Library Thing

Wow, this looks great and really easy to use. I can actually say that I had some fun entering books. I would propbably use it to seach for similar books by different authors and that sort of thing. It is nice to discover new authors occassionally, well new to me and my customers anyway. We do a lot of book swapping through the library and our personal collections as well. I will keep an eye on the library thing site and add more favourites as time allows. I tagged my choices in headings such as mystries, australian etc.

technorati

This was interesting, you could loose yourself in technorati forever and waste lots of time. The most popular page was a bit depressing for me. I could see my kids going mad over the most popular page, boing boing, the latest post was rocket making for amateurs. The most popular book, how to succeed as a small business owner, I'd never heard of but was definitely interested in. The most popular music and DVD I'd never heard of either. I was saved by the news and OBama's speech in Cairo being the most popular.

There were slight differences in pages from bookmobile and the advanced search feature. All the sites were about mobile libraries so to speak but there were different ones in the advanced search to just the normal search.

Del.icio.us

Right-oh, as usual it takes me longer than I think to get these test drives done and blog about them. I've decided to separate this test drive into the three areas and blog about each one individually and hopefully this means I won't get confused. Setting up my own del.icio.us account was easy and following the notes by Sharon Morris was great. Maybe I'm finally getting the hang of this.

I spent a fair amount of time bookmarking and tagging in delecious so that I could understand the concept. As with all other test drives we have accomplished the is always a way you could use this to help in the library. There are advantages in the easy access to information and having it all together under one heading. I played around with this for a while and it was simple. As a research tool I think it would be excellent as the amount of information available is mind blowing but you still have to sort through for what you want. I had a child doing an assignment on skiing in New Zealand so we bookmarked information together that was appropriate to her work and level. She has no computer at home so each time she comes in we can access all the information for her.

The hardest thing I find with all these test drives is not having anyone close to help when I'm having trouble. This means that all the clients are now invovled as I lean to them for help and discussion. I have leant that I am not the only person challenged by these tasks.

RSS Feeds

I takes me a while to work out all these new tests. The RSS feeds test took me a while to get my head around. Now that I've got the feeds on the computer it's not so bad and self expanitary.

I had a hard time working out how to add the rss or blogs to the computer. I should read the hints first and not after trying to find appropriate sites.

The feeds I added were the opal training one of course, courier mail news, bollon weather, a houses for rent in brisbane site and hot books. I managed to add these last week and have gone back today to check these sites and how they update which they all have so I must have done something right. I was happy with the sites I picked as they all have had something of interest to me. I had a hard time deciding what to pick in the beginning and finding a site with the rss icon on it which was what I wanted. I changed the feeds trying to find the ones that had the right information for me. I think I could waste a lot of time seaching for the perfect rss feed.

I must admit I didn't really spend much time searching for library blogs. Obviously the opal training site I added first and I had read the update in an email before I opened the feeds. The hot books site was great with a variety of new and older books with a short story about each. Some of them we already have in the library but there were others I would like to order. I have customers who only read certain styles of books and this site will be helpful when I am ordering books for them.

Social Networking

I feel I'm getting behind in my blogging. Social networking is something I have had something to do with in the past, having two children living away from home. I don't actually have facebook or my space but I have their passwords so I can check what they are up to occassionally and look at their photos. If I were to join a network it would be either my space or face book for the simple reason that my kids are on these sites and most of my friends from school and uni have a page on these sites. At this stage I'm not interested in having a site as I find it hard enough to answer emails, faxes and phone calls. This would be just another thing to check each night when you get home and reply to. That sounds lazy does't it? My friends have issues with who to allow to be friends as well. Some only want adults as friends, some are happy with children and adults on their list. It is lucky that you can pick your friends I suppose. The other problem I find with this is the child peer group pressure issue. I have heard of children being persicuted by their friends in posts that everyone can read and you can't remove.
Anyway, moving on, I can see a few postitives in a work environment that may be advantageous. My library is a small library and there are four libraries in our shire. I think this networking between the libraries would be advantageous for sharing information, ideas and upcoming events etc. As a library I could see having a site would be a great advertising tool. Each week or month you could post the new magazines and books that come in and advertise when the new exchange has arrived. I could help school kids with homework and assignments with information available in the library. You could also have themes for younger kids each week and post books available and a play day or some such activity. We work in conjunction with the local playgroup at present.
Hopefully I can get the next two programs through before too long so I can feel I am catching up.

What's a Wiki

I don't know if I would be confident enough to actually change anything in a wiki at this stage but it is something that I may try to do in the future.

Since I'd never heard of a wiki before and didn't quite grasp its use, I had to do a bit more work on this topic than the others. I had a quick look at the comparisons between all the wiki sites and which were the best for each use. Obviously if I was setting up a wiki I would have to go to the wiki sites that are easy to set up and have heaps of user support. There was also talk of the simplist syntax, I have no idea what that means, but put simple in front of it and I'm happy. The wetpaint wiki seemed to one that I may have been able to handle as it seemed to be easy to follow. You could easily see who and when it was updated and a list of members. It had lots of tags that made it easy to follow. It didn't seem too hard to edit a page but I was too chicken to have a go.

The first site I looked at was the book lovers wiki. That seemed a bit out of date but ok I guess. The next was wookieepedia as I had no idea what that might be. I hate starwars so that was a bad choice. What on earth is a spoiler by the way. This site had over 66,000 articles though so there must be plenty of fans out there. The last wiki I went to was Winsconsin Heritage wiki. This is a great way to preserve history. I picked the names I'd heard of and looked at country schools in Winnibago in the town of Oshkosh.

After a bit of searching I finally found Bollon in wikipedia. Our population has certainly dropped since 2006. It didn't have a lot of information but distances to other towns and average temperature and rainfall are handy bits of information. This week I have been helping a local child with a local history assignments and according to local records the town was established before the date in the wikipedia. One day I may work up the courage to change this.

Photos Online

This is my second attempt at this blog, how difficult can it be? Somehow I managed to delete the first one as I was rearranging the photos to make it look better. I definitely need help with my editing skills.

It has taken me ages to complete this test but have enjoyed it along the way. I have now learnt that I have to do these activities at one time, I kept forgetting what I had seen and covered over the last weeks.

I have managed to post one photo of the library on flickr using the tag slql2td09 and will try to add another on Friday when the library is looking a bit neater. The previous photos of the inside mad the place look like a tip. Thats school holidays for you. I have cleaned up today and hoping take the photo on Friday and will post it then.

I have found some lovely photos of Bollon in my searches. They depict our town acurately. I have added these to this blog, along with the photo of the library. This time I don't think I will try to edit so the photos will be at the top of the page. There must be another town of Bollon somewhere else in the world as not all photos were relevant.

I am trying to free up space on my home computer by storing my personal photos on flickr but have internet problems at present and not enough guts to do this. The kids have been home and used up all the gigabites or what ever they are and I don't have enough speed to do much at all, internet wise.

I was hoping my kids would help me with this but that never eventuated. They told me next time if I reminded them. Great isn't it. I'm sure my other draft is somewhere because it autosaves but I can't find it.