Week 7: Tagging, folksonomies, del.icio.us and Library Thing

The social bookmarking of del.icio.us is very useful to assist librarians in finding relevant online reliable resources quickly with collaborative online reference service. I would like to visit the National Library of Australia AskNow's del.icio.us webpage http://del.icio.us/usefulresources to find relevant websites and share with my customers.

Week 6: videos online

Watching oral histories on YourTube and author talks at Mosman library on Google Video are really inspiring. Libraries can use YourTube or Google Videos to post library tours, author talks, children storytime, launch of latest library events, projects and exhibitions so that people are able to access online no matter where they are. It is fun and you can watch again and at any time.

Week 5: Wikis

I have been using Wikipedia all the time to get basic information on some topics at work. It is good to know that the German Wikipedia came out on top in a study regaring to accuracy, completeness, up-to-date informaiton and ease of reading.
The nature of Wikis is to create a collaborative piece of information, sharing the knowledge of all contributors. It can be used for sharing knowledge in a community of interest. Libraries can use the idea of Wikis for their procedure manuals, book reviews etc. Librarians can also use Wikis to work collaboratively and share their knowledge in providing Reader's Advisory service.
The SJCPL Subject Guides wikis is very handy to locate resources on specific subjects and only librarians can edit the information so that it is more reliable.
Montana History Wikis is a collection of information to guide researchers to the resources and it also contains collaborative projects to meet the needs of particular groups. For example, you can find all sorts of information on African Americans History in Montana, such as oral history collections, manuscripts, local government records, newspapers and books. This wikis is not opent for editing but you can email your comments to them.
Readers shared their books on the Book Lovers Wikis and reading book reviews from other readers is really fun.

RSS readers and newsreaders

RSS readers make me able to manage the internet information. This client software, or a Web application is so easy to use, and it aggregates syndicated web content in a single location for easy viewing. It saves me lots of time to regularly check my favourite websites for updates. Feed filtering option allow me to tag keywords so that the available articles can be sorted into easily navigable categories.
So far, I have selected some sites which are relevant to libraries and librarians, including Powerhouse Museum's picture of the day blog, Librarybytes (Helen Blowers blog), About Contemporary Literure, ABS Blog for Librarians, and Librarians' Internet Index: New This Week.
I am going to use RSS readers to receive and organise up-to-date information relevant to my work, so that I will always get the latest information about what is ogoing on in my industry.
I can see some potential uses for library patrons. For example, the patrons can subscribe library feeds for library updates, library events, new titles arrivals, etc.

Huge Martina and the little Cologne Dome

Huge Martina and the little Cologne Dome
Originally uploaded by dr. motte

Viewing photos on Flickr has been so much fun. People always have lots of great ideas when taking photos.I have to say that I have been inspired by other people's work on Flickr.I am going to use the photo sharing and storage on Flickr to share my personal photos with my family and my friends.
I really like working through this course because I have learnt so much ( I never thought I would be able to do this before I started doing this course).
Next step I will take my digital photos and post them on Flickr.

Search photos on Flickr

It was a bit confusing when I did the advanced search on Flickr by choosing exact phrase search "marrickville library". It returned 4 results, but neither the tag words nor the text words with these images really matched my search.

Tag words are used to describe the images. I think it is very important to follow some certain guidelines to list the tag words with the photos so that the images can be more valuable and precisely searchable resources.

It is good for a library to use blogs to promote library services, collections, events and resources, and to invite library members to participate in by providing feedback, comments and suggestions. Groups of people are more easier to share their photos,ideas and thoughts online with all these new technology nowadays. I think the Learning 2.0 program is really good for us to keep up-to-date with all these new things.