Week 6 Play Week

Table of Contents 13. Play around with an online image generator or create an avatar. Estimate of time: 20 minutes to listen to a podcast and create an avatar of yourself or generate an image Overview Benefits Perspectives Discovery Reflections: Localize your learnings Challenge 14. Take a look at LibraryThing and catalog some of your favorite books. Estimate of time: 30 minutes Overview Benefits Perspectives Discovery Reflections: Localize your learnings Challenge 15. Roll your own search tool with Rollyo. Estimate of time: 1 hour Overview Benefits Perspectives Discovery Reflections: Localize your learnings Challenge

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13. Play around with an online image generator or create an avatar.

Estimate of time: 20 minutes to listen to a podcast and create an avatar of yourself or generate an image

Overview

Find a few fun online image generator to play around with and write a post in your blog about one of your favorites and display the result. Often adding the image you mocked up to your blog is as simple as copying and pasting code that the page provides. If not, you may just need to right click on the image and then save it to your hard drive before using Blogger's image button to add it to your post.

Benefits

Great freedom to be someone or something else. Fun way to share an image of yourself with others. You can create images for library/information center promotions, enewsletters, and more.

Perspectives

This is a fun exercise. Try theses sites for beginners to find one you like:

• Meez
• ImageChef
• Yahoo! Avatars
• Big Huge Labs
• Customer Sign Generator

Discovery

1. Listen to this one minute podcast by Helene Blowers.
2. Play around with some image generators and find one that you like.
3. Post the result of your discovery process in your blog. Note: Be sure to include a link to the image generator itself, so other participants can discover it too.

Reflections: Localize your learnings

What did you think of this exercise? Was it fun or frustrating?

Challenge

Create an avatar in Second Life: http://secondlife.com/. You'll need to download the SL software and have a fast connection.

14. Take a look at LibraryThing and catalog some of your favorite books.

Estimate of time: 30 minutes

Overview

LibraryThing was developed by booklovers, for booklovers. It lets you quickly and painlessly create an online catalog of your personal book collection. And what makes it even more special is its social networking component - once you've entered your books, you get to see everyone else's via book titles, authors, and the tags you assign to each entry. Libraries have started using LibraryThing, too. Small libraries are using LibraryThing to catalog their collections. Libraries are using the LibraryThing widget on their web pages to recommend books and list new titles.

Benefits

Catalog your personal or your professional collection and, if you like, network with others who share a similar taste in books. Cataloging is very easy with the ability to import from so many free sources. There are over 24 million books in LibraryThing. 

Perspectives

Would this be useful for a special library instead of a commercial ILS or an open-source ILS such as Koho? 

Discovery

1. Open a new window and navigate to LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/). "Take the tour," to read a little bit about the different features of LibraryThing.
2. Sign up for a free account.
3. Add 5 books to your library
   • Just type in the title, author, or ISBN (a nice feature for those of you who have bar-code scanners at your desk...), and then select your book from the list that pops up on the right. You can search Amazon, the Library of Congress or 252 other world libraries. Import from anywhere.
   • If your book or edition does not appear, you can build a new record for it from scratch by clicking "Add the book manually"
4. Tag your books
   • You can add tags to your books when you are building your library, or by clicking the pencil icon next to the record.
5. Write reviews of your books
   • To write a review of a book, you have to click on the 'pencil' icon next to the book on your library page.
6. Already have a LibraryThing account and want to try something new? Give Shelfari (http://www.shelfari.com/) or GuruLib (http://www.gurulib.com/) a try.
7. Blog about your findings and be sure to link to your LibraryThing catalog.

Reflections: Localize your learnings

• Would you consider using this tool for a real library? Why or why not? 

Challenge

• Add a widget to display titles that are in your catalog or install an LT Search box on your blog. (See Library Thing Extras)

15. Roll your own search tool with Rollyo.

Estimate of time: 1 hour

Overview

Rollyo* is a Single Site Search released in 2005 by Yahoo that allows users to take up to 25 urls and create a search tool (what Rollyo calls a Searchroll) that searches only those domains whether from websites or blogs, powered by Yahoo. Users can also share their "rolled" engines with other contributors, also HTML is available to post a mini search box to a user's website. You can edit and modify your Searchroll at any time.

Rollyo is a Single Site Search, which is particularly useful if you're always going back to the same sites over and over again like Dictionary.com, Amazon.comor Ebay.com you can create a searchroll that includes just that single site so all your searches are in one place. You can always expand any search to include the whole Web. With Rollyo you can search one site, the whole web, and everything in between. Remember, if the page hasn't been crawled by Yahoo, Rollyo will not find it.

Benefits

• Folksonomy enthusiasts will be happy since it's possible to "tag" your Searchrolls for better retrieval. All rolls can be marked public so they can be seen by all Rollyo users.
• A good use of Rollyo is to search the latest news articles and blog posts, giving you up-to-the-minute search results from the news sources you know and trust when it comes to a particular topic or area of interest.
• I liked that I could search the web and blogs without having to go through a lot of ads and false drops.

Perspectives

• Go to the Rollyo site and read " About Rollyo"
• Check out the news buzz about Rollyo

Discovery

1. Try gathering 25 or fewer urls that contain content of interest that you search frequently and click save. It's that simple. There are no limitations about what you can create a specialized/target search tool about.

Here's a simple example suggested by Gary Price. A user might want to create a focused search (aka Searchroll) about meteorology/weather.
With Rollyo, all they have to do is find and enter the urls of a site or sites of that focus on the topic.

• http://www.noaa.gov
• http://www.wildwildweather.com
• http://ggweather.com/
• http://www.worldweather.org
• http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/

Non-commercial web directories like the Librarians' Index to the Internet, RDN, and Infomine are great places to begin.

Then, Rollyo allows you to name your focused search database (Searchroll), let's call ours Weather Search and now, when you click search, they're only searching the content in domains they listed.

2.  Check out the Rollyo dashboard to  see all the pre-selected choices.

3. It is also possible to add "searchrolls" to the Firefox search bar and to make it Firefox's default search engine with a drag and drop - try it.

Reflections: Localize your learnings

Use your blog now to describe:

• What you liked about Rollyo?
• How do you think you can use Rollyo in your personal or professional life?

Challenge

Share your Rollyo "Searchrolls" with friends and colleagues. Explore also: Google Co-opand Eurekster.