Online productivity tools

I think there is an amazing variety of these tools available free on the internet, even if they don't have all the features of the versions you subscribe to. I had no idea there were so many free online tools out there. I couldn't access the Thumbstacks site but had no trouble with the others in this week's lesson.

Picnik - online photo editing in your browser at www.picnik.com - could be useful if you carry photos around on USBs and have them emailed to you. I sometimes do this as I don't have a computer with graphics software. Or if your library doesn't have graphics software but you want to edit photos of an event or exhibition to put on a blog or website. Text documents like Google Docs and Writeboard would be useful too if you don't subscribe to MS Office, especially as you can roll back to any version and share a particular version instead of emailing attachments (and creating new copies). I like the idea of Yousendit where you can email a very large file without freezing email or taking down a network. You don't need to register for this. Yousendit holds the file for 30 days and emails the recipient. This could be useful for emailing Youtube videos or podcasts in a library situation (provided work firewalls didn't interfere too much).

With Zamzar you can save and convert YouTube videos. If you wanted to save a frame from one as a still picture and post it this could be useful. I also liked the presentation by Janie Hermann and her co-author, about 15 freebies in 50 minutes, hosted by www.slideshare.net. Slideshare lets you post your slides and share them with others, thus creating online presentations or webinars.

Even Jott could be useful, it lets you leave a voice message and have it transcribed and texted. I'm not sure how user friendly the interface is though -- perhaps you have to spell half the words.

Mashups

I am curious to see how my star poster mashup will look when published.

I looked at London: a life in Google images. It is arranged geographically and historically. You can click on different periods and see the "map pins" corresponding to each, and by clicking on a map pin can see an image depicting that period. For example, the pre-18th century heading had a link to a 16th century map. The three different views - satellite, map and hybrid (with place names) make it easy to see where a particular link is on the map now. I think this is a very effective use of a mashup.


The US Library Finder mapping tool makes it easy to see where libraries are. You can search by place name as well as postcode - I would have trouble with postcodes as I don't know them. A link to a similar mapping tool could be useful on a public library website in Australia, especially if the library has branches. (My library is on a network with 4 other council libraries, some of which have branches -- users could find this useful.) Perhaps the "homepage" of the mapping tool could default to the library whose website the user is looking at, if it was like the US one and you could search for any library in Australia on it. (This might cost money to set up -- a project for the National or State libraries, perhaps?)

Voicethreads could be a useful tool for a local history collection. Staff or clients could add their recollections of a place or digital object.

Podcasting

I'm enjoying this week's lesson. What follows is my rambling, if enthusiastic notes on it. Podcasting seems simple in theory. A podcast is a non-music audio or video recording distributed over the internet. P O D = Personal on Demand. You can download it from a website onto an MP3 player or iPOD. To listen all you need is a PC with headphones or speakers. This week's video said you can subscribe and download automatically when new content is added, unlike with streaming. The Apple iPOD was the player for which the first podcasting scripts where developed, and podcasting is a "backronym" from iPOD. Other new terms I learned were vodcast = video podcast; and iTunes (a free tool for podcasting).

I listened to 2 British Library podcasts. One was a discussion of new CDS of British and American writers. The podcast featured soundclips of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf (her only known published recording from 1938). It was fascinating to hear their voices. Fitzgerald read a Shakespeare speech with a recognisable American accent, but spoke more slowly than I am used to hearing American actors speak.

I also listened to a podcast tour of a British Library exhibition "Taking liberties" which touched on suffragettes, the Magna Carta, the history of Parliament and much more.

Then I did a subject search of the ABC's podcasting website. I chose "Arts and entertainment", then an Australian Music podcast site. When I clicked on a title it took me to the announcer Margaret Throsby's website. Then I went back and clicked a link at the bottom of the entry and found a list of music podcasts. (I chose one of the Song Company with a spoken introduction.) Entry to these was more roundabout and not as slick as on the British Library site, but I expect there would be many more podcasts here as the ABC is a broadcaster. I wonder if the British Library archive theirs.

On the Library Success Wiki, Cheshire Public Library and Orange County Library Service had podcasts for teens. Orange County Library Service site had an ad for a 'teen talent show'. There was also a Manga videogame party ad with teen girls conversing - I thought these were a good way of getting this age group's attention. There seemed to be duplicate links to podcasts which corresponded to different download formats like MP3 and WMA.

I think there would be a wealth of applications for podcasting in libraries. One for clients would be author talks; my library has about eight of these per month. Staff could either record the whole speech; or a brief introduction advertising the author, subject and date of the talk (as Orange County Library did for Mark McEwen). Children's Services and Local History could use podcasting for storytimes, exhibition introductions, and oral history for clients. Staff could record important staff meetings for staff that couldn't be there.

P.S. I thought I might have to blog about this subject in 2 different posts, but the blog gremlins sorted themselves out. When I first wrote my blog entry for Week 8 on Answerboards, I saved it as a draft before trying to publish it. I tried twice to publish it but it would not appear as a published post even though the message appeared "Your post published successfully". When I tried to view it it only showed Week 7 and earlier. I could view and edit my Week 8 draft though. This was frustrating - until I published my week 8 post and the week 7 one appeared under it.
They now appear on my blog! :-)

Answer boards and social searching

On http://answerboards.wetpaint.com it is suggested that reference librarians "slam the boards" once a month. This seems to be a U.S. site and there seems to be a movement of librarians internationally who aim to do this. Many of the questions on WikiAnswers are vague and sometimes ungrammatical.
For one question in the "Exemplary answers" section of the "Answer Board Librarians Wiki", the best answer as chosen by voters was superficial. A librarian's answer, on the other hand, was thorough and helpful - it answered the question (how to get whiteout off a shirt) while the "chosen answer" sounded like an attempt to be smart (buy a new shirt). I'm not sure whether readers/askers always read the longer answers though. I think it may be easier to give face-to-face reference services where you can clarify what the asker means, than to try and understand a very vague question and answer it on an answer board.

Regarding a role for my library in slamming the boards: I think it is easier to justify answering reference enquiries if the enquirer is local or if the service can be directly linked to your source of funding. For example, in a public library, answering local history enquiries is clearly a service that comes under the banner of a local council. The same applies to collecting local history materials: they are less likely to be weeded than other library materials. Slamming the boards may be a good way librarians can promote their services. I wonder though, who is going to fund the librarians' time doing this? Will they work on the answers in their own time? Employers may not think it is a good use of staff time to answer questions from enquirers in another suburb or another country.

I think using taglines like "Libraries - because you NEED to KNOW" at the end of an answer boards answer, is a good way of promoting library services, especially as it appears that librarians' answers are often rated highly by answerboard users.

Customers of my library might like to add their reviews of our books or DVDs, if there was some link on the catalogue record that enabled them to do this. They also sometimes make suggestions for improvement of the service. A blog on the library website might enable them to do this online. The Council has a blog where they raise a topic periodically (e.g. parking, social isolation) and customers can add their comments about it.

Delicious, Technorati, LibraryThing

Hi again. Today I reran the Technorati searches on "bookmobile" and "nswpln2008". This time I found 11 blogs with "bookmobile" in them. I tried an advanced search for "nswpln2008" and clicked "find posts tagged" with that term. Although I didn't find any blogs when I selected the "blogs" tab, I found more than seven pages of photos tagged "nswpln2008" under the "photos" tab. Many were by the same person. Thanks for the tip.

Another useful thing I discovered today was the "language" field in the top right hand corner of the Blogger programme. I learnt how to select English as the language when the default language was Korean, at an internet cafe.

I am finding this course very interesting and hope to complete it by the end of the year. I wonder when it will be taken offline?


I will try to add a link to my LibraryThing account. It isn't working - there is a JavaScript error - I will try again later.


This is pmarydu's account on Delicious.

http://delicious.com/pmarydu/money

I tried to add this as a gadget on the right hand side of my blog but when I typed in the URL the system wouldn't accept it. I wonder if there is a way I can add it there with a Delicious icon.

For the Technorati searches this week, I tried as a keyword search and an advanced search and found 268 posts both times. They seemed to be in date order, newest first. Then I tried a "tag search" in advanced search. I got 39 posts.

I couldn't find any results for using any of these 3 methods. Can it be that nswpln2008 blogs are invisible to Technorati? or somehow private because they are training blogs?

Online videos

As part of this week's lesson I searched for on YouTube - there were no results - then on Google video. I found videos of their author talks which are saved on their website. They can be downloaded. I think this could be useful at my library as it hosts many author talks.

I am going to try and paste a video into this blog.



Today I resumed the course after a few weeks off. I searched for some videos on YouTube under "lego" and "liverpool plains". I found a video called "Simpsons intro lego style" with clever lego imitations of Lisa's saxophone and Bart's skateboard and the usual theme music. I thought one called "Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Lego" was even cleverer because it was choreographed like the musical, with funny actions, not random actions like the Simpson one had. I found a video on sorghum harvesting in NSW with a harvester driver's commentary when I searched "liverpool plains". I also found a video with a Turkish language title which included the words "liverpool" and "song of plains": people were singing and waving scarves, it looked like the stadium at a football match. Another video that came up was of a rock group "Plain white T's" performing in Liverpool: this video was rotated 180 degrees which was distracting. Videos on YouTube showed a name for the creator and the date added. It didn't say if they were from YouTube or another programme.

I searched for the same keywords on Google Video and found some of the YouTube videos I'd already found. It acknowledged them as being from YouTube but didn't show creator name or date added for anything. I looked up "kogarah" and found an eyewitness video from an accident. I couldn't see the date added and I thought it would have benefited from this information to help identify the accident. Another video I found was a Kogarah crash eyewitness video; its first screen contained a warning about images that might distress. I thought this was good to have.

I am getting error messages when I try to save so will publish this post and update it later.

Wikis

Wikis are a popular online collaborative publication like an online encyclopedia.The best known is Wikipedia. Anyone can contribute to a wiki. Some say this makes them less authoritative than academic journals and traditional encyclopedias where contributions are written by qualified experts and peer reviewed. Others say wikis are always more up to date than print encyclopedias, e.g. a word like "folksonomies" probably won't appear in any print encyclopedia. It may appear that allowing students to use wikis for research purposes encourages plagiarism and discourages in-depth research. However, students are meant to use more than one source and cite their sources, even if their preferred source is Wikipedia. I was interested to read that in Germany, it is more popular than the revered Brockhaus print encyclopedia: "in 43 articles out of 50, the German language Wikipedia came out on top" according to this week's Learning 2.0 lesson on the website. This applies in a country with a history of extensive funding for research and a large print publishing industry.

For this week's Discovery, I looked at Wisconsin Portal at Wisconsin Heritage Wiki. A search on "movies" yielded 'screenwriting course' without the word "movies" in the text. I wondered if this is because the entry has been tagged somehow with the word "movies".
The Princeton Public Library's "Book Lovers Wiki" was a snapshot in time of a summer reading club, being maintained as an archive using pbwiki. This one has closed membership. It says staff upgraded the library catalogue to include reviews; there is a link to reviews. I think this kind of catalogue upgrade using wiki is a good idea. There is also a link "report an inappropriate review". It's not clear to me how you'd join the wiki.
Wookiepedia at http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page, is a star wars wiki. There was a note under "wookiee" that said editing of the site by new or unregistered users was temporarily disabled due to recent vandalism. It appears that wikis do have editorial standards, as this one has "official policy pages". One of these contains a warning about spoilers on the wiki. It says a spoiler is considered and flagged as such till one month after the official release date of a particular product in the US or the country of origin. An "official policy page" has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard.
Another application that might work well within a wiki is an exhibition catalogue, e.g. for a local history collection.

RSS

What I like about RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is that you can subscribe to new content from a favourite website and it will appear in a link on your blog rather than you having to go to the URL of that website and check it for new content. This is Pull Technology versus Push Technology.

To subscribe to news feeds I looked for the Powerhouse Museum Picture of the Day; two topics on the ABC News website (environment and aboriginal); the White House 08 blog on the Sydney Morning Herald's blog website (www.smh.com.au/blogcentral/index.htm); and a blog from the Spooky Men's Chorale, a group of folk-singing comedians based in the Blue Mountains.

Another blog I saw and found interesting was by Helene Blowers who is credited with founding Learning 2.0 (http://plcmclearning.blogspot.com). She said she was asked whether the use,or growth in use, of Web 2.0 may be unsustainable. I found it interesting that she said that is not the point; she suggested we stop focusing on long-term issues and solutions and simply try things out, and think of pilot projects and the value of transience. I am not sure where I stand on this. On the one hand, I think some new inventions wouldn't happen if people only thought about the long-term implications. Also libraries are in danger of being left behind as information providers if they don't learn how to use Web 2.0. However I don't think Web 2.0 can necessarily be used to replace long-term solutions that may be outdated unless we think through the implications. I wonder how libraries in other cultures are handling this. In 2001 I asked in Germany whether they had corporate libraries there and was told no, corporations have information portals on the internet.

I wonder if there is some way a public libraries' users can "subscribe" to its continuous catalogue updates, whatever format these might appear in. Another possible use of RSS in a library could be updates of a writer talks program; the library where I work hosts regular talks by writers. Another could be updates of a book club program.

photos

This is an image of cats sleeping. I found it on Flickr by searching on "cats". The creator is tjflex2. I am not sure if this is how I am meant to acknowledge the author. I am a cat lover and had cats as a child, they always lived outside and lay around outside like the cats here.

I looked at one of the pages on Flickr relating to tagging and noticed that sometimes pictures are tagged with variants of a word. E.g. nyc, New York City and New York are all possible tags. This is less sophisticated than a library catalogue where there are cross-references to a "preferred" subject. However, if a browser accepts fuzzy logic this may not matter as the browser may look for variations on a word, so 'nyc' may bring up 'new york' and 'ny'. I'm not sure if this is how it works really.

The idea of Creative Commons is an interesting one, allowing you to set limitations on use of material so it is not "all rights reserved" and not "no rights reserved".

challenges and discovery in Week 3

Today I tried to access this blog from a PC loaded with Windows in Korean at my local internet cafe. I wasn't sure what the labels meant. Then I managed to "get in through the back door" by logging into http://www.blogger.com/. I then selected language=English from the right hand toolbar and logged in. This is useful to know because I use my local internet cafe if I need extra time for a lesson sometimes. Also, I don't have a PC at home. So this is progress. :-)

Hello, I am trying again the next day - at a public access computer in a public library. When I tried to open some links attached to the Week 3 lesson, the browser closed down. I had this problem with the Library of Congress photos link, the FAQ page on Flickr groups and the link at the text "look at this photo" under "Creative Commons". I also couldn't open an image to link it to my blog. As frustrating as this is, it illustrates that public access computers in libraries often have glitches, and library staff often have to assist users with them, especially on the weekend when specialist IT staff may not be there.

I looked at Mosman Library's photos on Flickr and saw many pictures of youth events including "Shoreshocked". I wonder if Mosman Library found it difficult to get permission to publish photos of minors there. When I typed in my community I found several libraries with the same name, some of them in the U.S.

Well, I did discover something else this week. I came across the AquaBrowser at Queens Library in the Borough of Queens, New York. I'm not sure if AquaBrowser or similar technology is covered later in this course, however I found this intriguing. It is a catalogue for a library which seems to have about 60 branch libraries. It uses fuzzy logic and shows a diagram a bit like a star with rays radiating out when you type in a keyword. It shows associations, translations, and spelling variants. I typed in "Josquin" and found a few similar words; you could select the one you wanted. It then brought up a library catalogue display a bit like a Google display. Some records were brief, others more detailed. I was impressed with the fuzzy logic because borrowers often misspell things and then it's hard to find them.

It is good to see that I can access my blog, even though the firewall at work currently won't allow me to view it (I will contact the relevant person about this). I enjoyed viewing the Memoirs of a WWI soldier blog on the SLNSW Learning 2.0 website. His age in the profile was given as 120, and amusingly, he "hadn't got to see a movie yet". He couldn't spell properly -- it seems this isn't a modern phenomenon even though many people complain about literacy standards declining nowadays.

learning 2.0

It's been interesting watching the videos about this program. Great to see that cool people like Stephen Fry are interested in the technology. This makes it seem like it is not just a passing fad, but a development of older types of media like book publishing and broadcasting. Web 2.0 could be useful in a library. One local history blog I saw invited people to submit their memories of events it mentioned. This would be a useful addition to a collection that relies on more informal information gathering methods like oral history.