Week 12: Social networking etc.

I have tried out Facebook in my personal life - not sure how well it works to have personal and professional overlapping but I guess that happens in real life anyway.

I think MySpace, Facebook, Bebo etc. are useful marketing tools but I think before we use them we need to check that the demographic we're trying to reach are using them. eg. MySpace works well for public libraries in the US marketing to young adults ... but in New Zealand Bebo is more prevalent.

I think Second Life is interesting but will be more relevant to us when more of our clients start transacting more of their lives in Second Life.

Wow... I made it to week 12. It's been quite a ride, tricky to steal the time to complete all the activities but definitely worth all the effort.

Week 11: Online applications

Ahhh... I'm on familiar ground with this lesson. I have already been using Google docs to work on committees that are geographically widespread, also Google Groups for storing committee files etc. that are accessible to everyone.

I have found Zamzar very useful for converting files to PDF - something I need to do suprisingly often. Doc2PDF online is very good too.

I have yet to fully explore the project management tools that are out there but find I am living more and more of my 'life' online so no doubt will begin using them as well.

Using any different programs requires a bit of flexibility - I have used Open Office as well and found I had to think more about things I could do automatically in programs I am more familiar with but perhaps that mental agility is something to keep developing as we age anyway?

Week 10: Podcasts

Podcasts are great - though now I can see I really do need broadband at home so I can subscribe to some!

I think we could use them in so many ways:
- downloadable self guided tours of our exhibitions or the library itself
- capturing author talks etc. from our events program
- providing curator talks about rare books and other important items in our collections
- building training tools for the public library folks
- developing training resources for our own staff [eg. induction program]

Perhaps our future includes library as broadcaster?

I have collected an mp3 player and am finding it a bit of a challenge to master but will persevere. I'm not sure the player itself really adds much value to the program?

Week 9: Mashups

What fun! I loved this lesson and have had quite a bit of fun exploring the many image generators linked at the Generator Blog.

The French map mashup is so impressive - surely we could look at something like this with some of the maps in our collection and also in relation to the Dictionary of Sydney project? I'm not sure what skills and technology we'd need but it would be worth investigating.

Week 8: Answer boards and social searching

I first heard of "Slam the Boards" last year and thought at the time it seemed like a really smart and proactive move for librarians to be involved. I think our experience with Ask Now shows that clients do want to interact with us online and I think we need to factor Answer Boards in context of both a service and a marketing exercise - pointing people back to libraries.

I wonder if we're beginning to see a trend that information is valuable because it's accessible and fast (point of need) rather than authoritative that might be important. Do we know what our clients value about information? Do our clients have diverging opinions on this issue?

Week 7: tagging, folksonomies etc.

Before I did this course I had heard the term 'folksonomies' and didn't really know what it meant. In context of more structured 'taxonomies' I 'get it'. I think we need to meet our clients somewhere in the middle on this one -

• I like the examples of catalogues that include tags, we should look at this in our catalogue
• I think we should be able to 'connect' tags and subject headings in some way [somehow in an automated way in our catalog]
• I think we could use tag clouds to help secondary students explore some of our resources ... helping them find the right keywords to track down what they need
• I think we could use tag clouds and resources like Del.icio.us at the information desks, particularly for very topical enquiries and to capture links to be considered for the official lists on our website
• I set up a del.icio.us account and was disappointed that I couldn't download the widget for my toolbar - it should be part of our SOE...
• I set up a LibraryThing account but since I don't have time to read all of my books at home I doubt very much I will have time to catalog them into LibraryThing... :-(
• I think LibraryThing for Libraries is a trend we should keep an eye on

Week 6 - online video

I had heard of YouTube before - mostly for fun stuff ... like the internet version of funniest home videos. Boy had I underestimated it's potential:

• I have seen some great examples in this course of short video tutorials, embedded in the course they work well.
• I have learned that YouTube isn't the only hosting site - videos can also be found in TeacherTube, blipTV, MetaCafe, Daily Motion, DotSub and Google Video to name a few.
• I have learned that many organisations block access to sites like these to limit the use of bandwidth - we need to keep this in mind when we put resources up in these formats for our clients
• I haven't tried uploading a video ... but I hope to in the future
• I added a video bar from youTube to my blog and here is a video I've embedded:

I chose it because it shows that even if we don't add content to online video sources library clients are quite capable of putting up their own... as the folks at SLQ have discovered.

Checklist ...

I thought I should do a quick checklist against the topics and make sure I haven't missed anything so far:

• Week 1 - watched it, read it OK
• Week 2 - set up my blog and explored Technorati, have also set up a blog using Wordpress (a few more features but trickier to get the hang of so I think Blogger is a good choice for this course)
• Week 3 - I've uploaded photos to flickr, added tags to them, searched for quite a few. Haven't quite mastered the Flickr upload tool direct to my blog but managed to upload photos to my blog anyway. I think Creative Commons is important - it has applications to a lot of the work we do here where we're happy to share with acknowledgement. I think people misinterpret it as an alternative to copyright law - it's not, it's just a way of indicating what type of sharing and reuse you authorise within copyright.
• Week 4 - RSS: I have used bloglines a lot, it compares well to another RSS reader I have used "RSS Bandit" which is also good, I have also dabbled with Google Reader. I have to track blogs a lot in my day to day work so tools like these make it much more effective ... now I just need a daily timeslot to read the posts! I'd like to see us put RSS feeds on a lot of our SLNSW webpages and into our catalogue for new items by authors / subjects - I think our clients would find it really useful.
• Week 5 - I have edited a Wikipedia entry and created a couple of wikis in pbwiki (so easy and working well). I think we need wikis behind the firewall for internal use and also access to ones externally for our clients. I think we need to have a discussion about what information we put on our official website and what needs to live in these 'collaborative spaces'. I wish we could set up an Australiana wiki...!