How email Works

Happy Easter 2011

Clap your hands all ye people, shout unto God with a voice of triumph.

O clap your hands all ye people, come on and help me praise the Lord.

Heres a great little song to celebrate Easter 2011

Information gets a new lease on life?

Information gets a new life with social media because you get a lot more personalized and user generated content. Information is now possibly more raw, honest and closer to the heart of those which are generating the content, the reason for this is that people are sharing this 'new' information usually along the lines of areas that information that matters to them most.


*I think* Social media certainly aids to break down barriers that exist between businesses and customers -cuts through some red tape if you will. For this it takes bold initiative and some risk for businesses to expose themselves in this way (opening themselves to honest feedback from customers). On a personal note: I recently made a business transaction in order to make a purchase from a purely online store. I did not know a lot about this store other than its website and I noticed that it had a facebook page and I saw that it had a good amount of "friends" and positive feedback. So I decided to proceed with my purchase. However to cut a long story short the business transaction went sour and the store did not provide the services that it had promised. At the very least I felt the need to provide some constructive criticism to the organisation and I actually decided to do this via email and not make it public by doing so on their facebook page. But you can see where the opportunity exists where institutions could be embarrassed publicly through social media technologies.


Regarding breaking down the barriers you would think that it would be even more difficult to do this with the relationships between the government and citizens due to strict regulations however the government are keen to take advantage of the web 2.0 revolution and are certainly not afraid of becoming more flexible and they are certainly developing a greater online presence and availability improving communication with regular citizens. Although let's hope that the governments adoption and acceptance of web 2.0 is not just internalised in improving government procedures but actually reaches out to the regular citizens, (who can respond in kind).
The report can be found at: Government web 2.0 report


It was enlightening in the social media slideshare presentation located at Social media to see that the focus of web 3.0 will be centred around the idea of "live" that is a real time extension of the web 2.0 focus which is collaboration. Moreover after reading the statistics and finding the growth of internet use and TV watching, information certainly does have a new life and since in web 2.0 it focuses on community it can be extremely addictive for many. On a personal note: I am a little concerned that our society is spending too much time being wired and I think that each new generation will find it much more difficult to unplug and amongst the positive benefits of social media there are serious dangers as well.

State Library's learning 2.1 course review

I have finished the learning 2.1 course, with some workplace whirlwind webbing. I thought this post would be better suited with my highlights of this bonus adventure rather than blogging about each one.

Firstly building upon the web 2.0 course and some of the features that have benefited me personally are: Google Documents, Flickr, delicious and Youtube.

The web 2.1 course gave excellent tips and advanced features for Google documents: The keyboard shortcuts will certainly come in handy and I have even started using the spreadsheet function which is excellent. I am a big fan of the Google Suite of various programs: Google calendar will indoubtedly help me as time management is never one of my strong points.

Some of the features raised in the various weeks of the 2.1 course, I was already quite familiar with and have used previously. For example I have had a igoogle page for quite a while. (It's always interesting to see what barren landscapes look like around the world when its 3am in the morning!)

Some of the web 2.1/2.0 tools that dont seem to be as much use to me are Nings, Twitter, maybe this is because it is only early days for my utilising of these technologies. Although regarding twitter I think that because I dont have an I-phone or similar product, I am not going to be terribly mobile, i.e. To answer the Twitter question: What are you doing now? The answer would have to be a boring, sitting at a computer somewhere logging on to twitter :). I also found out that of the people I knew, many more people were on facebook rather than twitter. On a side note: I would like our library service to have facebook and twitter accounts but I am not wholly convinced of the usefulness for the libraries to use these two services specifically. Although it may certainly provide an option for the library to reach a younger audience.

By far and away the best web 2.0 app that I have used in delicious, although I dont normally scan other peoples bookmarks and see whats popular. I mainly like it for the convenience of being able to access my bookmarks anywhere. This has helped greatly at work where I have to access regular sites from different pc's but also with my university studies. It is handy that the learning 2.1 course has taught me how to link twitter with delicious so I can comment on my bookmarks and do so collaboratively as well!.

I think that some of the next best things to be developed and used (more so than they are already) by libraries and other organisations are slideshows and online screencasting.

Slideshare application

Check out this SlideShare Presentation: on creating a technology plan which our Library will be conducting.

Slideshare as a web 2.0 application has good potential because it has format similar to Youtube with showing similar presentations or others by the creator. It also allows room for comments.

The benefits of the web2.0 app Slideshare is becoming increasily obvious. Professionals creating slideshows for presentations can place them onto a digital viewer on the application so people can work through the slides at their own pace.

Session8--Creating a technology plan

View more documents from Denise Garofalo.

Merry Christmas

Well its that time of year again.

The snail would like to wish you all a very merry christmas.

The snail would like to offer his apologies for posting so little, but this year has been very busy with other commitments.

I leave with you a challenge? Do you know the true meaning of christmas?
(It has very little to do with web2.0 Im afraid)

Digital libraries and global cohesion

In my library and Internet travels I just wanted to write a post that highlights the advent of digital libraries and how the Internet is bringing libraries together not just on a national basis but internationally as well.

Some of the impetus for me to write this has come from my discovery of these sites

World Digital Library http://www.wdl.org




International children's digital Library http://en.childrenslibrary.org/
This excellent library is a modern marvel as not only is the library completely digital but it also encompasses works from around the world. They have actually scanned it books to make them more readable, and the pages are not certainly not like Microsoft Word documents, which I find hard to read large amount of text. One of the great things about this library is that when they created the library, they consulted heavily with children to determine what they would like to see in the library. Moreover they gained advice about how the library should work and even how the books are catalogued. For example children can read books that have different coloured covers, or book are split up into short, medium or long works.

World Cat http://www.worldcat.org/
This is an exciting website that is a catalogue that enables the user to be able to search for items all around the world. All you have to do is enter the country or area that you are and the item and you can find what you're looking for. This service would be excellent if you were staying in an overseas country for a long time and you could find library resources there that you might like to borrow/use.

International Youth Library (physical library) http://www.ijb.de/files/Page00.htm
This international Library is quite special as it celebrates it's 60th anniversary this month. The library is certainly unique as it has over 550,000 books in over 130 languages and all the literature is for children and youth. And yes they do have Australian authors of course!

The Internet Public Library http://www.ipl.org/
Note: With the Internet Public Library, they are currently undergoing a merger with the Librarians Internet Index, and they will be deciding on a new name soon. Both these sites are excellent and have amazing resources and they do seem to have similar features which must have resulted in the merger. What these resources provide is Internet resources and sites that are organised by subject just like a non-fiction collection would be organised by subject under the Dewey Decimal system. They even have a list of podcast links that have been organised by subject.

These sites are and contain fabulous resources and they herald the way that libraries are moving. It goes without saying that the Internet has brought the world closer together, but libraries and library users are also being brought closer together. The development of these resources also have significant repercussions for the library and information management profession. In the past most of a library's material was in physical form and the library's clients were people from the local area. Now with some of these libraries above, the whole collections are online digitally and the library patrons can be accessed from anywhere that there is an Internet connection. There are new types of librarian positions being created in the job market such as virtual librarians, web librarians and emerging technology librarians. While technology and computer librarian positions have existed for a while, their roles will change and morph as the Internet changes but also as library clients change to become much more reliant on digital media.

West Ryde Library

Come on in to West Ryde Library, we are open 7 days a week!

World Digital Library

The World Digital Library was launched in Paris on the 21st April 2009 by UNESCO a division of the United Nations.

Here is the url to access the World Digital Library

This monumental library is a joint project organised between UNESCO and the Library of Congress.

The library has a strong emphasis on culture and history with many rare artefacts and documents that have been electronically added to its collection from all over the world

learning 2.0 in practice: Stumped!!

It has been awhile since I finished the learning 2.0 course (the debate about whether it can actually be "finished" may have to wait for another time) and the knowlege that I had gained had been nagging at me to try and implement some strategies learnt throughout the course. In particular I had been struck by the collaborative capabilities of the net and online applications. So I thought I could produce a document (that the library where I work did need to produce - which was related to informing new borrowers of fundamental library procedures). I wanted to produce it online and so all of our staff members can have access privileges via Google Docs to edit the document and make suggestions etc. However when I invited the staff members through their work emails to give them this access the emails were allegedly blocked by the council's spam stopper. One of the reasons that I can guess that this happened was that I had signed in using my GMail account and that is where my invitation originated from; not only that I was sending it to multiple email addresses - which is common for spammers.

After this I couldn't really be bothered pursuing it any further, and the document now is going to be produced by one person by good ole pen and paper. How is that for progress?

Information Online conference 2009

I was able to sneak a peek at Alia's Information Online Conference for the wednesday afternoon and if you have read my previous posts you can probably guess that I chose the "And Action" segment where librarians and information professionals were discussing how technology and especially the visual mediums of video and 3d internet has been utilized in their institutions.

The keynote (I must admit) was a bit beyond me, however I felt that the presentation was very good and used excellent technology and diagrams to emphasise his main points. The address was by a representative of Macquarie bank and the presentation was on innovation in the knowledge management(KM)field. It was interesting to learn that their knowledge systems (or understanding of) involves three spheres of features that are interlinked: 1: Core Knowledge: repositories and processes, 2: Collaborative technologies and processes e.g. sharepoint the software that enables facebook and 3: Knowledge and expertise aggregation and delivery mechanisms (e.g. portals and mashups. It is comforting to know that leaders in the business world are open to using new technologies.

And Action

The first seminar I attended was a presentation by Diana Blackwood from Curtin University (WA) on how their library has implemented and dealt with video streaming and various administrative and technical issues associated with this technology being used by their library service. The university has a diverse need for showing video to students from studying standard movies/t.v. to instructional video content regarding courses (physiotherapy tutorials were mentioned as an example) and of course video of their own lectures.

Some of the administrative issues mentioned were difficulties with using different suppliers that held different conditions for hosting and distributing video content, Where streamed video content should be hosted and considering the cost of obtaining various licences should the university make greater efforts to seek out free content.

The second life is a 3d virtual environment that internet users participate in. This is the basis for a presentation by TAFE Library representatives who used second life as a training environment for one of their subjects (information literacy). One of the aims of this was in order to make it more appealing to students, attempting to engage them closer with the material through an innovative medium. Second life involves people choosing and designing an avatar which they are represented by in the virtual world.
TAFE reported that distance learning is on the rise and that isolation is a factor, so this virtual environment would help students feel like they are really apart of a class as they would be able to see each other albeit virtually.

The presentation actually took us into Secondlife to see the island or "world" that the Tafe class created. In that area they showed the different modules that students could interact with and various tasks that the tafe students were give to do in second life. Some of the outcomes from this project was that it was a great opportunity and a good medium for further study, also you can meet people from all over the world in 3D. Some of the challenges and issues that were raised was that high end technology is needed to participate and client software needs to be downloaded every few weeks and better software skills are needed. Also the teachers found that class control was difficult for example the students in second life could simply and literally fly away. More outcomes from this was that the Tafe Library profile was raised considerably and Second life has connected lots of libraries.

The final segment was a report on Fostering digital inclusion by Leona Jennings from Gold Coast City Council. This report arose from a visit to an international conference in Glasgow. The conference focused on some programs run in Scotland in order to reducing the technology gap between groups that have greater access to ICT's (Information & Communication technologies) and those that don't for example seniors and the unemployed. This was very relevant to me because this topic had been a major topic of my university studies for the previous year. Leona reported that the EU in a commission on digital inclusion set clear targets by 2010 for this technological gap (also called by some the 'digital divide'), however some countries in the EU have made greater progress than others.

In the UK there have been various infrastructure projects that have been supported by the government and other institutions to try and achieve targets in relation to the digital divide. It was interesting to hear of some of the methods involved in bringing people in to participate in learning centres and other ventures, sometimes literally inviting people straight off the street. These learning centres provide a range of self-pace computer based courses, whereas the Gorbals Library and Real Learning Centre had a more of a mentoring /targeted approach to individuals this centre was situated in a quite deprived area of Glasgow. It is admirable that governments realise that technology and communication is so important in today's society and are willing to invest heavily to bridge the digital divide. Not just financially supporting some of the ventures that have been mentioned but also aiding in their establishment and continuance.

Merry Christmas 08!

To all I wish a very merry christmas, may you all keep well and have a great break. But most of all I want to encourage you to remember the real reason for Christmas: Jesus. Jesus is the reason for the season, we celebrate it to remind ourselves that Jesus was born into the world a man.



This photo is courtesty of Fantartsy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fantartsy/

Week12: Social networking

Well, this post is my last official blog post concerning the State Library of NSW's learning 2.0. This course has been very rewarding and incredibly enjoyable. Once my brain has digested all that I have learn't I will post again regarding further feedback, findings and conclusions.

With regards to social networking, you only have to look at the American Library Association's Myspace page http://www.myspace.com/atyourlibrary to see what great future there is for libraries that utilise social networking. To think that they have 4000 members is outstanding (although not surprising considering America's population), but many rural Australian libraries might be happy with having 4000 library members as part of there service.

Our library could benefit by using social networking because we can tap into different client bases, i.e. for example a lot of youth at our library are not big in communicating with us face to face, they might prefer to do so electronically. For marketing library services, the social networking services have features where you can create and advertise events and invite people, they could discuss the upcoming library events and staff could provide extra information if needed.

Libraries can also be involved in virtual worlds: reaching out to a whole new audience and in an exciting 3D environment. This link http://infoisland.org/2008/10/24/ala-slymposium-on-virtual-worlds-and-libraries-in-second-life/#comment-31290, is a description of the American Library Associations Slymposium on libraries in the virtual world Second Life.

Learning 2.0 course week 11: Nearly there...

This week I have looked at Online Applications and Tools. Personally I have already experienced the benefits of online applications with online briefcases where you store documents you create on the internet. The benefit is that you dont waste your own storage space on your personal computer and you can access your documents anywhere that you can connect to the internet.

Working at the library here as part of this week's course I have created a document using Google Doc's. There was a good option for sharing the document where I can invite others to collaborate with me in using the document or simply viewing it. As mentioned above I can then go home and connect to the internet and edit my up-to-date document. This technology could be used in a myriad of ways for a library. For example at our library there is various things that our staff inform our patrons when they join to become members of the library, I can create a document and begin to list things that I would like people to be told, then I can invite collaborators to add things to the document. The final result would be a comprehensive list of introductory information to our library (our patrons wont know what hit them!)

I am excited by the possibilities of online applications: especially the Zamzar application, it would be really handy for me if you can convert .pdf documents back into word documents.

Mashups

Yet another exciting week in the world of learning 2.0 leads us to Mashups where different internet services or technologies can be joined together or 'mashed' as it were to create feature and detail rich programs.

The voicethread mashups http://voicethread.com/#home could be used to create virtual classrooms, which could benefit people that do not enjoy full physical access to libraries.

The various mashup tools investigated commonly use audio and visual mediums which can really enhance libraries appeal if they are featured in the libraries website.

Podcasts and audio

There is a variety of different uses for podcasts libraries (as we have discovered over the course of this session). There could be some good opportunities for our library to utilise podcasts too.

Some ideas we had were:

1. To record staff meetings and make them available to staff who were not present and other interested parties.
2. We could use this technology to train staff, because this would save time and money because the training process would not have to take up extra staff time (regarding trainers), also the staff could do the training at their own convenience, and repeat it at home for reinforcement
3. We could give weekly updates for staff (which would come in handy for part-time and casual staff)
4. We could bring library news and changes to the library patrons in an exciting and easily consumed format)
5. We could record library talks and events and make them available to people who couldnt come at the time of the event.
6. We could record library participation at outside events.
7. We could notify patrons online of new books and resources available at the library, and if it a video podcast it would really assist in this situation because patrons could see what the book looks like. Also book reviews could be performed.
8. We could record the performance of library storytime and baby rhyme times so parents could replay podcasts of this to do rhymes and songs with their own children.

In conclusion we think podcasting has great potential for public library use.

Tallest meets shortest

Courtesy of The Jothiek Corner

Answer boards and social searching

I do not think that there is a place for us to survey answer boards and provide feedback on answers, because time consideration at our specific library does not allow us to provide that depth of service. If our library had a blog promoting our collections where patrons could provide feedback then they could do so via comments or we could add a poll to the blog to rate books and library items.

Learning 2.0 week 7

Web 2.0 conference

I discovered this above link whilst exploring and conducting our week 7 stage of the learning 2.0 course on Tagging, folksonomies, del.icio.us and LibraryThing.

Despite our Council Internet security unfortunately blocking Del.icio.us and connected sites (hence cutting us off from 60% of this weeks web 2.0 adventure) I still learnt quite a bit. I do like the ability to add our own books to library thing and tag them.

Since our council's obstructed del.icio.us I registered at home and I instantly liked its service, although I havent been able to utilize it's full features especially in the social bookmarking areas, I like the way my bookmarks are now much more easily accessible. I also really like the feature with del.icio.us where your most popular bookmarks are in the most convenient place above the browser.

Technorati was an excellent can of worms to be opened, and it was especially fascinating to see the 5 most popular blogs as well as top word or phrase searches that had been performed in blogs too.

Scanblog

If you had a look at the link to the blogs that I posted previously and investigated the blog hosted by 5 OCLC staff called Its all good. If you love a good read they have a link to a recent article on "why public libraries close" written by written by Christie Koontz, Dean Jue and Wade Bishop:

Dewey decimal system made easy

Dewey decimal classification (DDC)!

For all you library staff out there, for those random times when a school student wants to learn how to go about finding books and understanding how our books are arranged direct them to the above link. This has two powerpoint demonstrations that helps explain the dewey decimal system and shows how it is arranged in a visually pleasing format. You may like to show it to that eager student...

You may also like to have a look at their sponsored blogs that discuss the "intersections of technology with libraries, archives and museums." by using the link below.

OCLC blogs

NEWSFLASH!

Has web 3.0 arrived? or should I say Web 3D?

If you see my links page to the right you will see a
new link called 3D internet. This exciting technology
was featured on today's sunrise program on channel 7.

Basically as far as I can tell it is a virtual 3D internet
browser called Exit reality. Where you can transform any
website into a virtual 3D website. Don't worry if you get lost
it is as easy as clicking a button to twitch back into the
normal 2D view that we are used to.

Is this the future revolutionary step to internet so
please download the program and explore and let me
know of your experience with this.

Please note the Exitreality program is only in beta format, so
it is certainly not the finished product.

Snail's thought of the day

Thinking back to the early days of the learning 2.0 course that the staff at our library (If you haven't already guessed the Snail works at a Australian library) have been undergoing for a while, one of the excellent video's that we watched (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g&feature=related) hinted that web 2.0 will force our society to rethink the way we do many things including copyright, commerce and even relationships. This has become apparent to The Snail as I have become more exposed to web 2.0 and even library 2.0 lately. For example I have come across official policy's from governmental institutions that are created in a blog format, so as to provide the functionality for people both internal and external to that institution comment on the contents.

Pepper

If the world was Dr Pepper it would look something like this

Updates Amended

Also I forgot to mention that I love feedback, if you have any suggestions for how I can run my blog more effectively please post them as comments. Thank you for those who have already posted comments.

Updates

Hi all,

You might have noticed that I have made some cosmetic changes to my blog as well as updating my profile. Check it out.

Online video

We have explored the wonderful world of online video courtesy of Youtube and Google video. We liked the concept of online 3D book reviews, it seems more appealing than a traditional book review. After watching the World of Warcraft parody video, people at the library in which I work would like to create a video where we are represented by digitally created superheroes. In which our everyday working life is depicted. I was amazed that video's have been made of other everyday work like farming and posted on the internet for all to watch.

wiki-ness

Off the top of my head from last week's wiki session, I was encouraged how easily
it seems to create a wiki. Also as a serial emailer I can relate to how wiki's can improve communication flow. There was also some great examples on the internet of what other libraries are doing with wiki's and just how detailed some of them are.

Learning 2.0 has paid off!

I just happened to check my google RSS reader a few weeks after the initial session and I got a pleasant suprise when I checked the powerhouse museum's photo of the day feed. I found this excellent link to a mash-up (Im excited about mashup's before we have even got to that week's installment) (you will need to copy and paste this link into your browser).

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2008/08/27/flickr-meets-google-street-view-paul-hagons-then-now-or-interesting-things-clever-people-do-with-your-data-6247

Credit for bringing this information goes to Paul Hagon (http://www.paulhagon.com/) and Seb Chan (http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/).

Its a mashup between a flickr collection and google streetview. Where on the left you see a photo of a building that is quite old, and the location of it, and on the right you can see the current google street view of the location/building of how it looks in the 21st century, great!.

http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys/sw018.gif

Pocoyo?

This photo is courtesy of Iron Lung on fLiCkR

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3018/2788843421_0c1b331930_m.jpg

Check out: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/show/

Rss and newsfeeds

It's good being able to receive online updates and news so easily. I chose board game sites and soccer feeds because of personal interest. I could subscribe to Library news feed to keep uptodate with the library profession.

This photo is courtesy of Philippe Sainte-Laudy's photostream

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pilou/2284200542/

Learning 2.0

So far I am enjoying the experience of learning 2.0. I am already quite computer literate and am familiar with blogs and flickr etc. I hope to delve deeper into these new collaborative environments and gain a deeper grounding and experience more benefits from this. I'm also hoping to learn how other information proffesionals are benefiting from this course. For someone who has been studying for a very long time and who works in the information industry, lifelong learning is a key desire. Not only do I want to keep learning, gain wider experiences personally but I would like to do better that I have done previously in encouraging others to pursue lifelong learning. Ive discovered and found other library related blogs as well as obviously personal friends blogs related to overseas trip's etc. They are just great forums with ease of access for communicating in the digital age. The formats and layouts are very easy to use and navigate.

There will be a place for blogs in libraries, because I have noticed that our society is moving towards communicating differently, especially with these virtual mediums. The younger generations have been at the forefront of these changes too. Hence to keep interest among these groups, then blogs will be a valuable tool for users to interact with libraries in new ways. In the future there may be opportunities to blog to clients.