Man of Constant Sorrow

Had a good browse around YouTube, which I was already familiar with and tried to add a video of the above song by The Soggy Bottom Boys (a song I love from the movie O Brother Where Art Thou which I also love) but it didn't work for some reason (error on page) and I even googled the right way to do it, but this didn't work either.

YouTube is great for looking up old videos and golden moments and seeing new artists whose videos are not shown here for whatever reasons. I'm not sure what features could be used for library websites, apart from "how to" videos for people wanting to know how to use the catalogue or the self check machines or such like. Unfortunately people who would be likely to go on our website and watch a video would probably have no trouble with using electronic applications.

Music heaven

This week I have had a look at 3 Web 2.0 Awards winners - the first 3 in the music category. The first "Last" is a pretty, flashy site with lots of photos and offering lots of music videos to sample (through YouTube). It offers a search engine to match you up with new music according to what you already like. I typed in The Dixie Chicks and it came up with a list of other female country artists - many of whom I already knew the music of, but others who were new to me. It was good to have some new ones to try although it was a pretty blunt instrument in terms of matching tastes - as I guess it could only be.

Next I tried Pandora, the second place getter, but it said it was unavailable to the world outside the US.

Thirdly I tried Mog (whose subtitle is "because the web mostly sucks"). This is interesting informative and thoughtful and it would make a nice complement to Last. I think I will definitely use these sites again. I think they could be used by libraries to locate other suitable titles to purchase if a particular genre is popular in a particular library. In our library it could be useful in finding more music suitable for playing in our library - soft but not too boring.

So much for Zoho

Actually the Zoho writer will be very useful for me as I often use a laptop on which Word has not been installed. I can now use this to create documents when I need to.

I managed to publish my book review document to my blog after a few hiccups. I used the FAQs link to clarify the procedure and hey presto! it worked. Unfortunately I had been so focussed on this that I did not remember to do a pretty coloured font or anything else to make it beautiful, but I know I could in future.

Hello

Hello library colleagues

 

This is my first Zoho writer document.  I intend to use it to give a short book review for a book I have recently finished, called "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" by Mildred D. Taylor, and which I am pleased to see is still in our library system despite being published in 1976.  It is the middle book in a trilogy but can be read as a stand-alone.  It tells the story of an African-American family in the Deep South in America in the 1930s and the racism and consequent difficulties they encounter in their everyday lives, told from the point of view of Cassie, a girl of about 10.  It is a good reminder of how far attitudes in US society have changed in less than a century, particularly now they have their first black president in Barack Obama.  It also reminds us why there are still people alive in the US who said they could never bring themselves to vote for a black man. 

Caught in the social net - #17

This week I have created a profile on Facebook and have visited Bebo to have a look at the Auckland Library page among other things. A couple of months ago I set up a profile on MySpace as well but I have decided to cancel it as I could not find a single person on it that I knew, either from NZ or from my friends overseas! However, just by signing up I immediately had 2 friends, one looked like a friend allocated to me by MySpace itself and the other was a NZ network in the US. Nice to know you're never alone on MySpace!! I've sent out several requests for friends on Facebook just from people who were in my email address book. Very interesting.

The Hennepin County Library site on Facebook was an interesting idea - using the interest in the community (particularly the young community) for social networking to promote library matters and as a point of easy and convenient access.

Librarians and the web wilderness

The only one of these articles that was easily comprehensible to me was the first by Rck Anderson, and I don't agree with the idea that we shouldn't collect materials in case someone might want them. People don't always know what's available and don't always know what might be interesting until they see it and browse for it. I think these comments are really only applicable in academic libraries where students are looking for specific stuff for their studies.

I think his vision of the future for librarians and libraries is interesting but not one for our public libraries.

Technorati shmechnorati

This has been perhaps the least interesting lesson so far. I'm sure the site is a serious blogger's delight but I found many of the blogs I read were opinionated ramblings. It had some good up to date American pop gossip though, although that's in plentiful supply all over the media anyway. Ther's only so much good hard interesting news and information around and the BBC has enough of it for me. I'm not too keen on adding my own opinionated ramblings to the pot so I haven't claimed my own blog to make it more visible to people such as my fussy self.

Tagging but not the bad kind

I found the Youtube demo very useful - tagging is just uncontrolled subject headings for your own personal database. Would certainly be useful for people who use the internet a lot for their personal interests. My husband could probably use it for his aircraft modelling and I could use it for a database of recipes that have tags for all those ingredients that you want to use up from time to time - like the half a can of cocnut cream or the rest of a packet of risoni in the back of the cupboard. So thrifty! Not sure about library applications - have to think about that one some more.

PB wiki

Added my favourite movies and my blog address to the favourite blogs list. Week 5 finished yay! Great reading what other people loved to watch and read. Can't say I agreed with many of other people's TV or music picks - it's funny how diverse we can be - I guess that's what makes life interesting!!

Wiki Wonders

Some of the links on this topic were a bit dry and I already knew about Wikipedia and how it worked but it was still interesting to think about how we could use something like this for library purposes. In a branch such as ours where we have a great many part time and casual staff I think we could use a wiki instead of staff meetings, as long as people are encouraged, and given time, to look at it frequently and add their comments.

The existing wiki I liked best was the booklovers one and I could see this working well throughout Manukau Libraries with staff posting their reviews of books they've read and adding to everyone's readers' advisory knowledge.

Emails

I think emails (and I don't include chain letters) are a huge advancement in communication - quick, reliable on the whole, able to be edited endlessly before sending (unlike messages you leave on answerphones!) and with the great advantage of conciseness. You don't even need to answer them instantly. The disadvantage is in not hearing a tone of voice or receiving other non verbal cues that help us form relationships with others.

My Eastern European Odyssey

I had fun creating a travel itinerary for a trip to Eastern Europe through the Third Party Flickr application, Yahoo's Trip Planner. I added a list of destinations and places of interest within those destinations, arranged them and scheduled them. This will be very useful to me when I win Lotto!

I also created a magazine cover on Big Huge Labs, featuring my favourite Russian heroine, Evgenia Ginzburg, and it turned out beautifully smoky and mysterious.

Rolling with the rollyo

This procedure was reasonably straightforward and worked well - the instruction to go to "template" probably should have read go to "layout" but it wasn't too hard to figure out. My rollyo will help me find lyrics lickety split although I don't usually find them too hard to find anyway.

I think this sort of thing (the rollyo) could be very useful in an information literacy session where you want kids to practise searching among a limited number of useful websites so they will have a good rate of success.

LibraryThing

I needed Brett's help to get this to work. This could be very useful for recommendations for further reading for myself or customers.

Kiev, The Ukraine

This is Kiev, in the Ukraine the city we want to visit next - it's where Dimitri's dad was born and lived until Stalin's secret police took his parents away. He never saw either of them again.

I had problems using Flickr's uploading tool - it seemed to work and told me the picture was successfully uploaded to my blog (and I tried 3 times) but they didn't seem to make it. They must be circling in cyberspace!

In the end I saved it to My Pictures and added it via Blogger.

Valderi Valdera

Here is my gibberish version of the Happy Wanderer song we had to sing at school - it was pretty much gibberish to me then in its original version!

My knapsack on my back.
I wave back on my back.
Chorus:
Val-dera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Val-dera,
Val-dera.
My knapsack to all I meet,
"Come! Join my hat to me, the mountain track,
But just like me,
And as I go, I love to all so loud and sing,
And as I go, I love to go a-wander by the day I die!
Oh, may I always laugh and sweet
From ev'ry green wood tree.

Had a good time playing around with all the applications - some wouldn't work on my laptop but enough did. Some have definite future possibilities...

Week Two - just a wee bit late

Have just set up all my RSS feeds with a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing. It helped when I realised that bloglines were not actually part of blogger and that I had to set up a whole new account! After that it all fell into place and I now have 13 feeds. Some of them look so interesting I think I'll keep them and add to them at the end of this exercise. So much to read so little time...

Kalinikta!

It's very late - I'm very tired. Creating this blog and registering it has used up the last of my energy. Although it wasn't really that hard. Just took up a bit of brain space. I'm sure it will be an interesting and enjoyable exercise but I'm not sure exactly where I'll find the time. But I will somewhere. Till tomorrow...