NSW Public Library - Week 7c

I had already created a LibraryThing account, so I want adventuring and created a Shelfari account and added some books.
I read alot of sci/fi and fantasy and I found that Library Thing listed some of the authors and titles that I own, but Shelfari didn't.
However, I prefer the way that Shelfari displays the books on your shelf, it looks more appealing and more "library oriented".
I also like the way you can add Shelfari to your blog as a widget, that is so cool!

I think both tools are a great idea and I think it is entirely up to personal preference and the books that one read/owns as to which tool will suit people working in the library industry.

NSW Public Library - Week 7b

I searched Technorati for bookmobile and received 516 results. When I performed an advanced search for the same term I received 532 results.

I also searched for nswpln2008 and it took a bit of fiddling but I finally got some search results. I looked through the search results which ranged from Flickr photos to videoclips and wiki's.
There weren't as many results as I expected, but it was good to get some.

Technorati is not what I consider the most user friendly site and I don't really like it, mainly because of all the advertising, but the concept of the site and its overall purpose it quite good.

NSW Public Library - Week 7a

Del.icio.us - I created my account a little while ago and have been adding links ever since, in a library environment I can see this as being incredibly useful as it allows favourite/useful pages to be tagged and accessed from any computer.
No longer will staff access the favourites on a computer only to find that the sites they want have not been added. They will just access del.icio.us from any computer and all the sites will be there.

I think in the future research assistants will be able to make use of tools like del.icio.us and tags clouds to gather together sources without spending hours trolling the internet. Searching and locating information will be faster and research assistants with superior search skills will have more resources than they know what to do with.

This is a link to my delicious which I keep adding to, but finding the time to get back to the tagged pages is proving a little difficult. But at least I know they are there when I have time.

NSW Public Library - Week 6

Looking at both YouTube and Google videos it is interesting to see how many things people are willing to post for others to see.
Although many of the videos are very funny and its easy to spend time looking at them, I think that the videos that are attempting to share work related information and are worth viewing get lost amongst all of the funny or just plain stupid videos.
I searched library in YouTube and the first two pages didn't list any results that would give me valuable information that I could use at work. In Google videos I did get slightly better search results but it took more detailed searching (listing a library name) to get a list of good results.

Potentially there is a great deal that can be done with these sites, sharing author talks, storytimes, book launches, conference speeches, book groups and much more. The video would need to be added with search tags that would make it easy to locate or use a wiki or blog that links to the videos.

I tried to select only one video to embed, but I couldn't. I am a horse lover and cat owner, so i couldn't resist these ones.

NSW Public Library - Week 5

I have looked at a number of different wiki's, it always astounds me at the variety of content that wiki's contain. Wiki's can be used to share information about so many different things, the advantage of the Wiki structure is that generally the content of the wiki doesn't become old or stale as people are always contributing.
The collaboration of many allows information to be provided on many levels and from many sources, creating a pool of knowledge that others can draw from and make their contribution to.

A Wiki provides a user friendly interface that makes it easy to navigate a wiki and find the information you are seeking.
Within a library I can see a wiki being useful for local history resources that you would like members of the public to be able to provide information about.
I also think that a wiki would be useful for a readers advisory within your individual library, contributions could be made by library patrons, staff and avid readers that find the wiki.

I tried to look at the PB Wiki Tour and the video was no longer available.

I ventured onto Wikipedia and made a change to the Kootingal page, adding information about the annual Pumpkin festival.

Fox Glacier 3 - Week 3 Learning 2.0

Fox Glacier 3
Originally uploaded by marianb1

I have finally been able to get Flickr to talk to my Blog. Here is a photo posted on Flickr, a ice cave on the Fox Glacier in N.Z.

NSW Public Library - Week 4

I have created a Bloglines account and added a number of feeds. There is a enormous amount of feeds available for every subject you can think of. I like that RSS makes it so easy to gather these sites together in an easily accessible format. I have made my bloglines public and included a link showing all of the sites that I selected http://www.bloglines.com/public/marianb. I think that this will be useful at work by providing a single access point from which information from many sources can be obtained quickly and easily.
Libraries can take advantage of this technology by providing a feed from their website, this will keep patrons up to date with what is going on in the different areas of the library. Libraries can also provide access to relevant feeds on their website to give up to date information on a particular topic or subject.
There were a number of different library related feeds, some of which I subscribed to and have found quite useful and informative.

NSW Public Library Week 3

I have been trying to link my blog and Flickr, unfortunately there appear to be problems and it won't work. Help in Flickr indicates that many people are having the same problem. Hopefully it will be sorted out, but if anyone has any suggestions?

I have been able to get it to bring up the grant access page by fiddling the URL, but when I try to grant access it says that something went wrong. The link in the Blogger help doesn't work either.

I have posted a number of holiday snaps to Flickr, all landscapes so that avoids having to post pictures of people, haven't worked up the courage for that one yet.

When I can get the linking working I will put it on my blog.

NSW Public Library - Week 2

Hi Everyone

Well I have created a blog and made many postings. I had a look on Technorati at other library blogs, it's amazing how many blogs are located when you search library or libraries. It is also interesting how many of the blogs that were returned on these searches had library in the blog title, but some of them had absolutely no library related content in the blog.
To be fair some had alot of library related content and some of it was very funny, when I have time I will try and look at more library related blogs to locate lots of good information.