Finito

Well I finally made it. It's been nearly a year but I did it. It's not that I wasn't interested, it was just finding the time and dealing with the frustration of the technology not fully working at times in our library.

At the moment I have a Reference Blog, maintain a tag Cloud on our website and contribute to the new Regional Wiki! I'm sure there's more change and adventures to come!

Online Applications

Well there are certainly a number of free online software packages available. I think I might find the file converter and google docs helpful in the future. My only problem is remembering all the different logins and passwords. I already have 2 pages of my diary filled with usernames and passwords for various applications!

Mashups

Gee that was easy! Makes you want to do more. I can see many possible applications in libraries.

Podcasts

Unfortunately I have been unable to access any podcasts on my work computer. (Ditto Superchicken 77's comment).
I can imagine that podcasts could be interesting on our library website particularly on our youth pages. They may be more likely to engage our younger library members. I think I'll move on to next week's topic.

Answer Boards

This exercise was fun and quite addictive. However, at this stage I cannot see a role for our library in slamming the boards, apart from practice in answering reference questions. I think it would be great if there was a question site that was Australian as a lot of the questions that I read seemed to be focussed on America. It's great to have been introduced to this type of website as Reference work will probably head more in this direction in the future. I think having an answering service of some kind on our library websites is definitely the way to go. I've noticed that some libraries link to Ask a Librarian. Currently on our website questions are entered online and are automatically emailed to the Reference desk.

Delicious, Technorati & Library Thing

Well I finally made it to Week 7. It's taken quite a while to get here. I had forgotten the frustration of not being able to view the videos introducing each weeks lesson.

I absolutely love tag clouds. They are so useful for reference work. When I started in my current position at the library there was already a tag cloud set up on our website. Click here to have a look at it http://www.wagga.nsw.gov.au/www/html/1301-tag-cloud.asp?Thankyou=1

One of my jobs is to maintain the tag cloud i.e add new websites and delete ones that no longer work. As you can see from our site the tag cloud is no longer displaying correctly. The tags are scrunched together making it difficult to use. This is a fairly recent development which our IT guys have not been able to fix, as yet. So I would have to say that displaying a tag cloud on your website is a bit of a risk. For well over a year the tag cloud displayed fine but the problems occurred when del.icio.us upgraded their software.

Another drawback is that non functioning websites are not automatically checked and removed. This can be an issue depending on the number of bookmarks that you have. You can imagine trying to check a few hundred bookmarks on a regular basis. One last issue that we had was the number of tags. As our tag cloud grew it became more unmanageable and would no longer fit on our website in the space allowed so we decided to limit our tags and limit the number of bookmarks within each tag. It's still a work in progress and once the display is corrected we are hoping to place the tag cloud in a more accessible position on our website to highlight this great tool.

Technorati didn't do much for me and the suggested search for nswpln2008 didn't work. I think it highlights that for many of us, if something does not work the first time we never use it again. Something to be aware of with our own library websites. As for Library Thing what a great thing! Would you believe that I have even had a query at the reference desk from someone wanting books on Dewey so that they could classify their own home library. Whilst at that stage I had not tried it out myself I had heard of it and recommended it to the client. Hopefully they found it as great as I just did. Certainly a better option than Dewey, with added social options. I've put a widget at the side of this blog with a random selection of books from my library that I just created. Unfortunately they didn't display as expected but in this case near enough is good enough.

Videos Online

U tube is no longer accessible in our library which is quite frustrating as I receive quite a few links to utube via emails. I'm interested in how libraries promote via utube. One thing it was interesting to note is that there is a google version! I should have known being the huge google fan that I am but I didn't know it existed. I knew about google images which are fantastic for answering some of the Reference queries that I receive. Maybe it's because our computers are too slow to successfully view any videos.
I think I'll move on to the next week's topic!