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.