As a librarian, I love dictionaries.  In fact, one of the jokes at our family is that we can’t get through a family dinner without a dictionary coming out.  It’s just part of our family, kind of like filling the conversation with puns.

Wordia is a dictionary that won’t work at my dinner table, but it will get others interested in dictionaries who may not think that a thick tome is what they want to use.  This site offers brief video clips on words.  You can upload your own video for any word that has special meaning to you, or just enjoy the videos that are on the site.  The videos range from academic definitions to ones with a broad sense of humor. 

I love that after years of seeing articles that blogging has peaked and is on its way out, we are now seeing posts like Why Blogging Isn’t Going Anywhere Soon.  Of course, their focus is on blogs for business, but I think it holds true for library bloggers as well. 

I also applaud the final paragraph, because it holds so true for libraries:

As the economy continues to waver and businesses tighten their belts, not using every tool at your disposal is akin to commercial suicide. The popularity of blogging and blog readers should be seen as one of the most cost-effective and essential business tools available.

As our budgets and staff shrink, we cannot decide that online efforts are the ones we don’t have time for.  They work well, take little time, and speak to a generation of people we are struggling to reach.

On with the blogging!  (And twittering, and feeding, and friending!)

Jason from 37 Signals has a post about the problems getting rural Internet connections in southwestern Wisconsin.  He can’t connect via DSL, cable, wireless ISP, or 3G.  As someone who lived in rural central Wisconsin for some time, I completely feel his pain.  In fact, though I live in a less-rural area now, we don’t have 3G at all.  It’s very spotty except in Madison and Milwaukee. 

I remember how thrilled we were when cable Internet arrived in our small town.  It was gloriously fast and very stable.  But cable runs end quickly when they enter townships, trickling out for almost everyone.  Depending on how far out in the boonies you live, it can be impossible to get anything but dial-up.

Check out the comments to see what solutions people are suggesting.  None are for the non-geek or faint of heart.

WeAre.Us offers a centralized place for support networks focused on a variety of medical conditions.  You can suggest a new community, if you don’t see the one you are interested in.  Exisiting communities include ones focused on lupus, HIV, celiac, autism, crohns, diabetes, cancer, and psoriasis. 

In each support network you will find a place to network with others who have the same conditions, communities to explore with associated interests, photo sharing, forums for discussion, journals, and related articles. 

Tip’d is a new Digg-like service specifically for financial news and ideas.  You can look at the top news, upcoming news, or submit your own story of interest.  The site also offers several categories: commodities, economy, green, private equity and VC, stocks, currencies, funds and ETFs, personal finance, real estate, and tech.  As with Digg, you can comment on any of the recommended sites, tip them to vote them higher on the page, email the link to a friend, and add it to another social networking service.

On Mashable, Tom Smith has an intriguing new view of the impact of social networking on our purchases.  We now listen to bloggers, watch online videos, use online rating and ranking services, and everyone is able to participate.  For advertisers, it’s a whole new world.

But what about libraries?  I’ll continue on my soapbox from yesterday and insist that this is the time for libraries to start working on their own brand using online tools.   Using social networking is easy, fun, and doesn’t take much time.  Additionally, there is no buy-in cost for more technology.  Just get your librarians out on the services and active.  And again, they have to be creating content too, not just linking to known hot spots on the web.  That was 5-10 years ago, this is the new Web.

It also means that managers have to lose some of their control on staff.  We have to trust them to do their jobs well online or offline.  Remove barriers that prevent staff who are interested and willing to do this for you from being really active online.  Insist that online work is legitimate work.  That this has the same value as reading print journals.  It’s information in a different form, but better, it’s information that we can impact.

MyTopClip has a great video by SeoBook that explains why Google ranks old sites higher than new sites.  I come at this from two angles: 

1.  Librarians should understand the logic behind Google rankings to better use the tool.

2.  Librarians should be taking advantage of this.

Almost all libraries have long-standing web sites that are probably ranked fairly highly in Google.  Now all you need is new content to really maximize your standings.  You can leverage blogs to do this, create themed book lists on hot topics, or just start posting basic book reviews on your site.  It can be as easy as you wish. 

I’ve been in conversations recently where librarians bemoan the fact that no one visits our web sites.  Well, that’s true for a lot of library web sites out there.  But that can be changed! 

We have to position ourselves as a place worth visiting.  We can’t just be a gateway to the online catalog.  There has to be more than program listings on our site.  We need to be changing our content, updating, and allowing our public to respond on our web sites.

Frankly, we need to decide whether our web sites are going to be worthy of our staff’s time.  If they aren’t, why should they be worth our patrons’.

Joongel takes a little bit of figuring out to use, but then it offers such great functionality that it is worth a bit of puzzling the first time.  Joongel is a new meta-search engine that lets you query across a wide variety of websites, which are handily grouped by subject matter. 

Type your search terms.  Select the category you want: Images, Music, Videos, Health, Shopping, Local, Cooking, Finance, Jobs, and more.  Search.  The search then is done at the first site in that category.  A toolbar at the top of your browser lets you move to the next site to see the results there.  You can change your search using the toolbar, switch categories, and skip to the site you want to see.  If you don’t like the toolbar, you can hide it or close it once you find what you are looking for.

Looking at the ease of this search engine and its friendly toolbar that takes no plug-in or installation, this may be the perfect search engine for beginners.  Heck, for me, it’s a great search engine when I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for or may not be familiar with the subject. 

The final thing I really appreciate is that it lists the top 10 websites for each category.  Handy information for librarians!

Give it a spin.  It won’t replace Google for quick searches, but it adds another layer of service to their model.  Very interesting…

Library Journal has a great article by Chrystie Hill and Meredith Farkas that summarizes a survey sent out to 300 Mover and Shaker winners who were recognized between 2002 and 2007.  The article has sections on job satisfaction, time to think, and innovation.  For me, as a library director, the most important piece is the section titled Management Matters. 

Recognition is at the heart of people staying at a library long term, especially people who are leaders in their field.  Amazingly, only about 50% of libraries celebrated someone being on the Movers and Shakers list.  And between those two halves there was a distinct difference in job satisfaction. 

I recently found myself in a conversation where another library director mentioned that the reason people use the library is the STUFF, not the staff.  While I agree that the stuff is important, I believe that the staff is what differentiates one library from another.  Our collections can be so very similar, but the service, the warmth, the dedication of our staff to create programs, provide information, and simply be there for our communities is one way in which we can truly shine.    It is the staff that makes a library special.  And it is the staff that can get you through times of bad budgets too.  The stuff won’t do much to pitch in and be inventive and creative in solving problems. 

Stuff, yes definitely important, but staff even more so.