#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.