Will I mess up the mashup?

Some great possibilities with mashups.... the Star Viewer was really amazing. I have a few friends and family members who would be really interested to explore it so I will be sending a link to them although they probably know all about it already!

There are so many different types of mashups that there would be plenty of ways to use them in the library. The Big huge labs image generator would provide some great images for the library newsletter or website while Google maps could be used to set up an information page for tourists or backpackers about our region. Could Voicethread be used for an online book review or book discussion perhaps? The possibilities are endless I'm sure.

Now to see if my mashup has worked. Big huge labs was easy to use and I had lots of fun playing with it. I will try to upload a photo mosaic I made of random ballooning pictures from Flickr which were taken over Easter in our town.

Plenty of podcasts

A much better week... I was already familiar with podcasting as I have been catching up on favourite ABC radio and TV shows that I miss at home for a while now. I enjoyed checking out a few different ones though for this module.

The British Library site was very easy to follow - more so than the ABC I think - but both have a lot to offer. I got hooked on the kids stuff that I found through the Library Success wiki. What a great idea Denver Library has to podcast readings of popular kids books. The children's librarian inside me wants to run out now and record the shortlisted Children's Book Week selection ASAP! The Online Education Database would have been wonderful when I was studying. I didn't actually listen to any of those podcasts as I was a bit too tired at the time to take in such heavy topics!

Libraries could do so much with podcasting. My heart lies with children's services so I would love to follow Denver's lead and podcast kids stories - maybe as a follow up to our regular storytime session. Podcasts of the rhymes and songs we use for our lapsit sessions would also be useful for the mums as an accompaniement to the sheets we hand out - just in case they have forgotten the tune.

Podcasts and vodcasts, online video - all are ideal tools for staff education. Inservice sessions would be much more accessible when there was no travelling involved.

Q but not sure about the A's

Have tried a couple more questions on Yahoo!7 Answers with varying results. Have had one or two reasonable answers but a number of frivolous if not downright rude responses. I can see the value in this type of service but I wouldn't take it too seriously. After all the answers are obviously provided by the general public who do not necessarily have any expertise in the particular subject area. I think I will stick to the Ask a Librarian sites.

Q and A

I didn't find a question I felt I could answer on Yahoo!7 Answers but I did post a question - in the pets category about rabbits of course! It was a little bit tricky because I tried to add an email address but we got there in the end.
I was amazed to find answers to my query popping up within half an hour. Some good suggestions too some of which confirmed what I suspected. The answers did vary though as my question was fairly open but I might even try this again.

Slamming the Boards

Being a small library I’m not sure how well used such an online service would be at this stage. With lots of promotion it may take off, particularly with the younger members but we would need to have the time to be able to keep it maintained. Most of our patrons enjoy the face to face service we already offer and would not bother to rate or review items in our collection or services we offer.

We do have an Ask A Local Librarian - link on our website with a link to the State Library of NSW Ask a librarian service. We do get occasional requests from people from other areas who usually need information about some aspect of our community or its history – genealogy requests more often than not.

The possibilities for the future are endless, however and I would love to think that within a couple of years our library will also be way up there with the best of the big libraries. This course is showing me so many ways that we could improve or complement our existing service which is so exciting and I look forward to being able to implement some of them eventually. I just have to remember – baby steps!

I'm so over 'Week 7'....

For various reasons I have been labouring over the Week 7 module for almost a month and now I'm over it! I have looked at Technorati and Library Thing and was pretty impressed but I really need to move on right now so I will come back to the Adventure section at a later stage.

I was going well for the first 6 weeks but I think that the second half of the course is going to be a bit of a chore. But I am not giving up! I will not quit half way through...

Its delicious

It has been a couple of weeks since I have been into my blog - or any other learning 2.0 stuff either. I have a bit of catching up to do!
Setting up a delicious account was quite simple - but adding lots of bookmarks is going to take time. One of these days I will add lots more I am sure. I don't do a lot of bookmarking at work anyway as I don't really have the time to use them! Now I just have to add a link to my blog - hope it works!
I can see lots of possibilities for using this tool in libraries. A link on the library website or online catalogue would open up so many more options to our borrowers. But once again it is time - or lack of it - needed to set it up then maintain the lists. In a perfect world......