L2.0 - The ERL Blogbusters

Recently released records from the War Office in London have revealed the existence of a secret plan to win the War In Killing Ignorance (WIKI)and the crack squadron formed to bring about that victory..... Ladies and Gentlemen I give you the Blogbusters!

Prime Minister Winnie Churchill can be seen here giving the super secret L2.0 salute that acknowledges the existence and contribution of the Blogbusters to the WIKI....

L for Library

V for Two and Victory

O for OK

Winnie was heard to say - "I have nothing to offer you but blog, toil, tears and sweat". The ERL Blogbusters have certainly toiled, cried and sweated (yuk!) writing their blogs.
May I say that it has been a privilege to have served with such a wonderful group of chaps, chappesses and chappettes.....



Flight Lieutenant Paul "Bunty Bozo Biggles Bomber" Burden (retd. ht.)

Thing 26: Little bits of the Internet, on your desktop

I thought that widgets weren't all that useful until I came across this..... the Chuck Norris Facts Generator..... available for Mac OS X at the moment....... will go and load it now...... yes I do have a Mac just like Webgurl.

If you need more Chuck Norris wisdom go and check out the Uncyclopedia ("The content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit")


Even ninjas are scared of the Chuckmeister!!!

Thing 25: Newsletters in a Pop!

Sorry but LetterPop just doesn't do it for me.... all looks a bit too uniform and clunky although I'm sure that some of the 13 "Christmas" templates will be coming my way in the festive season.

Thing 24: Got file conversion issues?

This from Chris Whyley who co-founded Zamzar with his brother Mike:

"The name that we chose for the company - "Zamzar" - is based on a character from the German author Franz Kafka's book "The Metamorphosis". In the novel Kafka describes the extraordinary story of a young man who is transformed overnight whilst sleeping into a gigantic beetle. The man's name - Gregor Samsa - was used as the basis for our company name because of its' powerful association with change & transformation."

Not only IT wizards but literate as well! This is a really nifty tool for converting files from one format to another. Covers Image, Doc, Music and Video formats. Will be particularly useful converting Word to PDF files...... must go and play some more.

#23 Is this really the end? Or just the beginning ...

Having finished the programme I now feel like I have to go back and really get a handle on some of the tools/toys we have been playing with. It has been very useful as an introduction to what is out there in the Wired World and how folks in Library Land are using the newish technologies. It has got several of us at ERL seriously looking at what ideas we have seen that we can pinch/adapt/utilise/creatively plagiarise in order to add to or improve our services to our customers. We are currently looking at wikis for both staff and customer use; blogs for the branches as well as specialised uses such as reader's advisory and a possible notification service.

A big shout out to Helene Blowers for devising the programme, Melanie McCarten for co-ordinating the State Library's side of things and to Lynette Lewis and Leslie Sharples for jollying us along. Of course I shouldn't forget Stephen Abram who provided the spark. I went back and read his blog posts from 2006 and found the following which I think is sooooooo appropriate:

I've been asked a load of times how library workers can learn all these newish technologies. I don't know why it's easy for me and difficult for others. I do a few things.

1. I play.
2. I surf sites, blogs, and articles that friends recommend.
3. I schedule it.
4. I don't stay committed if it isn't fun or engaging.
5. I don't feel the need to learn every feature and nook and cranny of the site.
6. I share. I don't feel guilty is it isn't directly applicable today to my current needs.

See you in the sandpit.
Cheers, Paul.

PS: If you feel like carrying on with the concept of Learning 2.0 check out the sequel Learning 2.1 - more toys to play with.........

#22 Audiobooks (or "The end is in sight ")

According to a report in "The Australian" iPods command more than 70% of the MP3 market worldwide - estimates put the total number of iPods sold since 2001 as being between 80 and 100 million. Another article based on a Credit Suisse report states that by 2009 there will be over 300 million iPods floating around the world. In a word, or rather a couple of words, that is an awful large slice of the MP3 pie (an Apple pie of course!!). So what I hear you ask..... well OverDrive are one of the largest companies supplying digital e-books, audio books, music and videos to libraries BUT (and yes it is a BIG BUT) you find this information on their website:

Why can't I use my iPod with this service? Our audio titles use Windows Media DRM copyright protection technology from Microsoft Corporation. Unfortunately the iPod does not currently support copyright-protected Windows Media Audio (.wma) and video (.wmv) files. OverDrive, along with hundreds of online music and audio book providers, is hopeful that Apple and Microsoft can reach an agreement that would enable support for Microsoft-based copyright-protected materials on the iPod. To repeat, OverDrive would love nothing more than to provide content for your iPod. We urge you to contact Apple and request that they open the iPod to other copy-protected formats or license their propriety copy-protection method to third-party vendors.

And therein lies the problem - the service provided by OverDrive looks terrific, the products are up to date and it seems relatively easy to actually download an audio book once you have typed in library card and PIN numbers BUT (there's that BIG BUT again) until Mr Gates and Mr Jobs have decided how many squillions of dollars they are going to exchange it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to pay for a service that 70% of your customers are never going to utilise because they own an iPod only. The ACT Public Library and a couple of Queensland Public Libraries have signed up with OverDrive, probably in the hope that the problem of DRM will be resolved in the near future..... but until then I can't see too many other libraries signing up just yet.

I also checked out World eBook Fair but the majority of the titles I looked at were either old and out of copyright or were being narrated by well meaning amateurs - not quite as flash as having the latest Harry Potter audio book read to you by Stephen Fry ........ but then World eBook Fair is free and as my old mum always says "You get what you pay for".

We await further developments.........

#21 Podcasts, Smodcasts!

My podcast directory of choice is iTunes mainly because I have an iPod. I find it really convenient to be able to search for music, music videos, audio books, podcasts and vodcasts all in the one place. iTunes also scores over the other directories because each podcast has a "Podcast Description" which gives you some idea of what that particular podcast may contain plus there are "Customer Reviews" also available as well as a list of what other "Listeners Also Subscribed To". I did look at both Podcastalley and Podcast.net but they really didn't do it for me.

Obviously this is a technology that would have a lot of applications in the library - recording author visits, recording World War veterans in the local area, presenting short tutorials on how to use the library's catalogue or databases, recording local teenage bands etc. In fact Webgurl has just posted our first podcasts on the ERL website - recordings of the "The Eastern Regional Library Show" found on your radio dial at EasternFM 98.1 on Wednesdays, 12:05-12:45pm. A big Huzzah to Maryanne, Kathy and Lesley.

Podcasts I recommend are:
The Arseblog - just shows what one man with a Powerbook and a burning passion can do.
AskANinja - got a philosophical problem that needs solving? Why not ask your very own Ninja? Very, very funny.
Background Briefing - ABC radio show which is always fascinating and which I always seem to miss listening to in "real time"...... again thank goodness for "pod time".
And last but certainly not least the SirsiDynix Institute - a really useful professional development tool. Has podcasts on all things Library2.0 - I must listen to the David Free podcast on "What's New in Podcasting?"

If you're still having problems coming to terms with what this technology is all about check out this podcast by the Ninja on podcasting...... enjoy!

#20 You too can YouTube

Truveo is a video search engine that , to quote their self-effacing publicity, "is widely recognized as being the most comprehensive and up-to-date video search service on the Web". Despite such a grandiose statement I must concur because it acts like a meta-search engine trawling the web to find you such video gems as "Rex the Chihuahua vs Nancy Pearl" or my particular favourite of the moment "The March of the Librarians" .... obviously some people have too much time on their hands!! It scores over YouTube by itself because it searches a whole host of other sites bringing up relevant and not so relevant hits.

You should check out the "YouTube Copyright Tips" on their site which tells you what can and cannot be uploaded or copied. Basically it appears that 95% of the content available on YouTube may be in breach of copyright......... we await the first trial case with interest.

In the meantime here's 2 minutes and 35 seconds of Blues Brilliance from Fleetwood Mac (pre-Stevie Whatshername and the other guy) and one of the many reasons that YouTube is a fantastic resource. I haven't heard this in years......... play it Pete!!

#19 Discovering Web 2.0 tools

Quick Robin to the Book Cave......


I am adding this to my list for Xmas......... only $7,000 (American dollars that is) - and can be found at Sakura Adachi's online shop.

I found it by checking out the StumbleUpon website that came second in the "Social Tagging" section of the Web 2.0 awards to del.icio.us.
BBC World describes it as:

"StumbleUpon is a brilliant downloadable toolbar that beds into your browser and gives you the chance to surf through thousands of excellent pages that have been stumbled upon by other web-users"

In turn the StumbleUpon website led me to the ThisNext website which describes itself as a "shopcasting" site - this from their website describing what "shopcasting" is:

"ThisNext is a shopcasting network where you can discover, recommend and share things you love. Everything on ThisNext is recommended by real people like you. Shopcasting is a way to spread the word about things you love. "Shopcast" is a word that combines shopping and broadcasting. What podcasting did for audio is what we're doing for shopping—broadcasting taste and knowledge of great products recommended by people like you. Right now, we support several tools that help you shopcast lists and tags on your blog or website."

"Recommended Lists", "Wish Lists", "Tagging", it's interactive, it's social, it's has all the things an online library should have. I checked out the tag on books and found several other consumer items that piqued my interest......


How about a "Book Chair" as an essential part of your Library's furniture?

Or a "I Read Banned Books" bracelet as an item to sell in your Online Library shop?

Wasted a lot of time but had a lot of fun discovering these tools today..... TTFN.

#18 Web-based Apps: They're not just for desktops

Let's start at the very beginning.......

A very good place to start..........

When you begin to read you begin with A, B. C.......

When you begin to sing it's Do, Reh, Mi.................

I really dislike emoticons... just ppping up everywhere.....

I thought that I must really have had the Grumpmeter turned up to "Full" when I found the following Youtube clip by an Angry Young Man rather than a Grumpy Old Man.....

But asides from having emticns as part of the Word Processing programme I can see a great use for Zoho and Googledocs - they would allow a group of you to collaborate on a project at any time and from anywhere. There would be no need to send humungous files to each other nor would you live in fear of wondering if you had backed up your files........ but what happens when you don't have access to the internet? And I'm sure that they don't have all the features of a Microsoft or Apple produced piece of software........ but again these are early days.... I'm sure that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are a gazillion moves ahead already.....

Now that's really interesting - I wrote this piece in Zoho and inserted emoticons in the text but mysteriously they haven't transfered across - (means that you miss the joke!) - obviously some compatability issues. As I said though it's new technology so I'm sure that there's a posse of computer programmers working on a solution at this very moment.

Just for the record:
"pfrownpping" is "popping"
"Grumpundecidedmeter" is "Grumpometer"
"emcoolticsealedns" is "emoticons"

#17 Playing around with PBWiki

Have added "Amante della lettura" and my favourite TV programme to the Blog List of Infamy- all rather painless. Have also set up an account for my own PBwiki which I will be filling with references to all the other wonderful "PB"s out there asides from yours truly:

Pooh Bear
Paper Back
Paddington Bear
Pandora's Box
Panda Bear
Personal Best
Power Book (Macintosh)
Publications
Productive Burp (Post surgery)

Ah well back to the paperback..........


The illustration of Paddington is by Margaret Emily Noel Nuttall-Smith (aka Peggy Fortnum).

#16 So what’s in a wiki?

"Veni Vidi Wiki" - from the very funny Blaugh.com - The un-official comic of the blogosphere.



It has either been yet another strange case of synchronicity or just the fact that Webgurl and Dave Rave are also up to Unit 16 but I have had several conversations this week about Wikis and how we can use them in the library. At the moment there are several suggestions all of which are good so in no particular order here they are:

* A knowledge management tool for keeping staff up to date on the progress of a particular project - we will be updating to Symphony sometime in the not too distant future so a wiki would be a means of keeping us all in the loop.
* A place to deposit our subject guides and weblinks so that all staff have an opportunity to update them.
* As an electronic training room allowing the training staff a place to deposit the sum of all their wisdom as well as the notes and resources they have used.
* As a community directory for the smaller branches.
* A Local History Wiki - with photographs and histories of significant places in the local area able to be updated by our customers.

The pot keeps bubbling, the neurons and synapses keep firing - looks like "content production" and "designing wikis" are phrases that are going to be finding a place in all of our position descriptions soon.

#15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0 ...

What Michael Stephens has to say about Librarian 2.0 really resonates with me:

"Librarian 2.0 also listens to staff and users when planning, tells the stories of successes and failures, learns from both, celebrates those successes, allows staff time to play and learn, and never stops dreaming about the best library services."

Ultimately it is all about the customer/patron/user/client and that is who we have always concentrated on be we known as Librarian 1.0 or 10.0 or 1000.0. Library 2.0 has given us a different set of tools to use in order to satisfy our customer's educational/recreational/informational needs. By the way Michael Stephens runs his own blog called "Tame the Web" which you can find here. He is also one of the talents behind this video of a day in the life of the St Joseph County Public Library in Indiana - if ever an idea needed to be stolen/plagiarised/adopted this is it.



PS: Recently read a brilliant piece about how a University in Venezuela has combined the best of Library 1.0 and 2.0 to service some very remote customers. Check out the Venezuelan "Bibliomulas" (Book Mules) in this BBC report. A four legged mobile library equipped with a mobile phone, laptop and projector - fair warms the cockles of your heart!!

Half way there......................

So halfway there and what have I learnt so far?

Well one of the roles I have at work is as a trainer and one of the maxims I have always stood by is that the best way to learn something is to actually go off and teach somebody else how to do it and this is one of the terrific things about this programme. It has been great to see and hear about the other learners in our organisation helping each other out with the vagaries of Flickr and the intricacies of RSS feeds - a tip of the hat to Webgurl and Space Cadet Beta for their helpful and informative blogs. It has also been valuable getting all those tricky questions about Blogger from my fellow learners and then having to go off and track down the answer - again a big hurrah for the Help Group on Blogger.

We are also a large organisation with close to 200 staff spread over 17 locations and a reasonably large part of Victoria so the concept of offering training via the internet makes sense on a number of different levels. People aren't always able to make training sessions because of the tyrannies of time, distance and branch duties. In order to address this I have taken my first faltering steps in online learning and set up a training blog for ERL prosaically called "Learning @ ERL". We have recently been doing some refresher training on the Reference Interview for staff and instead of handing out sheets of paper at the training we have been directing the participants towards the blog so that if they feel the need to review what they have learnt they have access to all the material from the session. Discovering Zoho was great because it allowed me to put up the Power Point slides that we used in the training.

I have also been playing around with the idea of short and sweet introductions to the numerous databases we subscribe to (28 so far) so that staff, and eventually our customers, can check them out in any spare moments they may have off desk and get a feel for what they contain and how to search them. Again an example can be found on the "Learning @ ERL" blog - it's about the ANZ Reference Centre one of the new Gulliver core databases. Many of the vendors have some excellent training material on their sites but it is often buried several clicks or layers deep - I have just made it easier to access the Flash tutorials on the EBSCO site by adding links from the blog. I haven't added any other databases at the moment because I have the feeling that a wiki may be a more useful vehicle for collecting this information in one place - I shall explore further in week 7.
TTFN.

#14 Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

It's a bit like an index of the web but on steroids.......

I have staked my claim to my blog so boo sucks to those of you who wanted to steal "Amante della Lettura"....... it's mine, all my mine I tell you......(cackles manically to self). I am officially now ranked at 4,266,703 so come on people let's start tagging me! Let's get "Amante della Lettura" to 4,266,702!!!

Again a very useful way of searching the blogosphere - I particularly like the opportunity to see what videos people have tagged. Found the following classic Spike Milligan take on what happens when technology goes wrong......

Enjoy or you will be exterminated!!!

#13 Tagging, folksomonies & social bookmarking in Del.icio.us

As the late great Cole Porter sang....

"It's del.ight.ful, it's del.icio.us, it's del.ectab.le, it's del.irio.us,
It's dil.em.ma, it's de.lim.it, it's del.uxe, it's de-love.ly "

What a wonderful thing del.icio.us is. I am a great believer in wandering off in tangents or browsing or discovering things by serendipity but sometimes it is nice to be pointed in a particular direction by somebody who has been down the path before you. That is why I like the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" function in Amazon which shows you what similarly like-minded folk are reading, watching or listening to.
del.icio.us allows you to discover what other folk who have similar potentially esoteric interests to your own are checking out on the WEB and where you can go to find it. It's a bit like going round to a friend's house and scanning their bookshelves to see what they are reading and discovering a brand new author or book that you hadn't come across before.
Of course it is also very useful for bookmarking the sites that you may want to keep track of without being tied to your personal computer.
Two thumbs up for del.icio.us!!

#12 Roll your own search engine with Rollyo

Rollyo is rooly, rooly clever - my very own search engine to find all the weird and wonderful stuff that I am interested in on all the weird and wonderful websites I visit on a regular basis. When you set it up you can also ask it to search your own blog as well - v. useful if you tend to be verbose or prone to bouts of logorrhea.

#11 - All about LibraryThing

Could see how this would be useful on a Reader's Advisory blog - allowing folks to put up their own favourites and then finding like minded readers. Good way to find other suggestions. My LibraryThing catalogue can be found here.

#10 - Play around with image generators

A quick message from the Library Ninja........



Found at - www.fodey.com





What's on Repeat on my ipod at the moment.....

Found here.

Yup........... image generators are fun.

#9 Newsfeeds - feed your head......

We are going to set up a Graphic Novel collection for adults at Belgrave library and I thought that this would be a good chance to test Google Blog Search to see if anyone out there in the Blogosphere had set up a blog about graphic novels. Of course they had and I have subscribed to the RSS feeds for "Grovel" and "Comics Worth Reading". I wonder if there is any subject under the sun that people haven't blogged about?

Anyhoo - here's a picture of The Thing one of my favourite comic book characters.

Also set up a feed from the ANZ Reference Centre to "Library Journal" - a slight case of synchronicity here because we were only talking about staff subscribing to some of the library science journals through the databases yesterday. And yes it was really easy - go here and click on "One Step Alerts".

#8 Make life really simple with RSS and a newsreader - define simple!

Here's a picture of the wonderful Cesc Fabregas one of Arsenal's new stars - why I hear you ask? Why not I reply? I have included this picture because this is how I feel at the moment having negotiated Bloglines and RSS feeds.......... success!!!!!! Can see how Bloglines will be very useful but was all rather tricky to negotiate. Hav eput up my blogroll on the blog - Feed Your Brain!

Go you mighty Gunners!

Feedster

Playing with Feedster today...... oh so that's what happens to the widget!

#7 Blog about technology - The Wonders of YouTube

Like most people I have been aware of YouTube and what it is but hadn't really used it that much until last weekend when I wondered if it would be easy to find music clips and videos on the site. My have the scales fallen away and those who were once blind now can see and hear!! I have well and truly taken a stroll down Memory Lane testing YouTube to see if somebody has loaded this particular band or that one - and yes usually they have. I also like the fact that once you have discovered a particular video or song you can go into the profile of the person who loaded the clip and see their library of other videos they have uploaded. Lots of potential here for getting in contact with like-minded folk who are into the same obscure eighties bands as you are. For your aural and visual pleasure I present Shriekback's "Nemesis" from the wonderful cd "Oil and Gold"- enjoy!

#6 More Flickr Fun - There ain't half been some clever bastards....

Found this very clever website called "Amaztype" while browsing through all things librarian in Flickr. Would be great if you could actually create or type in your own message.... anyway check it out here.
Amazing eh?

#5 Flickr - Into the Labyrinth

A favourite artist is an English man called Michael Ayrton, a polymath who wrote novels, painted, sculpted, designed stage sets and appeared on radio. A recurring theme in his work is the myth of Daedalus the inventor who fashioned wings of feather and wax to escape from imprisonment on the Island of Crete where he had been forced by King Minos to build the labyrinth that held the Minotaur. You all know the story about what happened to Icarus his son who got too close to the sun and plummeted into the Aegean Sea. The sculpture on the left is of the Minotaur and can be found in West Yorkshire at Bretton Hall.

Why minotaurs and labyrinths and what does this have to do with technology? Well I find the whole concept of the the internet amazing - it is a tremendous example of human ingenuity and how we adapt so quickly to change . From the comfort of my pc at home I am able to find information on Ayrton, the Minotaur, the history of Labyrinths, Greek Mythology, track down pictures of Ayrton's artworks through Flickr all in the space of 30 minutes or so. Only as short as 5 years ago to have accumulated such information would have take hours upon hours of painstaking tracking in books, bibliographies and reference material. Daedalus - the ingenious maker of the labyrinth - would have been amazed. The internet is a modern day labyrinth - it is very easy to find yourself lost for hours as you follow one turn after another.... the trick is to act like Theseus and unwind a skein of thread behind you as you go....... or at least bookmark the pages that you have seen.
Looking forward to where the labyrinth is going to take me next.

#4 Blogging - Conscious Incompetence

Heard a terrific interview on Radio National last week with Richard Aedy interviewing a surgeon called Mohamed Khadra about his new book based on his experiences "healing with steel". He talks about his first experience cutting into somebody with a scalpel and how basically he stuffed up. As he says it was a case of moving from "unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence". In other words you suddenly realise that it's all a lot harder than it looks and that perhaps you don't know it all after all. Sort of feeling that way at the moment about L2.0 - but this is good. As they say in the classics..... "It's all shiny".

The link to the "Life Matters" program is here.


The book is called "Making the cut: a surgeon's memoir of life on the edge" by Mohamed Khadra.
And yes it is available in your local library soon.