As I don't actually use RSS it may be a little difficult to bluff my way through this week's unit .... I did set up the requuired five feeds last year and at least some of them worked.
The filtering of RSS feeds is a logical next step in the battle to survive the information explosion. RSS feeds themselves were an attempt to do this and putting in filters is the next step in sifting out what might be of use - a sieving of the sieve ...... With the emphasis on social networking which characterizes the Web these days, the sharing of RSS feeds along with everything else makes sense. If a set of sites/information is useful to you then it should be useful to others sharing your interests or professional milieu. And if you share your set with others and have the option on theirs in return, then it is more efficient all round.
I had a look at most of the suggested sites. FeedRinse (what an appropriate name!) seemed the best option in that it allowed different types of filters to be set (whereas FeedSift-filters just used keywords) and the home page had lots of information for the starting user.
I think my own computer probably send me enough reminders and Spreed made my eyes sore - I thought it verged on the gimmicky.
The flexibility of having RSS feeds sent to different destinations also makes sense. For instance Twitter seems to have largely replaced the traditional email for some users so RSS to Twitter would be more useful for them.
I checked for Google alerts today and there were another dozen, mainly to do with Weddin Shire. Somehow I need to establish "Grenfell Public Library" as a string because I got a couple of alerts with the words separated by other terms and hence not relevant.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Of slideshows, screencasting and digital storytelling.
As someone who has never put together a Powerpoint presentation it's all out of my league but it was interesting to look at the examples. I'm certainly not up to the Adventure!!
I rather liked the Culture Shock stories - a chance to be really creative rather than just dashing off a quick thought to inform someone or sell something, principally one's self , which seems to be what much of the Web is about.
I tried a couple of searches on Slideshare and feel that there is some good information out there. For example searching on "libraries" brought up such useful items as "Non Technical Introduction to CrossRef for Libraries (139 views, 18 downloads) and "Branding for Public Libraries (57 views, 9 downloads). I also experimented with "Alaska" and "Christmas". If slideshows are actually created for a presentation then they will have been put together with some care to meet the requirements of a specific audience and so the content may be of higher quality than some Web resources.
And of course being able to acess a presentation on the Web when you missed the original presentation would be very convenient - and cost-effective for funding authorities as a tempting substitute for sending delegates ...!! The animated versions are more powerful and the "Searching for Articles" from Academic Research would be a very useful piece for those requiring that information.
Slideshows are to the other elements on the Web as CDROMs or cassettes, etc are to books - another format. They become useful when they can be searched by search engines just as the alternate formats in a library are useful when they can be located by the catalogue. Can they contribute to RSS feeds or some other alerting service? - that would add to their usefulness.
By the way, there has been one Google Alert for "Weddin Shire" (the lead story in the local newspaper).
I rather liked the Culture Shock stories - a chance to be really creative rather than just dashing off a quick thought to inform someone or sell something, principally one's self , which seems to be what much of the Web is about.
I tried a couple of searches on Slideshare and feel that there is some good information out there. For example searching on "libraries" brought up such useful items as "Non Technical Introduction to CrossRef for Libraries (139 views, 18 downloads) and "Branding for Public Libraries (57 views, 9 downloads). I also experimented with "Alaska" and "Christmas". If slideshows are actually created for a presentation then they will have been put together with some care to meet the requirements of a specific audience and so the content may be of higher quality than some Web resources.
And of course being able to acess a presentation on the Web when you missed the original presentation would be very convenient - and cost-effective for funding authorities as a tempting substitute for sending delegates ...!! The animated versions are more powerful and the "Searching for Articles" from Academic Research would be a very useful piece for those requiring that information.
Slideshows are to the other elements on the Web as CDROMs or cassettes, etc are to books - another format. They become useful when they can be searched by search engines just as the alternate formats in a library are useful when they can be located by the catalogue. Can they contribute to RSS feeds or some other alerting service? - that would add to their usefulness.
By the way, there has been one Google Alert for "Weddin Shire" (the lead story in the local newspaper).
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Fascinat-ning ....
I looked at the four sample nings and were most impressed with them. The first three, directed to the public, were bright and colourful, logically laid out and offered a large amount of content. Mosman Readers was particularly impressive. The more professionally-oriented Library 2.0 ning was not as eye-catching but had the other elements of good organisation and lots of useful content. There seemed to be a degree of consistency in the way they are structured which would make the casual user feel more at home.
One of my concerns with Web 2.0/1 is how to you choose between blogs, wikis and etc and it seems to me that a ning is the answer because it has everything at the one site. And because a significant amount of the content is provided by users in the form of reviews, photos, groups and forum entries it wouldn't take as much upkeep as might first appear. (Not that Grenfell will ever consider having a ning!!!!) I would think that a large library with dedicated IT staff would find a ning a very useful means of communication with its users and professional bodies would benefit from the forums. Nice to have a range of forums emanating from the one site!
I did try to join the library 2.0 ning and as usual it is the little things that beat me - couldn't conceive of how to upload a photo and so wasn't accepted as a member. I would have joined the Rural Libraries group (even though they all looked to be US libraries) as well as the NSW public libraries group. I read through some of the posts for the rural libraries group and found myself very much in sympathy with the views expressed. It looks like small rural libraries face similar issues the world over!
One of my concerns with Web 2.0/1 is how to you choose between blogs, wikis and etc and it seems to me that a ning is the answer because it has everything at the one site. And because a significant amount of the content is provided by users in the form of reviews, photos, groups and forum entries it wouldn't take as much upkeep as might first appear. (Not that Grenfell will ever consider having a ning!!!!) I would think that a large library with dedicated IT staff would find a ning a very useful means of communication with its users and professional bodies would benefit from the forums. Nice to have a range of forums emanating from the one site!
I did try to join the library 2.0 ning and as usual it is the little things that beat me - couldn't conceive of how to upload a photo and so wasn't accepted as a member. I would have joined the Rural Libraries group (even though they all looked to be US libraries) as well as the NSW public libraries group. I read through some of the posts for the rural libraries group and found myself very much in sympathy with the views expressed. It looks like small rural libraries face similar issues the world over!
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Evaluating ....
I have set up a Google Alert for "Grenfell Public Library" and "Weddin Shire" this afternoon but will not know any results for several weeks. My guess would be none for the library and a few for Weddin Shire.
I have set up the Feedburner account but don't expect it to discover any action.
And I had a look around both Surveymonkey and Zoomerang, and experimented with creating a two-question survey (but at least they were different types of questions!) on Surveymonkey but didn't send it out of course. The general structure of their surveys is very familar from various State Library surveys .....
Evaluation is the essential final step in any initiative. It is alright to put heaps of effort into maintaing a blog etc but it can only be justified if it is actually being used. Getting online responses is one test but simple objective statistics are the easiest to understand and use in reports to funding authorities and the like.
And a site like Surveymonkey sure takes the hard work out of setting out surveys although one still has to create the congnitive content.
I have set up the Feedburner account but don't expect it to discover any action.
And I had a look around both Surveymonkey and Zoomerang, and experimented with creating a two-question survey (but at least they were different types of questions!) on Surveymonkey but didn't send it out of course. The general structure of their surveys is very familar from various State Library surveys .....
Evaluation is the essential final step in any initiative. It is alright to put heaps of effort into maintaing a blog etc but it can only be justified if it is actually being used. Getting online responses is one test but simple objective statistics are the easiest to understand and use in reports to funding authorities and the like.
And a site like Surveymonkey sure takes the hard work out of setting out surveys although one still has to create the congnitive content.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Del.icio.us ... but pavlova is better ....
But Del.icio.us has been OK too. I managed to set up the account OK, make a bookmark and migrate it to Twitter. With minimal tags bundling was not an option but I did find the relevant section of Del.icio.us. I even clicked on Linkrolls and Tagrolls but wasn't game to actually try and activate one of them. I subscribed to "Iceland + travel" thinking that would be reasonably esoteric but came up with 21,142 bookmarks so cancelled that one post haste. Either the spaces were a problem or else that just sums up how unwieldy Delicious bookmarks can become. Subscribing to "nswlearning2.1" brought up a much more manageable 18 bookmarks. Searching Del.icio.us under a general tag like "libraries" is a waste of time - the more specific one got (e.g. using the maximum four tags) the more useful it might be but limiting the search to a specific user pool would be more efficient.
I don't use Delicious at all, but if I did and was part of a Twitter group sharing the bookmarks to Twitter would be very useful (personally and professionally), and bundling tags would be essential. Bookmarking combined with Twitter alerts would be particularly useful to specialist librarians and researchers.
In the Web 2.0 course I made the following comments about Delicious and in the absence of additional insights repeat them here .... "I think social bookmarking such as Del.icio.us offers could be a great resource for libraries and their clients. Adding to a Favourites list soon makes that so large as to be unusable whereas the grouping/bundling of tags is a logical and easy way of managing links to multiple sites.
"The fact that the bookmarks are public means that a del.icio.us account becomes an online virtual-world equivalent to the old subject card catalogue. Library members can access a range of sites which come with the library's implicit recommendation as a reliable site sorted according to broad subject labels.
"In a regional/joint library situation different libraries/individuals could be assigned to different subject areas so that the burden of setting up what is akin to a subject index was shared. Or maybe something like the old Subject Specialisation Scheme but instead of collecting and managing books in a subject area libraries collect and 'manage' sites in a subject area, making access to them available through social bookmarking. I guess even now smaller libraries can 'piggyback' on the published tags of larger libraries, e.g. the Sutherland Shire Libraries tag cloud.
"A Library Journal article on the advantages of social bookmarking and tagging pointed to advantages for both patrons and staff. For patrons there was a greater accessibility to resources. Using the tags as links one can do all one's research from one's own home computer. As well having publicly-defined tags means that local terminology can be incorporated, terms that have been used in locallly-set assignments, also terms from other languages. The inherent risk of substandard as opposed to nonstandard tag terms could be overcome by having tags that broadly conform with the Library of Congress subject headings and would be entered by the library, tags that are judged by the library staff to be of local relevance and tags generated by users. Library staff could use Del.icio.us to add links to items of particular local relevance and resources for local students' assignment topics.
"For staff social bookmarking makes creating subject guides easier. Looking at what other people have bookmarked facilitates the task. No-one can find even a percentage of the useful sites in a subject area but sharing discoveries is of benefit to all, library staff as well as users. Bookmarking and 'bundling' also provides reference staff with a set of useful sites they can turn to immediately just as they would have looked to the index of an encyclopedia set in an earlier age. Once some librarians had card indexes of good sites but with the number of sites ballooning exponentially this is no longer a viable option. It is likely that users will also advise of sites they have found useful and they can be incoporated after checking to the benefit of all."
I am most unlikely to ever use Del.icio.us outside of this course but I can remember being quite struck by its potential when I first encountered it in the Web 2.0 course.
I don't use Delicious at all, but if I did and was part of a Twitter group sharing the bookmarks to Twitter would be very useful (personally and professionally), and bundling tags would be essential. Bookmarking combined with Twitter alerts would be particularly useful to specialist librarians and researchers.
In the Web 2.0 course I made the following comments about Delicious and in the absence of additional insights repeat them here .... "I think social bookmarking such as Del.icio.us offers could be a great resource for libraries and their clients. Adding to a Favourites list soon makes that so large as to be unusable whereas the grouping/bundling of tags is a logical and easy way of managing links to multiple sites.
"The fact that the bookmarks are public means that a del.icio.us account becomes an online virtual-world equivalent to the old subject card catalogue. Library members can access a range of sites which come with the library's implicit recommendation as a reliable site sorted according to broad subject labels.
"In a regional/joint library situation different libraries/individuals could be assigned to different subject areas so that the burden of setting up what is akin to a subject index was shared. Or maybe something like the old Subject Specialisation Scheme but instead of collecting and managing books in a subject area libraries collect and 'manage' sites in a subject area, making access to them available through social bookmarking. I guess even now smaller libraries can 'piggyback' on the published tags of larger libraries, e.g. the Sutherland Shire Libraries tag cloud.
"A Library Journal article on the advantages of social bookmarking and tagging pointed to advantages for both patrons and staff. For patrons there was a greater accessibility to resources. Using the tags as links one can do all one's research from one's own home computer. As well having publicly-defined tags means that local terminology can be incorporated, terms that have been used in locallly-set assignments, also terms from other languages. The inherent risk of substandard as opposed to nonstandard tag terms could be overcome by having tags that broadly conform with the Library of Congress subject headings and would be entered by the library, tags that are judged by the library staff to be of local relevance and tags generated by users. Library staff could use Del.icio.us to add links to items of particular local relevance and resources for local students' assignment topics.
"For staff social bookmarking makes creating subject guides easier. Looking at what other people have bookmarked facilitates the task. No-one can find even a percentage of the useful sites in a subject area but sharing discoveries is of benefit to all, library staff as well as users. Bookmarking and 'bundling' also provides reference staff with a set of useful sites they can turn to immediately just as they would have looked to the index of an encyclopedia set in an earlier age. Once some librarians had card indexes of good sites but with the number of sites ballooning exponentially this is no longer a viable option. It is likely that users will also advise of sites they have found useful and they can be incoporated after checking to the benefit of all."
I am most unlikely to ever use Del.icio.us outside of this course but I can remember being quite struck by its potential when I first encountered it in the Web 2.0 course.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Just Twittering on ......
I have opened a Twitter account but have protected it. (I assume the process is the important part of the exercise.) I included my blog address and I've published one Tweet. I've set up Mylee and Ellen as people to follow (sorry, ladies but who else ...)
My Twitter name is .. itnitwit of course.
I'm not fussed on micro-blogging - it would appear very time-consuming and the compressed language would be off-putting to older clients. However the flexibility of being able to tweet using a mobile phone as well as a computer is attractive and I gather Twitter provides updates in real time while Facebook only provides alerts to updates. (What a comment on our 'thirty second society' that Twitter has such tremensdous popularity ...)
In the library context ... Twitter is being used and obviously successfully. Professionals use it as an alerting service, e.g. Mylee - a bit like a human RSS feed with the advantages of a professional judgement of relevance and contact with all those serendipitous discoveries in sources no-one else has located to set up a feed from. And libraries use it to communicate with their client base, the aforementioned Sunshine Coast Library Service being a good example. They follow 36 names and have 142 followers and 141 tweets published, so the medium is being used.
Twitter could also be useful for quick contacts between professionals working on the same project at diferent sites. Direct messaging is an efficient approach.
Libraries need to choose just one social networking system. I don't feel I know enough about them to choose between Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and .... And they must accept that any of them carry considerable potential for abuse if only from individuals overly-focussed on checking for their next message
My Twitter name is .. itnitwit of course.
I'm not fussed on micro-blogging - it would appear very time-consuming and the compressed language would be off-putting to older clients. However the flexibility of being able to tweet using a mobile phone as well as a computer is attractive and I gather Twitter provides updates in real time while Facebook only provides alerts to updates. (What a comment on our 'thirty second society' that Twitter has such tremensdous popularity ...)
In the library context ... Twitter is being used and obviously successfully. Professionals use it as an alerting service, e.g. Mylee - a bit like a human RSS feed with the advantages of a professional judgement of relevance and contact with all those serendipitous discoveries in sources no-one else has located to set up a feed from. And libraries use it to communicate with their client base, the aforementioned Sunshine Coast Library Service being a good example. They follow 36 names and have 142 followers and 141 tweets published, so the medium is being used.
Twitter could also be useful for quick contacts between professionals working on the same project at diferent sites. Direct messaging is an efficient approach.
Libraries need to choose just one social networking system. I don't feel I know enough about them to choose between Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and .... And they must accept that any of them carry considerable potential for abuse if only from individuals overly-focussed on checking for their next message
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Twitter - it's for the birds!
I began by browsing Twitter using 'libraries' and 'librarians' as search terms . It seemed to me on the basis of the Tweets I looked at that the Tweets fell into four main categories: i) personal, which contained the search term but no information of significance outside of a defined friendship or work group, e.g. "Acquisition tasks are a lot trickier than I thought they would be . Oh, the challenge :)". Sorry, but to me that was pretty much a waste of time. ii) advertisements, which may well be useful but I thought there might be more efficient ways of communicating to potential users, e.g. "8 great #MooTools libraries for web designs" with a link to a company web page. iii) alerts to much longer articles on the web, which might be of use but perhaps there would be a more effective alert service such as an RSS feed. iv) (semi?)professional comments such as "I wonder if any libraries make donations to Wikipedia part of their collection budget .. going to suggest that where I work". But a Tweet like that seemed to me to belong more in a wiki or other profession-based network. More effective was "Forthcoming events @Boroondara Librarties for children and parents" plus a link to the library website.
I experimented with "diabetes" and "Central Asia travel" as optional topics. With respect to "diabetes" the first Tweet provided a website and "i think i died" - how useful a Tweet is that?? The second, "Pregnancy problems gestational diabetes", provided a link to a web site but wasn't much more than an ad for a brand of test strips. You'd do better with a subject search in a reputable medical database. The third was a reply to someone else's Tweet saying "My wife has type 1 diabetes" - on par with the first.
"Central Asia travel" produced four identical "I travel often far and near (list of continents/regions)" and one other Tweet ,"Tien-Shan Travel - your local expert in Central Asia - blog" and a link to a tour itinerary, which at least is useful (it looked a good tour actually ...) but you would get the same result with "Central Asia tours trek*" in a search engine.
By this stage I was ready to dismiss Twitter as a great potential time-waster for limited results but .... I looked at the Twitter entries of the Sunshine Coast Libraries and was much more impressed. That library uses Twitter as an alert service for patrons. It's most recent Tweet was "Last chance to purchase ticket for an evening with Judy Nunn tomorrow night" and there were also notices for other author talks, invitations to book launches and a link to the library's eNewsletter.
Tweeting takes up a lot of time and a library would need to consider very seriously why they are setting it up and what they want/can get out of it before making the investment. The Sunshine Coast Libraries have a clearly defined purpose and scope in Tweeting and that makes it work.
I experimented with "diabetes" and "Central Asia travel" as optional topics. With respect to "diabetes" the first Tweet provided a website and "i think i died" - how useful a Tweet is that?? The second, "Pregnancy problems gestational diabetes", provided a link to a web site but wasn't much more than an ad for a brand of test strips. You'd do better with a subject search in a reputable medical database. The third was a reply to someone else's Tweet saying "My wife has type 1 diabetes" - on par with the first.
"Central Asia travel" produced four identical "I travel often far and near (list of continents/regions)" and one other Tweet ,"Tien-Shan Travel - your local expert in Central Asia - blog" and a link to a tour itinerary, which at least is useful (it looked a good tour actually ...) but you would get the same result with "Central Asia tours trek*" in a search engine.
By this stage I was ready to dismiss Twitter as a great potential time-waster for limited results but .... I looked at the Twitter entries of the Sunshine Coast Libraries and was much more impressed. That library uses Twitter as an alert service for patrons. It's most recent Tweet was "Last chance to purchase ticket for an evening with Judy Nunn tomorrow night" and there were also notices for other author talks, invitations to book launches and a link to the library's eNewsletter.
Tweeting takes up a lot of time and a library would need to consider very seriously why they are setting it up and what they want/can get out of it before making the investment. The Sunshine Coast Libraries have a clearly defined purpose and scope in Tweeting and that makes it work.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Like Phoenix rising ....
ITnitwit resurfaces from technological inertia to tackle Web 2.1 ......
She would like to claim persistence in using a variety of Web 2.0 tools since completing last year's course but that would be a lie. She hasn't blogged at all but did go into a few other 2.0 course member blogs and leave comments.
There are of course a myriad of blogs she could have looked at, both professional and recreational, but she hasn't. What does she like about blogging? Well, apparently not enough to bestir her into participating in them, but she does appreciate their simplicity to use and the variety of elements that can be included. She still thinks that blogs work best for information dispersal ('vertical') and that wikis are better for communication between professionals - where sharing information is the prelude to creating new information ('horizontal').
She tried very hard to update her blog using a couple of templates from two of the third party sites, but without success (she did inadvertently end up with one design as her desktop wallpaper which was a bit unfortunate - she managed to get rid of it in the end ...). The colibri floral design was particularly appealing. However she was a bit comforted by reading in the comments below that template on the site that about half of those trying to download it failed and they got the same error message that she did ....
So she just changed to a new blogspot template, and added a couple of facts and a picture downloaded from Clip Art to her profile.
She would like to claim persistence in using a variety of Web 2.0 tools since completing last year's course but that would be a lie. She hasn't blogged at all but did go into a few other 2.0 course member blogs and leave comments.
There are of course a myriad of blogs she could have looked at, both professional and recreational, but she hasn't. What does she like about blogging? Well, apparently not enough to bestir her into participating in them, but she does appreciate their simplicity to use and the variety of elements that can be included. She still thinks that blogs work best for information dispersal ('vertical') and that wikis are better for communication between professionals - where sharing information is the prelude to creating new information ('horizontal').
She tried very hard to update her blog using a couple of templates from two of the third party sites, but without success (she did inadvertently end up with one design as her desktop wallpaper which was a bit unfortunate - she managed to get rid of it in the end ...). The colibri floral design was particularly appealing. However she was a bit comforted by reading in the comments below that template on the site that about half of those trying to download it failed and they got the same error message that she did ....
So she just changed to a new blogspot template, and added a couple of facts and a picture downloaded from Clip Art to her profile.
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