Week 5, Thing 12

#12 Roll your own search engine

Do you have a group of websites that are your favorites? Or a set of online resources that are similar that you frequently use to answer homework or reference questions? Well Rollyo may be the tool for you. Rollyo allows you to create your own search tool for the just the websites you know and trust.

Take a look at some of these search rolls that have already been created:

• Public Domain e-Books Search
• Rare Book Library Search
• Free Photos
• Quick Quotes
• Explore other rolls here.

Try a search for broad terms like "homework” or “history” to see results listed from multiple sites.

One of our own Geeks has a post on her blog, OPL’S PSA: Omaha Library’s Passably Sane Assistant on Rollyo

Discovery Exercise:
1. Explore Rollyo and create an account for yourself.

2. Create a search roll for any subject you like.

3. Create a post in your blog about your experience and link to your search roll. Can you see a potential use for tools like this?

OPTIONAL: Add your search roll to your blog using the "Create a Searchbox" tool.

Rollyo - You just never know when this little tool might come in handy.

Week 5, Thing 11

#11 A thing about LibraryThing

Are you book lover or cataloger at heart? Or do you enjoy finding lost and forgotten gems on the shelf to read? Then LibraryThing may be just the tool for you. Developed for booklovers, this online tool not only allows you to easily create an online catalog of your own it also connects you to other people who have similar libraries and reading tastes. Add a book to your catalog by just entering the title -- It’s so easy that you don’t even need MARC record training to do it – or connect with other users through your similar reading tastes. There are lots of ways to use LibraryThing. You can even view your books on a virtual shelf, add a widget to display titles that are in your catalog or install a LT Search box on your blog.

So why not join the ranks and create your own library online. With over 65,000 registered (BTW: LibraryThing also has group forum for librarian users) and over 4.7 million cataloged books, you're bound to discover something new.

A recent development for LibraryThing is LibraryThing for Libraries. This adds some of the Web 2.0 aspects of LibraryThing to the library catalog – it brings in LibraryThing’s users’ tags (edited to exclude things like beach read), word clouds, ratings & reviews. Danbury Public Library was the first libraries to use LibraryThing for Libraries.

Discovery Resources:

• About LibraryThing


• Library Thing tour


• LibraryThing blog (updates & news)
  

Discovery Exercise:

1. Take a look around LibraryThing and create an account.

2. Add a least 5 books to your library.

3. Blog about your findings and be sure to link to your LibraryThing catalog.

Continue to Week 5, Thing 12

Week 5, Thing 10

#10 Play around with Image Generators

Generators? No, not those gas powered back-up things. These generators allow you to easily manipulate image and graphics to create fun images like those shown here (and which you've seen in earlier posts too).

For this discovery exercise, just have fun. Find a few fun image or text generators 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 (which is what I did for this post). If you’re having difficulty getting your image added to a post in your blog, ask a co-worker for help. In looking at several staff blogs, it’s easy to see that we have lots of people in the system who have figured out how easy it is to add images to their blogs.

Discovery Resources:

• The Generator Blog (this has tons of generators, scroll through the list on the left side)
  
• Letter James (this has some generators in things like e-Cards and it is mainly free)
  
• FD Toys (this is the same as the Flickr mashups from Week 3)
  
• Wordle (this takes text from a link and makes an image – thanks to Nikki for suggesting this one earlier)

Also try searching for online generators, text generators or image generators!

Discovery Exercise:

1. Play around with some image generators and find one that you like.

2. 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.

So take some time and have fun with this exercise. And remember to be tasteful too!

* Images created with Birthday Cake and Classic Car Grill Sign found on The Generator Blog

Continue to Week 5, Thing 11

O What a Geek Wordle (Week 5, Thing 10)

O What a Geek Wordle done with the O What a Geek Blog.