A del.icio.us time in Monterey

I had the pleasure of spending a few days in Monterey, California recently. For those of you who haven't been there, its a beautiful area of CA. I drove up from LA through the Carmel (wine country) area. If I hadn't been driving - I would have been tempted to stop at some of the dozens of wineries that advertised their tasting rooms. But I passed them up and 340 miles later, arrived safe and sober. Monterey is on the coast and otters, sea lions, and lots of birds hang out by the shore and on/over and around the wharf. You can eat at any number of (overpriced) restaurants and watch the sea lions frolic right outside the window.

And oh yeah, in addition to communing with the sea lions, I hung out with hundreds of other shore-loving creatures, the techie-librarians. Internet Librarian met once again in Monterey. I learned about many new online tricks of the trade and places to be on the net. They are still buzzing about blogs (been there, doing that) and wikis (trying to do that.) There were amusing discussions about MySpace and FaceBook. One of the new library catch-phrases is to "meet the patrons where they are" Some librarians strongly felt that because many of our younger patrons hang out in MySpace and FaceBook, that libraries should set up a presence there as well. Others felt just as strongly that trying to make librarians look cool and hip would just end up making us look foolish at best and creepy at worst. Any opinions out there in the blogosphere?

One tool that I did come away excited about, was del.icio.us This is a social bookmarking site which means that you can annotate, tag, and share your bookmarks. My eyes had just about started glazing over, when the presenter mentioned that you can import your bookmarks into a webpage through rss feeds. Now this should make my life easier! I converted our old digital resource page to a del.icio.us rss feed page. Now whenever I come across a web site that I want to add to that page, I just click on the tag button on my toolbar, add my keywords, and the new site will appear on our page. I don't have to manually edit and upload the pages. If you're interested, you can check out the things I've bookmarked or if you have a del.icio.us account, you can send me suggestions (shery_the_librarian)

Another intriguing program is SecondLife. This is a virtual world where you can build a 3-D space where "avatars" can visit and interact. Any SecondLifers out there? This isn't tops on my "to-do" list, but I would love to investigate the possibilities for our library. Some schools are starting to hold distance education classes in these virtual spaces.