LIBRARY THING

Library Thing is just up my alley, as a book reader and library worker. I love the way you can rate and review the books you have read and the way you can see what other people, who have read the book you have read, are reading.

I find it hard to find books that I like. This is going to be a great tool not only for my own reading but also for finding books that other people would like. I could see if you were in acquisitions or the home library service this would be a great resource for finding stuff.

I am occasionally asked to recommend books for borrowers particularly young borrowers (often boys) and either think of things I liked as a boy or I see other people reading. I also get the book lists out that we keep behind the desk or the books we have in the reference section such as "Who else writes like..."(I hope I got this title right). For the avid reader that is trying to find more things to read, and is comfortable with the internet, this could be very useful. I can see it adding one more thing I can recommend to people to find more reading material.

Adieu for now

EMBEDDING A VIDEO

This is my attempt to embed a Youtube video into my blog. I have struggled with this for over an hour and am not optimistic about it succeeding. I tried to copy the html script in the little window to the right of the Youtube video I wanted and pasting it into the window. But it didn't work. I am now trying to upload a video from my hard drive that I downloaded earlier. I don't think that is going to work either.

If you find no video here you will know that I have thrown my PC out of my bedroom window in disgust.

This is so frustrating!!!

DEL.ICIO.US

I love these pictures of galaxies!

De.licio.us is a site that lets you bookmark websites online. It is useful for people who do not use the same computer for all there internet use which, lets face it, is most of us. It's also has a neat function that allows you to look at other people's bookmark sites. I guess that's where the name 'social bookmarking' comes in. Each of your bookmarks has tags which can be displayed as a list, in bundles or in a 'tag cloud'. You can look at other people's sites with similar tags, and it tells you how many people have used the same tags. The tag cloud is similar to the aqua browser at Queens library network(NY) although it's more static. I would like to see it more like the aqua browser. It interestingly makes tags which appear more than once bigger, which I liked.

I like the way you can, in effect, look over people's shoulders and see their bookmarks. I think it's a great way to find relevant websites. It's a bit like cheating on an exam, looking at other people's work. I can see how it would be helpful for researchers. You can be isolated and connected at the same time in a way.

I still can't get a Youtube video onto my blog. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Cheers.

YOUTUBE

I have always seen YouTube as being fun thing rather than a useful thing. My experience of it comes mainly from the television show Friday night download that was showing on channel 10 last year. In it, there were various YouTube clips of wacky and hilarious stunts.

The useful applications of Youtube are obvious. You could have clips that give new members a tour of the library or new employees an introduction to their job. I know in my library there are a lot of things I do, such as showing people how to research the history of their homes, that are repetitious and could be easily made into a short YouTube video for people to watch.You could have clips of people giving book reviews or of book group discussions.

My library would benefit by videoing book talks by authors. I know a lot of people cannot get to the library when the book talks are held, as it's during office hours. The clips could be accessible on our website over the internet. I've heard it suggested that we could do our Oral history things on video. We could even call it something like VidHist or FuddyDuddyHistory (remember you heard the term coined first on my website).

There must be loads more things you could do if the technology is cheap and accessible enough.

This last thing is a YouTube clip I thought was funny. Cheerio.

........................................................Bugger I can't get it to download. I'll do it next week.

WIKIs

I guess like a lot of people I had only heard of Wikipedia. I didn't know that wiki's were used in other ways. Some of the examples given on the learning 2.0 site were very interesting. I had previously thought that Wikipedia would be very unreliable and subject to "Vandalism". I remember seeing an entry in it for the Sydney suburb of Naremburn which had obviously been tampered with by high school aged boys. But having experimented with changing the library wiki myself (a couple of spelling mistakes and an added entry for my libraries local history page) I could see that there are some safeguards against such things. They were 'signing in' which seemed to stop totally anonymous entries and providing a "History" of changes so that mischievous entries could be changed.

I can see how organizing events with a group of people involved could work with a wiki, but I hope that it doesn't mean the end of the meeting. What if we spent our working day looking at a computer screen instead of looking at the faces of our colleagues. I know It's not always possible to have face to face meetings I admit. I guess people have been saying things like this since computers were invented.

The Wookiepedia was very interesting, I didn't know there was so much detail of information about a few silly Star Wars movies(I'm joking I loved them). With the New Zealand police wiki I couldn't see where one would edit it. Interestingly I saw mentioned a problem that they had with people who were changing 'New Zealand' to 'Aotearoa'. It shows that editing can be political and not just high school pranks. The Princeton book review wiki was a bit different in that you add reviews to it instead of editing the information that someone else has written. Editing other people's opinions would defeat the purpose of a book review I would have though. Would it have been better if it was a blog rather than a Wiki?

My exciting find of the week was the Aqua Browser on the Queens (NY) library website. It looks extremely primitive as it is, but I found it fascinating. I could imagine a more sophisticated version with subject headings which would make searching much easier. If you are reading this and you haven't seen an AquaBrowser go to this website and check it out: http://aqua.queenslibrary.org/

Bye.