#58 Being Green

Being green was quite an appropriate Thing for me this week. I spent most of the week in bed with the worst sinusitis/throat infection that I have had for years. And the cause of it? Melbourne was covered by a smoky haze emanating from scheduled forestry burnoffs in other parts of the state. There's nothing wrong with burnoffs - we don't want bush fires - but presumably some meteorological idiosyncrasy led to the smoke being stuck over Melbourne. Yuk!

I was amused when I got back to my PC today after days away from it (I was really, really sick) to receive a link to this video which has a section about cats and greenhouse gas ;>). It's not a very serious approach to take to Being Green I know, but my laughing was detrimental to my recovering cough though not my spirits and my cats came from the other end of the house to discover what was happening to the cats I had hidden here.

On a more serious and relevant note, I was also interested to learn about Earth Day on 22 April as it isn't something that we celebrate here, at least not in my circle. I was feeling quite confused as I thought I had just celebrated Earth Day on 29 March when we all turned our lights off for an hour. But I'd seen stuff on Facebook about 22 April (in Li'l Green Garden) and then Sandy's Thing mentioned it. I hit Google and an article in Wikipedia soon told me why. There are two Earth Days: the UN celebrates Earth Day annually around the March equinox and there is a second one mainly in the US on 22 April.

I had a browse at all the sites mentioned including the Going Green Matters blog where there were a couple of posts on tips for being green. These included sensible things like insulating houses, not heating and cooling places when you aren't there, and scraping not rinsing dishes before you put them in the dishwasher. There were also quite a few tips around reducing your "gas" consumption in cars. That was well and good but I would have had using public transport or walking or cycling up there in the tips well above these.

The strongest message I got from these tips was one about turning off things when you are not using them. This really reinforced the message I got on 29 March when I went to turn the lights off for an hour. I couldn't believe how many lights there were turned on all around the house! I really only focused on lights that night but I know others looked at everything they had on standby and not turned off at the wall. I still need to get better at both of these.

And what is the learning from this for libraries? We need to build (and renovate to) more energy-efficient buildings. We have a very energy conscious Council and are in the forefront of initiatives in this area. For example, we have waterless urinals in some libraries; we trialled motion and photo-sensitive lights in parts of one of our libraries but it wasn't very satisfactory; we are installing tanks linked to the downpipes at Camberwell and Balwyn Libraries this year; we are very conscious of recycling; we encourage people to travel to meetings and between branches on public transport by giving people free Metcards for this. As I am lucky enough to have a large external window in my office, I rarely turn the lights on: this does lead to useful discussion when people ask me why I am sitting in the dark when dusk is coming on and I haven't noticed how dark it is ;>).

These are only the physical things we can do in library buildings, but there are many other things we can do in terms of user education, of providing access to sites and databases etc. I like the cry: "Save a tree, borrow a book!" But wonder if an even better one mightn't be "Save a tree, read an ebook!"? Both of these are services that our public libraries offer and between them they do save trees.

#57 TasteSpotting - yum!

How yummy is this! I'm in heaven. I had a quick look at TasteSpotting just before lunch but had to stop and get my lunch cooked very smartly. This site is one for me. Though someone who loves cooking and reading about it, I just couldn't get interested in I'm Cooked, the focus of Thing 50, where people post videos of themselves cooking.

But TasteSpotting is another thing. When you go to the url you are immediately faced with a sea of luscious-looking food set out as on recipe cards. You can star them and search. Click on one of the recipes and you are taken to the source. I found a whole swag of foodie blogs from all around the world - Australia, New Zealand, U.S., U.K. and even one in Greek, the Saffron-gatherer.

I used the same terms to search as I had with I'm Cooked. Taramasalata still wasn't successful, and plum sauce only gave me a link to a recipe where you served it on the side. So I guess I'll stick with Maggie Beer for the plum sauce and either buy the taramasalata ready made or use one of the many recipes I already have. However, I got a hit for moussaka and hit gold (or meringue) with pavlova where I got eight hits, all of which I wanted to eat. Excited by this I just keyed in "lentils" as I was thinking of making a lentil salad for lunch on Sunday. Voila! There were 47 posts.

I was quite over-excited by all the food blogs I discovered and can see a whole new Bloglines addiction coming on. If I am not careful, I shall overtake Batgirl and Tapsister in the number of feeds I am monitoring. I also can see a personal organizational and de-cluttering application. One of my foibles is collecting and not sorting recipes. In fact, I have a very large folder of them in the dining room at present awaiting weeding (aka reading and throwing out). These are all paper ones or scribbled notes, but, of course, these days I also see them online and want them. If I set up my own food blog, I could store and label them there. I'd be able to search by label. I'd be able to post online recipes there using Clipmarks or other sources. The Librarian and the Kitchen blog is born and I have found yet another way to organize my life through Learning 2.1

Oh, and of course there is the library aspect. This is a great site to use if someone wants a recipe.

PS I didn't ever find the widget from the TasteSpotting web-site. However, I remembered that Tapsister had loaded it. So I grabbed it from her blog and easily loaded it here and on my Facebook profile, and other options were available. Someone please tell me where it is on the website!

#56 Smilebox - smile in a box?

Smilebox was fun and easy to join up. It provides a large number of templates for slideshows, ecards, scrapbooks, postcards and photobooks. Like many of these programs, there is a basic free version and a tempting one with frills that costs. You did have to install the program on your PC and from what I could see execute it every time you logged in.

I signed up and was quite spooked to discover a swag of my recently uploaded photos displaying along the side panel. I tried a few designs and had a bit of trouble with landscape versus portrait as the photos weren't very easily manipulable if they were portrait and the templates mainly wanted landscape. Finally, as funerals were on my mind, I did a floatings photos tribute to Elizabeth Moisidis. I emailed it to myself, I loaded a link to it on my Facebook profile and here it is below in my blog. It was quite slow to load up the link from Facebook and I also found that with Jamie's one included on the Learning 2.1 blog. This may be to do with the speed of my connection?

Smilebox is fun and useful and something that we could have loaded on our public PCs. I wonder if it would be worthwhile having a Click goes the library session on a number of these photograph tools? I could see it as something that could be quite useful to prepare a presentation of someone's life for a funeral or retirement event, and Jamie's example showed that it could also be useful for local or family history.

Make a postcard - it's easy!

#55 Slideshare - Presentations online!

Slideshare claims to be the Youtube of Powerpoint and it certainly does provide a great community of online presentations. You can upload presentations and search and view presentations (without joining up) or you can join up for free and set up an account. I had viewed presentations there before but I hadn't actually joined up.

So as part of the work for #55 I joined up and loaded up a few fairly banal presentations. They did seem to lose some definition in the conversion to Slideshare format, but I suppose that is not really surprising as conversion always seems to lead to some change. I was able to share these slide-shows publicly or with my friends or not at all. So I chose to make some private and some public. You tag the presentations to allow for searching. You also deal with copyright through Creative commons. There are also a number of communities e.g Web 2.0, Second life, Web 2.0 tools for effective teaching.

As I was researching my ill-fated VALA talk on Facebook and public libraries while I was experimenting with Slideshare, I did a search on Facebook and came up with a number of useful presentations. When I had completed my presentation I loaded it up on Slideshare so that I could, er, share it with the other presenter and the person chairing the meeting. That worked well except that it seemed to truncate some of the urls in my presentation. As the others didn't comment and one of them uploaded a link, I need to discover if this is a Firefox issue. I'll check out my Slideshare account at work on IE and see if the urls are truncated there. The other advantage of having the presentation on Slideshare is that you can present from there so long as internet access is available, thus obviating the need for uploading the presentation onto the PC in use or bringing along a PC.

I have already found uses for Slideshare in my work, in terms of searching for presentations I would like to read and also in uploading a presentation of my own that I wanted to share. In the lead up to the VALA talk there were several enquiries about where the presentations would be available, and I was able to reply that mine was available on Slideshare and to suggest that VALA set up a Slideshare account where they could either load presentations given at their meetings or at least fave them.

As I found it a useful presentation, I am uploading here Laurie M Bridges Facebook 101 for librarians (2008). Uploading was easy as any presentation that is freely available has a code for embedding. You can also share to Facebook, reddit and all the normal suspects. So I also tried sharing it on Facebook where a link was posted on my profile to the presentation and its url. This is a great tool.

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