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/