jane's blog

My personal experience with social software has been a new and exciting one. I am addicted to delicious (until this course my "favourites" took up half my screen).

I never thought I'd like blogging either. Personally, I found the idea of exposing my thoughts online for anyone to read or comment on frightening. There's no CONTROL. No PRIVACY.

And yet here I am. Happily blogging away, reading other peoples blogs, and searching for external blogs to read daily and comment on.

I am nearly a blogoholic.

Best practices for social software in a library starts with trying.

While it is important to upkeep the staple web elements (web site, online catalogue search, etc.) other important and exciting web applications should be explored.

These tools can be equally, if not more, helpful and interesting for users to learn about your institution.

1. Start with a need:

What is your library lacking online? Where can you improve your web presence?  What is your intention with the web? Once these questions have been answered;

Carefully considering all the technologies we've reviewed this term, my ‘favourite' tools for libraries include the Blog and the RSS feed.

Advertising is a visual experience. Users are accustomed to seeing information and being drawn in by interesting images. Photographs are a terrific visual representation for users to glance at and be drawn into. They are not the average laborious ‘what's new at the library' article.

I think you can use media such as Flickr and YouTube as a means of enhancing your library services. Especially since these days everyone is a Rockstar. People want to see themselves. Other people want to see their friends.

Educause Learning Initiative states that ‘Using virtual
worlds for education has significant potential to foster constructivist
learning, putting students in contact with others in an immersive environment
that challenges them to figure things out for themselves, without explicit
learning objectives and assessment.'

Hi Everyone!

I'm taking my second blog holiday!

Have a good weekend :)

Folksonomy, or ‘folks' and ‘taxonomy', has come to mean "non-hierarchical ontology created as a natural result of user-added metadata or tagging."

Reading through various articles on the subject, I have no conclusions as to how I feel about it.  Rather, I believe there are bits of good and bits of bad.

Here's why;

Folksonomy represents current trends in language and classification. It is the most up-to-date version of the LCA (Library of Congress Authority) one can find.

The Nature Publishing Group remarks, "Just as long as those hyperlinks (or let's call them plain old links) are managed, tagged, commented upon, and published onto the Web, they represent a user's own personal library placed on public record, which - when aggregated with other personal libraries - allows for rich, social networking opportunities." Where there was once (and still is) search engine territory, now exists a dynamic bookmarking service for online collaboration and shared taxonomy of web information.

Hello Everyone!

I've decided to take this week off from blogging!

Have a great weekend!

JAne 

While I believe RSS feeds are an excellent resource for libraries in general, I am interested in how RSS feeds will be utilized on a wide spread scale and the possible parameters set around their use in the future.

Using RSS feeds as a means of automatically updating library websites is a fantastic time saving resource when staff members are too busy to keep the site current. Also, feeds allow links to relevant news, articles, online journals, books or video reviews, etc.