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