katrina's blog

After learning about all the tools in this course I would have to say that some tools would probably work better in a library than others. There are some tools that would probably be easy to implement without major disturbances. In mind would be rss, gaming, and blogs.

I think that each of these tools could easily complement a library OPAC and website. Rss feeds could easily be set up to notify patrons of new titles and events at the library, as Ottawa Public Library currently does. A feed could be set up to customize the types of material to be notified about.

My personal experience with this course has been quite different from every other MLIS class that I've taken so far (1 left after this!). I've learnt a lot and interacted with tools that I was largely unfamiliar with 14 weeks ago.

I was not a heavy user of social software tools before this course began. I had a facebook account and occasionally browsed through flickr, but other than that I was pretty new to the tools that we discovered over this term.

I'm taking my 2nd blog holiday.

Back next week.

I was a bit unsure of what I would be learning about this week. I don't have much experience with gaming and am mostly in the dark in general when it comes to gaming and virtual worlds.

I was interested in reading about how gaming and libraries would intersect. This first seemed like an outlandish idea, but after reading the articles by Doshi and Oblinger, I now have a better sense of what gaming could potentially do for library instruction.

I was interested to read the articles this week that had to do with the academic environment and social software. I'm interested in it for a number of reasons, particularly, because online communities are so ubiquitous and increasingly popular and I'm interested in how the academic environment is responding to this.

There were two articles this week that touched on the topic. Although Hewitt and Forte and Williams discuss student/faculty relationships, their findings, attitudes and messages are quite different.

I was eager to read Ellyssa Kroski's article, The Hive Mind because just last week a co-worker was raving about her after meeting her at a conference. He has let me borrow her book "Web 2.0 for Librarians and Information Professionals" which is a great resource for those that are new to web 2.0.

no blog this week for me

These last couple weeks have been full of wikis for me. I have been working with Chris, Jen and Kristen on our wiki project for this week, and I am in the midst of starting to work with the staff at my co-op on a "Knowledge Base" (aka a wiki, but called a Knowledge Base here so it doesn't sound as scary).

 When I was telling my supervisor at my co-op about RSS and vendors for my readings this week, she automatically responded enthusiastically. The way she saw it, she said that it would be really useful if instead of having to go through catalogues from vendors about new books and subscription news, the RSS would provide this information instantaneously.