April 20, 2008 at 12:35 pm (Uncategorized)
Tags: Flickr, MLA CE, owls, photosharing
I’ve been using Flickr for ages – I really like it. Before I found Flickr, people would send me links to see their photos and to see them I had to register and sign up for a service I didn’t want. I hated that. Flickr is much better.
Something like this would be great for a library just to post event photos. For a library with a historical or photo collection, it would allow it to share with others outside of the library. My library has a historical collection with some photos, and at least a few aren’t identified. This might allow us to ask people to view and identify them. The Library of Congress has a brilliant set of photos from the 1930’s and another from the 1910’s up on Flickr right now and is having people tag them.
And here’s one of mine:
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April 20, 2008 at 12:08 pm (Uncategorized)
Tags: Google Docs, MLA CE, Web 2.0
The future of office software… I do think this is part of the future of office software. I don’t think it would be so great for anything like a novel, or someone’s individual homework or assignments, but you can’t beat it for group work.
For any kind of shared work, this can’t be beat – especially as so many of us work with people at a great distance. I used to work as a solo librarian in one of eighteen connected libraries. We spend a fair amount of time emailing documents back and forth every time we had to do any sort of collaboratory work. This would have been much better, if it had been available and usable for everyone. Google Docs was available, but our company felt it was too insecure to advise using it – that’s something that might have to be overcome, or corporations might use one of the paid ones.
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April 14, 2008 at 6:35 pm (Uncategorized)
Tags: ce, class, social bookmarking
I adore social bookmarking! I was a little creeped by the idea when I first heard about it – I tend to be very self-protective – but it is so much fun to see how many other people like the same pages you do. It’s especially interesting to go see if somebody who has a lot of the same bookmarks as you do in one area – I have a lot of newsblogs, for example – also has a lot of other totally unrelated things in common – like parody, or comics. I’ve also found other things that I might never have by checking out what other people who like my stuff also like.
This is extremely valuable for research assistance if you have enough time to nose around, and if you use similar terms to describe things as the others who are interested in your topics do. I’m not sure how useful the more general of these like del-icio-us would be to a science or medical researcher, but the specifically science-targeted ones are great for that. I think they’d be most useful for finding funding sources, news about other people’s studies and papers, and for locating government and other resources for practitioners to share with patients. Some rarer topics that may have little pockets of disconnected research all over the world might really benefit from this, too, if someone takes the time to link all of the sites and notices about the research.
It’s also a way to make links usable and visible for all, but it does require a user to leave the library’s site and go to a different site that he or she may not be familiar or comfortable with using. I definitely think that it should be used in conjunction with a regular library page listing resources if used at all, at least for now. I think it might also function better as an option for user generated content rather than as something the library creates.
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April 6, 2008 at 10:08 am (Uncategorized)
Tags: MLA CE, social networking
It’s an odd coincidence, but I had just signed up for Facebook right as this CE course started. It’s useful personally for finding out about events, and seeing what some of my friends in other places have been up to. I’ve had a Myspace page for ages, but I’m not very active with it.
I do think my library should have a Facebook page, as so many people use it as their primary tool for tracking events and announcements. I think that it would be beneficial at least for those individuals to have one less place to look. I also think that having it set so announcements go automatically to someone and easily add to calendars make it more likely that people will attend events, just because they didn’t have to deliberately seek out the information.
As a working tool, it would be valuable for a group or committee within the library or a professional organization to track and publicize its activities. Obviously, confidential information could not be posted or available through one of these sites. Used properly, I don’t think there’s a significant privacy concern – most library business is intended to be public, and most libraries are funded by the public and therefore subject to Open Access laws anyway. That said, it would obviously be a good idea to explicitly state what should and should not appear on one of these pages before having the staff start to use it – some staff may not be net-savvy enough to remember without prompting that this is publicly available, and what that means.
I do not care for Myspace so much, although I think it could be useful for some of the above reasons. I really didn’t like those two library pages because they had bad music embedded – really, Timberland?! I think that the music clips might be off-putting for some library viewers, although maybe they have the sites primarily targeted at a particular audience instead to all of their patrons.
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