She's got medals - Mashups

I'm already familiar with musical mashups as they've been around for some time now. David Bowie's 2004 single release "Rebel never gets old" was a mashup of two of his older singles, "Never get old" & "Rebel rebel".

I've now discovered there's a whole lot more to mashups.

Our library could use Google maps along with Streetview (when the local one is launched) to show our branches on our catalogue to make it easier for the public to find us.

Here's a mashup of my photo added to a calendar:



The library could also use mashups involving the catalogue so our members could use search results and data in their own applications at home.

Join the gang - Podcasts and audio

I didn't realise there were so many podcasts available. Educational, informative, fun, songs, video and radio programmes. I've discovered an interview I missed whilst I was at work on my local radio station. I was able to download the podcast and will now be able to listen to it!

A lot of material is being archived which is good as much of it is transient in nature. It's great for timeshifting programmes too.

A number of libraries are making use of podcasts and content is varied as you'd expect from libraries. I particularly liked the he way some libraries podcast their author talks and storytimes. I can see no reason why we couldn't podcast our forthcoming author talk. We could test-drive our new video camera. We could also podcast our storytime and lap-sit sessions so children who can't make it to the library due to poor weather or illness are still able to see the stories being told, or join in with the songs from home.

Come and buy my toys - Answer boards and social searching

It is very good to see that answers given by librarians are often rated quite highly. I'm not surprised though after seeing the range of responses given to some questions. Many librarians go out of their way to provide informative and complete answers.

I've discovered, much to my dissapointment that some people who can't help at all, still reply with silly statements like, no I don't know! or No, can't help. Looks like they are trying to build up their points, but it spoils it for the rest of the community. That's the problem with a system like this where points are awarded for each answer. This to me is a form of spam. I've just joined up with YA and have posted my first question and given my first answer. It looks like this is going to be fun. There goes my spare time! Only have 99 points... Must build it up!!!

I'm already a member of Eatability, which is the best of the restaurant review sites on the web. I often review and rate the restaurants I visit, mostly highlighting all the positive aspects (as they are running a business) and hope that this helps to encourage them to continue to provide excellent service. I always mark other reviews as helpful, if they are useful, as I love it when others rate my reviews as helpful.

Our library is about to implement reviews and ratings on our catalogue. It will be interesting to see what books are rated highly and which ones receive really low ratings. We may be able to use this feedback to help with collection development.

Silly boy blue - Tagging, folksonomies, delicious & LibraryThing

Del.icio.us has been quite useful for bookmarking my favourite or useful websites. Only problem is I have to have many of the sites marked as private as they are innapropriate for shared computers at work. A few of my sites are shared and i'll get around to sharing more in the future.



I like the way some quick search boxes appear within the listings, so searches can be performed from within Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us would make a great library reference links page, similar to the one Sutherland put together.

I tried looking up Bookmobile in Technorati and got the same results in both the keyword and advanced search, so I thought this was a bit of flim-flam on the State Library's part, then I scrolled down and found the tag search box and tried the search there. I ended up with a much more useful list of 25 hits.

I now have a LibraryThing account.

I like the way you can add covers and see other readers who like the same books.

I'm about to start using GuruLib instead though as I like the way I can catalogue my CDs, although that will take me a few years to do! I'll have to stop buying them.

Little Bombardier - video online

I've just been searching on Youtube and google video and discovered there is a huge range of videos available. Some are good and some are so bad, I can't understand why anyone would bother uploading them onto the web.

There appears to be a lot of great library related material available. One video I found relates to renewing loans via the web catalogue:
We have a lot of trouble explaining to our borrowers how to do this even though it is simple. It would be great to upload a video showing how to renew items on our catalogue and embed it on our website.

When I live my dream - Wikis

My wiki

I've been having a lot of fun with wikis. I have my own web site that I put together many years ago, however I haven't updated it too much recently as it is very labour intensive. Now I'm thinking of ditching it and replacing it with a wiki which not only I, but my friends can help me maintain. I'm not sure if I want to let everyone play around with it yet.

At the moment, the only wiki I regularly use is a private one that my wife, a friend and myself use to help us organise our pending overseas trip. Just like the camping mob who used a wiki instead of email to plan their trip, we have found the wiki is the only practical way to do this when there are multiple people involved.

I started with a Wordpro spreadsheet that had the calendar on it, but had to convert it to a PDF so my friend could read it on his computer. He's email me changes and I'd add them then convert it and send it back to him. It was impossible to keep track of the emails too as they all had different subjects.

Our wiki has a number of pages linking off from the calendar. When there are flights involved, we click on the link to get to the flight page with more links to airports and the appropriate aircraft so we can view seating plans. For each city we've listed things we want to see or do with links to websites. There's discussion boards on each page which we use instead of emails. Even the emails from travel agents with quotes are uploaded onto a discussion board. I just can't imagine how we could plan this holiday without the wiki.

Library wikis

Some of the library wikis I have found have impressed me. I particularly liked the SJCPL subject guides wiki. Our reference links page is maintained by the council so it is hard to update, but this one would be so easy to maintain, add to and update links by any of the library staff.

Due to the council controlling our website which makes it hard to add or change anything, I'd love to have a wiki attached to our site where we could update library news regularly. We'd be able to promote our collections and activities.

Wikipedia

I looked up my suburb on Wikipedia> There is a very good and comprehensive article already there. I did find an error though. It mentioned that my locality was subdivided in the 1800s and there are now three streets in the subdivision still existing. There are really only two, and one of the named streets never existed in our area! It was very easy to edit the entry. Only took a few seconds to do and it is all correct now.

We are hungry men - RSS feeds (a few days on)

I've now got RSS feeds Bloglines and on My Yahoo. I've also got an RSS toolbar on my Firefox browser at home, however that isn't as useful for work related feeds as we use the inferior internet explorer at work. I prefer Bloglines though for my RSS feeds. It's one of my bookmarks on my internet homepage.

I love the way I can add some of the sites I like to look at every now and then and check if there are updates in one place.

I've added a weather site that had an RSS button on it and I've found a David Bowie site that didn't have any RSS button or RSS feed info on it, from memory that was the same situation with the Powerhouse museum's pic of the day. Anyway they both update regularly when there's new info or pics on the sites.

With regards to the use of RSS in libraries. I'd like to see it used for our new items lists. Currently I print up one each month costing us $16.00 each time, just on printing. If our users were able to view new items through their RSS readers then we could cut down on the number of copies printed. Another advantage would be the number of collections listed each month wouldn't need to be limited to the three collections (due to volume) printed each month.

I like the way Sutherland library has an RSS feed from their news page and loved the way they have all the different buttons for the different readers to select from.

Somehow I don't think we'll be doing that though as we ususally update our library news once every year or so!