Social Networking

All of this is food for thought. I have a facebook site but only occasionally sign in to it but my daughter and her friends use it almost every day and I guess that would be the appeal to younger members of our library. We could have a social network site that lists the latest music Cds we have like the one I looked at in the activities. I need to check out the difference in a lot of these new tools, Social Network site as opposed to a Wiki, I can see subtle differences ie Facebook would appeal to younger members as opposed to a wiki more academic.

I really liked doing this course and learning all about these new technologies, I will look for opportunities to use these not only in my work but outside activities as well.

Thanks for all the time and effort you have put into structuring and monitoring the course and the great feedback.

Shared documents googledoc - Zoho

Shared documents - I really thought this was a great idea. There would be endless documents/projects, programmes, press releases etc that would benefit from this tool.

I found initialling doing all this a bit slow and frustrating but I would imagine as with all of these web 2.0 tools the more familiar you are with the process the faster it would get.

Mash ups

Really liked the idea of mash ups.
Created a library calendar for my blog, but I have also geo tagged some of my photos taken in Norway.
One of the best uses we could make of this tool is to attach text to our local history picture files.
A group of work for the dole participants did a history of Parkes. They loaded images, put text and music with them I think they used mash ups. I thought it was very clever when I saw it and it certainly brightens up the page and makes it more interesting.

Did the state library use mash ups when they were digitising their early records.

We could also use mashups for the kids for holiday time activities. Would be great

Podcasts and audio

I am already familiar with podcasts as we often download from the ABC and listen to them when we are travelling (That's when we can get the ipod working).

I did listen to one from the British library introducing their "Taking Liberties" exhibition and it was interesting to look at the variety of podcasts on the ABC site
I hadn't thought about the library making some for educational purposes.
Our library could make a podcast about our HSC resources or do occasional reviews of books with frequent borrowers. We could also use them to publicise special events eg author visits and special holiday activities. I can see a positive use for these in libraries.
We could also make a video and audio about searching the catalogue or reserving books online.

I love answer boards and have been using them for awhile for answers to difficult questions. They always present a funny solution which although often said in jest is quite appropriate as an alternative answer.
I really liked the "Answerboard librarians wiki". of course librarians would give the best answers. They are trained to look up and evaluate information.

For the first time I answered a question. I haven't done this before. I think if I answer another one I will identify that I am a librarian. Will explore the answerboard librarians wiki more.

I think it would be great to set up a site so customers can rate or review books they have read. I like books with a really different storyline so rely on information provided verbally by our customers for recommending crime, adventure etc books to other readers. There would be some customers who would really like to add their reviews via this format and others who would rather talk about their books.

Well I found my RSS feeds on my bloglines site. Must put a link to it on my blog.

I just hope I remember all of this. It has been fascinating having time to actually look a bit closer at all of this new technology instead of just having a vague idea of what it all means.

Week 7 social bookmarking

I found all of this fascinating and probably spent too much time getting my head around all this, exploring websites and seeing how this might be useful for the library.
I thought the National library's list of useful resources great and added a link to it on my blog. I can see how adding your own tags would make it more user friendly.
From our library's point of view I think that a site like this would be great for us for reference queries but we could also set one up for our borrowers to use as well. We could also set up links to information on our locality as other libraries have done.

I loved the Library thing site, and added five of my favourite books to it with some reviews. I can really see this being a useful tool to set up in our library or for our patrons to use amongst themselves. We tried an online book club with our sister library in America but that never really took off, but if we encouraged some of our local people to join Library thing - then they could easily see what other people with similiar tastes were reading.