Podcasts, Video and ebooks

You Tube

Today I checked out Youtube and some other similar sites like Vimeo. I liked youtube and I thought it was a great forum for people to post information. What I didn't like about it was that some of the videos posted on there were such low quality that they were hard to watch. Conversely, some of the videos were such high quality that they uploaded really slowly and so were hard to watch. I've embedded a video below of an interview with Cecily Von Ziegesar, the author of the teen series of novels Gossip Girl. I thought libraries could use youtube, in that they could post relevant author talks/clips on their book club blog to enthuse their book club members.



Podcasts

Today I explored podcasts. I am interested in music so I subscribed to the Indie music blog Indie Kids Bible which I found through podcastalley.com pod directory. I watched the podcasting in plain English post on youtube and found it helpful. I guess TV on demand is a kind of podcast in a way. I looked up teen books inthe podcastally.com directory as well and found some good book review pod casts and podcasts which specialised in interviewing authors.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheBookcast - this podcast provides interviews with authors of new, bestselling books.

e-books, e-audio-books and downloadable media

I looked at Auckland city libraries digital collections for ebooks and e-audio books. The collection of e-audio books is not huge but my guess is that it is growing. I did manage to find an e-audio book of The Canterbury Tales, nice. There are a number of e-books available on the auckland city libraries catalogue and some of the digital databases have e-books as well. This is great if you are in a book club and you want to read a book but you can't find a physical copy in the library (because all the other book club members have taken them). Now you can just read an e-book of it.

I made a netlibrary account and added five e-books and e-audio-books to my page. I noticed there were cliff notes available on the site which I thought would be good for students. I have linked to it here http://www.netlibrary.com/FavoritesAndNotes.aspx

What did I think of the ACL web 2.0 programme

I enjoyed this web 2.0 programme, it is a good way to keep up with fast moving technologies and in turn be able to keep up with our customers. I particularly enjoyed exploring you-tube and the pod-casts. I run a teen-book club at my library and I think some of them would get a lot out of listening and watching author interviews on-line, especially as some of them are budding writers.

One suggestion I have is that links that are provided on the Web 2.0 instructions blog of sites to look at etc should pop up in a new window. It is eternally frustrating to have to keep reopening a new tab for the web 2.0 instructions while you are looking at a website it has linked to.

Thanks!

On Line Applications and Tools

Today I joined Zoho Writer and created a document which I have shared on this blog (see below). Zoho seems like a great way to share documents and is especially good for people who want to create word documents but don't have word on their computer at home. This is where Zoho is better than google documents - ie there are more file format options in zoho than in google documents.




Last FM

From the Web 2.0 award nominees list I chose to explore Last FM. I thought it was a really great site for music fans. It is easy to use and gives you recommendations of other bands/artists you might enjoy listening too based on the artists/bands you have in your library. It also connects you with other users who might have similar music taste to you. Choice.

Week 7 - Wikis

This week I checked out the various Wikis on the web 2.0 page. Wikis seem like a great way for people to share information and make culmulative lists for things like book recommendations. I thought it would be great to have a recommended teenage fiction Wiki on the Library website, where any Librarian could edit the page or add more books. The only trouble with Wikis especially ones where anyone can edit the information is that sometimes the information doesn't end up being that credible. I have found this for example on Wikipedia.

I added my blog to favourite blogs on the ACL PB Wiki and also one of my favourite books "Leaving the World" to the one of the favourite books pages. I thought PB Wiki would be a good tool to use if you wanted to set up your own wiki for work or play.

Rollyo

Rollyo has been undergoing maintenance for the past three or so weeks so I have not been able to do the task until now.

I joined up to Rollyo and made a personalised search engine for teen fiction. I thought this would be good when I am looking for reviews of teen books for my teen book club. I have pasted a link to my teen fiction search engine below.

http://rollyo.com/orangejuice/my_teen_fiction/

Week 6 - Tagging, folksomonies & social bookmarking in Del.icio.us

Today I joined Delicious, I book-marked a bunch of sites that I like as well as some that I found through searching the popular tags section in delicious. Delicious seems like quite a good research tool, though in terms of finding information from information (or linking) I still prefer to read an article or something and get a link from that as opposed to looking through tags on Delicous. Delicious would defintely be very helpful though if you were travelling and using different computers and you wanted to save your bookmarks.

I also joined up to technorati, and claimed my blog. I searched "learning 2.0" in the tags section, and the blogs section. It was quite surprising that I didn't find many blogs about this. This site seems very amerocentric, all the most popular posts seem to be american.

I read some of the articles about Library 2.0. Personally, most of the ideas surrounding library 2.0 sound sensible and practicle considering the way people are constantly evolving with their use of technology and the way they get information. Libraries can either sink or swim.

Week 5 - Searching and Cataloguing

Today I joined Library Thing (see some books from my catalogue below). It seemed like a good website - I particularly liked the local tab or section. I thought this would be especially good if you were travelling and wanted to find out if there were any literary events happening in the town you were in. It would also be a good way for Auckland City Libraries to promote their events.

Week 4 - RSS Feeds and Twitter

Today I explored RSS feeds. I set up a blog-lines account and subscribed to a number of feeds, some of which were blogs like "Scooper" on the Auckland City Libraries website. I thought this would be a good way to keep up with the latest news in the developement of libraries. I was a bit dissapointed to find that some of my favourite blogs didn't have a subscription option, for example, Simon Reynolds music blog, Blissed Out. I thought RSS feeds would be a good way to deliver library news, or could replace traditional news-letters. For example library patrons could subscribe to the "library news-letter blog" to keep up with the latest news at their local library.

Twitter

I joined Twitter today as well and added as people I follow a few bands and artists that I like as well as the National Library. I am fine about using flicker to follow institutions or public enterprises but I don't like the idea of using it for my personal life. It seems like an invasion of privacy, as does the way it collates information and trends. I like a bit of mystery.

Here is a link to my twitter page http://twitter.com/butterpeanut1

Week 3 - Flickr

This week I explored flickr. I already have a personal flickr account and I use it to upload photos and look at my friends photos on-line. It's another good way to catch up with what your friends are doing especially when they are overseas. Tags are a really great feature in flickr because if you want to look for a picture of something specific you can search items tagged with "whatever you're looking for" and you'll get a whole bunch of photos of that thing.

I didn't know about the third party flickr applications though so I signed up to the Big Huge Labs application and used it to make a border collie photo booth effect image (pasted below). It's great how they have a bunch of effects that you can apply to your photo.




This is a movie poster I made using a flickr third party application.



Mashups applications seem really great too in the way that they borrow content or ideas from another site to generate something new.


Online photo editing tools

Unfortunately I was unable to check out picnik on my computer at work because flash player is not installed. I checked out Splashup and Pixenate though and Splashup seemed to have similar tools to photoshop, which I use a lot on my computer anyway. I edited a photo in Pixenate. (see below) These tools will be great to suggest to customers who want to remove red eye from their photos or manipulate them a little.



Generators

I checked the image generators, they seemed like a fun way to make a card or a poster. I made an image using Letter James below. And I used a text generator I found on The Generator Blog to make an old school dj name :)

Old School DJ Name Generator - NamePistol.com

Week 2 - Social Networking

This week I checked out facebook, bebo and myspace. I am in a band so I already use a myspace page for this. I did go through and have a look at some of my favourite bands on myspace and have posted some images below from them. It's really great to be able to check out a bands music on myspace before you go out and buy their album or see their show. It's also a good way to keep in touch with friends and family because you can post pictures and videos on your myspace page. The lack of privacy associated with it bothers me a little but you can set up your page so that only your friends can see your profile which is good.



This is a picture from Jolie Holland's myspace page. She is one of my favourite musicians.

I am on facebook as well and I find this is a good way to keep in touch with friends and family overseas. It would also be a good way to advertise library events because you can set up an events page on facebook and then invite other members of facebook to your event.

I also had a look at bebo as well and checked out the acl bebo page. It seemed similar to myspace in a way except that it doesn't have a facility for playing bands music. I like how the blog part of bebo was on the main profile page similar to the comments section on myspace. Again the privacy aspect of bebo bothered me a bit.

Web 2.0 Week one - setting up a blog

I already had this blog from previous work on the web 2.0 programme so I didn't have to set it up again or set up a gmail account again. I did check out some of the different layout and theme templates available through blogspot and changed my current one. I found that there were some interesting themes but that it was also cool that you can customise the layout and patterns, colours etc of your blog. I have recently started up a teen book club at my library and I think it would be great if we could have a teen blog for our club. That way if anyone happened to miss a book club session they could keep up with what was happening by going on the blog.

Web 2.0 Final Post

So I completed the on-line survey about the License to Play programme. I am a little worried that it I won't be recorded as having filled it in as I completed it on a computer with a generic library log-on and not my own account.

Overall I found this round of Web 2.0 very useful. I think maybe the fiction on-line resources could have been a little better. Some of the author sites were not a lot more useful than google though it was interesting to see them. The Lit-lovers site though was really great.

I enjoy doing these web 2.0 programmes and I get a lot out of them, I think it's great that we get the opportunity to upskill in worktime. It also seems mandatory to our jobs as librarians to keep up with web advances and new ways to get and share information. It would be cool it the next one concerntrated more on non-fiction resources. Also some excercises that focussed on resources/tools for children and teenagers.

Thanks!!

Week 5 - Social Networks

I checked out all the book marking sites and signed up to stumble upon. I searched a few topics that I was interested in and found a good recommendation for an mp3 encoder. I found this site really useful because it is hard to filter through all the information available on the internet and recommendations for sites makes it much easier. I checked out the top art stories on Stumbleupon.com and the top one was about the side walk chalk guy. It was cool to see all his trompe de l'oeil chalk creations.

I found a story in the top stories of the last 24hrs on the Digg it site about the fifty most admired companies in the world. Turns out Apple Macintosh is at the top and Johnson and Johnson is not far behind. This site had lots of interesting stories on it especially ones that related to US politics.

One of the limitations of a lot of these bookmarking websites often seems to be that they largely focus and/or rely on American stories or news sources (Amerocentric).

GoAnimate.com: Library Jam

GoAnimate.com: Library Jam


http://goanimate.com/go/movie/0zrr9tMCm6wE?utm%5Fsource=gigyaembed&uid=0yqpURSUVsQQ

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Week 4 - Get Creative - GO ANIMATE

I had a look at some of the ways other libraries had used Go Animate. I liked the lost library book animation. It seems like Go Animate is a fun way to promote resources and for use in a demonstrative sense. It's animations would probably appeal especially to kids.

I created an account on the go animate site and made an animation. I have embeded it in my blog above. The only problem with this site is the animations that you create are quite low resolution.

Animoto cat video I made

Web 2.0 Week 4 - Getting Creative

Animoto

I joined Animoto and made a silly animation about cats which I have embedded below. I thought this would be a good tool to use to liven up story times or to present information for class visits to the library or other educational programmes that we have here. We could use it on our library website as well as a way to archive or to promote events that we have here. The only down site to this site is that it is a little slow and that you have to pay to create an animation that is more than 30 secs long.

Web 2.0 - Week 3 - Books and Authors

So I explored the Litlovers site. It seems like a really good resource if you are running a book club or even if you are just recommending a book to a customer. I like the way it has information on the books it recommends and extra information on the authors. This section of the site seems really thorough.


I liked the recipe section of the site and thought some good Southern American cooking could be good for a southern gothic themed book night. Fried Chicken with your Capote perhaps?



I thought that "The Catcher in the Rye" would be a good book for book club. I found a good synopsis of the book with and information about the author. There were quotes by readers about the book and good suggestions for discussion points in book club.


I thought this site would be a really good resource for secondary school students or university students who are interested in English. The Litcourses section of the site would be a good resource for them if they need extra help or extension. I did the Litcourse on "How to Find Meaning" and thought it would be especially good for students who have trouble with close reading which lots seem to.


One of the draw backs of this site, as one of my co-workers pointed out, is that it is only good if you are interested in more high-brow literature.



* Authors on the Web



I found Lemony Snickets official website http://www.lemonysnicket.com/ through the authoryellowpages website. I really like Lemony Snicket so this was good.

I joined Bookjetty as well and made my own book shelf. Here is a link to one the books on my bookshelf http://www.bookjetty.com/books/0316769029.

I thought this site would be good to recommend to customers who read a lot and who would like virtual recommendations of other books to read from other members of Bookjetty who have similar tastes to them.

License to play - week 2 Genealogy

I joined up to the "My heritage" and "Geni" websites and created a family tree in the "Geni" site. These sites seem very similar and both would be particularly good if you had a number of family members interested in researching your family tree and then you could share information easily and make connections through both of your seperate researches. I felt a bit strange about having my family tree published on-line and I thought that perhaps a lot of our customers would too but both sites are great graphical tools for building family trees even if you didn't want to share them on-line.

The Geni blog looked good too as well as the Kintalk one and they would both be helpful resources to pass on to customers who are wanting to know about how to go about starting to research their family trees.

Web 2.0 - License to play - discovery exercise

So I haven't used this blog since I participated in the web 2.0 programme in 2007 but it didn't take me long to find my blog because it is attached to the email I use regularly. I looked at the discovery resources about blogs and internal communication. It reminded me that we have the Fitch on our library zone which is similar to a blog and is a good way of communicating the best ways of finding resources and information between different library workers across the Auckland City Libraries system.

It was good to read other librarians blogs (that I found through http://www.libdex.com/weblogs.html) because again they always have good tips on the best ways to find information (using web technologies), good weblinks and great recommendations for books on a whole range of topics that will be good to pass on to customers.

On a personal level I find blogs a good way to keep up with my friends especially ones living overseas. http://www.tumblr.com/ Tumblr is a good blogging site and one that many of my friends use.

WEEK 4 of Web 2.O - RSS Feeds

#8

So this week I learnt all about RSS feeds which was quite helpful because I had never heard of them before. RSS feeds are really great because they mean you only need to go to one place to locate the latest articles, news and information from your favourite websites. This is good for my work at the library because I subscribed to a number of fiction review sites so I can keep up with all the lastest books that have come out.

I set up a bloglines account and subscribed to some of my friends and co-workers blogs. I also subscribed to the readers club - short stories RSS feed as well as the New York Times review of books so that should keep me busy. I also subscribed to the Web 2.0 RSS feed and the unshelved cartoon feed. Even though the idea is great I actually found bloglines quite annoying because I constantly have web access problems when using it. I don't know whether this is to do with the library internet or with the site itself but I noticed a lot of my co-workers having the same problem. Bummer.

My public bloglines URL is http://www.bloglines.com/public/gwenorcliffe

This RSS technology could be used at the library to distribute news of what events are on and to keep people up to date with what new books are available at the library. There could be a librarians choice RSS feed for example.