#17 a few of my favourite things

Raindrops on roses , no that was Julie Andrews. Favourite things walking the dog, Tai Chi, pottering in the garden, watching the baby magpies and noisy miners play in the bird bath, walking along a beach anywhere, collecting shells. Well I added my blog to the favourites and perhaps I'm thick but the instructions were a bit vague. What it needed to say was that you add your blog at the bottom of the australian favourites by hitting enter next to the last blog entry so that you get a line where you can type your blog address in, and you don't need the brackets as it works quite happily without that. Maybe a few visual prompts would help. Otherwise it was fun.

#16 What is a wiki

I can see lots of potential for wikis within the library sphere. I have problems with the wikapedia type wikis as the fact that anyone can add content and it may or may not be accurate is a worry. Where I do see potential is in setting up a library success wiki for Australian content. I can see potential for all sorts of topics to be covered in a wiki of this nature. Thinking as a Youth Services Librarian we all have a huge store of knowledge which could be shared on a wiki from ideas for programs to valuable websites. We so often reinvent the wheel and this would be a good way to share this wealth. All those Viclink training days could have the content from the days added to the wiki so we could all access and use it. Wikis also have great potential for pathfinders for our patrons and also for book reviews, though with spydus we are already able to add reviews to the catalogue.

#15 Library 2.0 & Web 2.0

What an amazing world we are moving towards. I am old enough to remember card catalogues, reverse brown's filing systems and photo charging plus the gradual introduction and change to computer technology. I must admit I feel a bit like one of the people Alvin Toffler talked about in Future Shock plus I can see elements of Brave new world in some of the articles which are in the batch of OCLC articles.
I liked the fact that the author of Into a new world of Librarianship talked about not buying technology simply for the sake of technology. I think Libraries have to be very careful that they are using technology because it will enhance our services and be useful for our customers not because it's wizz bang and hey aren't we better than everyone else because we have this.
He also said we need to have face to face as well as virtual conversations which I think is very important. Yes we do need to and are reaching out to users who don't want or need to come to a physical building but we also need to maintain those physical spaces and places where people can makes contact other wise we move towards some of the worst excesses of the brave new world model. We still need to have programs which are physical not virtual - I'm afraid I can't quite imagine a virtual preschool storytime!

He talked about the need to give staff time to play and learn and I think this is vital. We are all hurrying and racing to keep up with technology plus trying to maintain current services and be everything to everyone. There must be a balance between what new services we want to provide and what current services we continue to offer. Continually adding without reassessing the time commitment leads to staff who are stressed and skimming across the top of the information they are trying to absorb without really taking it all in.
As we value customers so we also need to value staff and makes sure they have the time to provide the best service for the community.

Many of the aspects of web 2.0 will be very useful for our customers. As a Youth Services Librarian I have noticed in the last few years that they number of non-fiction titles borrowed, particularly by secondary students, has decreased as they become more reliant on the internet for their information. We can use technology to assist their searching and certainly things like library link Victoria are helping with this plus all our on line data bases. We can certainly make sure that the searches they do provide information that is authoritative and it should be one of our aims to do this.
I hope the libraries of the future will still have a physical space and that there will still be books to read as well as virtual spaces and e books because I think it would be sad if those community meeting spaces disappeared. My hope is that the 2 can coexist together.

#14 Technorati

I've had a look around Technorati using "learning 2.0" as the search term and it's interesting to compare the number of hits you get under blogs, tags and blog posts. Tags obviously narrows the field but there is still some superflous material getting through. Looking at the topics listed under search terms and tags and the most popular sites I wonder if technorati or similar search facilities could ever replace dewey and subject headings. I think at this stage the search results are still too broad and our current way of cataloguing does by and large yield a better hit rate. Who knows though what may happen in the future particularly with more and more people using on line catalogues.

#13 Del.icio.us

had a look at the PLCMCL2 account and I can see that it would be a useful tool to bookmark favourites when you use different computers. eg work and home or, as we often do, different computers over several libraries at work, depending on where you are working for the day. I can also see that peering into someone elses bookmarks and following the trail they have set up to useful sites would be helpful for students or anyone who has a particular passion or hobby. Sorting out the garbage from the gems may be difficult but I guess that's true of any internet searching and maybe it helps that someone has done at least some of the work for you first.

#12 Rollyo

Well I've ceated a rollyo account and made a list of Tassie destinations as I'm off to Tassie in November and thought this would be a good way to pull some of the sites we've searched together. Mind you it feels a bit like a glorified favourites list so I'm not sure how much more useful it is than this given that you can create folders in favourites for relevent sites just as easily. It looks prettier in the finished product. Can see it might be useful for students doing research to pull together useful sites on a particular topic. I've added it at the bottom of the blog and this is the link.
http://rollyo.com/editroll.html?sid=320757

Week 5 #11 Librarything

I can see this is a fun way to catalogue not only your own books but books in a library too. Interesting to see how many other people have added the same book as you to their catalogue. Jackets of books are always appealing and though we shouldn't judge a book by it's cover it always helps! Spydus now displays book covers which is a great tool too.
Here's the link to my small lot of books. I could add more but there's always something else to do
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/ritafellows

#6 More flickr fun

Opps forget to put in the post that I had looked at some of these sites and liked Librarian trading card - good way to create a different view of librarians perhaps we can trade like we used to with swap cards - opens up lots of possibilities.

my image generator Week 5 #10

Found this on generator blog and as a Taurus thought a bit of bull would go a long way. You can find other zodizc signs at http://www.imagechef.com/ic/final_widget.jsp

Week 4 #8 & #9 Thoughts on RSS Feeds

Well I've set up the Bloglines account and added some feeds from the sites which have feeds and I can see that it would be useful to manage all the information you might want to access on a regular basis from the internet as it allows you to use one site rather than several to do that. However I still come back to the concern that to do this you are spending so much time in front of a computer and there is so much more to life than a computer. I can see that if you had a news group where everyone was discussing a particular topic that this would be a way to do this without having to have a face to face meeting and would certainly be useful if you all lived along way from each other or if time was short. I don't know that this is something I would use on a regular basis. Having looked at some of the search tools to find feeds my head is reeling. There is so much information and you wonder about the privacy associated with feeds. Google blog search like google seems very easy to use but very broad in it's coverage whereas some of the others are a bit more specific. Finding time for all of this is very hard to do but I guess I've made a start.