Thing #9: In which Stacey visits MERLIN

I'm from Bawlmor, hon and for some reason, every time I see Merlin in this context, I think it's how we say our state's name. You know, Bawlmor, Merlin. Okay, not really, but my uncle had just sent me a list of "You Know You're From Maryland When...", so it stuck in my head.

Seriously, though, I had taken a training on MERLIN sometime last year. An interesting place. I was all excited about the training we were supposed to take, only to discover that, at the time, the classes were all about Microsoft Office products. So much for that. I think the disappointment left me a bit disenchanted with MERLIN (pardon the pun). There are some interesting things on this site, but to be brutally honest about it, I'm not sure how much I'd use it at this time. I think if technology was my workplace raison d être, I'd feel differently. Right now, I think I'd mainly use it if I was directed to go there.

As far as searching for other library blogs and feeds, I tried Technorati. I did a blog search on libraries and Maryland (not Merlin) to see if any of my friends' 23 Things blogs would show up. Amazingly enough, one did. My friend Christina's blog came up and as I was reading through it, I read about something called Library Elf. This is a cool service that allows you to keep track of the books checked out on your library card. It goes beyond what our e-mail reminders do. First of all, you can enter more than one library card, so you can have your whole family signed up or even check your cards from different counties. But even better, in the e-mail, it gives you a list of everything out, when it is due, what holds you have waiting for you, etc. Plus, there is a calendar with due dates highlighted. Way cool!

Back to the blog/feed searching. I must confess that I'm not into the RSS feeds as much as some of these other technologies. Having a Bloglines account isn't as helpful to me, because it's yet another thing I have to remember to check. I did discover a compromise. At home, I use iGoogle as my homepage and have discovered how to select my homepage as the spot for all of my RSS feeds. It doesn't work (yet) for all feeds, but enough to make me happy. I have created for myself another tab just for these feeds.