Week 7 - Library Thing, Del-icio.us, Tagging etc

I can imagine old school cataloguers being up in arms about the tagging going on in Library Thing - all those amateurs making up their own subject headings!

There is scope for Library Thing to be useful for our customers who want to keep track of the books they are reading or have read. But then again, there are a lot of those tools out there that are just as good. Good Reads is another site that does the same thing but without the tagging.

I have been aware of del.icio.us for some time and it seems like a good idea in theory but is a bit clunky for my liking and tiresome to look around. Hats off to Sutherland Libraries for bookmarking HSC Pages but I wonder is it useful to their customers or just another place to look at? It seems to me in these time poor times the one stop shop is what people want.

Week 6 - You Tube and Google videos

I decided to add this video of the Angry Librarian as it is an example of how we should never be with our customers no matter how much they might drive us up the wall. This is a great example of a passive agressive librarian!!

And for all you lazy librarians out there here is an excellent library workout you can do to get that blood pumping. Its also fun to see how much libraries have changed since the late 80s.

Wikis - Week 5

Wow! I came to Week 5 ready to be unimpressed with wikis - I was under the influence of Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur that has a lot to say about Wikipedia and how Larry Sanger, who ran Wikipedia's day to day operations and was responsible for policing the lunatic fringe amateurs who posted and reposted thousands of entries a day came to realise that ..."the democratization of information can quickly degenerate into an intellectually corrosive radical egalitarianism. That the knowledge of the expert does triumph over the collective 'wisdom' of amateurs....and that fully democratic open source networks inevitably get corrupted by loonies" p.186

But after having a look at BookLovers Wiki Montana History Wiki and SJCPL Subject Guides Wiki I am prepared to give them another go.

I can see us using a Book Lovers wiki on our emerging Readers Advisory page at Mosman and a Subject Guides wiki would work very well in bringing the Libraries collections to people at home. The Montana History wiki was of interest to me as I have a friend who is the Special Collections Librarian at Montana State University and a board member of the Montana Historical Society. This kind of wiki would be a fantastic local studies resource that would be of interest to local historical societies and that would allow their collective knowledge of all things local and historial to be accessed by others interested in local history.

RSS Feeds - Week 4

Today I added 7 RSS Feeds to my Bloglines account. They are mostly on library related matters because I don't really have time to read continuous news stories. I really like the Shifted Librarian blog which I have read over a number of years as it really gives a good insight on what librarians can do with emerging technology to make their libraries relevant now and in the future. I have added a link to the site on my blog. I have also added the Mosman Council Rss Feed because I'm biased! I think discrimination is the name of the game with these gadgets!

Photo from Flickr

This is a gorgeous photo from the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens in Alice Springs. I visited Miss Pink's garden while I was attending the ALIA Dreaming 08 Conference recently.