#20 Youtube - Graham Kennedy

Youtube hmm! You could spend days looking at all the fascinating videos on this site and still feel that you hadn't made much headway. I must admit it was great finding graham Kennedy footage on youtube and some of our staff will attest that i was laughing out loud. He really was the king. Apart from the fun side of youtube I'm finding it hard to envisage how it really has much relevance for libraries.

#19 Web 2.0 tools

I had a look at realtravel which is a travel site which pulls together information on any destination you care to name. I like the things to do tab which puts travel into categories such as activities you like doing eg beach, shopping or travel style e.g adventure or family. That way you can choose a style which appeals and limit your search but bring up places from all over the world. You can also obviously search by a particular destination. You can compare prices for air fares and accomodation. There is also a forum where you can ask travel questions like what are the best travel shoes and people using the site can post answers. It's really a one stop travel spot and I can see would be a useful site to recommend to all our lonely planet, rough guide and fodors users.

#18 Zoho writer

Had a look at Zoho writer and I've managed to publish a document to my blog. It's come through rather large but it's there so that's a start in the right direction! I still think I prefer word for creating documents but maybe that's because I'm not as familiar with Zoho. I can see it would be useful to be able to use the web for groups of people to be all seeing and editing the same document and saves you sending it backwards and forwards to each other. Would have been quite useful the other day when I was editing a literature review for my daughter and had to save and then resend the document to her.

Garden of Delights book talk

 

Garden of Delights                                  A special talk about author and landscape Gardener                                       Edna Walling                                                                    Thursday 1st November                                               7pm                               Hawthorn Library                             584 Glenferrie Road                              Hawthorn                               Session is free but bookings are essential

#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.