Wiki Week

Wikis - ah Wikipedia didn't cut it as an authoritative source in a Stage 3 History essay - but three years ago I didn't know what they were, but i do now! Anyway looked at a number of the Wiki sites on the list and some were outstanding (Princeton's) and some were amateurish in appearance - and looking attractive is an important requirement for pulling the punters and appearing credible. I found it interesting in the University of Calgary's one that they had instituted the need for email verification to get round the vandalism issue. The better sites stated their purpose, were well designed, and had good categorisation of subject areas.

The Princeton Wiki has a lovely presentation - clear, fun and professional. It ran great book reviews.

What do I think libraries could use it for - well, book discussions and reviews, the sharing of information with the information highway becoming a two way highway so we can tap into our users brains too to provide a better service.

Library 2.0 and Web 2.0

The articles were interesting - was particularly taken with the 'To more powerful ways to co-operate article, especially in light of the new vision for ACL's web pages. There is tremendous overlap in the ideas that the article expounds and what we are going to do. The concepts on co-operative approach, collective intelligence and users add value is common stuff to both. The ideas that users can be let loose with tagging etc is a new phenomena and quite scary to a librarian and difficult to get the brain around - so its good to read about the ideology behind it and think about it more rationally.

Technoratti

Some of this was so easy to do - like joining up. A matter of filling in the form and tagging it and then linking it through to my blog. Simple, so simple - why aren't the other exercises so user friendly? I guess for me I don't in fact want to increase my blog's visibility but for those who do, it is a good easy solution. Some of it though was difficult and was a result of slightly haywire instructions - why didn't the creators of Web 2.0 put that you needed to go via Advanced search button to do the exercise. Anyway moans aside the most accurate searches I thought was blog directory search with 877 hits and tags which brought up stuff that may not be brought up by doing a normal search via directory.

technoratti link

Technorati Profile

De-li-cious

De-li-cious meant nothing to me at the beginning. I had several attempts to look at the dummy account - should that be account for dummies and still it eluded me. In the end, I went to the boss and asked her to explain it to me....and then it clicked! I went through the paces to set up an account to get an idea - the process was easy (although still waiting for email verification as I write this). The concept would have been perfect for me when i worked in the museum as I had a lot of favourite sites for my job which other staff members and my volunteers had use for at times, - I could give them the site address and they could access it. I could also access them from anywhere too, whether i was at my computer or not. I also could have accessed them easily when I left the museum as I did still need them on occasion. The tagging would have replaced the folders in the favourites too.

Rollyo

Rollyo - well talk about confusing! Totally easy to create a search engine and I chose travel and put a few things in it (while I was doing it, I found a brilliant fare to London next year...but no money ..sad!) Anyway the problems started when I tried to attach it to my blog. I went round and round and round in circles - couldn't find template firstly, then found Rollyo instructions totally beyond me. I wasn't quite screaming, but nearly. Anyway I think I got there! Will I use it, or has it much use for me - aaah, no - will stick to favourites on the computer - but maybe I missed the point. (and we lost the netball - so I'm walking around pretending I don't care - and I don't!)

The Library Thing

The second session on the Library thing and I added two more books. One of the titles I tried to add was a New Zealand published book and didn't appear on Amazon that the site defaults to. I therefore looked up the 82? other sites which are grouped together in countries - New Zealand doesn't appear - we don't exist. Our neighbours across the ditch do though... wait til we win the netball!! I added tags to three of the books.

http://www.librarything.com/profile/hmdowning59

7. Technology

I am a convert (convert, not convict) to the digital camera. I discovered how wonderful they were on a trip to Uk this year when I borrowed my daughter's. Unlike a lot of people I do get prints taken off as I still like the ease of physical photo albums. The Flickr concept is great for sharing them with friends as is Facebook.