Thing 23!! Nearly the end...for now

I liked the image generated for the last entry in the training blog. Very amusing and clever, particularly as I am doing this work on Dec 3rd.

I have very much enjoyed this program and would like to say thanks for all of the hard work that has gone into creating it for us and supporting it...along with all of our questions and glitches.

I feel that there will be several things that will be taken up very quickly in our library service..(that means in the new year!). RSS feeds, Bloglines, librarything are just some of the things that I see being implemented. This assumes that I can persuade others, if they don't already agree. Also, wiki approaches for information that we can all use to keep infromation relevant and current.

CHRLC is launching a new web site in the new year. I hope it has been set up with enough flexibility that various of these things can be incorporated into it.

I know I will use many of these web 2.0 services personally from now on and that I will be showing people I know personally how to use them.

I have made a commitment in my annual review to conduct some internet/computer training with patrons, in very small groups, and I can see that I will be using the things learned in those.

I very much enjoyed the approach of the training. training doesn't have to be torture..it should be fun and relevant. Bring on libraries 2.0.

Thankyou once again.

Made my blog link work on fav blogs page

Finally made my link seem right on the Favourite Blogs part of the pbwiki sandbox. I included my blog under the Victorian Public Libraries(Australia)title, in the CHRLC section.

I'm nearly finished this learning 2.0 program now!

Flicka fun and mash ups...oops

I realised when looking back over the web 2.0 course that somehow I had missed doing these fun activities from #6. So, I thought I had better go and catch up.

Yahoo-Flicka-Wikipedia-Weathermap has a terrible name, but is a great mashup. You nominate a city, see photos from there, short snippets from wikipedia about there and a map, all on one page. I have it currently set on London. I can see this as a great way to entice kids to find out a bit about places. I'm going back to see what Melbourne and New York look like. I found out about this mashup from the MashupAwards site, which I have linked into my blogroll.

Audiobooks (or "The end is in sight")

I looked at the homepage for the Project Gutenberg and realised that I had known about this and forgotten it. It is a great initiative. It is interesting in the light of the tension for libraries to try to be a repository of literary works, as well as fulfill all of the other aims of libraries(all on a limited budget).

I was immediately aware that the audio books I saw listed seemed to all be male authors, except for Beatrix Potter. When I actually did a search the ebooks I found lots of Jane Austen, but still an enormous amount of male authors. I was interested to see the asian ebook project, as well things like the buddhist ebook group.

Talking books at the library are already very popular, I can see these continuing on in the same vein. It provides another option. The physical talking books aren't very sturdy, tapes break and MP3s and CDs get scratched. It may be an effective way to reduce the costs for libraries of keeping up with the spoilage rates.

I noticed Mark Twain's 'On the decay of the art of lying' and I am very interested to listen to that. I can't believe in the modern age with all of the spin doctoring that there is any danger of it dying out!!

Podcasts, smodcasts!

I have selected a podcast that shows in my bloglines over to the right as 'City talks - building better cities' that examines how places can be designed/supported to encourage community. I found this using podcast.net I found it to be a very easy site that was well organised. I think there are a lot of very interesting podcasts out there. Again, I am not entirely sure of their application in our library service because of the issues regarding the slow speeds of the dial up internet access that many peope use in our country area. I'm not even sure what could be supported direct at our library. In the future I think it could be a good tool for the library to use, perhaps book reviews, guided historical walks along our bushwalking tracks, guided talks on natural features like our recently extinct volcano, guided talks about historical and local flavour things (like our tree of knowledge!). Lots of focussed local information eg about the current debate on windfarms in our area.

You too can YouTube

A video called 'The adventures of super librarian' created by circulating.





I love the idea of YouTube but it is impractical with dial up. Way too slow. Many patrons come to the library to use our broadband as it is generally not available. The library service struggles to have the capacity for this. I don't see this technology being relevant for the country areas until the web revolution reaches us!! This is a pity.

Discovering web 2.0 tools

I had a look at Biblio.com It is hard for a book lover to go past a book site! It seems a very reputable commercial shopfront for buying primarily rare or out of print books. I found several by Barbara Deming I might be interested in!! It made me realise that I haven't been thinking about the more commercial activities as web 2.0. Of course they involve interaction, of a sort, but I think of web 2.0 as somehow the more exciting, fun stuff. I use a lot of commercially related web 2.0 sites all of the time, so I suppose they don't seem as exciting. It was interesting to see the opportunities on the site for discussions on books and all sorts of other things. I could see discussions that had happened over a couple of week period to sort out returns of money from credit cards when booksellers couldn't fill a book order. I found it one of the ways I decided that the site seems reputable. I'm not sure how this could be used in a library context. I will be looking at lots of the other sites that received awards.