Ann's Fun Photos

I'm sure I'm missing something simple here to get them to just show up, but for the life of me I'm not sure what...
Please click on the box below to see my fun pics.

It Has Been Far too Long!

The summer flew by as they tend to and we are now a couple weeks into the new fall schedule for the bookmobile which has a new look for the Monday stops. One of the interesting things I realized when updating my Bookmobile Stop mashup map is that because it lives on the web any changes I make occur instantly. If I had wanted to keep the old summer schedule for posterity I would have had to start from scratch to create the new fall schedule which just didn't seem logical. I simply went in and tweaked a few things to add the Monday stops and through the mysterious magic of the web the link on our website automatically reflected the changes I had made!

I have been enjoying the 8N08 exercises 5 & 6 and have found them to be quite useful. The first RSS feed I tried was a bizarre British serial graphic entitled "The Night Bookmobile" (by the author of The Time Traveler's Wife). After that I started looking for some Reader's Advisory websites and blogs for the WOW strategic plan and was able to add a few more.

I ended up on all kinds of tangents with the downloading and podcasting exercise and have determined that I'm going to replace my ipod (which my daughter has confiscated anyway after an unfortunate water accident with hers) with a different MP3 player that is more audiobook friendly. While it is great that Clevenet now has books that will play on ipod the choices are still so limited! That ended up leading to research on various MP3 players and I was leaning toward a Zen of some sort until I discovered that they don't work with Macs which is where all of my music resides at home. Then I discovered a shareware that does allow some Zen models to work with Macs, but the model I liked best hasn't been confirmed as one that works yet so I guess I'll be doing more research... If anyone has a great recomendation for an MP3 they like please let me know!

As for podcasts -- they are an interesting concept, but I am too addicted to audiobooks to add one more thing to listen to. If only there were more hours in the day!!!

Summer Has Begun

The bookmobile is off an running on the new summer schedule. Every year we do a little bit of tweaking and try to add some additional runs earlier in the day since the kiddos are out of school for the summer. This year we have added stops at the Cloverleaf Middle School (it is a public stop, but will alsso service the elementary summer school program), Westfield Center on the Circle on Wednesday mornings and on Thursdays we have added Arlyne Lane, Honeystone Circle in the Cobblestone Development, Union Square and Heritage Elementary. We are providing numerous Take-n-Makes and gearing up for story times to start the week of June 23rd.

Since the demise of Annzbooks I have added my shelfari list to my blog. One of these days I'm going to be really in tune with the Web 2.0 world -- there is just way to much to explore!

It Has Been a Long Time. . .

I haven't posted to this site in far too long! Eee gads -- it is getting stale. Actually I went off on a tangent since I was having fun with this and created Annzbooks to keep track of what I've been reading. However, I recently discovered the joy of shelfari.com (here is a link to my shelf http://www.shelfari.com/o1518125774) and decided it was much easier to keep track there. I especially love the feature that allows you to create a shelf for what you want to read. I'm sure my shelves will be filling up soon, but right now they are rather bare since I am a newbie.

I have completed all of the 8N08 assignments so far and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience! I already had been a user of Pandora, I'm still not real sure I totally get the rollyo stuff. I did create one based on wine bars in Ohio. The image generators are fun, but I'm not nearly as addicted as Kym. Checkout the tombstone for my book blog :) I have also played in webjunction a bit and have found some helpful information, but it seems rather slow (could be the time of day) and difficult to manipulate.

Lastly, my staff has a busy week ahead since we are off the road the week of Memorial Day so we can pull everything off the shelves, do a major cleaning and reload with fresh materials. One new high tech task I managed to accomplish yesterday was to update the Bookmobile Google Map to show our Summer Schedule. We always add a few additional stops earlier in the day. This year our extra stops include: Westfield Center on the Circle, Cloverleaf Middle School, Montville Lakes, Honeystone Circle, Union Square and Heritage School. It is hard to believe it is almost Summer Reading Celebration time already and there is always so much to do to get ready. On that note, I'd better get back to work!

Central OLC Conference

I went to the OLC Conference in Columbus since I couldn't fit the ones closer to Medina in my crazy schedule and I was able to combine it with a trip home to visit my sister and father. A couple of the sessions were really good. In particular I enjoyed the "Things That Go Bump in the Night" (which I didn't realize was a double entendre). The presenters Cathy Allen & Monica Baughman booktalked oodles of creepy vampire/werewolf/zombie etc. kinds of things that I normally wouldn't read, but they did such a great job that I think I might just have to read a couple they recommended. I'll try to get a copy of their Booklists out on the I-Drive for all the staff. I also really enjoyed the "No Techie Translator Needed -- Web 2.0 101" which tied in very nicely to these 8n08 assignments. The presenter, Tracey Jipson, said she would put her power point out on slideshare.net under OLC, but it isn't there yet.

Also, the tech department was able to add a link to the googlemap of the bookmobile to the website!!! Now I'm in the process of updating and creating a new map for our summer runs. Never a dull moment. . .

Bookmobile Stop Map!!!

Oh my gosh!!! I can't believe that actually worked! If you haven't tried it yet, click on the link in my previous post and you will get a map of all of the current bookmobile stops with their locations and times. This is a tool I have been wanting for a long time.

One of the flaws with a bookmobile stop is that if we only visit for 1 hour a week and someone who lives in that neighborhood doesn't typically come by at that time, they may never realize we are there at all. Maybe a map will help people find us.

Googlemaps

I've been playing with Googlemaps and think I have created something, but I'm not sure how to create the link so I'm playing here. . .http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=112156325097910710895.00044a4b7e48a79fc09bc&ll=41.199033,-81.921487&spn=0.016016,0.029011&z=15