October 29, 2007
Week 7, Lessons 15 and 16 – Wikis
I thought the subject heading wiki was great. We should do something like this. It might make searching for stuff a whole lot easier for people who don’t want to sift through all of our catalog entries. I also liked the Book Lovers wiki. I could think of many ways to use wikis, like planning a family reunion or any kind of party for that matter. The main barrier for me right now would be simply remembering to use a wiki and getting other people to use it since we are still so email oriented. It takes a long time to put something new into practice and to get people away from what they perceive as the tried and true. But learning about it is the first step and then trying it out and convincing others to give it a try. Just like everything, if it’s easy enough and the need is there, it will catch on. I am definitely going to try this when it’s my turn to plan the next big family event.
As for the library, I’ve always wanted a library “intranet” where we could put all of our policies and procedures online. This would be a perfect way to set up an intranet. Who wants to take this on? Or, should I say, who wants to help me?
Week 6, Lessons 12, 13, and 14 -Tagging
These sites were fun to visit. It could be very convienent to have all your bookmarks on del.icio.us so you could access them from any computer, especially if you were moving around a lot. We might put one together one for our patrons so everyone could have access to our librarian-selected favorite sites. Maybe we could put a link to it from the library web page.
I spent quite a bit of time playing around with technorati and was a little disappointed in it. I was trying to find blogs relating to flute playing and got many, many irrelevant hits. I know James Galway has a blog and I never found it using technorati. Perhaps there’s more that I need to know. If it worked successfully, we could use it to help our patrons find blogs about things that interested them or that would help them with research, etc.
My favorite of the these three sites was LibraryThing. It was quite fascinating to see how many people liked the same books I did and how well the recommendations matched up with what I like to read. This would be fun to share with some of my distant friends so we could see what each other was reading. I think the library could use it, too, but I think we’re going to get something similar when we finally get community reviews up with Millennium.
October 19, 2007
Week 4, Lesson 8 More RSS
I found that searching for interesting blogs wasn’t as easy as I thought. I used Feedster and Google Blog Search and with both of them I typed in a keyword, in this case, flute, and got all kinds of hits that had the word flute in them. Some of them were totally unrelated to what I was looking for. I found it much easier to type in the address of the blog I was interested in. I looked at the Library blogs and liked Library Bytes. I liked Helene’s Blowers posts on leadership. Especially her motto, “A leader brings out the best in themselves by bringing out the best in others”. You don’t have to be a manager to be a leader, we can each lead in our own way.
Our speaker for Staff Development Day is Michael Porter, who has a blog called Libraryman. It might be worth taking a look at that blog before November 9.
Week 4, Lesson 7 RSS
I enjoyed learning about RSS feeds. I decided to use Google Reader since I already have a Google account. It was very easy to add the feeds and organize them in folders. I have one flute feed and several that have to do with libraries and reading. I can see how it would be come quite addicting to continually check your feeds and see what has been added.
October 18, 2007
Week 3, Flickr
Trying out the different mashups was fun and I could see many uses for them. We could have a lot of fun with the trading cards. Hmmm, maybe we could have each member of the staff make a trading card of themselves and we could put them up so we could get to know a little more about each other. Of course, we would have to get pictures of everyone first, but that could be arranged.
Not everything went well. My computer was so slow and I had to wait a long time for some of the pictures to come up. Frustrating! If it happened often, it would be enough to make me stop using these sites (or get another computer).
October 12, 2007
group pix
Look at all these library 2.0 learners! We are a happy group and enjoy working together.
