On Line Applications

Well, I've sent my document from Google Docs. Again, very easy to do. I know if the majority of our customers who pay $2 for 30 minutes of word processing knew this was free on line, they wouldn't bother! How long before fees for such things go out the window?

I have already stated in my document some of the uses I can see for on line documents in public libraries. Just the simple fact that they can be shared between branches so easily seems reason enough. E-mailing and attaching already seems old hat!

Have had a quick look at Zoho. Seems to have even more options! I'm looking forward to sharing this one with collegues and friends. I'd never even heard of it before ... what rock have I been under!!

Mashups

Well, as you can see I've been playing with Flickr toys during this week. Here is my mashup made on the Big Lab site. Have brought together pictures of my beautiful twin grand-sons that I had saved on Flickr. Was very easy to do and I can see a great use for something like this if you have an event with plenty of pictures. They can all be grouped together - makes a better impact than looking at pictures individually.

Or maybe book covers of recently acquired titles...

It's really endless how libraries can use all this stuff, we really just have to use our imagination.
And regardless of what the average joe believes, we librarians have plenty of imagination!

Podcasting

Enjoyed visiting the sites this week and seeing the different uses for podcasting in libraries, but was a little disappointed overall. I'm not sure we, as a public library could warrant broadcasting in this way. I believe most of the information we would want to get out on the web would be better off in a written or video format.

Although I like the idea of children's stories being available through podcast, I'm doubtful they would get a great deal of use. The audio books for children these days are so good, I think a librarian's reading (well great in the flesh) would leave most kids unimpressed.

Of course it would be different for a specialised library, as podcasting would be great for lectures, talks and forums.

I was able to listen to a few of the British Library podcasts and of course the ABC, which I have enjoyed for awhile now. If ever I miss something on the radio that I wanted to hear, I can always go on line and listen to the podcast. Great! I decided to add a RSS feed for the Book Show to my Blog, as you can see.

I was unable to listen to any of the others sites though, because you needed ipod, and I could not load the software onto our work computer. I'm sure there are others out there with the same problem. Work computers are proving to be a small but annoying hindrance during this course.