this.)

First task – email, also the blogs in my “favorites” folder and my friend’s shared items (both nearly all library related, though a comic may slip in…) It being Monday there’s not too much accumulated yet, so it’s a pretty quick task.

After email I decided to go through some of the things lying around my desk, but stop because I ran into my trusty reminder note – Monday – send out “This week in Staff Development” – so off to write that. There actually isn’t anything this week, but I’ve started doing two weeks at a time and there is something next week. I check the Google calendar I’ve created for this as well as our internal wiki.

That sent I go back to the desktop tidying. This includes some filled order forms – I go through them and sort by whether they’ve been acquired, back ordered, or canceled. I’ll come back to them once the budget resets with the new fiscal year to see if I can get any of the ones that had problems. Or I’ll pass them on to the next bibliographer if our collection areas get shuffled. Right now I have American History and Radio-Television-Film (which is what my undergrad degree is in).

Time to head to the meeting. It’s about redesigning our current information literacy tutorial (the Info Game) that’s taken by all of our Comp I students. We’ve got two librarians working on it along with an instructional design specialist and a multimedia developer. It was a good meeting, we iron out a few structural things. Now I have to do some content things and send off our text to the multimedia developer to get working on the code.

Lunchtime.

Check in on email and tweets that have accumulated while I was out.

One of the emails is setting up a meeting to discuss a draft report that I realize I haven’t finished my section of, so I’m off to work on that. It’s part of the Transforming Texas Libraries project. (wiki) (blog)

With my rough draft a little more polished I went back to the Info Game to send out what we’ve done so far to the multimedia developer.

Checked my campus mail and got my mileage reimbursement paperwork, so I went down to the cashier’s to pick that up. Yay $. Also, that reminded me to put today’s trip on this month’s form.

Also got another batch of processed order forms, sorted those.

Winding down and seeing that my work day is almost over, peruse through our library copy of Library Journal so I can pass it along the chain. Found two American history books to add to next year’s order. (Next fiscal year that is, which starts next month.)