Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Thing 20 Libraries and Social Networks

My last Paris pic during this little walk through the 23 Things. This is the interior of Saint-Sulpice and the gnomon which, contrary to the popular book, the Da Vinci Code, has nothing to do with the "Rose Line" of the best-selling novel. The library connection with the novel is, of course, that great line uttered by Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks): "I've got to get to a library. . ."

And, wow, when I went to the Denver Public Library site my first reaction was "there's a lot happening on this web page." The same holds true for the Hennepin County site. To my eye, it seems really busy (plus it seems to take a fair amount of time to load). I think it really taps into the kind of multi-tasking that seems so much a part of life these days. Both sites are what I'd call "fragmented" with a lots to choose from: blogs, blurbs, music, lists, searches, etc. In fact, the performance on my home machine plummeted when I had four tabs open, two of them in MySpace. It seems like it takes a lot of computing power to drive these sites, so you probably can't have a lot of tabs open in a browser, which I like to do, and have any productive time.

All of the sites that I visited seem to really be keyed to younger users. I didn't see much evidence of college or university use at first, but when I started to search some more I found plenty of listings. Many of them seemed to relate to library jobs in the MySpace Jobs group, although I did find the odd video tour or sites connected in some way, shape or form with graduate MLIS programs. I did find Vermont's 23 Things group, but couldn't locate any other group.

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