Monday, December 29, 2008
Online productivity tools
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.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
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.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
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! :-)
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Answer boards and social searching
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.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Delicious, Technorati, LibraryThing
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
I couldn't find any results for
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Online videos
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.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Wikis
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.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
RSS
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.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
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".
Friday, April 4, 2008
challenges and discovery in Week 3
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.