Pathway to the end

I have now reached Week #12. What a sad occasion this is. I have thoroughly enjoyed my travel through the roadway of web 2.0 and have learned many new things and recapped a few. These tools are making a huge change within the world and our libraries that most of us probably didn't even fathom.

I find social networking an exciting tool as well as a bit of a reclusive one. It's interesting how social we can be whilst sitting alone in our home with a computer. A question arises of whether we are becoming more reclusive and shy around actual people? Something to think about....

Aside from that I think that using social networking tools in our libraries can link the community together. It is particularly difficult to involve young people in library activities so perhaps we could use this to connect with them as well as the members of our community that may not be able to get out due to disabilities or illness.

There is a huge scope of usage with all of these tools...we just have to implement them...and not to mention have the time to use them!

thanks everyone...it's been great! :)

Online Applications

Yet another cool thing! I think that this would be a great way to stay in touch with all staff that don't get access to their work emails regularly. Our email program is generally only accessible at the library so and using these tools would give access to documentation online outside the usual email account via sharing.

Whilst travelling or out and about, you could use these tools to create all sorts of things and distribute as necessary without having access to software like MS Office and the like.

This is excellent!

Mashups

How cool is this! This is my first time with using mashups. I didn't even know what a mashup really was until now. I'll definitely be doing more of these!






The calendar is so cute. Perhaps we could use the calendar for our events in the library. We could integrate all sorts of photos from previous events, library photos and more. We could mark events on the days they're on or even link a map on how to get to the library on our web page.

There are so many uses for this!

Podcasts

Podcasting would be such a useful tool for us at the library. When we have events it is not always possible for everyone to come so podcasting could be the tool we could use to reach more people. We can use it for author talks, student lectures, storytime, concerts, fun days and much more. I'm looking forward to implementing such a tool within the library.

It's interesting how many different topics people use to broadcast via a podcast. Also the many resources listed on the library success wiki will become very useful in the future. The only downside I can see at this point is the time it takes to download some of the podcasts and it would depend on the speed of your connection on how long it takes. This means that people with slow connections could get frustrated and maybe even give up on using it.

Answer boards

This is a cool thing, but one has to be careful what to believe when the questions are answered in some instances. There are people answering questions left, right and centre and you don't know how accurate the answer might be. The exception to this is the Librarian answer board. The answers are usually supported with evidence and references. At least the asker can depend on this to be as accurate as possible.

Answer boards can be a useful tool within libraries, but in ours we use RefTracker so I can't see us implementing another similar system in the near future. However, a rating option for our borrowers might have some merit. Some people like to have a say about specific items such as a book so from that point of view it may be good tool. (we already have a feedback option on our website so they can also use that for a similar purpose)

Delicious and the like

Looking at this resource it definitely is something that I could use. I'm just getting a little overwhelmed with all the resources that are out there. I would like to utilise them all but am somewhat time poor with my workload already stretched. I guess I'll have to juggle things around a bit more so that I can get into it more.

Setting up delicious was easy but putting the link onto the blog was a little more fiddly until I actually worked it out. So my link is there :)

I also found LibraryThing exercise a bit confusing and not as easy to use as the others. Hopefully I've done the exercise correctly 'cause my list is on the side.

With regard to searching on these, it's interesting what different results you get depending on how you search.

Videos....Yihaa!

This would probably have to be one of the most entertaining of the activities. I've just finished watching Lego 'Indiana Jones: Raiders of the lost Ark'. It was great and made me laugh. The timelapse video was excellent! I particularly liked the user guide videos which show people how to use eg. the library. It think that something like that would be very handy.

People can be so creative....keep it up!