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).

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......