2/22/2008

More on Social Networking

CollegeDegree.com library blog has a post commenting on 25 Useful Social Networking Tools for Librarians. I'll have to refer to them when presenting the workshop I mentioned in yesterdays post. My colleagues nod sagely when such ideas are mooted but there seems to be a fear of trying out anything that hasn't been passed by the College board for approval. "Stick to your job; you don't have time for the fun stuff", was my director's advice.

2/21/2008

Social Media Will Change Your Life

Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up or catch you later.

This is from an article in BusinessWeek that I plan to use to promote the staff PD course that I conduct at Central TAFE. I'm also going to borrow from the title and call it Social Media Will Change Your Life rather than Making the Most of Wikis and Blogs.


2/19/2008

New 2.0 Tools via ResourceShelf

ResourceShelf is a never-ending source of ideas and information. These new tools look particularly interesting:

New 2.0 Tools: From Twitter Traffic to Image Resizing to Visualizing del.icio.us Tags

Here’s a selection of a few new “2.0 tools and services” via the KillerStartUps weblog.

+ Traffic Alerts via Twitter–CommuterFeed.com

+ Momondo–New MetaSearch Flight Info and Pricing
From Denmark, over 800 sites searched.

+ Visalize del.icio.us info with TastyTag
Tasty spits out bar graphs indicating the top ten tags del.icio.us users use to categorize any one URL. Using its API, Tasty effectively canvasses the del.icio.us mindset and gives site owners a glimpse into how their site is perceived.

+ PicResize.com - Easy Image Resizer

+ JukeFly
Stream your music library to various computers.

2/13/2008

Dancing Librarians

The Infomaniacs in Second Life are a fun-loving, stimulating group of people and I am honoured to be one of their number. Here we are dancing in our new clubhouse. I'm the first avatar to appear in the clip.

Collaboration (again)

Central TAFE librarians have been busy since the start of semester teaching information literacy skills to many of the new students enrolled throughout the college. We have a good team and have developed (and share) some useful tools to make our jobs easier.

On the theme of collaboration (mentioned in my previous post) I came across an email that I sent myself last year relating to collaboration via wiki with librarians everywhere, as well as the video tutorials mentioned in the first paragraph.

Techtorials via LibrarianInBlack by Sarah Houghton-Jan on 11/29/07

Here's another technology tutorial website for your toolkit, either for staff or user training. We all need to know computer stuff, right? Right!

Techtorials offers video tutorials for three applications: Adobe Photoshop, Irfanview, and 7-Zip. It's not being updated frequently (last video was uploaded 7 months ago), but what is already there is quite useful--particularly the Photoshop tutorials. Take a look!

I think it would be lovely if libraries who have developed technology tutorials could contribute what they've made to this and other collaborative wiki-style tutorial sites. There are many, and sharing what we have is what it's all about. While I'm at it, I'll put in a plug for the Library Instruction Wiki, another place that libraries should be sharing any training materials created in-house (Word documents, Powerpoints, wikis, blogs, videos, screencasts, podcasts, anything).

We reinvent the wheel so much. We don't need to. We just need to convince administrators to let us post things we've created, for the betterment of libraries and users everywhere. Good goal, right? But you'd be surprised how often administrators say that those materials cannot be shared because they belong to the library/city/county/university/school and are the property of its funders/taxpayers, not the "everybody" of the Web. Oy, the politics make my head hurt.

(Techtorials was found many months ago on eContent (can you tell I'm wading through my backlog of "stuff to blog"?))

Thanks to Sarah for blogging about this and bringing another blog and that useful wiki to our attention.

2/01/2008

Library 2.0 COW

Collaborative Online Workspace - an initiative of LATN, Librarians of the Australian Technological Network of universities. Presented by Alex Byrne, University Librarian, University of Technology, Sydney

Alex started by asking “What is driving the need for change?” and the simple answer was “we can and we must”.

Web2.0 is a mindshift about the use of technology, not the technology itself. We are the facilitators.

He discussed what he called “disruptive technologies” such as Google, blogs, ebay, Wikipedia, flickr, Amazon, MP3 and podcasting, mashups and social networking. In all of these the contributors become data collectors. They harness the wisdom of crowds (eg. Wikipedia).

There are many ways librarians can take advantage of these new technologies. LATN has developed a Collaborative Online Workspace.

They use open source content management software to work towards their concept of physical spaces moving towards virtual spaces.

Alex's presentation was very interesting but the venue in the State Library of WA left much to be desired. It was located in an open space and the speakers' words were swallowed up in the void. Add to that a buzz of noise coming from the central well of the building and the audience had to strain to catch what was said.