Can't Keep Away

Yes, the heading says it all. I am totally frustrated being unable to put virtually anything I have learnt into practice.I am going to have forgotten it all. It is like living in the dark ages or even being kept in a prison. You know there are all these tools out there but you are not permitted to use them and they would make our jobs so much more satisfying and be of such a great help to the public BUT Oh No the almighty IT department says there are problems with doing all these things - they do not specify what they are - and there fix to the problem (?) is you can't use it, not how can we cure the problem.

Sorry but I had to get that off my chest. I should change the title of my blog from I can do this to I could do this if I was allowed.

For those of you out there who are still going, keep going, it opens a whole new era of possibilities. Our profession has such a lot more to learn and many more challenges in the amazingly expanded horizons of the electronic information world.

The End

What an exciting journey this has been and how frustrating that most of it I will not be able to use professionally. It would be interesting to set up a MySpace account for the Library just to see how many people would use it.I have a personal one which nobody uses the reason I expect is the age of my friends, my daughter uses hers all the time and has found long lost friends and far flung relatives on it.

Thankyou so much State Library for running this Course, it must have been an amazing amount of work for you and I am very grateful to you.

Further to previous blogs I could not use Zoho at work either and as this was one of the tools I would have found really useful from a management point of view I am really cranky about it. I also edited a wiki which was a bit of fun.

Goodbye and thankyou again SLNSW.

Google docs etc

What marvellous tools google.docs and zoho are with so many uses in the workplace. As I cannot use google.docs at work I feel very frustrated and hope zoho will work. Sharing documents would be an immense help with rostering, attendance sheets, cleaning reports and I'm sure many more I cannot think of off the top of my head.

I would not have much use for sharing slide shows and presentations but one can see the application would be great in many other positions. Isn't there an astonishing variety of tools out there. Look at the explosion of tools in the last 5 years, imagine what it will be like in another five. how will we ever keep up. Please keep training us PLNSW otherwise we will fall behind and sink.

Mashups

Just to prove I CAN do this.

What fun - again. I can see alot of uses for this, particularly in the local history fields, putting maps to photos and talking about them or writing text. The choices seem to be endless.This could be of great help to patrons, making the presentation of information much more user friendly.
Oh, I do wish our IT and Communications department were more open to this technology. I am sure if we thought we could actually use it we would think of so many more applications.

Podcasts

This one has really got me thinking about its use in a local Library. Yes, we could give a virtual tour but would anyone look at it. We could video our Law Week talks and podcast them, or just an audio of it. Over the years I suppose we could build up a good resource - but then information may become out of date and the Solicitors may not agree. I found the author talk podcasts interesting They would be a useful tool to choose the author you wished to talk as well - some authors are really good speakers and others not as good.

Overall very interesting and useful in a large Library or a Library with a large budget but of much more limited use in a small Library. Other Libraries podcasts could be a useful tool and those on, for example, the ABC site could be of interest to patrons.

Answer Boards

All those people out there who don't know where to go for answers, who can't search for themselves is absolutely amazing. There is obviously a lot of scope for professional library help BUT how on earth would we sell it to Council? How would we keep the obligatory stats? Justify the fact that most of the questions answered would be for people not living in the Council area? Even if your Library set up its own Answer Board it would be open to the whole world whereas the physical placement of the Library building means the majority of users are locals.

Slam the Boards is great if you have a spare half hour (lucky you!) otherwise it is an "in your own time" activity. If you had an Answer Board just for your own Library I guess patrons would have to sign in with their Library card to use it.

There, I guess I have answered my own fears and objections. Bring on the Answer Boards, I am all for them.

Technorati and LibraryThing

Have just finished trying Technorati and can think of no use for it really. Mind you I am not a fan of talkback radio and a lot of blogs seem to be along those lines, there are some good ones but not many. I suppose if for some reason you were looking for something specific it would be useful.
LibraryThing on the other hand is terrific. Highly recommended for bookclubs.
What a lot of things you can do if you have the time.

Tagging

What a fantastic tool Delicious is. Loved Sutherland's site but how much staff time must it have takn to get it up and going - do they have staff who do not need to stand in front of the public all day. Much as I love my work there is no time to do fancy stuff or even stop and think about it - that has to be done at home.
In my dream Library this would be a fantastic tool, a great adjunct to the Library catalogue, it would give the patron access to books, periodicals, audio visual, databases and internet resources.I checked out Sutherlans's genealogy page and was impressed and will be showing this to those asking for family history help.

Youtube

Well, this was even more fun. The excitement increased when daughter comes in, leans over and types in "stupid girls" and 2 or 3 entries down, there she is with a friend doing some weird dance. The things they get up to that you have no idea. Quite scary really. Computer geek walks through "if I knew you were going on that I would disconnect the wireless. I don't want viruses on my computer". Ho hum.
Can't see much point in putting the Library on there except maybe for major events and mainly for posterity. Fairly boring to look at now but probably interesting in 20 years time. Maybe if building a new Library some good ideas could be found.
Verdict - good fun but limited professional use. I will have to read other people's blogs to see if they have come up with useful ideas.

Wiki wonderland

That was interesting. What a lot of uses there are for wikis. I can see them being useful between staff or to keep clients up-to-date. I loved the school wiki where there were the subject headings taking you to different information and especially the homework helper pages, this was marvellous. I haven't actually edited a wiki yet as I am waiting for my invite key but in the mean time I can think about what to say.

I have fallen a little behind with this due to Easter and the extraordinarily busy week at work. I am afraid I have just got home and conked out from exhaustion. Anybody who thinks Libraries are dead should come to our place sometime. I shall now carry on to the next week's work and come back to this when I have had a go.

RSS feeds

Oh, wow. That was painful, I knew we would come up against all those initials and funny words where my brain turns off, and we just did. Having been married to an IT guy for many many years I have an automatic close down when initials and such like are mentioned and a polite smile comes to my face. This was a large hurdle to overcome and I am not sure I managed it.

Personally I can see no use for this in my private life but for Library purposes it could be a great information tool for the public. All those book reviews and local news you could put to a feed. Why are IT people so obsessed with protecting their systems? Even the one at home blocked Messenger so teenage daughter could not use it -mind you, teenage daughter got round it. This of course could be the answer, get teenage daughters to work in public libraries and confound IT departments - mine has actually gone to work in a special library where I am sure her skills will be wasted.

Hopefully I will cope better with Wikis next week. It wasn't the actual doing of RSS feeds that got to me it was all the jargon.

Flickr

Can you believe I did it. Actually transferred a picture from Flickr to my blog. Wow. I think I am supposed to say who took the 'photo but I can't remember but as hardly anyone will see this I suppose he won't mind. Then again I should go back and check. One problem with this tool is you get distracted looking at things and before you know it time has passed, you need to go and do something else and you haven't finished.

From a Library perspective one can see immense and exciting use for this tool, particularly in the area of local history. I am learning so much from all this. My internet lessons will now take on a new breadth - I know they are supposed to be only very basic but things like blogs and flickr can be mentioned and if the client is interested a quick overview given.

Barking Mad

Barking Mad
Originally uploaded by DaveWilliams

I found this on Flikr under barking mad along with pictures of dogs, bark and other strange unrelated, as far as I could see, items.

So we begin

Last week I was rather overwhelmed with the idea of all this new technology. I am still rather overwhelmed. There is so much one can do which if advertised, could open the Public Library to so many more people in the community. Many people do not realise the immense quantity and quality of services provided by the Library and this is a marvellous way to reach them. If, of course, you can get around your IT department (I bet I am not the only one doing this at home because the IT dept can't cope - which brings up the question for another day "will we ever be able to effectively use this skill in a work situation?")

On the other hand there are also an equivalent number of concerns. Copyright, plagiarism, privacy etc, the list is quite worrying. I think it will be many years before these issues are properly identified and dealt with, I suppose all we as Librarians can do is be ever on the alert but not let the problems demoralise us.

I am very grateful for this course as it is beginning to demystify Web 2.0 and hopefully I will not now automatically hand all such concerns over to someone under 25.