My Wiki Adventure

Well my wiki adventures were interesting. I found no page on the PB Wiki for library officers, so thought I would add one. That proved to be easier than I thought it would. No wonder wikis can grow to astronomical size in such a short time. Now that I am registered with PB, I receive alerts everytime someone adds or changes things on the Library Learning wiki. This is certainly handy if you are involved with a wiki that you want to keep updated on. From what I can see PB wiki is a great wiki site, and I would consider using it if I was going to set up a wiki for anything.

I then moved on to wikipedia and looked up my suburb. Sure enough, it was there and I actually knew something that could be added. This proved even easier. But there was a nice surprise in store. For when I clicked on a hyperlink in the references section of the article, where should it take me ... to our library site! We have links to local suburb histories on our website and who ever wrote and referenced the article used our information.

Again, this exercise has been great fun and I'm constantly learning new and surprising things. Hope everyone else is finding the same.

Until next post .... JoDee

Wikis - the limit is set only by our imagination

Was interesting looking at all the different wikis. I had no idea there were so many on the web. My only experience has been with Wikipedia, and that has not included adding any information or editing, just reading information.

I looked at the Library success wiki and really believe this serves an important purpose. There are some great ideas on there and available to everyone. The library camp was interesting. A great way to get an agenda happening on something like this. People planning to attend just add their topic of interest.

The Montana history wiki was a disappointment though. I can't really see how they can call it a wiki, as they don't allow anyone to add information.

And why am I not surprised there is a wiki for Star Wars! Of course there would be. I'm sure there is one for Star Trekkies too.

I like the idea of a wiki in libraries for staffing purposes. Our staff come and go at varied times through out the week, and it would be a great way of everyone adding their bit to a discussion or idea without trying to get us all together on the one day. As for our customers, a wiki would work well as an oral history for our local area. There are plenty of people out there that know and remember important aspects of our history. It would be great to have it all in one spot on our website. I am sure there are plenty more ways wikis could be used in a library, the list is only limited by our imagination.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are an interesting concept and I'm sure those who monitor the web for information find them very helpful if not essential.

But I for one prefer alerts, which send to my mail box links to the site for new information or in the case of a blog, a new post. I don't have to go anywhere else other than my inbox, and I have a choice of clicking it or not.

Creating an account with Bloglines was easy enough, but will I visit it each day to read my feeds? Probably not.

My feed for this post with ABC news, again was easy to do. I am very impressed with Bloggers set up. It is so easy to use. I will look for other, more relevant feeds as I continue Learning 2.0, adding them as I go.

For libraries, RSS feeds or alerts could certainly play an important part. As others have mentioned in the Learning blog, customers who do not visit the library on a regular basis but are still interested in what is happening will find them a great service. It is just another way we can keep in touch with our community through Web 2.0.

Still playing around with Flickr. Just had to take the 'Adventure' challenge and posted a few photos of our library. I organized another set with my photos to separate them from family photos I have on there already.

This proved to be quite easy, and a word search and tag search found my photos fine, except for one that seems to be missing when I do a word search. Can't work out why, as I have all the same tags on each photo.

Will try again later and see if it manages to find the truant photo!

How is every one else going with Flickr? Probably way past it, as I did start a week behind. Thought I could easily catch up, but there seems to be so much to look at the time quickly gets away.

Never mind ... forward and onward!

Fun with Flickr

Here I am for my second post, and it was not an easy exercise, I can tell you. I have two email addresses registered with Google, and of course I put the wrong one in, so I was unable to get to my blog (as a blogger). I could find it through the URL, but unable to access it without the correct user name.

It has been fun. Including this Blog I contribute to two others and they all work just that little bit differently. I can be my own worst enemy though, as I am bad for not reading what's in front of me when on the net. Taking in all the instructions does help ... so here I am!

Week three has been fun. Flickr is a great site for photos. I do have an account already and have posted photos of my twin grand sons. I have many relatives in Canada so it is a great way of giving them access to them. Did a search on my home town and found over 6oo photos available for viewing. This is pretty good considering I come from a very small, generally unknown fishing village. The world really is a smaller place.

Above is one of the nicer photos I found. I'm a sucker for sunrises and sunsets. Have a look at some others from Beautiful British Columbia.

It seems easy enough to load pictures. But I was puzzled with loading from my computer. In other blogs I have to type in where I wanted to retrieve the photo from, but Blogger seems to know that already. I couldn't get my cursor to click into the search box so I just clicked 'browse' and it took me straight to 'my pictures'. My other blogs require more direction.

So the learning continues ... what will next week bring!?

My First Rant

Well, I'm a little late getting to this Blog, but I'm sure everyone will understand as I've been on holidays (far from any computers) and have just got started. Looks as though it will be fun. I am not unfamiliar with Blogs as I have been blogging for awhile now, but there is always more to learn, and the advantages for libraries with Web 2.0 has been clear to me ever since I started.

So far, I'm impressed with the course and have obediently followed all the steps in week one, knowing I am already behind and could possibly skip a few of them. I find it exciting to think about getting libraries interactive on the web, so that users can become part of our community through their computers.

This said, it was a little disappointing going to the example links for Library Blogs and finding few or no comments on most of the posts. We have a big job ahead of us! The on-line users need to know that libraries are out there with Web 2.0 at their disposal.

I won't rant any further ... Save it for another post.