Something missed!!

I missed adding my RSS feed to my blog! Better late than never.

Simplicity

I'm an idiot. Adding my blog to the Learning 2.0 Favourites page was soo deceptively simple, I tricked myself into think that it was a little more complicated than what it was - I kept looking for a button or something to add my blog's url to the page. It was like typing in a web address in Word, the link just appeared! I got there in the end. I even added something to the favourite books page, so I guess this technology is not totally beyond me...........

I like wikis........................

I keep a series of folders containing booklists of Popular and Recommended Reading for Children and Teenagers. These resources were first established to provide Information Desk staff with a guide to help them find titles suitable for children or teenagers upon request if the Youth Services Librarian was not available. These files are kept on the book shelf at the Information desk and are available to both staff and patrons.

The file is divided into sections, each dealing with a particular issue, popular series or simply titles recommended by Youth Services staff for different age groups. In order to help the Information Desk staff feel confident in assisting parents look for possible items, each section consists of a series of booklists that not only supply the title and author, but also a short synopsis so that parents, children and young adults are able to make informed decisions before borrowing or making a reservation. Each title has been crosschecked with the catalogue to ensure that the item is held by WMRLC. The file is active, in that it is regularly checked in order to have new titles added or old ones removed.

As you may imagine - this is a labour intensive task. Also, sometimes thankless as some staff and parents are not always aware of the folders when looking for suitable books. These two points may change with the possible introduction of wikis.

If wiki software is introduced to the library service’s website, the Popular and Recommended Booklists would be readily available to all staff and families. Links to this information would be provided on the Parents, Children’s and Teenage web pages. The task of maintaining this resource would be easier as, instead of one member of staff adding and editing this information in a hard copy format, each Youth Services Librarian would be able to contribute to an electronic document. In turn, everybody would be able to benefit from this shared knowledge.

Technorati

I can see this as having 2 applications - one as a professional communication network discussing upcoming events, ideas and developments - the other as just out and out fun! Like YouTube it's a great repository of popular culture.

Del.icio.us

I'm not much good at learning new technology unless I play around with it a bit. So I signed up for a free del.icio.us account and I've got to say that I'm really impressed. It highlights a lot of what is wrong with Microsoft because Apple pcs allow you to create files and tags to organise bookmarked sites, although you can only access these lists from your PC. Web based bookmarks are an excellent resource sharing idea, I like the idea that I can create tags to describe and organise bookmarked websites as well as look at what websites are useful to colleagues. I guess the only weakness is that different people will inevitably different terms to describe the same thing.......................

Rollyo

Well, I must say, I had a bit of fun with Rollyo. I'm a bit of a passionate armchair traveller and love my food, especially food from around the world., so I put together a little list of what interests me in this area and the result is in the top left hand corner. Have fun with it.

LibraryThing

This is a little rushed as I'm about to go on Desk in a few moments. This looks to be an interesting tool - it would be good if libraries could take this idea and produce something similar, and little more personal for their borrowers.a