Wikis

Several of the wikis were interesting and I thought a couple of them that I was not familiar with like best practices seem to work really well. I was glad to see that all of them looked like they required some form of registration since i think that helps keep the qulaity high.

The book lovers wiki was kind of disappointing since there were hardly any entries. I think that is the sort of site that could be useful for a library if it had more users, but I only saw around a hundred reviews on the site and the ones I glanced at were all positive as well. A site like amazon already does a similar service, but with multiple reviews for hundreds of thousands of books and other media. The librarian chicks wiki worked well, except that some of the better reference sites require a subscription.

The bullrun library one works well and I am most excited about that one. Our staff sends out emails to each other and it is easy to get information lost in all the clutter and a central place to put all the information would be useful. Also, there can be several layers to get through before our public website can be changed and having a public wiki that could be updated quickly by any staff member for instance when libraries are shut down or events scheduled/cancelled would be very useful.

Library 2.0

A lot of this library 2.0 stuff sounds great especially in the weeding down of our reference book collection. The main thing it means to me is using technology to adapt to the information needs of our users and giving users more control over how they organize and access the information. People need information and are used to getting it as quickly and chaaply as possible and by using the search tools they are most comforatble with.

The hard part is I can not imagine our city government or its IT department addressing all of these issues and being able to adapt to rapid change. We can barely keep our webpage up to date as it is and we are supposed to be adding all this new webpage based content to it. There are new library technology tools and software that we bought months ago (and paid tens of thousands of dollars for) that I still can not use because they have not been installed on any staff PCs. And regular librarians are not allowed to install anything on their computers on their own. And this does address the fact that I mentioned a few posts ago about how many of our users, either a large minority or a small minority, are technologically illiterate.

I would love it if our library was ready to make it 2.0 and we are starting to do that by providing things like downloadable books, but all of the library and the city that runs its IT system has to be on board for thsi to happen.

Claimed on Technocrati

So I had some trouble claiming this at first beacuse none of the emails were showing up in my email account. So this post should finish claiming this blog and should tag it properly as well.

Technorati Profile

SAPLL2

Technocrati

I had heard of most of the blogs listed on technocrati, but a few of the popular ones were new to me. I was surprised by how mundane the search topics were with both Paris Hilton< jennifer Garner, and Jennifer Aniston being three of the top ten searches.

Del.icio.us

I think Del.icio.us can be a useful tool, but i do not use it much. It has been on our home computer for a while, but I never use it. For bookmarks I have my yahoo which I can access just as easily. For work book marks this could be a lot more useful since I use about 15 different PCs at work over the course of a month, but we are restricted to Internet Explorer and are not supposed to use firefox, which I use at home along with the new google seach engine. So far I just try to keep a "my favorites" list saved on my H drive for work links.

Rollyo

So I added a roolyo search bar to my right hand side bar. It is all about searching for primates and is a good tool to use if you need some information on lemurs or gibbons for instance. This is the first time I have used Rollyo, but I had created a customized google search box about a year ago. These are useful if you have a handful of sites that you trust, but I like having a little broader search than this. This is a good tool for when you have a small colelction of sites that you use on a regular basis and I could easily see setting up a site for my use for colelction development work.

Goodreads

I thought goodreads is a deent idea, but I did not really want to send a bunch of emails to my frieds bugging them to join up. I know I get a bit annoyed when people try to to get me to join up with their social networking type sites. Plus the emil adress I used for this account does not have any friends in it, it is the account that I use when signing up for automatic feeds so none of my friends are even in my address book. The site was easyt o use though and all of my books were on there, although none of them were obscure choices. For one I had a couple of different editions to chose from and I hope I picvked the right one.