Wikis a go go

It's wiki time again, I do tend to be jumping around in this course a bit. but it's really a matter of when I can access various sites ( and when time permits of course).

As the adventure exercise for Week 5 (yes, the jumping around means I've already finished week 6), I edited the entry for Earlwood on Wikipedia - just put in a few more stats that I thought are interesting - legitimate ABS ones of course :0) Registered with Wikipedia and found it all very easy to do.

I also put content on the SLNSW Wiki after getting my invite key from the lovely PLS team. All very straightforward and achievable. Need to get one happening here, and if the State Library did one for all the great content they discover, that would be fantastic!

As a by the by, I'm really enjoying looking at people's blogs - there's some great ideas out there, so now I've added a Library Thing widget to my blog, as well as a counter, as well as feeds from my favourite library blogs.

Continuing the youtube adventure

Today I did an explore of various videos on youtube. I didn't really find anything particularly fabulous about the videos we were instructed to watch -

• “lego”
• “Liverpool plains”
• “Kogarah”

I thought the We love our NJ libraries and QandANJ: Now Your Library is Open Late Night Too! were great examples of library marketing, and Mosman's use of Youtube for their Author Talks is a good one, though it shows the technology still has some way to go as even on broadband my picture and sound were inconsistent (as was a bit of the filming). It's still going to come back to the same old problem for many of us in local government though - getting approval for making a video such as the great US marketing ones could be a tricky and almost impossible process. That's not meant to sound negative, but it's going to be some time before the machinations of local government catch up with what's possible using Web 2.0 technologies. Author talks are however a pretty safe bet and probably wouldn't be too controversial. And other ideas such as Oral histories, staff orientation (though face to face still has to be preferable in this instance I think) and guides to library services are all good ideas and may be doable in the short term.....

In my explorations I did find the silly - such as UHF Conan The Librarian and Super Librarian ,
the disturbing - ANGRY LIBRARIAN,

the strange and you've gotta wonder why -The Librarian Song
and of course, the educational and informative - A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto

I'm also embedding another video because I can't resist. I know I've already down this last week, but it seems like a good idea and as I've already gone down the cringeworthy path with the last one, this time I've decided to be tasteful and politically correct - so this is a vido about the Day of Action for public libraries which took place last November - a subject near to the heart of all of us who work in public libraries, and many thanks to Roger for compiling it - and adding his musical skills. :-)

Keeping up with RSS feeds and discovering more about Wikis

Only just got back to my blog today, and at the same time, had a look at my rss feeds on bloglines – oh no, what a lot there are, but there’s so much good information there.

Came across another good site recommended by the inimitable Sarah Houghton-Jan
(LibrarianInBlack - I’m starting to sound like a fan aren’t I?). It’s called 25 Useful Social Networking Tools for Librarians and is written by Jessica Hupp. The list includes many of the types of social networking tools we’re covering in this course, but also goes a bit further – which of course what the course is about – encouraging us to expand our knowledge, our horizons, and up play along with our curiosity factor……

I also started having a look at a variety of wikis today. I particularly liked the idea of WorldCat – haven’t had much of an explore previously.

There’s such a great range of ways that wikis can be used in a library environment to help patrons, and that started the brain buzzing about what we could introduce…..

I really like the idea of using Wikis to collaborate, sharing the invormation. The Library Instruction Wiki is a great example of this - there’s space for collecting Web links, hand-outs, and success stories about providing information literacy instruction – we should all be heading this direction – their subtitle is stop reinventing the wheel, and I’m a great believer in that :0)

One of the other really interesting wikis I looked at as part of this weeks learnings was the full Library Success: A best practices wiki. This is a great site – lots of room for expansion as it covers areas such as organizing collections, professional development, programming, services to specific groups, selling your library and much more. It’s great to see that that NSW content is so prominent in the Services in a Multi-lingual Environment section. I have a feeling this is a site that has been encouraged in the past by Ellen and Victoria, so I think it’s high time we all made a commitment to getting some other great NSW resources up there.

Another site I looked at is one created for library users - it’s the Book Lovers Wiki at the Princeton Public Library. It is a wiki of categorized and rated book reviews contributed by readers and it appears to be linked to the Summer Reading Program as well as obviously being promoted through Princeton’s book groups. Definitely a path that we could easily head down in our own libraries,(after making the big decision about external or home hosting).

Youtube - while I can

So it really is way too late, but whilst I can get access to youtube, thought I'd paste a video. Whilst I've found everything else pretty self explanatory, I had a bit of trouble with this one, till I went to the blogger help pages and found the instructions there. Simple - all you have to do is change to html layout and paste the code in - I was originally trying to embed it as a page element - no success that way.....

I found this video on youtube a while ago and thought it was so bad that it was really funny! The 80's have a lot to answer for!

So here goes....




And woo hoo! I've got success!

Adding Pictures

So tonight I've managed to add library pictures - all very easy really, just would like to know if they can be centred. There's obviously a lot of editing ability with text, such as this post, just don't know how to do it with the pictures. Something else to find out......

Looked at my rss feeds today - decided I had to get rid of a couple, because how on earth can anyone keep up with the number of posts that come through. I did of course keep LibrarianInBlack and Library Stuff, along with a couple of others.... And of course Unshelved can be pretty funny - might have to add one of these cartoons to the blog - is there a point in blogs you get to where there is just too much? Where do we draw the line?

Library Week is coming up in May and we got thinking today that maybe we could get a blog up and running in time for this - there's just the concern about managing the approvals process. More to think about.....

One of the best things about this course is that I think it will give staff the skills, and hopefully the enthusiasm, to want to train our library members in Web 2.0 technologies - not the Gen Y's obviously, because they do know it all....

Wikis - so now I get it!

I've just been watching the video that is part of the Week 5 group of exercises. Found it really helpful - I think I know actually understand when it's better to use a blog than a wiki and vice versa. I did actually set one up a couple of months ago using WetPaint - have a horrible feeling I meant to ask the lovely state library people (mainly Ellen and Mylee) for permission to use some of their messages (and I didn't want to put their content up there without giving due credit).

Idea being, that we get soooo many emails, and there's terrific information there, but I need to be able to access it better than just sticking it in email folders - so, long saga, started a wiki, was very good about it for a while, but then got a bit slack. The problem is, my wiki isn't really taking full advantage of being a wiki, as it's not really a collaborative effort ( though I've had aI could see great uses for wiki's in the library when it comes to a work situation and working on a collaborative document..... have to have a think about this one....

Back to blogging and rss feeds

Got back to learning again tonight and I've had fun playing with adding a picture to my blog along with the rss feeds which are part of the course - none very library oriented I'm afraid, but I'm still learning, and they reflect my interests. I think we could be doing a whole lot more with our website using rss feeds - another thing for the "to do' list.....

There's still parts I've got to get back to from last week - adding photos to Flickr - but that will happen.....

It's always a problem knowing when to stop.... choosing my favourite blogs and news feeds for my rss aggregator

I've had some fun choosing rss feeds. Now of course I had to subscribe to the one we were instructed to (yes, I can probably be ticked off on the follow instructions competency)

1. Powerhouse Museum - Photo of the Day

And then there's the one which is the basis of all our current learning


2. NSW Public Libraries Learning 2.0

Now to library ones which I think are great:


3. LibrarianInBlack
   
   I'm in awe of Sarah Houghton-Jan!
   


4. Library Stuff


5. The Shifted Librarian


6. Unshelved - Gives the lighter side of library life - cartoon strips
   
   As the adventure exercise I did have a look at technorati, but feel like I've probably subscribed to as many as I can handle, because to feed my own personal interests I'm hooked up to:
7. ABC News : Just In -yes, a news junkie I'm afraid, though News Just In may happen just a bit to often and I may have to kill this one off....
   
   Mind you, there's some good stuff there - a quick stroll down the page took me to an article titled Blogging boosts your social life . So I then checked out the article, which claims that
   
   Blogging can help you feel less isolated, more connected to a community and more satisfied with your friendships, both online and face-to-face, new Australian research has found.
   
   The research, from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, found after two months of regular blogging, people felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those who did not blog.
   
   
8. Good Living - a foodie from way back - this is one edition of the paper I make sure to get each week
   


9. Lifehack.org - because it's full of interesting bits and pieces, things to think about - its a Daily digest and pointer on productivity, getting things done and lifehacks....
   


10. The Shallow End - because I really can be totally shallow and superficial (yes, I even watch the Academy Awards)
    

and it is tempting to get some more, but at the end of the day, fun as there is, there are other things in life other than computers......

Though gotta confess I did do the Quick Pew Quiz as suggested by LibrarianinBlack to find out how techie I am - and to my surprise, the quiz results classified me as an omnivore, a group that is only 8% of the US population (with an average age of 28 and mostly male) Don't exactly fit either of those demographics! :-)

As a total side track, to get this list working properly, because the number kept going astray, I found I had to go back to my old web page creation skills and actually use HTML to edit the page!!

Back to work......

The Machine is Us/ing Us

On the weekend I finally got to see the youtube video from Week One - Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us . I loved it and felt very comfortable with it because that's exactly the way my mind works, and that's how I'm approaching the learning involved in Web 2.0. One thing leads to another, so you click another link, find something else interesting and keep going from there......

I'm so excited isn't just a name for a song....

Oh, I am so getting into this now and I really have to go home... because I actually do have a life outside the library. Wish I'd come up with a more inventive name for my blog.

Today was a classic example of starting on one thing and it leading to another. I started with having more of a look at Flickr, as per the lessons for Week 2. Amazed to find it still isn't blocked by work! Liked the Mosman Library photos, great to have them up there. Our library also has some, but they've been put up by a staff member and aren't at this stage reflecting the whole of what we are doing and what we want to broadcast to the world. Also found some photos that I'm guessing are put up by an ex staff member - and there's some very strange ones there - our stacks, falling books, and put room, as well as some of the more predictable ones.

But then I looked at Flickr groups, ended up sidetracking to the Librarian inInBlack Blog. This is an amazingly awesome useful blog LibrarianInBlack and again, one thing lead to another and now I'll have to do more searching to find out about widgets and the like. This month she (being Sarah Houghton-Jan, the Digital Futures Manager for the San José Public Library) has really interesting posts on managing your social network presence (using Profilefly), Tips on using RSS Feeds - and that's not even skimming the surface. I also came across another great blog, but in the middle of all my enthusiasm, I can't find it at the moment - but I'll let you know what it is when I do.....

Know I'll be drawn back over the weekend to learning more though (and accessing the sites I can't get to at work).

So much to do, so much to learn, but now it's time for a weekend.....


Dinner, and of course good wine, with friends awaits.

Jumping on board with Web 2.0 training

Well I guess I'm up and running now with my blog and starting the Web 2.0 training. Have to confess to skipping a few bits (namely video watching) through lack of access to various (I should say many) sites at work. I'll have to go back later in the day and fill in the gaps at home or on the public access computers.

I'm so enthusiastic though about this opportunity to get staff upskilled with Web 2.0 technologies. I think the days of basic Internet training being provided in public libraries have really run their course and we need to be expanding our offerings, not only demonstrating an expertise of emerging technologies, but educating library users who may not be up to speed -and yes, I know the Gen Y's know it all and we couldn't possibly be teaching them anything :-)

Time for coffee....