Thing 3: Photo Sharing

Here's a quick video and pictures from Olana, historic home of artist and painter, Frederic Church. My husband and I visited this site last spring. I can't wait for next month when we plan to take a tour of The Mount, Edith Wharton's estate in Lenox, MA. Anyone ever been there?

I created a slide show, and hope it works. I've had a personal flickr account for quite some time, but never posted much because I am too cheap to get a pro account. We have a pro account for the library which I maintain. We use it mainly for displaying book covers of new acquisitions. Our web librarian created a badge for the library website, and the new books display is prominently visible along the bottom of the screen. The content changes every month when I clean out the images and replace them with newer titles.

I have seen other Learn with CDLC participants create a slide show of their sets. I have to say it took me quite a while to figure it out, but hopefully it will work. Sometimes these things are intuitive, other times you have to keep digging until you find the answer. We will see if it works, I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

This exercise was a lot of fun. I have played around with picnik, which you can get to through flickr. I like how you can edit a picture and then save it back in flickr; it is a very seamless process. Some of the features are very handy for photo editing such as cropping, resizing, adding borders and text. Which reminds me, adding text to the image would come in very handy when you want to create a watermark. I plan on experimenting on adding Sage Archives to some of the images that we are digitizing for the CDLC Digital Collections program using CONTENTdm.

Edited to add: For some reason, the slide show did not appear when I used Internet Explorer, but it did open up for me when I used Firefox. I read somewhere that it might have something to do with flash. Anyone know what's going on?

Top 10 books Kathleen Graber would recommend

Top 10 books Kathleen Graber would recommend, a photo by The Sage Libraries on Flickr.

What are your top 10 poetry books?

I know, there are only 4 pictured here. There was a whole room full of poetry books for her to choose from, so she couldn't decide. Actually, this should be titled "Top 10 books Kathleen Graber would steal from the library" (only kidding, of course!). Included are rare, signed, and first editions.

Okay, this is Option B, #5, on this week's Thing 3: Photo Sharing assignment. Added this image from our library's flickr account by clicking on the Share this on Blogger icon. Also, I'm having fun playing around with picnik. The daisy border is new since I last used it.

Spring has sprung

Every year during National Poetry Month the college sponsors a poet to come to do a reading and book signing. This year the special guest poet is Kathleen Graber. She will be reading poems from her books, Correspondence, and The Eternal city tonight at Bush Memorial. The event is free and open to the public.

                      Professor David Salomon, Chair of the English and Mondern Languages Department and Kathleen Graber
                                   in the Hare Room which houses the Carol Ann Donahue poetry collection, Russell Sage College

For the second year in a row my boss, Terry Wasielewski, and I have been commissioned to create floral arrangements for the event. I have to say it's a lot of fun creating these huge bouquets. It always makes me ready for spring and the nice weather.

Thing 2: RSS pt.2

Ok, I think I'm going to stick with Google Reader for organizing my RSS feeds. It's so easy! I can't believe I never knew about this until now. I find that Google has so many features that it's hard to keep up with every single gadget or application. So far I have 12 subscriptions and follow 2 blogs. I think that will be enough to keep me busy.

Thing 2: RSS

Ahhhh... light bulb moment! I have known about RSS for awhile now, just never concentrated on learning the new applications that have come about in recent times.

I was able to create Personal Start Pages on iGoogle and Netvibes. I have four different E-mail addresses that I use;  1 for work, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Gmail, so setting up the accounts was pretty easy. I like how Netvibes allows you to log in using your Facebook login. It's so much easier than having to remember yet another password. I also like how you are able to check your different E-mail accounts on Netvibes. Now I don't have to have multiple tabs open on my browser. I like how Polly created a list of all the Learn with CDLC participants, now all I have to do is remember how to get there! I must admit I am a CNN news junkie, so I'm glad I can get to it through iGoogle. I have also changed my homepage to iGoogle at home (point of no return, yikes!), but will probably keep my current homepage at work. I only have two subscriptions so far  on my Google reader, but suspect I will add more as I continue to explore RSS feeds.

CDLC Bloggers

List of Learn with CDLC participants

I just thought I would post this on my blog in case anyone wants to see who else is participating in the program. I could bookmark it in my favorites, but my list is a mile long.

I have a blog

Just one more "thing" about blogs, and then I will move on to the next assignment.
Yesterday my family and I went to dinner at our favorite restaurant to celebrate my son's birthday, and my daughter getting into a one year Japanese language graduate program. Anyway, during the conversation, the subject of blogs came up. I told them that I had a blog. Their eyes lit up as if to say, wow, Mom has a blog? What's the name of your blog?, my daughter asked. At this point, I am glad I remembered what Polly said about remembering our blog name, and password, etc. My blog is rosetheblogger.blogspot.com. There's also Sister Rose's of Maria College at rosethelibrarian.blogspot.com. The two should not be confused. I am not a librarian, but for convenience sake, my son often refers to me as a librarian to his friends when they ask what I do (see the first post below). My daughter typed it in on her iPhone, and sure enough, it came up. Did she doubt me? I don't know...Kids, they think they know everything! End of story. On to the next assignment.

Pushing buttons

I just have to share my experience about our new phone system that will be put in place sometime in the next couple of weeks. Yesterday we went to a training session to learn how to operate our VoIP phones. I am usually not afraid to try new things. Well, it turns out that you have to push a lot of buttons in order to learn how to make calls, review your list of missed calls, delete your list of missed calls, do call transfers, and conference calls. What ever happened to good old fashioned phones where all you have to do is pick up the receiver? It's a good thing we have a user's manual.