The Higüera of Puerto Rico is called "Totumo" in Other Countries

So I've been doing a personal search of info on how to craft with the higüera, a fruit that looks and behaves kinda like a gourd that grows on trees in Puerto Rico. But all searches for "higüera" online kept bringing me to higuera, which is a fig. (Note the little snake bite above the "u" in higuera.) After some creative word combinations I found a video that referred to the higüera as a totumo in Colombia, and the rest is arts and crafts online searching history. A whole door opened up to videos and images of people making things with the higüera and their final creative projects.

The first step was to find out how to prep the fruit for crafting. Because it is not technically a gourd, I couldn't follow all the amazing tips by all the gourd crafters out there. In PR, you cut the higüera in half (or in whatever shape you want), scoop out the guts and set it out to dry. But then it ends up drying really dark brown and I've seen samples with a cream base.

I found one video that followed an artisan through the steps of prepping the totumo and she said that you have to boil it.

But the video continues without an explanation of how long to boil it. I went back to Google and this time typed in "hervir totumo" and found a great Prezi, which I've embedded below for your viewing and instructional pleasure. Spending time on youtube, I've found loads of different ways to prep the higüera. I've also found out that it's also called "jicaro" in Mexico.

Making Maps

A friend of mine owns a water sports business in the Caribbean and I wanted to help her out with creating some maps to show the location of one of her excursions and to display the coral reefs surrounding the island. (Actually, now that I think about it, it would be great to create an interactive map where you can see corals, sea grass beds, limestone cliffs, mangrove ecosystems and so on and so forth with the various coastal and marine habitats of interest. A data manipulation skill to learn for the future.)

So in pursuit of creating the map, I looked up GIS software and of course the daddy of it all is the US Geological Survey's The National Map page for downloading pre-existing maps and The National Map Viewer for creating custom maps. I'll admit, after taking up 15 of the 30 minutes max I wanted to spend on this little project just exploring the features and lingo of these tools, I decided that the USGS NM and NMV were more high tech and less user friendly than I wanted. So I went looking for an easier user interface (note, I didn't say better)...

And I found the National Geographic MapMaker Interactive tool which allowed me to do everything I wanted, like draw on the map, zoom in, choose a satellite version (vs. topographic or street map) of the island, everything I was looking for initially... except download an image ( you could download a pdf, which I suppose could be converted to an image, etc, etc. but I wanted it now! Thank you, MS Windows, for the PrtSc function but then I needed to crop out the window, so my "workaround" still involved work.)

Here's the route my friends take for one of their snorkeling trips:

After I created that map, I then got all excited to see where all the coral reefs are located around Vieques Island and found the excellent tool ReefGIS by ReefBase, which is a database used by several international coral monitoring networks with funding by the United Nations Foundation. Below is a map displaying corals by their depth.

Light purple is shallow reefs, mid purple is mixed shallow/deep reefs, and dark purple is deep reef. Unfortunately, the actual depths were not included in the map, but from my snorkeling experience, I can say the mixed depth reef ranged from 8 - 20 feet deep. After checking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Coral Reef Conservation Program page, I learned that corals may grow to depths of over 200 ft and that shallow reefs may be considered up to 90 feet in depth. Wow! But then that makes me want to question the map's data and what ranges were set. Oh, well, at least it identifies location of corals around Vieques. Enjoy.

The Digital Shift 2014 Online Conference, Twitter Tag #TDS14

This online conference was well organized and technologically easy to navigate with a graphically pleasing interface. I'm glad I was able to log in and participate for a one of the sessions and a few of the poster presentations. I just wanted to make a quick note about:

StatBase, an open source data management software built on Joomla and created by an in house team of librarians and IT/ digital management librarians at the New Port News Public Library. They have basic documentation and information at their sourceforge page and at their libguide page. The presentation reminded me of Counting Opinion's LibPass and LibStat browser based distribute-able software for data collection and statistics presentation. I'd love to see what some of the forms pages look like and what the presentation of the data looks like. I guess I'd have to download a copy and mount it to play around.

I missed the first speaker for the Content Containers and Beyond Session at 12:15pm EST, but wow! the sessions were archived almost immediately and so I was able to review the excellent presentation on the Digital Public Library of America. Emily Gore talked about the Ps of the DPLA which were portal, platform, and partnerships.

• things a good portal can do with an aggregated collection of over 8 million items- create online exhibitions using items from different contributed collections (making use of linked data to form links of unique items that may be spread across the states), use GPS metadata to "place" items on a map for geographic discovery (this is good for people looking at local history) and make use of time/date metadata to "place" items on a timeline (perhaps best when looking a thematically linked items to see their appearance in history and if and how the when of them relates to the when of other items).
• by providing an API (application programming interface), the DPLA is a platform for other imaginings of how to use the data, or how to make the data relevant to your local area/ collection/ needs
• the DPLA relies on two types of partnerships - content hubs and service hubs, each which contribute digital items and their associated metadata, without which the DPLA would be a seriously unfun place to visit. They also have community advocates in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) "industry" to speak on the DPLA's behalf, like at conventions, local outreach events, etc. Types of partners include (and I list these for when thinking about writing a grant to look at the local level for these types of partners):
• libraries
• gov't agencies ( municipal?)
• museums
• non-profits (cultural centers, look at those that share your mission area?)
• universities
• encyclopedias (currently I'm in PR, so the Enciclopedia de Puerto Rico supported by the Puerto Rican Foundation for the Humanities is an example.)
• high schools and local universities with departments or student organizations in your area of interest
• historical societies
• international partners (continuing the PR example, el Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College, the City University of New York)
• Upcoming- standardization of vocabulary to describe rights statements from free text to perhaps checkbox able descriptions to allow filters to be applied to digital objects so that users could focus in on items in the public domain, or which allow reuse. a Knight News Challenge (grant?)

And finally, there was mention of Linked Open Data Library Archives Museums #LODLAM from Jon Voss of History Pin (funded by WeAreWhatWeDo) which would allow mashups of digital objects such as overlays of images on maps and overlays of information on images. 

Here's a list of links for me to do further study:

http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web?language=en
http://entopix.com/so-you-need-to-understand-language-data-open-source-nlp-software-can-help/
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/lod/index.html
http://challenge.semanticweb.org/2014/submissions/
http://code4lib.org/

Geocaches in Libraries and creating a Letterbox Maker Space program

I was doing some reading about geocaching, and found that there are some libraries that have allowed cachers to place a cache within the stacks (best place is probably the reference stacks). Laura Goodwin describes her experience (in the comments section of the post) of finding a cache at a library, where the coordinates for the cache took her to the front door of her library and then she figured out the name of the cache, given in Dewey decimal "code," would reveal the actual location of the cached item.

Geocachers searching for the cache hunt through the stacks then sign the log once they find the book, which could be hollowed out to contain additional items. I see a letterbox hybrid (scroll down on the linked page for the description) as being especially cool and could even be part of a maker space (individual) program where participants make a stamp to add to the letterbox log. (Letterboxing is itself an activity that is similar to geocaching, but rather than use GPS technology to mark the location of the letterbox, orienteering skills as well as problem solving of hints and clues are required.) The book wouldn't even have to be cataloged! 

A Maker Space Letterbox Activity could be:

• find the letterbox cache, 
• "check out" the book which would really involve getting the maker space tools
•  carve the stamp, then ink and add your personalized stamp to the letterbox's logbook
• return the tools and letterbox cache/book to the library
• go home with your new stamp and perhaps take up letterboxing

Issues with this activity

• carving tools are sharp and could cut the person if they don't use them correctly
• ongoing cost of the stamp material for carving
• messiness of the inks (which is why it would all be contained in the makerspace!)

Here's an awesome letterbox found in a pill bottle. A healthcare blog posted it as a thematically related activity they suggest for nurses!

FreeSpirited1 has created a list of geocaches located in libraries on geocaching.com. (You don't have to be a member of the site to see the list, but in order to see the full descriptions of each cache, you'll need a free membership.)

Storytelling Resources

In the pursuit of some online self instruction of storytelling, a (thwarted) attempt to pin an image from a blog post on building stories in video games led to a video (embedded below) which led to the very funny YouTube channel Glove and Boots. The channel per se doesn't have anything to do with storytelling unless I wish to treat G&B as inspiration for how to tell funny stories incorporating popular culture. (Which I do.)

EMBEDDED!

The oh, so fantastic image that I could not pin (read the corresponding content at the above video games stories link):

A cool storytelling resource list (I can delete it from my tablet now) maintained by Elizabeth Fig, Ph.D. of the University of North Texas: Storytelling SLIS 5440, with such interesting topics as:

• Breathing for Public Speaking!
• FAQs and Tips
• Digital Storytelling
• Oral Traditions
• Curriculum for Teaching
• y mucho más!

A selection from the poem Lord of the Isles. I've been looking for this from when I was a biobay tour guide- a way to begin and capture the imagination when introducing bioluminescence. (Because selling things is actually telling a story. (well duh.))

Awak’d before the rushing prow,
The mimic fires of ocean glow,
Those lightnings of the wave;
Wild sparkles crest the broken tides,
And flashing round, the vessel’s sides
With elfish luster lave;
While far behind, their livid light
To the dark billows of the night
a blooming splendour gave

From Lord of the Isles (1815)
By Sir Walter Scott

Where to Buy Big Books

Just a note to self on some online seller's of "big books," those large display (like 3'x1 1/2 ') picture books for storytime. Probably book vendors have these, but I don't know that I'll have access to them.

Scholastic Big Books
BookSource - not very many
Kaplan Big Books - bundled sets
Lakeshore - 3 bundled sets as of 07/2014, or buy individually
a helpful guide to other sources by TeacherBigBooks.com, including amazon and ebay lists.

Book Trailers

[A few weeks ago] on my LinkedIn updates there was a comment in the ALA forum about Cinematic Book Trailers. Having no idea what the commenter was talking about I checked them out and they were awesome! Two of them totally got me interested in looking up the book.

Many of the book "trailers" I've seen are actually book reviews (guilty here) a la Reading Rainbow. (And who didn't love RR's "but you don't have to take my word for it!" section?) But who says we can't push the envelope a little? I like the idea of snagging a reader through a sort of visual book jacket blurb, especially as the summer reading program is starting up. What better way to market a One Book, One City Reads campaign than a highly visual trailer? This one produced by Red14Films totally made me believe that a movie was due out for the book.


Okay, so the envelope is being pushed a lot. This has great production value and after I realized there isn't a movie due out, I said to myself, well, I gotta read the book! Which is the point, right? I was speaking with a co-worker who used to run a GameStop store and he told me he instituted a similar strategy to increase pre-order sales. He loaded the video trailers of the upcoming games on a laptop computer and had it running on loop and bam! Pre-orders rose from nineteen a week to nineteen a day.

Now, I've got all kinds of opposing thoughts as well. As much as I enjoy the production quality of the book trailer example above, I wonder to myself about... Update: 7/17/2014 I must have forgotten my opposing thoughts because I can't remember one. If you have an opposing thought, please list it in the comments section and we can have a conversation. Oh! Wait, maybe one of the opposing thoughts is that the production quality of these book trailers is so high that it feels impossible to "compete" with them if you are a small community group looking to have some video fun with a group of kids making a scene from a book. But, who cares? Kids aren't in it to compete, just to have some fun expressing their favorite parts of a book and for every book with a professional trailer, there's gotta be awesome books without... right. **end stream of consciousness argument**

Other book trailers to get ideas on making one.
http://reederama.blogspot.com/2014/01/award-winning-book-trailers.html
(Check out the Mr. Wuffles trailer)

A very cool reader's map guide to How to Make a Book Trailer
http://www.booktrailersforreaders.com/Prezi+On+How+To+Make+A+Book+Trailer


Using a mix of live action and pages from the book. This sample brings up questions about fair use of books when making a trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2gN_8P9yts

Notes from a Wired Magazine

This is more of an observe than an analyze post...

I'd like to able to say that I get all the information I need to be a good digital librarian from the professional sources. And I do get a fair amount, especially the tech as relates to library policy, or the research into user behavior. However, I love Wired for the trends and new commercial resources.

Here's one: Please Press 1. currently a UK based site, but there's to be a US based one. It gives you a visual of the phone tree of customer service lines so you don't waste time sitting and listening. Wonder of wonders; you'd think that the individual companies could post on their websites the phone tree like a site map.

Fits.me is a web service that has dress form dummies made out of robots. You enter your personal dimensions and the robot morphs into the appropriate shape. THEN the cool thing, you can overlay any clothes you're shopping for and see what it would like on your shape. Great for clothing designers end producers too b/c they'll build a database of body types and then see which sizes are trending in aggregate and be able to sew clothes appropriately for those types. One of my co-workers says that it'll never work b/c she doesn't want to see what clothes look like on her, it's depressing enough to wear clothes, much less look at a representation of her body type in the clothes.

There was a question about whether a person has the right to delete offensive posts/comments/replies on their social media accounts. I liked the response:"If someone spray-painted a nasty comment on your house, you would get rid of it. Our virtual space may just be rentals, but that doesn't mean what happens there doesn't matter." Sort of a you are free to speak as you like, and I am free not to listen to it.

Notes from a review of Google plus's photo organizing service vs. the awesome settings one gets on an Apple camera: Google+ has excellent photo organization, but the quality of Android cameras is poor in comparison to Apple cameras. G+ organizational features use algorithms to compare images to its database of images, selects the best lighting, tags faces, all without the user having to do it. "But who wants a bunch of well organized photos that aren't very pretty?" (I beg to differ, the camera on the iPad that my job gave me isn't good at all (in my kid's school auditorium.) I'm the type that if I had enough time, I'd take the picture via the good camera and then upload to the G+ cataloging service, but who has the time? And no matter the quality of the camera, you can't get a good shot if there's another person in front of you.

Advertisement: Nextissue.com magazine service like audible.com. Pay one monthly rate, read as much as you want online. "No clutter." I'd be interested to see if the service allows you to bookmark and take notes, like Zenio. (the website doesn't address that issue.) And is the content available offline?

Graphic Novels and Apps

Totally unrelated to each other, I wanted to note that I am working my way through a reader's advisory book and discovered a mobile app creator for non-fiction interactive books.

GN Scavenger Hunt
The reader's advisory book is Read On-- Graphic Novels: Reading Lists for Every Taste by Abby Alpert. I'm having fun identifying books that we don't have in my current institution's collection (hey, the selector said I could make a list!) and books that I want to read (sometimes these lists correspond, sometimes they don't). The fun thing about this is the process:

1. I read an entry and identify a title that I think should be in the collection like Chuckling Whatsit
2. then I check the catalog to see if we have or ever had it
3. I go to our vendor (bibz) and look to see if they have it, 
• if they do, I add it to the recommend list, 
• if they don't, I look to see if Amazon has it or if it is available as an ebook in Overdrive

It's like a scavenger hunt. Sometimes the graphic novels in the reader's advisory book are out of print, such as True Story, Swear to God by Tom Beland and I have to track down used copies. (For myself, b/c my system doesn't buy from anyone other than our one vendor and before you get all up in arms, many library systems do it that way b/c they just don't have the man power to catalog and sticker everything. It's a trade off. I.L.L. it, if you want it.) This is the fun part of learning a collection and assisting in collection development, well, I guess if you really like the genre you are researching.

Book App
While reading the Dec 16, 2013 edition of Publisher's Weekly I came across the article "Mobifusion: Making Apps Make Money" [article not available online from what I can tell]. The company builds book apps for various publishers, kinda like my favorite app developer for children Loud Crow Interactive, only this one is for adults. I'd love to get more info on what tech they can support. It is just an interactive book, like search, bookmark, highlight, or can it do more, like if they have a cookbook, can I build menus and add up ingredients? I'm excited about this, but I'm wondering also what are the costs and are they on the scale that only established publishers will want to purchase their services?

Been on Vacation, Checkin' Back in

I can't believe it's almost been two months since the last time I posted something. But I went on two trips almost back to back and was jet lagged for two weeks so, oh well.

After returning to the culture of work, the November 2013 School Library Journal landed in my inbox (hey, it's a fairly numerous department, we only have one copy) and I knew I needed to log the following tools about from the article, "Build Your Own Video Course." Tools for curating videos, for talking about videos (with an open or select group of people), and for reinforcing learning of video content with supplemental material. And they are:

• OpenEd
• Teachem
• Huzzaz

I did want to note that while I was on my snowboarding trip, I did visit the Glenwood Springs, CO library. Very nice space. The community is really proud of it (I spoke with a man who just raved!) and they are open 7 days a week.

In Japan I visited the Kyoto Prefecture Library (next to the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art and the Museum of Traditional Hand Crafts) and while I was hoping for a futuristic experience of libraries (and was disappointed), I did get a quiet reading room and a cart with Japanese and English guide books. I discovered the guide to all the museums of Kyoto, which I will be referencing when I return to Japan. I'm done with visiting temples and shrines (in the cold)!