Being sociable

Social networking - first I have problems with it in "real" life, now I get to suck at it online as well. I think it is interesting that libraries have their own FaceBook and MySpace sites. I do wonder, however, how many of their "friends" are other libraries also trying to keep up with the newest interest. If clients are actually using the library sites, or if new people are using the libary resources as a result that is a good thing. But like all online things they need to be updated and dynamic, which means staff time dedicated to providing new content. Soon enough every library will have a librarian whose full time job it is to update the blogs, attract new friends to FaceBook, respond to answer boards..... Great job for some! (it might drive me crazy).

By the way, Delicious is back on my site. Yay!

And it is a good time to send a big thank you to the State Library staff who worked on this program.

Google Docs

Can you even remember the time before Google? Trust them to find ways to make sharing documents easier. And anything that can prevent multiple copies of the one document floating around will always be welcome.
Online applications will also be a great relief to Information Desk staff. If documents are stored online there will be no more desparate students ringing us up to ask if anyone handed in the USB stick the left in a library computer (the answer is no). And there will be no more complaints about our version of Word not being able to open their Vista created documents. But woe is us if the internet ever goes down!! Then it will be ALL OUR FAULT.

Mashups

Having a shocker of a week. Am running late (work got in the way), and then when I finally made my mashup (in itself nice and easy - thank you Big Huge Labs) I had big problems getting it into my blog. In fact, in the course of trying I have managed to delete my Delicious link (note its absence from the right of this post) and been unable to return it due to the fact that I cannot find the "Add Elements" option from my layout dashboard. "Help" is no help, as it just tells me to click on "add element" - I would if I could.
Thank goodness for friends - one logged into her blog and we discovered that she didn't have the "add elements" either, so I am counting on the fact that maybe it is blogger and not me (a girl can hope). I was also advised to add my mashup to Flickr or Photobucket and copy the html code into my post, so here it goes. Mashup (I hope) will appear above.
As to mashup themselves.... very useful for promotional material for the library. I especially liked the Warholizer. And adding GoggleMaps improves just about everything :)

Podcasts

From the British Library I listened to a talk by Karen Armstrong. Truthfully I chose it because it was only 31 minutes long (I am at work you know, and sure, I am multi-tasking, but still, I do only have 1 hour a week to do this:))but the talk was related to the exhibition "Sacred" held at the British Library last year. I was happy to listen to this as I actually went to that exhibition while I was in London last year. And by the by, the website was lying - the podcast is much longer than 31 minutes.
And from the plethora of gold at the ABC how could I resist listening to Roy and HG and a podcast of "This Sporting Life".
Some of the podcasts I listened to from Denver Public Library were from storytimes. The reader of the stories had a lovely expressive voice, but I feel that podcasting storytimes is really a waste of time. The joy of storytime is children gathering together to be READ TO, the interaction between the reader and the children. And the books themselves! The kids get to look at the pictures. What is the point of being read a picture book without getting to look at the pictures? And another aspect of storytime is the parents and carers getting together in a social setting. Not going to happen at a download.
Author talks would be a better use of podcasting, as the content is not as reliant on the visual aspect. Thanks to chillipepper for pointing out that podcasts would be useful in training for rural workers (library or otherwise). Libraries with branches could also use podcasts so that all staff get the same information (also useful for those staff who are manning the desk during a meeting.) I'm not sure that my library is large enough to warrant a library tour download, but it would be useful in larger libraries such as academic libraries. I also liked the podcasts a university library had describing some services that their clients may not have realised were available (such as ILLS and different types of resources). Clients in my library may prefer podcasts to a printed brochure.

Answers and questions

Thanks to Taste I now have several recipes for chicken risotto. Because obviously I am far too lazy to walk downstairs to the 640s - I have only been meaning to do that for months but have never gotten around to it. Well now I don't have to. (I'm not convinced that is entirely a good thing. If one is going to cook risotto, one should probably climb a few stairs.)
"Slamming the boards" is a good idea, seeing as answering questions is what we do, and we know how to find authoritative sources. (Well, I don't know how to get tickets to the American Idol final, but if I left the Entertainment & Music/Television section of Yahoo Answers I might find some questions I could answer. Then again, I COULD answer "What is the song from the last scene of "The Office?" by going to DVD 791.457/OFF, pulling the episode off the shelf and using the public DVD player to watch it.)
I guess like so many things we would need to have time to do it, or be willing to commit time to having staff go on to answer boards. Or have staff who are so committed to being library professionals that they do it in their own time.

yummy del.icio.us

"What are you up to?" a friend asked. "Delicious," I replied. "What's that?" "A website where you store all your websites." "I just add them to favourites." "Yeah, me too." I was dubious about the benefits of this week, but tragically had fun adding websites to my new del.icio.us account. And, as a person who doesn't actually own their own computer, grudgingly admit how useful it could be. (I'm in a grumpy mood this week, so everything will be dubious, tragic, and grudging.)
Useful in a library setting? Yes (she muttered through clenched teeth), adding useful reference sites as we staff come across them so we(and our lovely colleagues) don't have to start from scratch the next time we have a similar enquiry, adding all the sites we use constantly and tagging appropriately....I admit, it would work (mutter mutter). No more complaining when someone deletes all of the "Favourites" I think should be there. No problems with upgrades. Fine! (she throws down her pen in disgust). It is useful.
PS It is good to see bookmobiles are well represented. And my favourite book has a average rating of 4 stars on LibraryThing.

Videos, or how to make time disappear really quickly

I fell for You Tube a while back and this clip is the reason why:
This song is from 1998 and the flatmate I was living with at the time owned the single after we both fell for the song on Good News Week. However, when we moved on our separate ways she of course took her CD with her (ah, the perils of share housing). And as it was only released on single it wasn't like I could go out and buy it years later. But thanks to the wonder that is You Tube I finally got to hear the song again. Sigh. And of course, since I discovered You Tube I haven't stopped.
But fancy using it for work purposes! To film author talks and storytime sessions and public events. Or providing library orientations, or lessons on how to use the catalogue. But, as others have noted, there are good (great even) clips. And then there are the not so good ones...

Adventures in wikiland

Aren't wikis fun? I must admit, I am one of those people who were dubious about the accuracy of Wikipedia (it all stems from those 4 years at uni where absolutely EVERY sentence I wrote had to have a citation (in the Harvard style, thank you very much) to a peer reviewed journal following it), so it was interesting to read arguments indicating that Wikipedia may be authoritative after all. And there is no place like the web to feed a Star Wars addiction (although perusing Wookieepedia (what a fabulous name!) just proves to me that too many post trilogy novels have been written, with things I can never approve of: Han and Leia's child would never turn to the dark side, what is with Chewie being killed off, and how many times can the Sith rise? Oh, and don't get me started on the prequels, and as for the Special Editions....but I digress. Wikis. That's what I am here to talk about. Not Star Wars.)
I liked the way Princeton Public Library incorporated a wiki into their summer reading. My library also asks for summer reading reviews, and runs a challenge for kids over the summer as well. We get the kidlets to submit their reviews on paper but perhaps they would enjoy adding to a wiki?
PS As noted before, on the computer I use every day all of the blogs are blocked and in order to view them I need to be on a different computer on a different network. As a result I haven't read as many as I would have liked. So thank you all for your interesting contributions to the NSW learning 2.0 wiki (which is not blocked) that I just spent a happy time reading. And yes, I did contribute as well.

RSSing

So I set up my account and added some feeds. And the next day I checked my account, realised I had been a bit too enthusiastic about adding feeds, so deleted some feeds. And then today, I checked my feeds (today the Powerhouse Museum photo of the day is a Red Kangaroo Paw - but then you all knew that, didn't you?), added a feed to my blog (I've finally gone on an "Adventure") and pondered whether it is useful technology. Conclusion: yes, it is useful to have one site where you check all your favourite sites in one go. Just don't get too excited and subscribe to so many feeds that it stops being convenient and starts becoming a chore. What sites did I pick? Book and film reviews (got to be useful for collection development, right?), words and quotes sites (to learn interesting words and how others have used them effectively), library sites (to see what others are doing), and news sites (so I can pretend to be well informed).

Doorways, or seaching through Flickr

Follow my titlelink to my Flickr image....Yes, it is a doorway (it's thematic). Who would have thought there were so many pictures of doorways (89616)? Much better than the results for my old home town, where most of the results were road signs indicating how many kilometres you were from somewhere more populated. Or a woolshed. It wasn't even that interesting a woolshed.
Good news though! There are no photos that I didn't know about of me on Flickr (at least none with my name in them).
Am I the only one who couldn't locate Blogger's photo upload tool? (Hence my use of the Titlelink, which I COULD figure out how to use). I have instucted my very computer literate friend and collegue to hurry up and do her blog, so she can help me.
And just an update regarding our IT situation. On Friday of Week 3 everything was perfect, all links worked and I was busy checking out everyone elses blogs (any by the way, to all those people who have all ready completed week 4, you are making me feel lazy!!!). By Tuesday Week 3 most of the blocks were back, everyones blogs were once again "harmful and stealthy" and our Queen had to think up new ways for us all to gain access. Fortunately we have the network that the staff use, and a network for the general library public. So guess which network I am on now...

Week 1: Blogs

Getting to this point was harder than it should have been: not because my Library was unsupportive, not because the instructions were unclear, not because it was at all difficult! Only because our Parent Organisation cares about the security of our IT and most of the sites were blocked!
Our Queen worked hard, sending requests to unblock pertinent sites, letting us know when access was available, and (gently) hounding us all with "have you been blogging?" Even with all her efforts every single participants blog is currently deemed "Harmful & Stealth", so our IT department it looking at getting a long list of sites to unblock. Seriously, what sort of organisation is it that cares about protecting the security of its information? :)
Of the blogs we were referred to I thought the WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier was a wonderful idea and I liked the way it incorporated both scanned images of the letters and transcripts, as well as the way the letters were released in real time (+ 90 years). Up until now the blogs I was most likely to read were friends holiday blogs - why send postcards when you can update everyone by sending them a link to your travel diary? Never had my own blog before - I guess it had to happen eventually!
My Library currently has a couple of blogs - one general and one aimed at kids and youth. They are quite new so don't have many posts yet. Also, the kids one has no comments, so it looks like we need to let the kids know it is there - any suggestions?