Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Disco Tech Activity 6: One Click Digital



Blog about your challenges with OneClickDigital. What would you change about OneClickDigital? What did you like? Would you use it-why or why not?

Hi. I do like One Click Digital overall and I think it meets a demand for e-audio books which is great. I have downloaded the app to our Family Ipad and since our Ipad is currently in Russia along with my husband and son I downloaded the Media Manager to my home computer so that I could listen to an e-book while putting away clothes (because if I turn on the tv I will never get anything done, sad, but very, very true).

I haven't tried a bookmark or the timer yet so I will have to try that.

Things that have been frustrating..I recall that at one point I had trouble finding where to go to make my downloaded book play on my ipad once I opened the app. I will have to test this again once the family and Ipad are back. It is easier on my home computer because I just open the media manager.

I was just looking at the oneclick digital site on the work computer and I think the advanced search is interesting. It's nice you can search by narrator. I found a list of books reach by Barbara Rosenblatt who is one of the narrators who I would listen to read the phone book because I really like her voice and the different voices she can do. But if I wanted to search by genre I think that is a spottier search because one the books seem to be assigned genres strangely. I did a search on juvenile nonfiction and it came across a title about ancient Roman history and I think the genre listed is fiction and mystery and there is another book "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" where the genre is listed as Computers/General...hmmm..read the description..don't think that this is what the book is Really about...
 
But I have had fun listening to books both on the Ipad and home computer. My son and I found a Russian language learning book that we listened to for a while.


 
 
And I just finished listening to a Joanna Fluke mystery and it was interesting because there are recipes at the end and I realized that the narrator was going to read all the recipes as part of the e audio book and I guess that is as it should be since you should get the experience of the whole book, but I can't say I've listened to a recipe before.


 
 
 I saw a kids book where it talked about it having the appeal of the Origami Yoda books because of the diary entries and quirky doodles or something of that nature and I am curious to try this book at some point, because how do you express quirky doodles in an audio format..I just don't know.


 
Two things: One is that when you look at the books you check out it says that if you want to renew, just click the renew button next to the title and I think that must be an option we don't allow in SPPL, right? 'Cause I don't see the option to renew.
 
The other thing is that the Advanced Search as odd as it might be at times shows me that there are many more titles than is apparent from just looking at the featured titles. Also if you go in the list of checked out books there is a tab for recommend a title where you can recommend a e audio book you think the library should have so that's cool. 
 

Sunday, August 10, 2014

Disco Tech Activity 5: Freegal

Freegal is another one that I created an account for back when we first got it. I haven't used it a ton, although I do have a few songs that I've downloaded. It didn't seem too hard to create an account, what I find frustrating/interesting about Freegal is that when I search for things for example: Frozen (soundtrack) I don't find it. It seems hit or miss what is/isn't on Freegal. I wish I were more into top music, maybe then I would find what I was looking for...I feel like I find more on Spotify.  However, that being said, there are some interesting things on Freegal. Under genres there is an Educational category and there are albums of voice lessons, speeches, albums in French, learning state capitols. Under spoken word you can find abridged Ernest Hemingway stories in Spanish. There is an album of oldest recorded voices that has two tracks on it one of Andrew Carnegie and one of Thomas Edison. I will have to try videos..I haven't had too much interest in doing that, but I will have to give it a try. I haven't had people ask me for help with Freegal, although I do recall mentioning it to someone who was looking for a place to download free music.

Something else, at least when I am searching from the library computer, will have to try on Ipad at home, but I think I experienced something similar, is that I can't seem to enter anything in the search button at the top. So I click search and of course it doesn't find anything because I didn't enter a search term, but it does bring up another search bubble to refine my search and usually I can type a term/terms in this bubble.




DiscoTech Activity 4: Zinnio

Way back when we first got Zinnio I did set up the accounts..I seem to hazily recall some confusion between switching from the library page to the Zinnio page and back, but may this was in an earlier iteration or it only happens initially. I tried checking out some magazines today and it seemed like a fairly smooth process. We don't seem to get a ton of calls regarding Zinnio so I don't know if this means not a lot of people are using it or people are using it and finding it easy to use. We do get calls about e-books and One Click Digital and this is usually people who have something that is confusing them.

In any case, back to Zinnio. I wish they could come up with a way to not have 2 accounts. I get that there is the library page for limiting the choice to what the library subscribes to and the Zinnio page allows one to read, but it seems like there should be a way to do this without two accounts. Although once I have this set up, I don't really notice the two accounts thing, but it does seem better not to frustrate users in early stages (or at any point in the process.)

Zinnio does load magazines quickly and they are easy to move about with the viewer. I am confused about the search feature as I couldn't get it to "find" anything. In the National Geographic Travel magazine it couldn't find the word "geographic" nor other words in titles of articles. I searched other magazines for words that were in titles or clearly mentioned in the articles or captions, and nothing, nothing, nothing..so what does "search" do?

It is very nice to have access to a number of magazines, esp ones that are pricey like the Economist. I wish there were more children's magazines and I thought I had seen a short story mystery magazine-Ellery Queen, but maybe I was looking at the overall Zinnio site and not our library Zinnio site, still there is a pretty good and seemingly growing selection.

If you don't have access to a computer/phone/reader, than this isn't much of a help, but for people who do have access to technology it is a nice resource.