Thing 9.5: Image Generators

I took the basic picture from one of my Facebook photos and used the Mosaic Maker from this website : http://bighugelabs.com/

It is kind of fun, but I wish I could have chosen the background colors myself.

Thing 13 : Document Sharing

For my document, I wrote a summary of the history of one of my ancestors. I did allow anyone to edit. I can see one application we could use in the library. It would be nice for the staff to post a document that would allow collaboration; for example, directions on how to run bills on the library circulation software or how to open and close the library. As each person reads the document, he or she could make any changes or suggestions they think would help.

Thing 11 : Shortening a URL.

Here is a URL shortener for ArtStor, one of the databases at LFCC. http://bit.ly/VrKgC. I found shortening the URLs for databases to be extremely interesting and a lot of fun. But I can see the applications for working with students. It would be nice, if you needed to send a student or patron a link to an online article or to a particular website to send an email with the shortened link. I know I hate to copy and paste extremely long URLs myself.

Thing 10 : Searching Twitter

I had set up a Twitter account a while back and now hardly ever check it. One reason is that a lot of creepy people wanted to follow my tweets and that concerned me. For that reason alone, I would be a little skeptical of using it as a research tool. Many of the posts out there would not be useful to the average researcher looking for accurate data. However, I can see researchers in the fields of sociology, psychology, and possibly history mining tweets to find the reactions of the common people to historical events. I checked out the recent topics of BP oil spill and Joran Van Der Sloot. Although it is interesting to look through a few of the observations made by fellow Tweeters, I do not think there is much in the way of factual material there. The one Tweeter I saw that really displays why students should be careful of using Twitter as fact purported to be the PR dept. of British Petroleum but was actually someone only using the account name to give his opinions on the spill.

Embedded Librarians - Inside Higher Ed

I found this while on Facebook on Shenandoah University Libraries. It is an interesting article although most community college libraries would not be able to do everything that John Hopkins is trying to do. Still, I like the idea of the library going where the students and professors are. This helps both groups see what the library can do for them first hand.


Embedded Librarians - Inside Higher Ed

Thing 9: Photos and Images

This took a lot longer to set up than I anticipated due to a dead battery in my camera and a new cell phone whose features I am not used to! Our own community college uses it to post photos taken at events such as graduation and our 40th anniversary picnic last Saturday.

As far as using it for our library, I think it would not be useful unless we took more than ten or twenty photos of an event. It would be far easier to post photos in Facebook.


This particular set of photos shows our current showcase display titled "You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover." I apologize for reversing the order of the photos but I could not figure out on Flickr how to change them permanently. The display itself was done by our Library Director, David Gray, and highlights a small part of his book collection. If you can, take a close look at some of the titles. http://www.flickr.com/photos/52475763@N08/sets/72157624943171099/