Give It up | Daniel Boone Regional Library | BiblioCommons

Give It up | Daniel Boone Regional Library | BiblioCommons

Here's my practice using the sharing tools on the new catalog. This is the book I'm currently reading. The author spends a year giving up one thing for a month. It's not so terribly inspiring for me since it seems to be aimed at people who are living a Sex in the City lifestyle. Most of the things she's given up so far are either things I don't do in the first place (daily meeting with friends and associates for "drinks") or things that wouldn't affect me that terribly if I gave them up (my cell phone.)

So awesome!

I am totally in love with bibliocommons! I don't know if I can choose a favorite part, so I'll just start rambling about all of it.

The mark for later function is wonderful. My list already has a dozen things on it. Can't wait to read 'em all!

The catalog shows you other lists that the book your looking at has been saved to. Therefore, you can quickly see what other books in the same vein people think are good stuff. This can also help you find people with similar reading interests that you might want to follow. I understand that this will get recommendations to appear on your page based on what the people you follow are reading. I haven't found anybody to follow yet, though, so I haven't tested that part out first hand.

I read Lauren's blog on this subject and I have to agree with her that I'm a little weirded out by having everything you rate, comment on, tag, etc. saved to your public collection. I didn't really get that when I started starring and tagging things. Hello, my name is Heather and I'm a pagan. Please don't judge me because I gave 5 stars to a book on witchcraft. :-)

Overall, I'm so excited about this awesome new tool and I think our patrons are going to love it, too.

RSS Feeds

Here are the three feeds I subscribed to. The first two are both from the Library Journal. I figure they might help with reader's advisory type stuff and with selecting books for my homebound folks. The third is Awful Library Books because I like funny stuff. :)


Library Journal - Genre Fiction Reviews
Library Journal - Prepub Alerts
Awful Library Books

Revolution Health

For this assignment I visited Revolution Health. I thought it was a very good website with a lot of great information. It has articles on many different conditions as well as information on different drugs and treatments. Along with just the basic information on medications there are related articles, as well. For instance, I found an article comparing and contrasting the different types of birth control to help the reader weigh the pros and cons of each method and decide on one that's right for them. There are also useful tools for health and fitness related issues, such as a calorie tracker. It has a healthy recipe section which I enjoyed looking at. You can enter in your zip code and it will list all of the doctors and hospitals in your area. In this section you can even rate and leave reviews of the doctors. There is a personal health record section for which you must create a free account. I didn't have time to check that out, but I plan on doing so. And, as with most web 2.0 sites, there is a community section with different blogs, forums and groups for the users.

Overall, I found this to be a useful website that I can easily see being helpful in the library setting. It would be a great place to point any patron with health or fitness related questions.

Easy & Hard

Ok, our first blog post is supposed to be about which of the 7 1/2 habits of lifelong learners are the easiest and the hardest for us. I suppose the easiest for me is probably number 6, using technology to your advantage. I'm pretty familiar with most of this kind of stuff, at least in a passing acquaintance sort of way. There is probably a lot out there that's not on my radar yet, but that's why I'm doing this training, right? Aaaannnnddd....the hardest for me would probably be number 7, teaching and mentoring others. I'm terrible at explaining when someone doesn't know how to do something, especially computer related. I tend to be more of a "Here, just move over for a minute and I'll do it for you," kind of helper...which probably doesn't actually help much in the long run. So, there you have it. My best and worst.

hjp