How to lose a whole lot of time?? Browse YouTube trying to find a clever clip that you haven't seen on anyone else's blog. This one cracked me up! How could I resist a song including lyrics like "librarians are often sexy"?
I was already familiar with YouTube, but hadn't used it for much other than occasionally receiving or emailing funny clips. There is so much to choose from and look at which is one of the problems with this site, so much to wade through to find something worthwhile. It could be used in library website in the context of instructional videos, I would hesitate recommending it to patrons unless I knew exactly where to find something, again due to the volume of material available.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
#19 Discovering Web 2.0 tools.
It's hardly surprising that their would be awards for all these new Web 2.0 technologies, the sheer amount of them is incredible. I have spent quite a lot of time looking at various nominated sites but could not choose one that I liked more than the ones we have already looked at through the course of this program, or ones I was already familiar with. Question & Answer sites would probably be useful in the library environment but I still think that Zoho has the most potential in our library service given the number of times we are asked for word processing.
You really have to applaud all these people who come up with these things to make life more fun, interesting, easier, exciting & more organised for the rest of us.
You really have to applaud all these people who come up with these things to make life more fun, interesting, easier, exciting & more organised for the rest of us.
Posting to blog from Zoho
#18 Web-based apps : They're not just for desktops.
Like many before me I was prepared to looooove Zoho, but I had a few teething problems. Firstly I the confirmation email disappeared into Internet yonder yonder land & then twice it signed me into someone else's accounts. Once I resent the confirmation email and went through that process it was all smooth sailing. I really liked the user friendly toolbar, no more crusing from menu to menu trying to find something!
Obviously knowing about this application will be a boon for our patrons who have been knocked back for word processing facilities in our library since time began. The ability to have your documents saved online and access them somewhere else entirely is great - no more emailing all over the place to be able to work on something from another pc.
I'm sure Zoho has many more joys to discover, but alas time is short and I will have to leave it at that & investigate more later. Knowledge is power as they say!
Obviously knowing about this application will be a boon for our patrons who have been knocked back for word processing facilities in our library since time began. The ability to have your documents saved online and access them somewhere else entirely is great - no more emailing all over the place to be able to work on something from another pc.
I'm sure Zoho has many more joys to discover, but alas time is short and I will have to leave it at that & investigate more later. Knowledge is power as they say!
#17 Playing around with PBWiki.
I must admit I wonder how all these funny little names for these new gadgets come about...sandbox, wiki etc. I was amazed at how easy this "thing" was. Very impressed by the use of normal formatting instead of having to know html. The tour link didn't work but I did watch all the videos to try and get a good grasp of exactly how this all worked. Added my blog to the favourites page - aren't there a lot of people who have been through this experience! At the suggestion of one of my colleagues I added a new page for Favourite wines and put on my current favourite. My only issue is that it does tend to get quite messy. When I had a look at the Favourite Books page it seemed to have very little order and I found it frustrating to look through. After all, I think every library worker does enjoy a sense of order!!
Monday, November 26, 2007
#16 So what's in a wiki?
Having heard about wikis before but not really knowing anything about them I found the reading for this "thing" very interesting. I liked Library Success : a best practices wiki and thought their philosophy of using other people's success so that noone needed to "reinivent the wheel" very appealing.
Being known as being a little bit anal I had to have a laugh when looking through "Wikis : a beginner's look" and at the bottom of one page is a little line, "if control is really important to you, then a wiki probably isn't the right tool". I love the idea of patrons being able to add reviews on the OPAC but wonder at how this would be controlled, moderators would obviously be required and how can we use this tool without opening the whole catalogue up to the world? I did notice that many of the wikis used as examples now require you to sign in, some stating vandalism etc is the reason behind this. It is such a pity that there is always a downside to such a great tool.
Creating a community hub that extends to information on restuarants etc is a really cool idea, especially as many people expect that we already know everything about everything, and with the help of the community using a tool like this we will!
Being known as being a little bit anal I had to have a laugh when looking through "Wikis : a beginner's look" and at the bottom of one page is a little line, "if control is really important to you, then a wiki probably isn't the right tool". I love the idea of patrons being able to add reviews on the OPAC but wonder at how this would be controlled, moderators would obviously be required and how can we use this tool without opening the whole catalogue up to the world? I did notice that many of the wikis used as examples now require you to sign in, some stating vandalism etc is the reason behind this. It is such a pity that there is always a downside to such a great tool.
Creating a community hub that extends to information on restuarants etc is a really cool idea, especially as many people expect that we already know everything about everything, and with the help of the community using a tool like this we will!
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