With all the doom and gloom, it’s going to feel really good to see old friends and talk about strategies for the future. If you’re going to be in the LA area on Halloween weekend, come by the Uncon! It’s only $20, more than I would’ve liked but hey, can’t win ‘em all. I personally want to talk about how librarians should view themselves as masters of our discipline, and that we should be creating and promoting our work as such in our institutions. It all goes back to Michael Wesch. I wish I could be his research assistant! I need a little digital anthropology know-how as I think it would be a perfect complement to the study of information literacy and information seeking behavior (distinctly librarian fields of expertise).

Ahhhh (sigh, not scream). I already feel better about my future prospects. Imagine what venting to a whole group would feel like!

Now that I’m a real librarian,  I’ve been having a different perspective on students. One of the people I really admire when it comes to understanding students is Michael Wesch. I would move to Kansas to work with this guy. Unfortunately, they don’t have a Ph.D program. Since many of you have been telling me to put more than words on the blog, here are some videos made by Wesch that really should be watched by every academic librarian.

And if that’s not enough, you can watch him speak at LOC about YouTube.

When we’re thinking about technology, its always important to think about the students without access, who do not posses the tech literacy so many people assume they have.

Ok, and one cat video. It’s old to all of us in the cat world, but I would hate for anyone not to have seen this video:

So which jobs sites should you subscribe to? I started at this site, 100+ Job Resources for Librarians. It took a bit of time, but I ended up finding a bunch of websites that were relevant to me (academic librarianship). So once you get to a website you want to syndicate, say LISjobs.com you will find an icon that looks like this:

Usually it will say “Subscribe to this page” or something like that. At that point you click on it, and it will give you the option of choosing the reader of your choice. Now keep in mind that not all readers are available on all sites (correct me if I’m wrong here people!). There are some websites that use Twitter like Get Archivist Jobs or LibGIG (see, I told you twitter was cool). You can even get each new post texted to your phone. I found all of the job websites either through that initial page or just through some Google searching.

OK,  I don’t know everything about job searching or RSS feeds, but I have been getting around 15-30 job postings a day in my reader based on the number and type of websites I’ve chosen. If you need help, let me know. I’ve been setting up RSS feeds for all my friends lately so I’m pretty good at it at this point.

One other point. I also use my Google Reader to keep up with library blogs, news sources, crafting blogs, etc, etc, etc. It’s awesome!

Then I started my reference desk shift where another first year asked for the whole orientation and again, he asked me how I became a librarian, etc, etc. Oh, and last week another first year asked me about being a librarian. They even asked me to compare Google to the databases. Dream students! I love that they are thinking about these issues.  And it’s great to see students coming to me for an introduction to the library. It reaffirms my belief that academic libraries, and libraries in general, are still very relevant.

On other library related news, I would encourage my cohort of library school students to check out SJSU SLIS student podcasts on iTunes. I wish we had a class like this at UCLA. Just do a search of Library 2.0 in iTunes and you’ll find it easily. They also have an accompanying blog called Cool Tools for Library 2.0 with cool screencasts. Very cool.Listening to the SLIS’s podcast I learned about a lot of cool stuff which I will blog about in the future.

This past week I was preparing a sample web resource and I found the aweseomest web app, CaptionTube. It works with youtube which lets you upload captions. First you make a youtube video (for my video, I made a Jing video – had to upgrade to Pro because the swf file of regular Jing is not supported by YouTube or Vimeo). Then get a CaptionTube account (free and easy). Pull your YouTube video onto CaptionTube and start captioning! I would recommend working from a script as it will make it much easier (I learned the hard way). It’s all very intuitive and easy to do, especially if you already have the text written out.

I’m glad YouTube has HD now because the regular quality really wasn’t cutting it as far as Jing videos go. I was going to host on Vimeo but they said they have no plans to provide any captioning services anytime soon. BOOO! So dissapointed by Vimeo. Ok, people send me cool stuff and make podcasts for me to listen to!! I will have plenty of time come graduation!

Also, another thought about my first post… For my internship I updated the UCLA website Bruin Success with Less Stress which covers a lot of stuff like plagiarism, file sharing, IP, etc. In the file sharing section I listed a bunch of free content sites to discourage students from sharing content via things like Napster (remember those days? thanks Metallica, particularly Lars). Anyway, lists of free content should be posted widely in dorms (or the library, why not?) to discourage on-campus file-sharing while making students aware of hours and hours of procrastination fodder, a topic already taken up by other librarians.

I noticed the use of a new-to-me video hosting website when reading one of my favorite blogs, Vegan Yum-Yum, called Vimeo. Take a look. If websites could listen to music, this one would totes love the Shins. Anyway, I just bought a Flip Camcorder to help me with my portfolio presentation (it’s on Friday, I have no fingernails left to bite!). I’m going to try Vimeo next week to host the video of my new series, Cat Battles. Don’t worry, it’s just my cats being playful and hilarious. I wish Manny were here to video tape

Ok everyone, EXPLORE! And tell me new things.

What I’m really digging right now is Internet TV – I’m not sure if that’s the technical term for it, but I think you get the idea. It seems that almost every television network, including cable stations, are posting free media on the net. Here’s a list of free video sites I really like (and I’ll update the list as I encounter more sources):

Hulu: This is the first site I encountered. Hulu allows you to stream a lot of NBC, Fox, and their affiliates (I think Viacom since they stream the Daily Show and Colbert Report). You can watch clips, full episodes, and movies.

Veoh: Offers a mix of content ranging from studio produced to user-generated stuff. It basically aggregates the free content that’s out there on different websites for one stop shop convenience. Though I haven’t experienced any problems myself, seems they are plagued with technical problems… hope that changes in the future. Update: You have to download the player… easy enough but kind of a bummer.

Blinkx: I haven’t used this one much but according the Wikipedia article about it, Blinkx uses voice recognition of the audio clips as the way to classify the video. Cool! I wonder how well it works? I’m hopeful.

PBS Video: This was launched recently and is basically a portal to all the free PBS videos where as before, you had to go to each show’s website to get the content. Now you can browse PBS Video to look through all the PBS programs.

MUSIC

Just a couple of quick music sites … Imeem – is really awesome but beware of periodic audio ads that scare you, especially if you’re getting into some easy listening/adult contemporary jams … Pandora – I just looked at the Music Genome Project which is so cool. You enter a band name and they generate a playlist you might like based on the band you chose … last.fm – Also allows you to stream and generates recommendations …

I think libraries, particularly public libraries, could attract some more on-line traffic if they give patrons information about what they can get for free. It doesn’t cost a lot of money (you don’t need a server because you’re not hosting any videos or sites), doesn’t take a lot of time, and as content becomes free and accessible on the Internet, libraries can help patrons navigate to places where they can watch TV for free. Might be even more appropriate these days as families cut back on things like cable. Now I’m not saying librarians should be television pushers (blasphemy!), but it’s an easy way to show how the library is the place to go if you need info on recreating. I mean we’re already buying DVDs for circulation, why not take advantage of the the free content that’s already out there by “adding” it to our collection?

Google Video is good for known item searches. The sites I discuss here are great for browsing as there are categories you can look through.

That’s it for now. And it’s just a preliminary list. I’ll get down to finding more stuff once I wrap up a couple of projects for school.