Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Things 22 and 23

Some of these things are probably useful for libraries but maybe not all of them. Blogs on library pages with news of what's on and new books and DVDs etc would be useful and Wiki's would be useful for teams working on something together bur located at different campuses and Technorati is useful for reading lists and keeping track of websites visited. As for things like MySpace and Facebook, I'm not sure that they would be very useful in the library situation.
I have found the exercise to be good and have learned alot of new things. In the diploma course we touched on most of this and before we did I didn't know that some of these things existed.

Things 22 and 23

Things 18, 19, 20, 21

Google maps are good for getting directions and also just for playing around such as looking at your house or other people's using street view.
Google docs is very useful if you don't have Microsoft Office or other word processor. There are other free word processors such as Open office that have been around for awhile so if people didn't want to pay for a word processor they may have already used a free one so Google docs may not be a big threat to Microsoft Word.
Google book search is good and I have used it quite a lot even before doing 23 things.
iGoogle home page is good, because I can check Gmail without having to log on again and it is good to have all the extra information on hand. I added the artists theme so that I have a Leunig picture as a banner and it changes from a day time picture to a night time picture depending on the time that I am using the computer.

Things 14, 15,16, 17

Technorati is a great tool if you have time to look at other blogs that may interest you.
Flickr has an amazing number of images.I had a look at "cats" and there were about 3 million photos.
Youtube has lots of interesting videos and one can waste a lot of time looking at them. I have include an interesting one in an earlier blog.
I'm not sure that MySpace and Facebook are really relevant for libraries except maybe they could be used for contacts from other libraries.
I came upon a a site called Stumbleupon ( http://www.stumbleupon.com/) which gathers up articles which are posted and sorts them into categories and you can customise it so that only look at things that interest you.

Thing 12 Library Thing and thing 13 Delicious

Library Thing is a really great tool. I have a large library at home and it makes it so easy to catalogue the books- just need to type in the ISBN and "hey presto" you get a picture of the book and a bibliographic record. I have also found a similar program called All My Books which does the same sort of thing but you do have to pay for it unless you can get hold of a free version via a computer magazine.
Delicious is a good way to keep track of websites that you look at. If you find something interesting when you are surfing the net you can tag it and then you can find it again and you can share it with other people. It is a good idea for a shared reading list.

Thing 11 Image generators

These are fun to play with but I had trouble getting it to work with my photos. Another good time waster.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Difficult library customer

Podcasts and wikis

Podcasts are very useful. In my course we had to look at some talks on the Sirsi Dynix website and as they were available as podcasts I was able to download them to my MP3 player and then listen to them where ever and when ever I wanted to without having to sit in front of a computer for an hour at a time. Some radio stations make some of their broadcasts available as podcasts so that if you miss the session "live" you can still listen to it later.
Wikis are probably very useful for team work to cut down on e-mails.
OCLC is trialling a wiki on their catalogue for people to write reviews of books so that when you are looking for a book you can see whether it would be useful.

Friday, May 9, 2008

My Cat


Seeing others have included pictures of their pets, I am posting a photo of my cat, Shelley.





Things 5,6 and 7

I had to create a blog in my library course a few weeks ago so it was much easier to do second time around. We only did blogs and adding images and videos to blogs. The teacher would have liked to do more Web 2.0 things but the person who wrote the course had other things in the course so it is good to be able to continue on with the 23 things via Chisholm.
I posted my first comment today which was very easy also. On my Swinburne blog I received a comment from a person in Cincinatti in America, which was quite amazing.
I set up the RSS reader but I'm sure how much I will use it yet.
All this is very interesting but very time consuming. It is easy to get side tracked.

Saturday, May 3, 2008

Add-ons and extensions

I found this exercise very useful and easy to do. If you have websites or search engines that you use regularly it makes access to them very quick and easy. It's amazing how many thing like this are available but the average person never hears about them unless they get involved in something like this. My search plug ins are Flikr, Ask.com and Amazon.com and my extensions are 'morning coffee' and webmail notifier.