#17 Sandboxes

I added my blog but now I'm getting lots of emails whenever the pages are edited! Agh! And why is it a sandbox? My childhood memories of sandboxes are tainted by always having cats!!!

I added a favourite wine. I have to admit this didn't excite me very much. Playing favourites has limited scope for me but for our library we could use this to play favourite books, dvds, cd, talking books, websites, etc.

I think you really have to create a wiki and play around to get a proper feel for this. I'm sure it's got potential - i just don't know what that is right now!

# 16 Wikier pussycat, kill kill!

A Ref Desk E manual - fantastic - except for when the computers are down and really, are our computers fast enough? I'm sure you've all noticed that doing 2.0 stuff is slow at work.

I do like the wiki sites on St. Joseph County Public Library cooking page. I like how it links to cookbooks, magazines, cooking careers websites, staff comments, recipes and upcoming events such as the farmer's market! What a great idea. It allows for a more dynamic representation of the resources available to people. If you like cooking you might also like farmer's markets. I wonder if this is more meaningful/helpful for people than our beloved LC subject headings?

However, how do you deal with the hard stuff? Like creationism vs Darwinism and science, or the presence and marketing of LOTE material when some people disagree with this service. How do you manage different opinions within your wiki without being biased in some way? This will be a challenge.

Another thing is that you start to duplicate your information. So all that information is accessible somewhere in the catalogue, the website, a directory, your blog and/or facebook profile. Perhaps this is a good thing because some people favour one particular 2.0 tool in particular. (For example, i have been addicted to facebook and if you're not on there well i just don't know you anymore!)

I like it...I want one!!!

#15 The 2.0 Library through my crystal ball

Collecting books is our bread and butter - imagine the complaints if we didn't! I don't think that our circulation rates our dropping - if a Balwyn 10am desk is anything to go by. Hybrid libraries are going to become better at balancing online and print formats in the future.

I like the idea of taking the library to the user. In fact, I think that delivering meaningful resources to people online, educating people about online resources and helping them deal with information overload should be important goals.

Web 2.0 is different because it allows interaction between users and other users, companies, organisations. It moves users into a more active role in their information seeking or receiving. It also connects people with each other. Many 2.0 tools have a social element to them, you share, compare, give, receive, edit, comment, respond, chat....instead of just reading, listening, watching. We don't just teach the machine, we teach each other. This could have a democratising effect. Libraries should jump at these opportunities.

All this is pretty nerdy so I apologise. I think we should also have fun...this exercise has been good for encouraging us to think outside the library box and play with emerging technologies and hopefully fit them into library services. Gone are the days of shushing librarians guarding their stacks viciously. Perhaps library 2.0 means opening up the traditional library to technology and users. This might also increase connection and collaboration between libraries that are geographically remote from each other. Allowing tags instead of subject headings might help be relevant to the Google generation too. I also respect Michael Stephens idea of controlling technolusts, after all we're librarians, not geeks!

Here are some other things we could do:

• allow users to tag our collection or websites and create clouds for easy access to subject areas,

• allows users to write their own reviews - hey, we already do this, yay us!!!

• youtube video instructions on how to find books or staff talking about their favourite books

• have a facebook presence and make lots of new friends

• federated searching of catalogue, websites, database records

all of this is great of course, we can web2.0 ourselves to craziness but i know there's almost nothing better than curling up in bed on a rainy day with a great book (digital or print?)

#14 getting technocractic

Technorati Profile
I've done it...am I famous yet? I wish I had something interesting to say.....There are many many blogs out there - a bit scary really. Unfortunately, most of the ones I found were on the boring side.

When the library blog goes live we definately need to do this to give us a strong web presence.

#13 Yum Yum Del.icio.us fun!

Library journal 15/09/2007 had an article about libraries and tagging which was really interesting. Click here to read it. Some libraries
Thunder Bay Public Library
Nashville Public Library
have already created clouds on their websites and also allow their users to tag books similar to how librarians add subject headings. There's obviously no authority control (which some librarians will hate!) but that doesn't mean they can't be organised or bundled into groups even corresponding to the Dewey Decimal System.
I like the cloud of tags - representing subject areas visually might help people browse better. I think the best thing about del.icio.us is probably the social element where you can infiltrate other people's search results and jump through the internet quicker than searching with a traditional (boring) search engine!

#12 Rollyo

Rolling along, all together now!!!!
I LOVE this. I have lots of websites that I regularly search for all sorts of things and now I don't have to leap over all over the web. I could be fantastic for librarians help people find out about their favourite authors or new and interesting books they might like to read. Alternatively, we could throw global books in prints together with fantastic fiction and other sites to create a more efficient method of searching for bibliographic information!

I need to know more about this -
What does it search - does it search within hyperlinks and perhaps advertising as well?
It searches advertising but it delivers these in a blue box - like google, so you know what you're dealing with.

Can it search PDF or is it only webdriven.

Can it search other search engines or search engines within websites? Yes, it does! Wow, I have been wasting my time searching so many different sites

And if I add more sites to my rollyo does this automatically change once I have committed it to my blog? Yes, it does! It seems to update immediately.

agh, so many questions, such little blogtime.

#11 Library thing

It's ma thang!
I love Library thing! Yep, it makes me feel special and not completely weird (or high-brow) about the books I read because others read them two! And you can see how pretty your books look on a shelf.
I wonder if we like the same books???

#6 and #10 mashing image generators

I decided to co-blog these as they are so similar.

I"m on a rock star, didn't you know? I play a mean avocado!

Information retrieval by colour is a fantastic idea Colr Pickr or Osokope visual search or retrievr where you need to draw what you want to find. The borrowers that ask for a book only knowing that the cover is blue this is for them! Imagine if we intergrate this into our OPAC - not sure if Spydus is quite at this stage yet. Browsing through the Visual Search Labs could be helpful for that project where you're not quite sure what you need. I love some of the ways that disparate images are connected only through their colour

The library could use photos taken from an event and load them on flickr and then mash them up to help describe the event or people who attended.

I created a librarian's trading card as an interesting social networking exercise and I am hoping to use this to connect with other librarians online - imagine what could happen! It's good to know I'm in such good-looking company!

LOLcats mashups - I can't think of a serious use for this except serious procrastination! i can't get enough.

I"m afraid this didn't excite me all that much but I did make really cool stars with Snowflaking - but I can't load them here - but check it...it's cool, like a snowflake. I did try and break the application though. I get bored easily and so I thought I should test out the application to see where the faults lie. Yep, horrible I know. But you can make ugly stars that look like they've been stepped on.

I"m on the front cover of rolling stone magazine this month - I'm splicing an avocado not playing a guitar.

# 9 newsfeeds

What a great information sharing tool. So great, in fact, that it is overwhelming.

I hope that Newsfeeds have a massive impact for customer service in libraries for our savvy users. It might also help us connect with users that don't visit the library or the reference desk and hopefully non-users as well. I suppose we already do a kind of RSS by allowing borrowers to set up profiles which send them an email when new resources are added to the catalogue that match their search terms. When the library blog goes live to the public I hope there are some keen borrowers out there that RSS is to capture our latest ramblings. We should make it worth their while by marketing services, reviewing new resources, connecting them to other web 2.0 features and promoting literacy education.

I have some favourite cooking websites that I feed into through MyYahoo to receive the most recently uploaded recipes. This means that I don't need to go to the websites every few days to check out what's new. Sometimes you can't even find out what is just been added as the web designers don't have an option for it. I can take a quick look at the recipe titles and decide whether to go further or not. It can really be used to save time searching, hunting, mining and then doing it all over again next week!

Feedstar is under construction so i couldn't check it out but i had a peek at topix. It's quite commercial but I could still spend all day there - I learned some useless things - like a cow recently gave birth to quadriplets in China and a one-house town in Italy was sold on E-Bay. Yep, changed my life that stuff did.