Peggy's Cove

Carnival Cruise to Canada

I was lucky enough to go on the Maryland Library Association's cruise to Saint John, New Brunswick and Halifax, Nova Scotia. We took a coach from Harford County and boarded in time for lunch in the Mediterranean Restaurant on deck nine, Lido. I thought at the time that I would never stoop so low as to walk around with soft serve frozen yogurt. Little did I know...
After lunch, we heard Eloisa James discuss her schizophrenic career as a Shakespeare scholar and lecturer and her success as a romance writer. She was funny and thought provoking.
We sailed out of New York City and left under extremely foggy conditions. We were glad to hear the fog horns from our stateroom balcony but a little disturbed to recognize that the soft tunes being piped into the deck five common area sounded an awful lot like the theme from Titanic.
On Sunday, we spent some quality time in the Black and Red Sea Lounge or as Michael Gannon called it, the floating brothel.
Storytelling from the Field: Unusual Library Experiences explored prison librarianship- Gleaner Shirley and Shirley Smith told us about their experiences in the Maryland Correctional Library, Carol Carman shared her experiences working in the Maryland Department of Legislative Services and Louise LeTendre shared her experiences as an Army Librarian in Vietnam and currently at Aberdeen Proving Ground.
Next, Michael Gannon had us laughing with Love and Death on the High Seas - A Readers' Advisory.
That night, we attended the Captain's Party and formal dinner. We librarians cleaned up nicely. We had a wonderful dinner.
The next day was sunny and our Monday and Tuesday shore excursions to Saint John and Halifax was the best weather the Atlantic Provinces has seen all summer. (Perry, our tour guide to Peggy's Cove told us so.) On Monday, I went on a small group tour of Saint John with Lance Timmons, a professional photographer and teacher who helped us improve our skills with his top photography tips. He also shared interesting facts about Saint John. His web site is
www.timmonsphotography.com
Remembering Lance's tips, I tried to be arty on our tour of Peggy's Cove, in Halifax the next day. You can see my stunning photo of the lighthouse at Peggy's Cove. Halifax is an interesting city with a lot of stories. More on that later.

Web 2.0 Awards

I discovered this nifty section of Merlin a while back and blogged about it. For the purposes of this assignment I explored the three sites listed for Music. I want to create a CD for my sister who will turn 50 in September and I am looking for songs that address growing older. I have already Googled this. I love the way I can type in some long, drawn-out query and Google almost always comes through with very satisfying results. I was directed to several wonderful collections of songs that were perfect.

I was not so impressed with the three music websites included here. I did not like the search strategies or the extremely limited selection of fairly mainstream artists. www.pandora.com was the most satisfying of the three, which is probably why they won the award. I guess I expected too much. All three sites allowed one to search by artist, song and keyword. I was just not satisfied with the result.

Patrons in the library could use these sites to try to jog their brains when trying to think of an artist or song. Pandora Radio will play while you work on another project, providing useful background music - as long as one wears headphones in the library.

Online Productivity Web-based Applications for Day-To-Day Use

Tools such as Zoho Writer www.zohowriter.com and Google Docs www.writely.com are incredibly useful to our clientele. Now our patrons can create resumes, save them to an on line source that is available at any computer through the web, easily post the resume to an online job application and never have to spend a dime on printouts, floppy disks or CDs. To quote Maryland Libraries Learning 2.0:

One large benefit to web-based applications it that they eliminate the need
to worry about different software versions or file types as you email documents
or move from PC to PC. Another bonus is that they easily accommodate
collaboration by allowing multiple users to edit the same file (with versioning)
and provide users the ability to save and convert documents as multiple file
types

Zoho ho

 Comparing Zoho Writer to Google Docs: I think I prefer the versitility of Zoho Writer but the beauty of both tools lies in the fact that it is free, on-line, readily available. 

To become familiar with Google Docs, I will tell you a little bit about my recent trip to Cape May, New Jersey. Visiting Cape May is always a highlight of Summer vacation. This year I was able to squeeze four days in - sandwiched between my Monday evening programming responsibilities and my Saturday to work. Vacation always seems so much more satisfying after you have busted your butt doing something and can completely and utterly give your self over to the time off.

It has been a cooking summer for me as I did the two Cooking Up A Storm programs for Middle Schoolers, the Meet An American Girl: Molly's Hawaiian Hula Party, and cooked the beef for our Volunteer Fiesta Party. What a surprising success we have had with our Middle School programming.

Anyway, back to Cape May. When I go for a week, I feel obligated to pack the bikes, plan the menu, bring projects and books, but this little four day jaunt was very unstructured. Even the things I thought I'd bring, I forgot. So I just enjoyed early morning walks, beach time, pool time, eating at wonderful (but pricey) restaurants, and shopping.

Restaurants we've enjoyed recently include Freda's, The Black Duck, Cape Orient and the Lobster House. www.capemaytimes.com has some useful info. I highly recommend drinks at Congress Hall and a bike ride to Sunset Beach.

Why Wiki ?

For thing #16, I found the following wikis extremely informative:

http://instructionwiki.org/Library_2.0_in_15_minutes_a_day

http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Several months ago, we decided to give wikis a try, and two extremely resourceful librarians set it up and we started using it. We thought it would be more useful than the constant flow of e-mail but we discovered early on that, unless we set the wiki up to notify us of new postings, we never looked at the wiki. We also thought that the page set up was difficult to use. Our branch wiki has been tweaked several times and we are now using it to build Branch Meeting Agendas, for Brunch Sign up and recipe posting and for Branch Happenings.

I much prefer e-mail for ease of use and quick turnaround time. I love my blog but find that often I write in a vacuum. I think I could really get hooked on My Space or Facebook, if any of my friends used this.