NSW State Library

NSW State Library
Originally uploaded by sachman75

Silence! Foolish mortals!

Silence! Foolish mortals!
Originally uploaded by Soon.

Last post

12 weeks ago I was considering how did we survive without email, now I'm thinking what did we do without Wikis, Mashups, googledocs and zamzar. I feel a lot more confident about the whole learning 2.0 thing now and I just want to get out there and use it in our workplace.
It's been fun.

Cautious opportunities

Facebook, myspace, second life, I think they are all really interesting and probably provide us with opportunities to reach a greater proportion of our clients but I can't help but think if everyone is out there on facebook myspace and indeed second life simply becomes a replica of our first life, will our clients stay there? I think these are transient spaces that will become victims of there own popularity and people will move on to other spaces, looking for that exclusivity and connection...which is all fine and they way it should be, however I think we need to be conscious of this when considering the time and resourcing we commit to social networking sites. I also think we need to start thinking seriously about how we evaluate the success these tools in a library context.

Online tools

Online sharing tools makes sense, if you can share photos why not share documents online. It seems that as we collaborate more and more often and these tools allow us to do it in an effective and efficient way. I prefer google docs to zoho, not really sure why but it seems easier and more intuitive. I recently used zamzar to convert a document to PDF and to convert a PDF document back to a rich text file so I could manipulate it. One thing that does worry me a little about Zamzar and google docs etc is the security aspect, I'm just not sure where my document is going and where a copy of it might be kept. I guess it comes down to risk management and the level of confidentiality of the document.

I have been a fan of podcast for a while now although I have to admit I mainly use them to catch up on things I have missed via television or radio such as Denton or ABC PM or AM news items I may have caught the end of but am interested in following up.

I hadn't really thought about our towne meetings as podcasts but I guess they are. Now I think about it we could use podcasts to capture our events like author talks, discussion forums etc. We could use these to present or supplement training like Making Connection sessions, it enables us to fulfil our role to a much larger portion of NSW.

Mashups

Thought I would use a mashup to build on the theme of bad signage, fortunately I think this was a bookshop rather than a library.

I love this weeks lesson. Big huge labs was fun, there is lots of opportunity for using our collections more actively for promotion. My favourite was Voicethread, this fantastic and presents an incredible amount of opportunities for local history librarians and family historians. We could use Voicethread to provide context and meaning to our ephemera collections and photographic collections.

Anwser boards

I am a big fan of answer boards and I think slamming the boards is a good idea if it is in addition to creating a place where people want to post their questions directly. I'm not sure how we build support with our funders and our clients by going out and slamming the boards but then again I know it is not feasible to just sit back and wait. The thing about Yahoo7 and Wiki answers is that they are so easy, so transparent, so in the language and context that so many clients want to be....I think we haven't figured out what we want libraries to be yet, answers to anything and everything or answers to the everything else but anything and everything, and I think we need to decide soon.

I think there are great opportunities for us to integrate social searching into our catalogue, our resource lists etc, lets engage with our clients about our resources.

A little time since my last post

Well it has been sometime since my last post but I have a little time and a lot to do so I'll move on. Going back and looking over my blog I realised that I had been a little remiss around the flickr lesson so I decided to load a photo up on my blog. I selected this photo as I recently attended the Hyperlinked Library presentation where there was a lot of discussion around signage in libraries and how mch they contribute to the general feel of our libraries.

Week 7 blues

Its week 7 and I think I have the week 7 information overload blues. I was frustrated finding a unique delicious username and password and then felt almost overwhelmed by the number of tagged and labeled sites. I can see delicious is trying to bring some order to web and help users find what they are looking for easily...mmm sounds familiar. I think that is where a little of my frustration is coming from, should't we, librarians that is, have come up with this idea rather than just being passive recipients of it?

I really like librarything, but again it worries me that we are not out there creatng this type of value add to the web.

YouTube and the Lego librarian

I found this weeks lesson on videos online both addictive and infuriating at the same time. Once you're in YouTube you find you are stuck there, looking at "just one more link" before you log out! I also found accessing some sites at home using my wirless connection very frustrating, the connection kept stalling, I guess we take our internet speed for ganted at work.

I found this video on YouTube , it is quite strange , I'm not really sure about the content but thought I might use it as an example of embedding a video in my blog...unfortunately kept getting an error message...take a look anyway, it is pretty obvious what search words I was using when I found it.

PB WIKI

I tried to add a calendar to the SLNSW visitors guide Wiki but couldn't really get it happening. I think I will have to play around a little more with PB Wiki. It does seem easy enough to add content but I think an events calendar imbedded into an internal or external wiki would be great for the State Library.

Wikis, I love them

I love Wikis! I think they appeal to my need for a sense of order. I also like the idea that you are not working in a vacuum, that you can draw on other people expertise without creating a whole lot of extra work in the process.

I can see lots of opportunities for the Wikis in the library. Building corporate knowledge and documenting procedures seem like very obvious applications for us. I especially liked the Library Success Wiki-sharing stories about what we do well and building best practice guidelines and standards at the same time seems like a good idea to me.

Alerts follow up

It has been sometime since my last post, but just a quick follow up on alerts. Alerts are only to alert you to when someone post a comment to your blog. I guess RSS feeds are the most efficient way to alert you you to new posts on other peoples blogs. I thought I read on the Desk with View blog that you cannot set up an RSS feed for alerting you to comments posted on a blogs, it will obnly alert you to new posts?

At the risk of sounding lazy and I guess a little obsessive about alerts....can you get bloglines to send an email to you about new posts?

Setting up alerts

To set alerts to yourself if someone comments on your blog you just need to
1. Go to your blogger.com
2. Log in with your gmail details
3. Click on manage setting on the dashboard
4. Click on settings tab
5.Click on Comments tab
6 Scroll to the bottom of the page and then type you email address in the Comments notification email box

I'm not sure if it is blog etiquette to respond to comments individually or post to your blog?

Alerts

I just realised that you can set up alerts which go to your email when someone comments on your blog. This makes it a lot easier to respond to issues and feedback on a blog which you set up around a particular issue or specifically to gather feeedback. We could easily incorporate a blog into one of the ways SLNSW clients could comment on their satisfaction with services. Has anyone used a blog to provide feedback on a service they have used?

Catching up

The most difficult part about blogging so far has been finding a gmail account name, blogger name and address that is available! I can see lots of potential for blogs in the library and home but I have to admit that my main aim/concern at the moment is getting my head around the terminology, concepts and just feeling like I am catching up with everyone else in the world. What was web/library 1.0 anyway, I seem to have missed it?