Saturday, March 29, 2008

Enlightment

For some people, knowledge is sharing, quickly becomes learning and is highly treasured.
To a special lady who watches from afar, many thanks for educating me.

Friday, March 28, 2008

LibraryThing, del.icio.us

I enjoyed using these sites. I can see the advantage for library services such as Reader's Advisory, new book lists, who writes like, post a review etc. Link them with the library catalogue and engage borrowers well and truly. Would also assist ILLs. I like the way the information can be retrieved and individually organised. I plan on revisiting these sites. Just as a postcript, I had no trouble adding the tag buttons at home, but found it was harder to add them on my toolbar at work. Could be because Mozilla is default at home.
Glad to see that I knew what a "widgett" was on LibraryThing


Great reads- highly recommended

Monday, March 24, 2008

Serene Sea Dragons

Yes! Old librarians can learn new tricks! I have successfully managed to upload, sorry "embed", a short video from YouTube. I can see how YouTube would engage the younger generations and appeal to them when learning. However, somebody still has to take the time and effort in putting the video together in the first place.
I am becoming a little concerned about Web2. The interaction that is taking place remains very "singular", yes you can edit posts, edit wikis, etc, but discussion remains isolated if people do not leave their keyboards, (even if they stay at their keyboards, just check the participants roll to see how many comments have been posted to actual blogs)Yes the technology is excellent and can be used in libraries, but what about the social side? the personal interaction.
Have yet to watch all the videos suggested as my machine is to slow, will add more comments then
27/3/2008-- Have watched the videos advertising the library and it's services. While the clients were recording and doing the publicising, it was worth noting that they were in the actual library, using library resources and library "live" staff. The university library was being promoted as a place where reference staff were there to physically guide, instruct and educate, and help. So while the 'net is good and valuable, nothing beats the interaction between client and staff

Monday, March 17, 2008

Many thanks for the gift of education


Thank you to NSW Public Libraries Learning 2 for the opportunity to engage in all this fantastic learning. Yes I have my Wiki key, have added to the Library Wiki, (more than a few times) have also added more RSS feeds. Still experiencing a few problems with loading images. Could be the prehistoric computer I am using at home. If I was doing this at work, there would be no output.
Really excited as long last I have a comment from a fellow Blogger!

Wonderful Wikis

Really enjoyed the video clip and learning about all the possibilities when using Wikis.
Marvellous to think how interactive they are. Learnt a new term "Widgets".
I look at three wikis that were suggested and the difference was clear. Found 2 good ones and one not so user friendly. SCIPL was my first choice. the use of subject guides reminded me of directories, which I usually find cumbersome, however the guides worked. Was amazed to find that links included Credit card payments (just how BIG are their fines?), and Online Borrower Registration. Yes you did have to leave home to pick up your card! Glad to see the use of multilingual text on the site. Out of 5, I rated this wiki a 3. It was okay, and easy to use.
Wiki number 2-- Wisconsin Heritage Online-- boring!!! Hard to locate where to enter search term. Did manage a search using drop down box for Oshkosh and retrieve photos on the Main Street
The best was left to last. Yep, it got a 5/5! Book Lovers Wiki-- very easy to navigate, good links. I did a search for Lisa Scottoline, was taken to Mysteries writers, quickly figured that entries were alphabetically by title, found the review. A click on the title took me back to entries on the catalogue. Decided this might be useful for Reader Advisory stuff, so did a RSS feed!-- would not have been able to do that two weeks ago!!
Wonderful stuff-- just waiting for the secret key.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

RSS feeds

I like the idea that using RSS the information comes to you, however I find it annoying that to receive this information you have to be signed into something like Bloglines. This means if I had really good feeds I would be all the time signed in at Bloglines. Because our IT department monitor internet usage and report back to Council who are the highest monthly users, I don't like the idea of doing this. Is there a better way to receive RSS feeds, i.e direct into Outlook Express?
I also found this session frustrating with the searching. I wanted to get away from State Library suggestions and be a little more adventurous. One search term that I used was for Australian convicts, this was disappointing with the results, as it returned American results. I also used the term family history with the surname, again no luck. I decided to broaden the term to Australian genealogy, which wasn't really what I was after. However anything is worth a go when learning. An Australian genealogy blog was returned however as it was last updated in Aug 07, I thought it wasn't really up to date so it was discarded. In the end my feeds ended up being ABC news, ABS blog for Librarians (yes I forwarded the training dates to the Manager), Power House Museum picture of the day, Quotes of the day (I enjoy this one), and The shifted Librarian.
I also learned that AskNow! was actually Web2 technology, and I had used it without knowing this.
I don't know if our library will embrace Web2 technology, as it is impossible to even get a link on our Webopacs to State Library databases (even though other Libraries have managed to achieve this) Again this comes back to having our Webopacs open to Internet connections.
Again no comments have been post on this blog, so how useful are blogs anyway.