Sunday, May 18, 2008

Week 12: Wrap up; social networks and catch up

Social networking has changed the way we communicate and share information in today's society. It uses a variety of ways for us to share interests and activities and for those who are interested in exploring the interest and activities of others.our library can use MySpace, Facebook to promote our library, book club, upcoming events, highlight new titles and resources. Libraries can also use social network service to obtain feedback and comments from the public for library services and events.Clients can select the way they like to interact with our library, such as chat, email, messaging, voice chat, file sharing, blogging etc. They don't really need to visit the library to get the information. Social networking is the future of our library.

I have learnt so much from this online course,and I will keep exploring the Web 2.0. I will use them at work. I will show my clients free online applications, esp Google Doc, Flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia, to edit documents, share photos and presentations, use of social bookmarking in my daily work.

Thanks for organizing this program and your comments. I hope there will be more this kind of program that we are able to do it at our own pace and at home to come.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Week 11: Online applications and tools

The following slideshows is that I shared on the online free application Slideshare, showing how useful the Web 2.0 is at work.These free online productivity software, Google Docs, Zoho, Zamzar, Slideshows, Thumbstacks, makes sharing and updating documents and presentations so easy at work and around the world, and we can edit them anytime and anywhere.

It is amazing that we have so easy-to-use free online productivity tools. I came across mnay patrons using MS Word to create a document in the library then forgot to bring their disc to save it, and some patrons had trouble opening up the document on their disc. In the library, we can show our patrons Google docs, so that they could do and save their work online and access it anywhere.

Week 10: Mashups

I am from the country highlighted on the map


Note: When using mashup tools on Big Huge Labs, some tools don't show the code for the image ( which is used to copy and paste in the blog). In this case, we need to save the image on our computer, then go to our blog, then Customize (located at the top right side corner in our blog), then Add a new page element and select the feature: post photos from your computer.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Week 10: Mashups

Mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source, such as we can add local information, put bussiness and display ads on Google Maps. It is interesting and very useful. I like the Public Library Finder from North America. It gives library location information and driving directions in the map. There are a few things we can use Mashups at our library, such as using Google Maps to create library location and driving directions information; using Big Huge Labs to create library promotional materials such as posters; using Voicethread to add information to local history photos.

Week 9: Podcasts and Audio

I think podcasting is great because it is a convenient way of automatically downloading audio files to a computer and receive automatic updates once subscribing to a feed of a producer's audio content.

So far I am not clear how easy to do a podcast, I think libraries can use podcasts for staff meetings, training programs, professional development seminars and lectures to allow access by remote staff and staff not able to attend them.

Libraries can podcast library tours, storytime, author talks, library events and activities to make them more widely available to the public.

I think podcasting is a good way for house-bounded library users to access libray resources if a library produces audio (and video) contents and podcasting( and vodcasting) them.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Week 8: Answer boards and social searching

I like the idea of social searching. I really enjoy del.icio.us social bookmarking and Flickr photo sharing applications. I love the Taste website, which allows readers to rank recipes.

In libraries, answer boards can be used for reference librarians to answer questions for school projects and also answer specific questions from all library users. It will save a user's time because some difficult questions take some time for a librarian to search the information on the answers while doing face to face reference interview.

There is no boundary for knoweldge market. Reference librarians are "slamming the boards" to provide answers on popular "Answer Board" sites, and members of community can really have "online brain trusts".

Monday, May 5, 2008

Week 7: del.icio.us and Library Thing, continued

Del.icio.us

It took me a while to locate my del.icio.us and post to del.icio.us buttons on my computer ( I am using window Vista and having trouble to get familiar with it). First of all, I want to say Learning 2.0 is really a good program to motivate myself to keep learning and improve my online learning skills. Just for practice to get myself familiar with del.icio.us social bookmarking site, I have created my bookmarks on del.icio.us as you can see on http://del.icio.us/creationwang. I set up link to it both in this post and on the left hand side bar of my blog site.


The way to set up link to my del.icio.us bookmarking account in this post is as follows: go to del.icio.us, sign in your account, go to help and go to a guide to sharing bookmarks, got to Linkrolls , then copy the above HTML code from there and paste in your blog post(in Edit Html window).

I also put my del.icio.us bookmarking link on the left hand side bar in my blog site by the following steps: on my blog site, go to Customize, which is located on the top right side corner, then go to Choose a New Page Element, then choose HTML/Javascript(Add to blog).

It is great that del.icio.us allows me to save all my bookmarks in one place and classify them with meaningful tags to me, and I can access to them from any PC with internet access. It is also good to share bookmarks with others and see how other people tagged the same links and websites. It is a way to find websites that I may be interested in.

Cleverland Public Library's tags were set up to link evaluated bookmarked sites on del.icio.us, where a wide users can share bookmarks. It saves lots of time for people to locate relevant websites on their research projects.

Technorati

I did keyword search : bookmobile, it returned 607 results. Then I tried Advanced search, tag search: bookmobile, I got 26 posts. I tried both keyword search and Tag search: nswpln2008, but they all returned no hits. Advanced search feature seemed not working well. Tag search depends on how the blogs were being tagged.

LibraryThing

I like the social networking aspect of LibraryThing. It's interesting to see what other people read and how they tagged the same titles. The function to create an online catalog of my personal book collection and the features to see everyone elses via book titles, authors and tags will be helpful to provide reader advisory service to library clients.