Harvest Time

Last week #23

We have come full rotation and it is time to gather the fruits of our labours & reflect upon the success of the short season.

Successfully Harvested - would plant again:

Zoho
Rollyo
Bloglines
RSS
Wikis

Mixed success - may replant if conditions improve:

Audiobooks
Image generators
Blogging
flickr

Failed to thrive - will not replant:

Librarything
Delicious
tagging
Youtube

Not sure I can push the garden barrow any further, so just as well I'm finished.

General problems I found with the program conerned the very part-time nature of my position which meant I had to do all of it outside work hours, thereby grappling with very slow interent access from home. At times this made the whole procedure very frustrating.
I'm not into blogging - reading or writing - so that wasn't something I enjoyed & I'm particularly not interested in the social side of many of the sites we looked at.
I would assume that patrons who were into that type of thing would already be on that path & wouldn't need help from us.

I have used the Rollyo a couple of times & that is probably the single most useful item for me. I would also like to RSS to genealogy blogs (yes I know I don't like them but I'll make an exception here!) as an easy way to keep up with new resources etc.

Overall I have enjoyed being able to recognise jargon that others use & I feel more aware of a little of what is offerred online but I do feel that much of it is timewasting for me. I would consider doing another program but would prefer it to be shorter to cater for part-time staff.

Now, let's down our virtual tools and ....
rollyo barrow, dodge the webs, pot a few tubes, generate & tag some cuttings and search this del.icio.us garden of life for real ...

Garden Views or Tubes

Week 9 #20-22

Would I like to watch someone garden or garden myself? Silly question. I don't like to watch unless it's a view of falling rain or a nice TV gardening show (I'm also partial to a few other shows ...Landline comes to mind).
So.. I'm NOT a YouTube fan & could not be bothered waiting ages for the time it takes to open footage on my laptop - I'd rather watch grass grow - well maybe that is excessive given the drought - I do need to finish before the end of January! I picked this 'tube' because it reminded me of something ...something green that I haven't seen for some time ... but the quality is poor & there is no audio. No doubt there are many other good views but they are too slow & I don't see much value to library patrons unless they are more than merely 'live scrapbooks'.
I could see an advantage for local historians in having footage available via our website for remote users.



Yahoo Podcasts

This is another slow process & frankly I can read quicker than they can speak, so I'm too impatient to listen. If I had an MP3 player (hint, hint) I would probably download relevant & useful stuff to listen to when out ...oh, I don't know .... in the GARDEN! That would be agreeable.
I've reluctantly broken away from my theme for this task & searched for book review podcasts. I found several & picked one that seemed popular. Unfortunately it was even slower to download than Youtube, so I gave up. I also had trouble subscribing via Bloglines but eventually I was able to subscribe to an RSS of Nancy Pearl's book reviews - i just won't be able to listen to them.

Audiobooks

Another wait for the tutorial to download & the PLCMC site was closed for Martin Luther Day!! But I see from the YPRL Blog that we are to use another site. A pity as I have been trying to have a look at a commercial audiobook site for some time & keep missing out. This is one area I was really keen to explore.
http://worldebookfair.com/Mp3eBooks.htm

Tried to download 'Little Match Girl' to listen to via Media Player. The first mirror site I tried was a bad link but the second worked - just slow. The story seemed to be only 50 secs long but no indication of this seemed to be given on the screen. Did I miss something?Where is the info re what size MP3 player you need? How many books can fit on, say, a 1GB memory? Would also like to know how international the downloadable collections would be. Listened to a section of "The Happy Prince" & found the American narrator to be very irritating.

Tools

Week 8 #18 #19

Tools

• If the only tool you have is a pick, all problems begin to look like rocks.
• A bad gardener always blames his tools.
• Gardeners have many tools, but hard work is the handle which fits them all.

I created this document with Zoho & found it all reasonably easy to identify icons etc. When it came to publishing I couldn't work out how the publish icon worked. In the end I simply toggled the html button & copied/pasted the result into the "edit html" version of this blog. Worked well but found the formatting from Zoho has continued in this blog without my wishing it to.... but would I blame my tools??? You bet!

I have just found that by using space bar in "edit html" I have been able to revert to normal font.

Zoho	Word	Google Docs
Free	Expensive	Free
Internet access anywhere	Confined to original site unless copied	Internet access anywhere
Uniform version on Internet	Many versions operate	Uniform version on Internet
Collaborative access possible	Single user access at one time	Collaborative access possible
Can publish various ways	More limited publishing versions	Can publish various ways

I can see how Zoho or Google Docs would be really helpful to those without access to expensive commercial tools or for those who wanted to temporarily share/save/publish documents online. I don't think the value of being able to use it for blogs alone would be enough to make me use it.

Web 2.0 tools

There are not really any I would use regularly here. I already have a calendar/to do software that I like otherwise I would have considered one of these. The only area I would have been interested in is a property tool that included Australia in the same way that PropSmart covers USA. I like the blog aspect here & the ability to search so many properties on a single site. Maybe they could also add a wiki as Zillow has.

Wikis or Community Plots

Week 7 #16 #17

Wikis are like community gardens - a shared area with minimal formality to which anybody can contribute but which overtime may develop an agreed form. As such they are also subject to some of the same bugs & production issues.

I can see the benefit of a Wiki for:

• search guides: SJCPL Subject Guides &
• recommending books Library Success: A best practices wiki
• staff contributing to internal wikis to build guides to good work practices, ideas etc that may be informally known, only stored in a physical format or disseminated in an ad hoc fashion. This would be similar to a good intranet page with the benefit that anyone could contribute.
• students to share work (maybe within a limited access environment) in preparation for its presentation to class/teacher, esp if students are regularly separated by distance, illness, time etc.
• reader wikis linked to catalogue
• Wikipedia is great. The inherent danger of biased, incorrect or dated info etc is a concern but who would knock back a free share from the community plot just because of one bad apple! (pun intended). From what I have read Wikipedia does use experts & pest control to keep such problems under control & afterall, all information is suspect until facts are cross-checked with several other sources. I like that Wikipedia has entries on diverse subjects which encyclopedia don't normally cover. I also like its clear & consistent presentation, hyperlinks etc.

ButI doubt the use of wikis for events management because of the fixed nature of most of the information given. Wikis are more useful "on a subject that changes or needs updating frequently." ( http://plcmccore.blogspot.com/2006/04/wiki-wiki-wiki.html wiki, wiki, wiki)

Sandbox

Every good garden needs a recreational area & I've dug into this one to add my blog, a favorite book: White man's Garden, & I've created the beginnings of a pbwki for private use.

Tagging or Taxonomy

Week 6 #13-15

I don't know about you but I like formal classification systems & try to work them into conversation whenever possible ("Say, look over there, are they Pelargoniums or Geranimums?"). I guess that might classify me as OCD (ha ha)... or maybe I'm just an old Librarian ... same thing really... but back to tagging & Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us allows us to access combined 'bookmarks' from unconnected terminals. This is good.
It also allows us to use fluid, flexible and descriptive subject headings to organise our 'bookmarks'. This can be useful when content matter is constantly evolving and where access is made equal to all by the simplicity of the language. However, a tag by any name is not the same; 'spider' and 'web' have internet connotations that the humble gardener, hoping to eradicate a poisonous pest, will not find helpful. Not so good.
This brings me to the social feature of Del.icio.us whereby we can search the bookmarks of others via their tags & hopefully discover sites useful for our own research. Sounds good but I was disappointed in the lack of Australian content in the searches I trialled.

Overall, I judge 'share websites tagging' (aka Del.icio.us) to be 643.728 (aka waste product)!

Technorati

Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory - the blog post search allowed most freedom with choice of tags.
popular blog, searches and tags - nothing of interest.

Overall - see above. I don't have time to read blogs and I find them too chaotic.

On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0

Away from the “icebergs” -
To better bibliographic services -
To more powerful ways to cooperate -

I realise there is a need to evaluate how Libraries can remain relevant in a time when information is so freely available everywhere & more up-to-date than print material can provide. I also realise that we need to examine how we can tap into this in a meaningful manner. What concerns me is that I don't find much of what we have looked at so far to be meaningful. Nor do I think that patrons we seek us out to reveal such 'wonders' to them. Certainly we should look at ebooks etc & I can see some value in patrons contributing tags, wikis etc. I also think the ideas presented in 'To better bibliographic services' were mostly worthwhile (eg locating a map with geographic subject headings). Overall, however, I don't feel that the type of information/services patrons need will be found in blogs, image generators etc