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 :)