Completely mashed up

'mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool'

Am having so much fun with Big Huge Labs (BHL)I can't seem to stop mucking around on it. Where was this site a few years ago when I was creating my sister's 30th birthday invites! Though mine didn't turn out too bad, if I don't say so myself! BHL is great, it certainly makes one feel very artistic and the end product look professional.

I created this mosaic using pics of family and friends, the flower pics are from google. I wanted to create something like this since I saw one of the images from flickr, am glad it was so easy to do. BHL is definitely a website I would be using more of after this course.

Mashups allows for innovation within web technology to continue, their application for libraries can assist in promoting readers advisory services. One such library mashup would be whichbook, an new and exciting way to match readers with books.

Came across a youtube clip which directed me to ProgrammableWeb which seem to have quite a list of mashups. This site is all about keeping up with what's new and interesting with mashups, Web 2.0 APIs, and the new Web as Platform, it's worth having a look, as they have over 3,000 mashups. Conducted a search for books mash up, which resulted in 55 book mashups. Just a note, these 'books' websites are predominately aimed toward the American market.

A mashup that would be appropriate for libraries would be 22books. The main objective of 22books is to collect book lists. Lists of author’s books, award lists, books you want to read plus more. This could be a good way to capture community reading interest as well as using this as a Readers Advisory tool to look up authors books and award lists.

I'm not sure whether there are any sites out there that does do this, however some ideas for library mashups which would be worthwhile to develop locally would be:

Google mapping of authors in Australia:
-shows on map where author is lives/based
-provides list of authors books
-provides details on whether author conducts book talks
-books author is currently reading

Google mapping of all book groups in Australia:
-shows on map location of book groups in libraries, cafes or any organisation
- shows what books, book groups are discussing
-shows book group details of location and times, private or public
-displays advance listing of what books will be discussed in future
Advance feature:
-allows book swapping with various book groups.
-blogs for book groups

If you have come across a website that does this, please let me know especially one which is Australian based, rather than American, it would be interesting to see.

Personal On Demand

Discover: It would be good if they provided transcript with some podcast as it would have made it easier with some of the interviews conducted by the British Library.
I liked the fact that ABC provided three ways in which to access their podcasts, by subject, by network and also alphabetical. I also came also a podcast which I found interesting, it was Catapult, triple j. Catapult is about new ideas and inventions by young Australian entrepreneurs on triple j. The story, 'Socially networked success' is about the development of the company, thebroth.com which utilised social networking sites, particularly facebook to become profitable.

Explore: I would like our library to have podcasts for the following:

• Podcast for Children - Story books
• Podcasts for Youth events
  
• Podcast for Author Talks
• Podcast from Special events, both video and audio
• Podcast for HLS patrons for local events
  
• Staff: Training podcasts

Adventure: I didn't realise that yahoo had an audio section, pretty good stuff. It's also good to know that OEDB also provides free podcasts.

I download 2day FM radio station podcasts through itunes, which is a simple process, it just requires you to subscribe to a channel and it will automatically update when I hook up my ipod.

Slamming the board

Discover: What a wonderful global concept US Librarians have created to publicise reference services online and internationally. Congratulations to the two Australian Librarians who have also registered for wiki, it was good to see that we are being represented. Hopefully more reference librarians from Australia will register once they have completed this weeks exercise, however I know this would require time commitment.

In reviewing the 'Exemplary Answers' section of the Answer Board Librarians (ABL), slammers are encouraged to list sources, and often provide other links for more information. They also sign off using a general library tag which may or may not include links to local libraries.

Explore: Our library can set up a wiki where reference questions, services and collections can be discussed, questions answered and so forth. This way we are create a living breathing service, where the public can assist in creating the type of service they would continually use.

Adventure: Well I've done it, my question was 'Can someone give me a definition of 'resources' Thanks? I've included my answer which I got from merriam-webster dictionary online. Also I created my avatar, which was fun.

Some interesting links found while exploring:

Annoyed Librarian (blog)
Provides a less than enthusiastic view on slamming the board and wiki answers - post created quite a few comments.

Librarian net
Quite possibly one of the first Librarian blogger, Jessamyn West.

'My passion presently is mucking about in the intersection of libraries, technology and politics and describing what I find there.'

Ask Metafilter
'....arguably one of the more awesome “answer sites” currently in existence' J. West

Answer Board Librarians facebook profile
Can only be view if you are a member of facebook

Technorati and Library Thing

Headed over to Technorati and did a basic search on bookmobile. 556 posts tagged with bookmobile, there was only 16 actual bookmobile blogs. It's good that Technorati provides options to search within tags or in posts, it allows for greater retrieval.

Did advance searching and the results seem pretty consistent, except in the field for NONE of the words. I assume that the bookmobile will not be listed in any of the results, however it did? Which, unless I'm doing something wrong, seem to negate having a 'NONE of the words' searching capabilities. They also have something called authority, is this similar to how libraries uses authority records?

Looked up nswpln2008 and was able to view the photos tagged from flickr, was excited to see my picture was also listed. This is a good search option to have included on Technorati.
I initially had no hits with any posts for nswpln2008 until I change the authority from alot to any. In this sense we can see which members have actually been tagging their posts for the learning 2.0. I have to admit I never bother with tagging in my post, because I wasn't really aware that it can be applied to individual posts. However if I go to all the trouble of adding tagging would my post be picked up by technorati?

Note to self: Apply tagging to posts for all up coming weeks and do search on technorati.

Looked up what authority meant on Technorati:
Authority is determined by the number of unique blogs indexed by Technorati that have linked to yours in the past 180 days. So to build your authority, encourage bloggers to link to you and to ping Technorati

Library Thing

Amazingly enough I still remember my login details. The first time I checked out Library thing, I was impressed with the amount of resources online, but aside from showing staff the recommendation tools I haven't access it again until today.

***1 1/2 hrs later*** oh soo much to see, so much to explore and I've just stumble across book swapsites...oh dream, which site to register on?!? what a dilemma. I never knew that there were this many book swap sites out there. I know of only book crossing, which is another fantastic site, based on a shared passion for reading by leaving registered book crossing books in public places where they can be picked up. The person then logs onto to the website to register that the book has been caught, and blog about it. Once you have finished reading you then re-release it out into the wild again. One of the great things is that you can see how well travel a book is and follow it's journey. Admittedly I haven't done this yet, it would be exciting to see whether one of my releases gets caught and blogged about. If you're interested in reading a book that has been release you can go hunting, and find out whether any books have been released near you.

Give me a shout out if you have.

Okay need to focus, I added five books and wanted to place the librarything widget, but as I mentioned I only have five books currently in my library, so no point at this current stage. It was very easy to add books to your library. Out of the five titles I added, Castle of Wizardry by David Eddings was the most 'owned' book with 1,808 members.

Well I better move along to answer boards and social searching.

Last word about videos

Just a few more words about videos.

Firstly while doing the discover exercise for Week #7 – Tagging, folksonomies, delicious and LibraryThing I jumped onto the Cleveland Public Library website, and just have to mentioned that I was impressed by their inclusions of video clips which they have embedded in their youth pages. They preview videos of award-winning and cool books', they also show case authors talking about their books and also, simulations of books story line, a great initiative! talk about bringing books to life.

Del.icio.us?

I'm registered with digg, which is kind of similar to del.icio.us in a sense, except instead of sharing websites, you're sharing stories and ranking stories in terms of popularity. With that in mind I thought del.icio.us would be similarity structure with familiar features.

However after viewing Cleveland and Sutherland Shire Library del.icio.us accounts, I was taken aback on the low readability of the website. I had difficulty adjusting to the way the information/websites were presented.

In the initial viewing it looked completely unstructured with just a list of websites based on a subject matter. Save this and save by 1 other person features just added to the confusion. It probably didn't help that I didn't completely comprehend the full functionalities of tag clouds, and that in addition to how it appears, with related words all grouped together, I also did not realise that size and boldness of fonts relayed certain information about the subject matter .

**I wiki-ed tag clouds and discovered that tags clouds can also be presented according to different categories such as alphabetical, weight, random order plus more.

I was relieved that Cleveland Public Library have an 'connect to' webpage which structures subject into alphabetical order, clicking on a subject will take you straight to the listing of websites for the selected topic. This would assist those not familiar with delicious and would enable them to make the most of the website.

After saying all that I'm sure it will probably require time and practice before I'm comfortable with the functionality of delicious, and the benefits of it will outweigh my initial impressions.

As Sharon Morris listed in her notes, why do we need it. There's much to gain from utiltising what is essentially a free tool, especially when it enables shared knowledge, and the minimising of repetitive Internet searching for individuals.

I would like our library to create something similar to what Cleveland Public Library has accomplished.

Youtubing it.

I'm fairly proficient on this topic, having used it mostly for recreational use, ie: looking up the latest music video clips, tv shows, previews to movies and so forth. Like many things on the Internet, you can get stuck spending a whole night just checking out stuff on youtube. Seriously addictive!~

I created an account on youtube when I brought my digital camera and filmed a short dance clip of my brothers, and ended up uploading it to youtube for laughs, and partially to share it with our families overseas.

There were initial concerns in the family about having our brothers up there for the world to see, however the more 'perceived sensitive' clips were made private and can only be viewed by those I 'invited'. Needless to say my brothers became 'famous' when it got out they were on there.

Having an account definitely came in handy when I flew out year to attend a funeral, and was asked that the memorial presentation shown at the service, be uploaded to youtube. I had reservations about placing something so essentially private and emotional on there, but it was an expressed wish of the family and so it was uploaded that night.

It is still up there now, and every now and then family would comment on how they would watch the clip, time and time again. I have to admit I am strangely reassured that anytime I want to remember my nan I can youtube her, and reminisce.

Now to back to Explore...

It's great to know that Libraries like Mosman have such a strong presence on the web and a little envious (holding arms out wide) with the amount of diverse content they have out there. I know with the completion of this course, that the gap between those libraries without presence and Mosman would certainly lessen, however it is good to have a great example on the type of web 2.0 technology libraries in general should be applying and to use Mosman Library as a standard.

Just a couple of the things I would like our library to implement:

- Author talks - video clips
- Training talks - different topics (on intranet)
- A competition for youths to create a funky, informative, short video on our library and to run it within the library and include it on our website

There are so many great ideas to implement with each one of the topics covered for the learning 2.0 course, one wonders whether we may need to have some type of project management course to ensure that certain great ideas are implemented.


Have an urge to dance? Too shy?, no partner?, completely uncoordinated? Totally unfit? Have no fear, taking dancing lessons has never been easier, and cheaper. All you need is a computer with Internet connection and you're good to go.

Log on to www.youtube.com or www. video.google.com.au

What are you waiting for? Grab your dancing shoes and let's do the bus stop.

Wicked Wikis

I had a look at the 'discover' wikis and the work applications wikis, and I have to admit that I never fully understood the scope of what wikis can do . The first wiki I used was Wikipedia and I still remember my first impressions of it, skepticism mostly, on whether the information on it was accurate, and also its longevity on the web, why would people want to access information from an encyclopedia that was essentially edited by anyone. Who knew!

How many years later, and now not only do I use it to quickly fill in my knowledge gaps, but wikipedia actually has become famous in its own right, with mentions in some movies. Amazing! Actually wikipedia is probably a case in point for web 2.0 and how the social revolution has evolved the Internet.

Anyway, I thought the wikis mentioned for this week were interesting and fun. I enjoyed Wookieepedia, I had fun looking up my fave characters. Also I just wanted to put it out there, but after I watched "Phantom Menace" I wished they had left the originals alone, I still have yet to watch the other two prequels, oh well.

After exploring other wikis, I keep thinking how wikis can be utilised in my library, and these are just some wikis I would love to create, of course this depends completely on time and skill level in creating wikis, however these are my rough ideas.

1. Procedures/Training Wiki - This is one that I would really love to develop, I will need to search for more examples though.
2. Readers Advisory Wiki ? I'm not sure whether to create one specific for the library or get staff to access the NSW Readers Advisory Working Group wiki
3. Computer Course wiki - resources particularly for those who have enrolled in the public Computer / Internet course at our library.

Well that's it for now, better to keep it small and somewhat possible to implement.

I'm off to see whether I can add/edit information about my suburb in Wikipedia, well that's if some else hasn't beaten me to it.

Had a chance to play around in the nswlearning2 wiki which was a lot of fun, was lucky enough to also add an new entry into the list rather than edit one previously set up. Had a look at wikipedia and they have quite a few rules when adding, editing and sourcing, am 'scared' to edit in that wiki, lest I make a mistake and ruin the whole entry.