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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.