Grand Finale!

My final post for the 23 things....
The web technologies available were far beyond what I expected. Many seem to empower the individual, to do and create as you please, interacting with who ever may be interested. I was impressed by Flickr from week 6, but from the award winners I also liked the self publishing site.

The library learning program was worth the effort, even with the challenge of dedicating work time to it. I learned a lot about new techonlogies, plenty I hadn't heard of before. Whether I would find a use for many of them, I'm not sure. The emphasis is often 'sharing' with these web 2.0 technologies and that could be used to advantage in a library situation, but how much would we be duplicating existing services. Good planning and discussion would help us come up with a great service and obstacles shouldn't stand in our way of at least looking for improvements or offering a service to our students and staff. I hope we'll be able to keep up with the swift technological changes, though.

Podcasting

I never thought of podcast directories, but of course there would be...it's obvious now I'm nearing the end of my 23 Things. Key word searching for library orientation brought up something very interesting! But the tag searching worked quite well, then only to be frustrated by software requirements (download this, that, and the other) before I could listen to any podcasts. I think this is a very important consideration when we, as a library, add more podcasts to our web pages. Listening to our library podcasts brought home to me that the technical side of getting a podcast up is not so daunting, but the creative side, eg. voice talent, exciting script, etc, can make or break one.
As part of the FEA team it's now on to GarageBand, iMovie, and Profcast!

Video hosting and sharing

It was fun to browse around the various video hosting sites, before long you've followed a lead and ended up very far from where you started. But I loved the "dominoes" video, library related after all, with the swish of buckram and the thump of journals falling away into the distance.



Seriously though, great for library orientation or instruction for first time borrowers. I came across a few of those as well. YouTube is so easy to use and navigate, retrieving videos based on tags, then sends you off on tangents. Good fun!

Social tagging - del.icio.us and Technorati

Social bookmarking could be useful for reading lists, as per Helen Blowers podcast. It could go so far as to substitute our webpages for faculty resources, which could allow user input, lecturers and students. There was some interesting exploration of online subject guides on Meredith Farkas' blog. I also read that an academic presence was increasing on del.icio.us which could be useful to individual researchers. The library could possibly play a role here but researchers would probably find their own specific material. It's amusing that this easy to use everyman's technology raises the question about controlled language. Maybe we should all just use as many keywords as we can think of, covering synonyms, etc., for most relevancy.

The little searching I did on Technorati brought out some very irrelevant and odd things. I can't see that much use for the library, but would that matter considering the level of authority and relevance found in blogs. The useful subject blogs would probably be known to people that are interested in them rather than go trawling through millions of blogs.

On a personal level I think I could easily get used to using both handy tools for keeping track of bookmarks and interesting blogs, you know, for those times when you've got nothing better to do than surf!

Second life

"Don't believe the hype", appropriate to Second Life. I find the whole idea fascinating and the 4 Corners programme was very good, but I do believe there is a lot of hype around Second Life and it is not as widespread and heavily used as they like to make out. From a library perspective I can't see why you would add one more complex level of entering a virtual environment to get info or data that can be easily retrieved from existing databases, catalogues, and the web. Maybe in years to come improved technology would allow for some aspects of Second Life to be brought into virtual reference services, increase interactivity with online reference.

Flickr

Flickr is able to do much more than I initially thought and houses an overwhelming quantity of images. I chose the very sexy shot of our new library building to upload to my blog.

I loved searching the group Colour Fields...lot's of imagination and many inspiring shots. And Montager was a lot of fun the way it creates a mosaic from an image. Designers, photographers, etc must love this site, not to mention anyone and everyone keeping in touch via images on the web. I'm tempted myself to start up an account.

Library applications could include images to showcase a particular aspect of a library or display, or jazz up a library blog.

Wiki's cont...

Following up on my previous entry re: wiki's, my thoughts on possible use of one have been confirmed with the ECU Library Learning wiki on BlackBoard. It was very easy to use and I gained insight from reading other people's comments.

Wacky Wiki Week

Wiki week has me converted, I think I like them a lot!
My initial thoughts were "what...no control?" but how easy it would be to offer subject and/or faculty info/guides to students via a wiki. Being able to effectively lock down some infomation and enable login or account creation for editing purposes would work well. Great for developing topics or projects that would benefit from discussion, opinion, debate. Students would definitely be engaged - promote, promote, promote.
I could see uses for meetings and even staff info, in LCA we could put the whole LCA Bookmarks and procedure manual into a wiki!

RSS feeds cont....

The RSS feeds exercises took some practice to get my head around all the possibilities. I need to try and see what each method does (empirical!) and I'm still intending to see if I can add a feed to something directly from my own blog, but I'm having trouble at the moment with my blog settings, getting errors on edit pages. I may have to start from scratch.
I think RSS feeds from favourite searches in db's could be useful for students, academics, staff etc. It's another form of alerts, really, but without having to log in to your library profile - assuming the person is often on their own blog. It would be interesting to add to a library blog - but how non-specific would it have to be?

Getting on with RSS feeds

I have just created a Bloglines account and selected a few interesting feeds from their top 50 list. The next step will be to incorporate them into Blog City. I still want to find some of my own, but that means a bit of time surfing!
After some talk with Killer Kat it became a little clearer about RSS feeds, and the exact nature of Bloglines. I assumed once I set up my feeds on Bloglines I would have direct links from my Blog to them, but really you're linking to Bloglines. Blogger has the capacity to have feeds added to your Blog - I'll give that a go next and keep you posted.

First post...

Better late than never I suppose....


As commented by fellow ecu bloggers, it takes longer to think about the process, choose a name, template, pretty colour, etc., etc., than actually setting up the blog! This is my first step then to finally understanding those terms that are bandied about so easily nowaday's: RSS feeds, wikis, tagging, mashups and the rest.
I'm looking forward to see how we can use it in a library context as I have to admit I am one of those cynical ones that up to now have thought of blogging as an online diary talking about oneself ad nauseum. We shall see!!!
Please someone tell if I go down that route!