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.