Fin (Week 12)

It is truely terrifying how quickly three months can pass by... Here I am, at the end of it all, looking back through the misty lense of time (ooh, I can feel a song coming on, but what would our patrons think..)
I seem to remember writing about my aversion to myface sites in my first blog, and nothing has changed there. As far as institutions using them goes, well I really don't feel qualified to comment. Certainly I can't imagine there being a large enough user community to justify it in our library catchment area, and I don't think it is something we need to rush into, but maybe in the future when we are all just brains floating in a protein fluid they will be very useful. Yep, that's the future as I see it. Second Life will in fact be Only Life. I have chosen my avatar already.
However this course has been great for seeing how other libraries are using new technologies to remain relevant and accessible. Not everything is going to work, despite our best intentions, but is always worth trying. There are some great ideas out there, and there is no reason libraries can't get in on the action.

Online tools (week 11)

Well, here is my fabulous Google Doc Questionnaire. feel free to answer the questions as truthfully as possible.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pL4rFC9GA7kNc9XLhXSgPdg

It was a tough decision which document to make- a spreadsheet, questionnaire or a "presentation", but since I accidentally studied surveys and questionnaires for an entire semester at Uni, and have never had the opportunity to create one myself, the choice was obvious. As you can see I have a natural talent for them.
I can't think of any library specific application for these online tools. Any reasonable sized organisation would probably have the need for a collaborative approach to document creation, but who knows how many would use an online service. There are certainly lots of options available now, and Google Docs was very easy to use.

Mash Ups (week 10)

Since I don't have access to any of my own photos at work, I by passed Big Huge Labs for this exercise and went for a Google maps mash instead, adding this understated review of a certain Blaxland landmark. I would like to point out however that the typo in the title is not mine. How could Google get it so wrong? Baxland??? Where is that? Anyway, it is a bit of worry that anyone searching for Blaxland Library in Google Maps can read this review, but there you go- the internet is a scary, wonderful and unreliable place.

So what can mash ups offer the library? Well, apart from a bit of free advertising (heh heh), I guess we will have to wait and see how creative people can be. I can't think of anything that has blown me away yet, but it is early days...

Just Podding Along (week 9)

Ok, I am going to reveal something here- I have aged prematurely, and I have in the recent past downloaded podcasts from Radio National, my radio station of choice. That's right, straight from Triple J to RN in one gigantic leap. None of this "I'll stop off at 2BL for a few years first and ease gently into old age" business for me. So podcasting isn't new for me, and I still have some ancient Background Briefing programme on my mp3 player which I haven't removed yet, which is very annoying when I am listening to music and it inevitably comes up.
As far as their relevance to libraies goes... well I wasn't sure at first, beyond being one more potential media type to add to our collection. But I was looking at Orange County's Podacasting service, and they have a collection of short stories for children, read by the library's storytellers which I thought was a pretty nice idea. Not that I am volunteering to record my attempts at storytime!

Yahoo Answers (Week 8)

With an adventurous spirit I tried out Yahoo Answers today. Yikes! What a load of dross. I asked one question, which received quite a few answers straight away, but they were all just idle speculation. No one provided anything even remotely useful. I did get a couple of stars for posting an interesting question though. I re-posted my question into the science/medical section in the hopes of getting a better quality answer, but got none at all. Oh well.
I also answered two and a half questions: two easies on grammar, and a general knowledge question that I didn't need to look up. I was pretty shocked to see that someone else who answered that question was completely wrong, but wrote with "authority" and even had a web reference. I followed the link to the site they cited (a web cite! ha)and I have no idea how they came up with the answer.
These answer sites are fine for entertainment and popular culture purposes but I hope no one is using them for homework!

Library Thing (week 7 cont.)

I had a bit of a play around with Library Thing. It was definately fun, but I can't ever imagine wanting to catalogue my books at home. I chose a few random things that are on the bookshelf, and sure enough there were plenty of people out there with the same books. Maybe like finding a googlewhack (a Google search query consisting of two words that returns a single result) it might be fun to find out which is your most obscure book, or aim to be the first to catalogue something on Library thing. Of the 7 books I listed the least popular was The Australian Renovator's Manual, with only 7 entries. I was pretty impressed with that one!

del.icio.us- an old friend revisited (week 7)

In the spirit of this course I have signed up with del.icio.us, but I have already had an account in the dim dark past (well, maybe a couple of years ago). I even had the tool bar sitting on my home computer, but I ditched it through lack of use. I had set it up when learning about this stuff through Uni, and I thought it might actually be quite useful since I was spending hours on the net doing research. I was always forgetting the great sites I had come across so I would save the web pages, but when it came time to create my fabulously in depth bibliographies the saved pages would often have no URL on them and the computer would have long forgotten its address and I would spend ages trying to refind these obscure pages just so I could reference them and squeeze a few more marks out of the assessor and... so on and so on. I am sure you get the picture. Anyway, I thought delicious might actually be the answer, and I did use it for a little while, but it didn't stick. I probably found a couple of good sites from serendipitous delicious browsing, but it didn't really work as a personal filing cabinet, and once I had finished study I really had no use for it. This time around I have ditched information architecture sites in favour of the weather, because as Sydney market stall holders we are quite obsessed with it. And of course since there was a Blogger gadget for it that got added too...
I did like the Ask Now's collaborative reference page list. What a great idea. I plan on looking into the sites when I have the time and energy. I think that would work well in any library, and allow you to tailor the sites to the specific needs and interests of the library community, much as Sutherland has done.

More week 6 stuff

I just had an idea for videos in libraries. How about filming the living books from Living library events? They could then be "borrowed" at anytime...

Video Stuff (week 6)

OK, before I address all of the serious library related themes, time to embed some videos...
Humanity has been superseded. I have the found video evidence. Yes, robots have learnt to ride bicycles. From here on in anything is possible.

I present Exhibit A.



This fabulous robot had me worried for a while. I imagined this creature to be human sized, and armed with incredible balance and possibly some sort of jet pack. I was sure it was the beginning of the end for Homo sapiens sapiens. But being a very thorough sort of person (ahem) I conducted further research. Fear not gentle readers! As Exhibit B will reveal, our robot friends are just about the cutest little fellows around. It is hard to be scared of a chibi robot.




Anyway, back to the reason we are all here…

The whole youtube/google video search thing was a lot of fun- It was a guilty pleasure to look at videos during work time. Like Blogs, audio files, Wikis and the rest, videos have a role to play in enlivening libraries- they are one more media type to be exploited. Thet are such a great idea for oral histories, and book readings, and undoubtedly a hundred other applications that I haven't even been thought of yet. I think often though they are a bit of a novelty. Virtual tours and video blogs are fun, but of a less serious nature. It will be interesting to see how they develop in the future, and how much interest they get from patrons.

Futurelib Wiki (week 5)

I was contemplating the future of wikis and libraries, and I had a blinding vision. It is called the the catablogue ( or a catablog if you live in the U.S.). It is a catalogue that is a wiki. How obvious is that? All of our patrons will be potential contributors, making the cataloguer's job much easier. A load shared is a lighter load after all.

I think this could really be the future of user- centered design. We have held the power for too long, and it is time to share both the responsibility and the privilege of information management.

Ahhhr! SS (Week 4)

Mmm.. Really Short Syndication, Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, how can one acronym have so many potential meanings??? Anyway, I joined up to Bloglines and subscribed to a few feeds; some news, 2 weather reports, and a word of the day (gubernatorial: of or pertaining to a governor). I found the site a bit confusing, and more complex than I could ever require. I already have a couple of feeds coming through Google Reader, which I find a lot simpler. I am much more likely to actually look at it because it is linked to my gmail account and it is just a click away when I am checking my email. It is one less thing to sign into and remember passwords and usernames.
The YouTube video about RSSs suggest that it is way of saving time- why go to all of those sites when they can come to you? But I suspect it is really just another way to waste time on the internet. How much information about the world do we really need? But that is just my internet headache talking. I can certainly see why news junkies would enjoy RSS feeds. getting their daily fix is very easy. I think they would also appeal to people with a passionate interest in a particular topic, or to people doing a lot of frequent research on the internet. With a little discipline I think that RSS could be very useful in a professional sense- a regular quick scan of the headlines to see what is new, while resisting the urge to spend half the morning following up on all of the trivial stuff.

Flickr Foto Fest (week 3)

This picture from Flickr really reminded me of the film To Kill a Mockingbird. The memory of Scout's Halloween ham costume has been deeply and indelibly etched on my mind and on my psyche, and I really think that it has had a permanent effect* on my sense of humour and my sense of style. It also brings up a painful memory- my mother slaved away making a Christmas tree halloween costume one year (it was probably 1977, and it really was a fabulous costume), and I seem to remember refusing to wear it to go candy collecting. Yes, we lived in America then, and candy collecting was big business. Luckily my older sister wore it, and now she has been imortalised forever in that photo... Anyway, I was obviously a snot-nosed ingrate and deserved to stay at home locked in my room. I don't think that is how the story ended however... Ah, memories.

Anyway, another week down, and the end of my learning journey is one step closer. Flickr is a lot of fun to peruse, but I can't imagine uploading images to it. I guess I am too lazy for a start, and I don't really have any particular need for it. I sometimes get sent an email with a link to family photos on Picasa, and I guess it is good having the choice whether to view or not, without having all of those unsolicited downloads.

* note- I have just worked out why everyone is using the word impact these days! They can't remember whether to use effect or affect, and have opted for impact instead so as not to make a terrible grammatical blunder...

In the beginning

If you had asked me 2 weeks ago if I would ever write my own blog the answer would have been a resounding no! Although I started contributing to the Readers in the Mist blog recently the idea of starting my own was quite another matter. But here I am. It really couldn’t have been easier to set up the blog. And web 2.0 obviously deserves an XMLed, fully interactive, socially networked, collaboratively thinking wiki-working end user. So here I am. Human 2.0. Hopefully by the end of the course I will in fact be Human 2.1. But for now…

I think blogs have a lot of potential for libraries, but perhaps getting people involved (other than staff) will be a challenge. For some people surfing the ‘net and blogging is second nature, but for others I think it is going to be too much effort to contribute. They may read it, but thinking of things to say takes time and thought. Then there is the hurdle of actually posting it. In a small community, foe example Blue Mountains library patrons, perhaps it will be difficult to get active participation. I guess these things just need to be nurtured until people find out about them and feel confident and interested enough to get involved. Otherwise the blog is really little more than a bulletin board. But maybe that that is ok too?

However, I have been impressed with things like user generated tags on library catalogues. These are so quick and easy to create. I would love to see them on our BMCL catalogue. It is a great way to involve patrons, and they are fun and useful. User generated data will always be a little suspect, and will need to be monitored for naughtiness, but I don’t think that is really a problem when there is clear distinction between the tags and the catalogue entry. Alternatively it would be great to be able to link catalogue entries to book reviews…. The more information about a book the better I say!

As far as this course goes, I guess I expect to learn a bit of new stuff and reinforce some other stuff that I know about but don’t use much. I am familiar with a lot of the things we are going to be covering, but I don’t have much use for a lot of them, so the course will be a useful practical exercise.

Anna