Social Reading

These things were more of a refresher course for me, as I had previously set up an account on Vision but I haven't used it in awhile.  I'm actually kind of surprised that I haven't used it more, because I was so excited when I first heard that we were going with bibliocommons.  When I was taking my first courses at SJSU back in 2007 everyone was talking about bibliocommons.  There really are a lot of great features available for people who are into "social reading".

As I recall, it is fairly simple to set up your account - aside from getting a username that isn't already taken, but I think we all run in to that problem on pretty much all the social media sites.  As far as creating a list in Vision, the most frustrating part is that once you do your search you can't click on any of the results to get more information.  After selecting and then deselecting the wrong thing a few times I started selecting four or five, and then just removing the ones that I didn't want.  If I were going to suggest an improvement to the system admins, that would be it!  Writing the comment was easy enough, once I found the right spot to leave it - in addition to the 'leave a comment' option towards the top of the page, there is a 'comments' button at the bottem, that tripped me up at first.  So I guess if I was going to leave two comments, that would be the second one hehe.  Finally, following a reader with simple interests was a piece of cake.

The 'cool extra thing' this week was to create a Goodreads account, which is something I that already have done (I believe at an HSJ staff development day).  I have the app on my smartphone and it is AWESOME.  I love to be able to scan the barcode of the book I am reading and add it to my list without typing anything. (Sidenote: the scanning function is one of my fav things about the BiblioNB app too).

Almost halfway there!