16. Read a few perspectives on Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and the future of libraries and blog your thoughts.
I read all the listed articles from the OCLC newsletter and really felt like so much of the content was more applicable to public libraries or high school libraries than my elementary school library. But I definitely saw the point: libraries can't keep doing things the old way and expect to remain relevant to our patrons. I liked what Dr. Wendy Schultz said in To a temporary place in time...: "create a global, and globally accessible, catalog; invite readers to tag and comment." And actually, John J. Riemer said the same thing in To better bibliographic services: "Libraries should welcome the submission of reviews, assignment of keywords (“tagging”)..." Wouldn't that just make teacher's lives so much easier, if they could tag things in the library catalog with their own comments about what units they used things for? As it is, I can create bibliographies with that information (and I'm sure I could train the teachers to do it themselves, which of course plays into the issue of user education brought up by Rick Anderson in Away from the “icebergs”) but just think if patrons could easily do those tasks themselves, in a way that made things more useful and accessible to them.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Week 8, Thing 15: Technorati
15. Explore Technorati and learn how tags work with blog posts.
Well, I played around with Technorati but I really don't think it's anything I'd use for my work in an elementary school library. I might occasionally find a reason to search for blogs on a specific topic, but off the top of my head I can't think of any. I clicked around and checked out the photos and the tag clouds and all that stuff, but I just couldn't work up any real enthusiasm for it. I'm not sure if it was the fact that I couldn't foresee a use for it or that I wasn't really keen on the look of the pages, or both.
To test out the searching, I decided to look for something not related to school and see what came up if I searched both Technorati and Google Blogs. I figured I'd check out knitting blogs to see if I could find an interesting pattern that I might want to try out. I'm only an occasional knitter but I have noticed in the past that a lot of folks seem to blog about what they have been knitting and they share photos of finished projects as well as patterns (for free -- woo hoo!) For both knitting and one other topic I searched, I found some interesting things and did about as well on the Google Blogs search as the Technorati one. And when I found something I wanted to keep track of, well I tagged it in Del.icio.us, of course.
As suggested, I tried the advanced search and put the web address of my blog in the URL search box. No results. But I tried the URL for Vermont's 23 Things blog and found that there are 19 "blog reactions" or blogs that link to it. I poked around a few of those blogs and read a few things and ended up finding some very entertaining videos promoting National Library Week.
I didn't bother to "claim my blog" on Technorati. I mean, who is really going to go looking for it, other than people who already have access to the link from the participant page for Vermont's 23 Things? (And maybe my daughter, who can stalk my blog easily now that I've showed her how to use RSS feeds.)
Well, I played around with Technorati but I really don't think it's anything I'd use for my work in an elementary school library. I might occasionally find a reason to search for blogs on a specific topic, but off the top of my head I can't think of any. I clicked around and checked out the photos and the tag clouds and all that stuff, but I just couldn't work up any real enthusiasm for it. I'm not sure if it was the fact that I couldn't foresee a use for it or that I wasn't really keen on the look of the pages, or both.
To test out the searching, I decided to look for something not related to school and see what came up if I searched both Technorati and Google Blogs. I figured I'd check out knitting blogs to see if I could find an interesting pattern that I might want to try out. I'm only an occasional knitter but I have noticed in the past that a lot of folks seem to blog about what they have been knitting and they share photos of finished projects as well as patterns (for free -- woo hoo!) For both knitting and one other topic I searched, I found some interesting things and did about as well on the Google Blogs search as the Technorati one. And when I found something I wanted to keep track of, well I tagged it in Del.icio.us, of course.
As suggested, I tried the advanced search and put the web address of my blog in the URL search box. No results. But I tried the URL for Vermont's 23 Things blog and found that there are 19 "blog reactions" or blogs that link to it. I poked around a few of those blogs and read a few things and ended up finding some very entertaining videos promoting National Library Week.
I didn't bother to "claim my blog" on Technorati. I mean, who is really going to go looking for it, other than people who already have access to the link from the participant page for Vermont's 23 Things? (And maybe my daughter, who can stalk my blog easily now that I've showed her how to use RSS feeds.)
Week 8, Thing 14: tagging & Del.icio.us
14. Learn about tagging and discover Del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site).
OK, first of all, I just now realized, after having looked at it and clicked on it many times, that the title of this on the main assignment page said "social bookmaking" -- I wonder if Mara has some numbers racket going on that she hasn't told us about!
On to the actual assignment: I watched the Common Craft video and then the 8-minute tutorial, although I have to admit, I didn't really absorb everything in the tutorial. Some of it I felt would make more sense to me after I had actually tried using Del.icio.us for a while. It's hard to understand how some of the features and functions will apply to your own use if you haven't even tried the basics yet. Same thing with reading some of the articles. They will probably be more helpful to me after I have dabbled a bit. So I went ahead and set up an account, then added some of my personal bookmarks. I added the buttons for my browser, which really do make adding bookmarks a lot easier.
I did as suggested and tried checking out some of the tags other people have used for a topic I'm interested in. Based on how others had tagged the same sites I did, I ended up editing my list of tags for some sites, adding new ones and even including a singular form in addition to a plural form of the tag, or vice versa. (This can help you to see more things others have tagged, since there is no convention for singular/plural forms in a folksonomy.) Then I tried the same search in Google and came up with lots more hits but not really any more useful sites on the topic. Of course, I also picked a fairly narrow topic that's probably not of interest to as wide an audience as some,which helped limit the results to something somewhat manageable!
I can see how libraries, particularly school libraries, could use social bookmarking sites for research assistance, with teachers and/or librarians creating lists of sources to get students started on a project. And as a person who uses multiple computers, it makes sense to create bookmarks that can be accessed from any of them. I decided it would probably make even more sense for me to have 2 separate Del.icio.us accounts: one for personal stuff, another for strictly school-related things. Then I won't have to keep track of which tags would pull up things colleagues would want to see and which ones might bring up links that would be fairly useless in a school setting.
I may decide later to check out Furl, as suggested by Heather in her comment, but I found that I couldn't get much of a look at it without registering first and just wasn't ready to commit to that yet!
OK, first of all, I just now realized, after having looked at it and clicked on it many times, that the title of this on the main assignment page said "social bookmaking" -- I wonder if Mara has some numbers racket going on that she hasn't told us about!
On to the actual assignment: I watched the Common Craft video and then the 8-minute tutorial, although I have to admit, I didn't really absorb everything in the tutorial. Some of it I felt would make more sense to me after I had actually tried using Del.icio.us for a while. It's hard to understand how some of the features and functions will apply to your own use if you haven't even tried the basics yet. Same thing with reading some of the articles. They will probably be more helpful to me after I have dabbled a bit. So I went ahead and set up an account, then added some of my personal bookmarks. I added the buttons for my browser, which really do make adding bookmarks a lot easier.
I did as suggested and tried checking out some of the tags other people have used for a topic I'm interested in. Based on how others had tagged the same sites I did, I ended up editing my list of tags for some sites, adding new ones and even including a singular form in addition to a plural form of the tag, or vice versa. (This can help you to see more things others have tagged, since there is no convention for singular/plural forms in a folksonomy.) Then I tried the same search in Google and came up with lots more hits but not really any more useful sites on the topic. Of course, I also picked a fairly narrow topic that's probably not of interest to as wide an audience as some,which helped limit the results to something somewhat manageable!
I can see how libraries, particularly school libraries, could use social bookmarking sites for research assistance, with teachers and/or librarians creating lists of sources to get students started on a project. And as a person who uses multiple computers, it makes sense to create bookmarks that can be accessed from any of them. I decided it would probably make even more sense for me to have 2 separate Del.icio.us accounts: one for personal stuff, another for strictly school-related things. Then I won't have to keep track of which tags would pull up things colleagues would want to see and which ones might bring up links that would be fairly useless in a school setting.
I may decide later to check out Furl, as suggested by Heather in her comment, but I found that I couldn't get much of a look at it without registering first and just wasn't ready to commit to that yet!
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