Hmm, I didn't go so well with this exercise. I am not really an 'audio' person. I don't listen to the radio and would much rather watch something than listen to it (ie I'd rather read a book than have someone read it to me).
I did a search of Podcast Alley for Liechtenstein and came up with a 'school' in Liechtenstein that supposedly does them. I am a tad confused as to what the school is though because, after watching the podcasts (which all turned out to be videos), it looks like it is a school for Jonny Knoxville wannabees. Ah well.
The search engine sucks, I tried finding a podcast on Dana International (an Israeli singer) and ended up with all the podcasts with the word Dana OR the word International in it. I couldn't figure out how to get only the ones with both.
I then just randomly clicked on one of the podcasts on the front page (some Harry Potter one called MuggleCast) and the first entire minute and a half was taken up with ads...one for something called GoDaddy.com with some lecherous sounding man...ugh.
Just a note...the size of some of the podcasts is HUGE. The one I started listening to was 24meg for 44 minutes. I guess that's not too much really...not compared to video files.
If I see podcasts of things I'm interested in then I might listen to them, otherwise I don't really see myself doing this on any regular basis.
For a library, I think it would be good to podcast interviews with local residents for a local history project, or even podcasts of speakers that come to the library (if you can get the permission of the speaker that is). I've seen some libraries do podcasts about their libraries...'the reserve collection is kept on the second floor of the Dumbledoor Library'...that kind of thing (yes, I'm still listening to the H.Potter podcast). I'm not sure about this, I guess for people who are more audio-based it would be a good idea.
Showing posts with label online. Show all posts
Showing posts with label online. Show all posts
Thursday, October 25, 2007
#20 You too can YouTube
I love YouTube. I use it to watch music clips and parts of old comedy shows (like FastForward). I am quite glad that they merged with GoogleVideo (as having it compete was a bit silly when they did the same thing but YouTube's interface was better).
For a library website, I really like the 'Related Videos' feature. We could use that in the catalogue for related books. Or we might even catalogue YouTube videos. If there was anything of value to my community, I cannot see any reason we wouldn't catalogue the media. We could possibly even embed the player in the catalogue record (although what MaRC tag I'd use for that I don't know!). Maybe I'll try it and see what happens. Wish me luck!
I've tried to embed one of my favourite YouTube clips below...hopefully it works! All I've done is copy the 'Embed' text below.
For a library website, I really like the 'Related Videos' feature. We could use that in the catalogue for related books. Or we might even catalogue YouTube videos. If there was anything of value to my community, I cannot see any reason we wouldn't catalogue the media. We could possibly even embed the player in the catalogue record (although what MaRC tag I'd use for that I don't know!). Maybe I'll try it and see what happens. Wish me luck!
I've tried to embed one of my favourite YouTube clips below...hopefully it works! All I've done is copy the 'Embed' text below.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
#19 Discovering Web 2.0 tools
I was going to pick LuLu as my tool for this activity. It is an online publishing house that (I think) is going to revolutionise the publishing industry. It allows ANY writer to self-publish and LuLu will only print the copies that you pay for (so if you only want to print 12 copies of your work, 12 copies get printed). It will also sell your books for you so, if it costs $5 to print a book, you can charge $10 through LuLu and make a profit. Nice huh?
I've chosen not to do LuLu though because I've known of it before. A friend of mine was looking for somewhere to publish a book that he made and I gave it to him then.
Instead I have chosen Care2, a 'global network of organizations [sic] and people who Care2 make a difference'. My first comment is that the site is VERY full of information, a little too crowded in my opinion. In fact, finding out exactly what the site was was rather difficult. As near as I can gather, it's a 'profile' site for people who 'care' (like MySpace or Facebook where you advertise yourself for friends instead of to find someone who wants to help you change things).
Good things: The interesting search ways. Instead of just 'searching' for something you click on a term which brings up more terms for you to click on. After a while you receive a list of members. http://www.care2.com/c2c/people/tag/books/Gone+with+the+Wind <--that is a link to all people who like the book Gone with the Wind. I clicked on 'find people', then chose 'interested in books' and then 'Gone with the Wind'.
The site itself is very similar to any other profile site (ie MySpace) but you can give other users butterflies for being a Care2 member (ie you earn them for being good).
Finding petitions to sign is also very easy. You can create your own (ie Landrights for gay sperm whales), advertise it and have people 'sign' it online. Most of the petitions seem to be American based (about the US president or US politicians).
Bad things: Crowded, crowded, crowded!
VERY American based. I don't know if that's a cultural thing, but it's a tad daunting.
To do anything you need to sign in (I hate that kind of stuff, but that's a personal thing).
I've chosen not to do LuLu though because I've known of it before. A friend of mine was looking for somewhere to publish a book that he made and I gave it to him then.
Instead I have chosen Care2, a 'global network of organizations [sic] and people who Care2 make a difference'. My first comment is that the site is VERY full of information, a little too crowded in my opinion. In fact, finding out exactly what the site was was rather difficult. As near as I can gather, it's a 'profile' site for people who 'care' (like MySpace or Facebook where you advertise yourself for friends instead of to find someone who wants to help you change things).
Good things: The interesting search ways. Instead of just 'searching' for something you click on a term which brings up more terms for you to click on. After a while you receive a list of members. http://www.care2.com/c2c/people/tag/books/Gone+with+the+Wind <--that is a link to all people who like the book Gone with the Wind. I clicked on 'find people', then chose 'interested in books' and then 'Gone with the Wind'.
The site itself is very similar to any other profile site (ie MySpace) but you can give other users butterflies for being a Care2 member (ie you earn them for being good).
Finding petitions to sign is also very easy. You can create your own (ie Landrights for gay sperm whales), advertise it and have people 'sign' it online. Most of the petitions seem to be American based (about the US president or US politicians).
Bad things: Crowded, crowded, crowded!
VERY American based. I don't know if that's a cultural thing, but it's a tad daunting.
To do anything you need to sign in (I hate that kind of stuff, but that's a personal thing).
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Gnoos
I've just registered for Gnoos. It's an aussie blog search engine. Kind of like all of the other blog search engines we've been using but only for Australian content. It's worthwhile looking at if you want some local blogs.
Also, in response to my last blog post, I stick by it all :P Technology is fast advancing and we've not really had anything like this since the industrial revolution. It will take at least a generation for all of the new gizmos and gewgaws to infiltrate right through. I may not see it in my life, but I believe it's inevitable. Inevitably inevitable (Team America quote for those of you who know it).
Also, in response to my last blog post, I stick by it all :P Technology is fast advancing and we've not really had anything like this since the industrial revolution. It will take at least a generation for all of the new gizmos and gewgaws to infiltrate right through. I may not see it in my life, but I believe it's inevitable. Inevitably inevitable (Team America quote for those of you who know it).
Friday, October 5, 2007
#15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0 ...
I found this exercise fascinating. The very first thing I noticed was, of the five speakers listed in the exercise, only one was female. For a female dominated industry, I find that quite sad. Why aren't more females spouting the crap that us males spout? Equal rights rah rah. I find it even more pathetic because all of the strong advocates of Web 2.0 technologies in libraries that I know are female. I liase with librarians in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria, and only two male librarians spring to mind who advocate this, the other 20 or so are female. (Maybe it's because the only people talking about this are either academic librarians who have to justify their employment with innovative research or upper management of IT companies wanting us to use their products...or is that just my jaded view?)
Back to Library 2.0. The most interestesting article to me was 'To better bibliographic services' by John Riemer. As a cataloguer, he talks about using existing metadata (our library catalogues) to enhance our collections. This is something close to my heart, I believe that all libraries do way too much duplication and that there should be easy ways of acquiring all kinds of things. Book data is very easy to acquire (log in to LibrariesAustralia, edit my holdings and ta-da, I have a catalogue record for my library) but data for other media are lacking. Even something as commonplace as a Naruto DVD required me to make the record myself (we are a small, poor public library, we do title cataloguing for such works and I wouldn't even bother making it available to everyone else, it would be lovely if someone did full cataloguing with tables of contents, etc). Even better would be linked tables of contents/chapter listings. With audio this would be brilliant and could link to snippets of the music that are available on various CD sites. I understand there'd be copyright implications, even for 10 second snippets of music, but it would still be nice.
Sorry, got distracted (it happens so easily). Actually, the distraction works for me. One of his 'hints' is to adopt web features...things like linking in to data that is already available (ie snippets of music). Maybe even link to reviews. We're hoping to get something similar working at Brimbank Libraries with a link to LibraryThing. Hopefully, we'll be able to get LibraryThing to connect to our data and give suggestions for other books to read. This is currently available in things like Bowker's FictionConnection but, well, this doesn't integrate as easily as LibraryThing would (and costs a crapload more).
I also thought Wendy Schultz's article 'To a temporary place in time...' was interesting, mostly because I don't really agree with her forecasting. Firstly, she assumes that libraries will be a quiet place in the future (ha! I wish they were quiet now...has she ever been in a public library?) and that just got my goat. I don't want my library to be quiet. Quiet areas, yes. Comfortable, yes. Quiet everywhere? No. I'd rather my public library be comfortable and cosy, like a living room. I want couches. I want a fireplace. I want someone to serve me a hot chocolate and bring me the latest Who Weekly and call me sir. Personally, I think libraries are going to end up as entertainment only venues. We'll have free gadgets (virtual reality spaces), free reading material (the latest Virginia Andrews books, sure she'll be 986 years old and dead for 900 of them but she'll still churn them out) and somewhere you can dump the kids whilst you go shopping (storytime 7.1). Our specialist skills will all fall flat, very few people go to a public library to get research done. Academic and school libraries will still exist (if only to help teach scholars proper was to search the Googlenet) but public libraries won't be for that kind of stuff.
I was interviewed recently as part of a research project looking into the library services for Baby Boomers and I think I'm quite jaded. If the physical library exists at all in 100 years, it will be as a data storage centre. Although people say they can't live without books, in all honesty, they're going to all die off soon enough (myself included) and new technologies will emerge that supercede paper. They can already create a screen that is as thin as two credit cards, and technology will only get better. I'm fairly certain that I'll see something that supercedes paper as a reading medium in my lifetime. After all, I'm young enough that I don't need a book to do anything really, sure I don't like reading for fun on a computer, but I'd much rather read a recipe on one than store 600 cookbooks on a shelf in the kitchen.
Maybe I'm just too jaded today.
/end rant
Back to Library 2.0. The most interestesting article to me was 'To better bibliographic services' by John Riemer. As a cataloguer, he talks about using existing metadata (our library catalogues) to enhance our collections. This is something close to my heart, I believe that all libraries do way too much duplication and that there should be easy ways of acquiring all kinds of things. Book data is very easy to acquire (log in to LibrariesAustralia, edit my holdings and ta-da, I have a catalogue record for my library) but data for other media are lacking. Even something as commonplace as a Naruto DVD required me to make the record myself (we are a small, poor public library, we do title cataloguing for such works and I wouldn't even bother making it available to everyone else, it would be lovely if someone did full cataloguing with tables of contents, etc). Even better would be linked tables of contents/chapter listings. With audio this would be brilliant and could link to snippets of the music that are available on various CD sites. I understand there'd be copyright implications, even for 10 second snippets of music, but it would still be nice.
Sorry, got distracted (it happens so easily). Actually, the distraction works for me. One of his 'hints' is to adopt web features...things like linking in to data that is already available (ie snippets of music). Maybe even link to reviews. We're hoping to get something similar working at Brimbank Libraries with a link to LibraryThing. Hopefully, we'll be able to get LibraryThing to connect to our data and give suggestions for other books to read. This is currently available in things like Bowker's FictionConnection but, well, this doesn't integrate as easily as LibraryThing would (and costs a crapload more).
I also thought Wendy Schultz's article 'To a temporary place in time...' was interesting, mostly because I don't really agree with her forecasting. Firstly, she assumes that libraries will be a quiet place in the future (ha! I wish they were quiet now...has she ever been in a public library?) and that just got my goat. I don't want my library to be quiet. Quiet areas, yes. Comfortable, yes. Quiet everywhere? No. I'd rather my public library be comfortable and cosy, like a living room. I want couches. I want a fireplace. I want someone to serve me a hot chocolate and bring me the latest Who Weekly and call me sir. Personally, I think libraries are going to end up as entertainment only venues. We'll have free gadgets (virtual reality spaces), free reading material (the latest Virginia Andrews books, sure she'll be 986 years old and dead for 900 of them but she'll still churn them out) and somewhere you can dump the kids whilst you go shopping (storytime 7.1). Our specialist skills will all fall flat, very few people go to a public library to get research done. Academic and school libraries will still exist (if only to help teach scholars proper was to search the Googlenet) but public libraries won't be for that kind of stuff.
I was interviewed recently as part of a research project looking into the library services for Baby Boomers and I think I'm quite jaded. If the physical library exists at all in 100 years, it will be as a data storage centre. Although people say they can't live without books, in all honesty, they're going to all die off soon enough (myself included) and new technologies will emerge that supercede paper. They can already create a screen that is as thin as two credit cards, and technology will only get better. I'm fairly certain that I'll see something that supercedes paper as a reading medium in my lifetime. After all, I'm young enough that I don't need a book to do anything really, sure I don't like reading for fun on a computer, but I'd much rather read a recipe on one than store 600 cookbooks on a shelf in the kitchen.
Maybe I'm just too jaded today.
/end rant
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
#11 All about LibraryThing
I've used LibraryThing before so it was a quite easy activity for me to use it again. I had 25 of my own books on there already and added a few more so I could write about it on here. I think it's quite a good idea but honestly can't see the practical use of it for most people (maybe apart from the Suggester). I do like how it can link into the opac of a library catalogue and 'recommend' books, and I suppose that really wouldn't work without all of us people out there making catalogues on there.
I did like it how it told me that I had a duplicate in my library already. But, when I searched for new books, there was no way of clicking on the book to see if it was the right one (especially as my covers were different to the ones I found).
Anyways, it's available at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/tas666
I did like it how it told me that I had a duplicate in my library already. But, when I searched for new books, there was no way of clicking on the book to see if it was the right one (especially as my covers were different to the ones I found).
Anyways, it's available at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/tas666
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
#10 Play around with Image Generators
Haha I really enjoyed this. I concentrated on 3D Stereogram which allows you to draw a picture, press the generate button and then it does one of those 3D eye puzzle things. I found it really easy to get it to work on my laptop monitor (much better than on paper when I tried doing the in that book thing). It turns out I suck at drawing with a mouse but the below picture should say 'tas666'. Click on it to get the full picture (it doesn't work so easily small). You have to look through the picture...ie look at it unfocused and then slowly bring your eyes back into focus.
PS Bah, just realised that that's as big as the picture gets. Sorry!
PS Bah, just realised that that's as big as the picture gets. Sorry!
Monday, September 10, 2007
#2 Lifelong Learning
Introduction
Well, I've just started the '8 and a half' week course Victorian Public Libraries Learning 2.0 Program arranged by the State Library of Victoria in order to teach 1000 library staff across the state about emerging technologies that may be of benefit to libraries and their staff.
Some of the stuff seems interesting (photos & images and podcasting), some rather boring (RSS) and some I have already had a play around with (online word processing/spreadsheet tools...I love you Google docs!) Although it sounds the most boring, I'm hoping to learn a bit about RSS because I have not the faintest what any of it means...here's hoping I learn!
Hopefully I won't embarass myself too much by sounding like a bit of a dumbarse (or a lot of a dumbarse)...I know a little bit of most of the Web 2.0 stuff but nothing in depth.
Week One Work
My first task was to listen to the 7 & 1/2 Habits Online Tutorial which was all about how I could do things to encourage myself to learn.
The thing I think I'll find easiest is the play part (habit 1/2). I'm quite happy to play around with online tools with little or no instruction in what they can do or how to use them. Look at me, haven't read any of the blogger stuff and already I'm typing away (hopefully it'll look good...I'm shallow enough to want it all pretty, even if there's no content).
The hardest part for me will be keeping myself motivated (well, actually it is habit 2 which is 'Accept responsibility for your own learning' which actually means 'Do the work and stop whinging about how boring it is'). I did my Masters degree by distance education and I found that motivation was by far my biggest obstacle. Even when I enjoyed the material, I'd usually find an aspect that I didn't enjoy so much and that was the end of that. Assignment time = clean house. Exam time = mowing/spring cleaning/autumn cleaning/learning how to cook Moroccan food/etc. Hopefully I'll feel a bit more motivated to do this because I'm scheduling some time each morning to do a little bit instead of attempting to write an assignment the day before it's due.
Well, I've just started the '8 and a half' week course Victorian Public Libraries Learning 2.0 Program arranged by the State Library of Victoria in order to teach 1000 library staff across the state about emerging technologies that may be of benefit to libraries and their staff.
Some of the stuff seems interesting (photos & images and podcasting), some rather boring (RSS) and some I have already had a play around with (online word processing/spreadsheet tools...I love you Google docs!) Although it sounds the most boring, I'm hoping to learn a bit about RSS because I have not the faintest what any of it means...here's hoping I learn!
Hopefully I won't embarass myself too much by sounding like a bit of a dumbarse (or a lot of a dumbarse)...I know a little bit of most of the Web 2.0 stuff but nothing in depth.
Week One Work
My first task was to listen to the 7 & 1/2 Habits Online Tutorial which was all about how I could do things to encourage myself to learn.
The thing I think I'll find easiest is the play part (habit 1/2). I'm quite happy to play around with online tools with little or no instruction in what they can do or how to use them. Look at me, haven't read any of the blogger stuff and already I'm typing away (hopefully it'll look good...I'm shallow enough to want it all pretty, even if there's no content).
The hardest part for me will be keeping myself motivated (well, actually it is habit 2 which is 'Accept responsibility for your own learning' which actually means 'Do the work and stop whinging about how boring it is'). I did my Masters degree by distance education and I found that motivation was by far my biggest obstacle. Even when I enjoyed the material, I'd usually find an aspect that I didn't enjoy so much and that was the end of that. Assignment time = clean house. Exam time = mowing/spring cleaning/autumn cleaning/learning how to cook Moroccan food/etc. Hopefully I'll feel a bit more motivated to do this because I'm scheduling some time each morning to do a little bit instead of attempting to write an assignment the day before it's due.
