Exercise 16: Wikis

I think the idea of the wiki is wonderful but I worry about it considerably in practice. As an instructor, I hate to see my students reference wikipedia in any way. However, I know many people who start their research questioning in wikipedia. On occassion I have looked at the content there, but it still bothers me just a bit that anyone can change the content. Then it hit the news that someone had indicated a new person was implicated in the assassination of John Kennedy...which was false of course and mean spirited, but who would know? As I looked through the information provided in 23 Things, I found the following in an article by Brian Lamb and thought it was a very humorous was to describe my feelings:

Please, grant me the serenity to accept the pages I cannot edit,
The courage to edit the pages I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference
—The Wiki Prayer

But still, I am afraid that many people won't have that level of wisdom. Now on to how these could be used in libraries - I think there are some wonderful possibilities for internal use - best practices for work flow, information updates, new books and reviews...I do think this one will take more convincing with staff members who are a little worried about the technology.
Cat

Exercise 15: Library 2.0

I really enjoyed the articles regarding Library 2.0 and I think the overall message is that if we are not careful libraries and librarians are going to miss the boat and find themselves out of the information business. I agree with many of the authors who suggest that many librarians need to have a new mindset - for example, we have talked a little about allowing social tagging in the library catalog and for some this is almost a cardinal sin - what about the MARC record?? What about crazy subject terms that students might apply? What about integrity?? And while I understand exactly why they might ask these questions, I also know that Amazon and other online bookstores have somehow managed to keep things in order and increase their sales and site views dramatically. I suspect this is because people not only want to find information, they want to find it using their own words (not ours) and they want to know what other people think about the information as well as where they might look for other useful information. Just as a side note - I recently earned my MLS and in my cataloging class, the only format we used was Dublin Core...trying to make sure that every thing had metadata and would be locatable on the WWW. Of course, in the real world of my library, no one uses Dublin Core - anyone know why?

Of course another key discussion in libraries today is about the percentages of monies to be alloted to electronic vs. print sources. For the acquisitions librarian, it is almost a death match, because we all know that "real" books are the mainstay of the profession - well, not if there are no users in the building, right?

I think the hardest part for me to understand is that while we (library faculty and staff) often attend workshops or classes about the newest and the trends, it takes an Act of Congress to get consensus for change. So that new Wiki or Blog just sits and gathers dust when we could be meeting the students where they are instead of maintaining our stereotypical identity of stagnation.

Sorry for this rant, but it gets a little tiresome to read about people who are going places with the new technologies while others are entrenched in the same old things.

Cat

Exercise 14: Technorati

After creating an account in Technorati, it was quite simple to claim your blog and add other's blogs to your list of favorites. It was also not too difficult to add tags to the blogs to sort them. I am not sure that I will use this in the future, because I feel like bloglines does something similar and will suffice for what I want it to do. There are so many applications available - all designed to save us time and effort - and I think the best practice would be to pick one and stick with it - monitoring of course new technologies.

One thing that Technorati did provide was a means for "advertising" your blog. If you had a Reference blog or departmental blog, it might be nice to see if you can get others to link to it as a favorite.

I did add the clickable Technorati button to all of my blogs - this too was fairly simple.
Cat

Exercise 13 Delicious

Here is my Delicious cloud:



I have used Delicious for quite some time and I really enjoy using it for research needs - just to get some ideas. I think I have posted about this before.

As for tagging, we spent some time with this topic when I attended library school. In fact, in my cataloging class, we did not even talk about MARC records - we only used Dublin Core. Thanks to some good training by my fellow library workers, I did learn about cataloging with MARC records. I have also done some research on using student tagged records in an academic library setting and while I wonder how the catalog would maintain its full integrity, I think using these types of tags would certainly provide some insight into word usage and why students often fail to find what they are seeking.

Library Cat

Exercise 11: Library Thing Revisited

Finally LibraryThing was repaired and back up for adding books. I am so glad, because I absolutely LOVE it. Rather than just add a post here about it, I added a list to my blog. The social functionality is particularly appealing to me. When I went to library school, we used to 'recommended" function in Amazon to think about classifications of books. This is the same type of application.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I am.
Cat

Exercise 12: Rollyo

Here is my search - for cheats for XBox 360.

Select...XBox 360 CheatsSearch The Web

I must admit that I did not care for this product. I think that it might have some good applications, but not for me! One application I thought about would be for a teacher to create a search for students to use - limited to valid and appropriate sites.

Cat

Exercise 11: Library Thing

Unfortunately Library Thing has been down this week and therefore I have not had the opportunity to have a new experience with this play toy. I can tell you that people are quite passionate about it if the comments about the downtime are any indication - when last I checked there were over 200 comments and two songs posted about the situation.

Fortunately I have been to the site before and I know the basics. I think the social aspects of the site are phenomenal with reading groups and other online activities. Linking out to specific selling communities is also good. I am sure that there are many uses for this in a library setting but one that comes to mind is a reading list for a specific class. People could have the link to the list and comment on the readings. I think that would work as well as other things which people have tried to use for this purpose.

While waiting, I searched about and found this site Bookmooch, which looks like it would be perfect for a voracious reader who does not horde books or work in a library where books are readily available for tasting before purchase. At any rate, I am going to look around the house and see if there are any not-so-dear books that I can bear to part with and sign them up!

Anyway, I am going to move on to the next exercise but plan to keep checking library thing because it is the perfect nerd activity!

Waiting,
Cat