For a wonderful lady

With love and gratitude....

Answer boards

I thought that WikiAnswers seemed a better place than Yahoo 7 Answers, if only because the questions had a bit more depth... but any question deserves an answer. I think it is very important that libraries get involved in answering questions, so that people remember that this is what we do. The difference in quality between the librarian's answers and other answers was interesting.

LibraryThing

I like LibraryThing- but I can't seem to work out how to get images of covers from LibraryThing into my blog as a side bar on the righthand side "Randomn books from my library"- I liked looking at these on AtticusMockingbird's blog and Bambino's Bloggerama. Help! There is something I don't understand..

Del.icio.us

I think the concept of social bookmarking is wonderful. I'm a packrat by nature, so my favourites list takes a lot of scrolling to get through, despite the fact that it is mostly in folders. This should make my life simpler- now if only someone could show me how to organise my stuff at home...that would be truly delicious.
webnewbie's delicious

I can also see that this would be very useful in the library. Just this week, I typed up and printed a handout list of sites for school students doing the CWA project on Mexico- a link to the library's delicious account would be a very handy thing on our web page, and might encourage more kids to use our page.

Video adventure

Video offers libraries a great tool for creativity and fun. It would be fun to have a DIY library video competition during the summer school holidays, with the entries posted to a wiki, maybe. A lot of kids seem to have phones and cameras with video, or we could let them use the library camera.

We could also make a video about how to use the online databases from home- and put it on the library website.

My favourite YouTube video was "Library pacman" from Swinburne. Here it is:

Wiki world

While I use Wikipedia a lot, and thought I had a rough idea how it worked, I had not realised how I might be able to use it to work collaboratively with my colleagues. Our regional library has 4 branches, each about 80 km apart, with few staff. We could use wikis to work collaboratively on
* creating a regional customer service training day for our casual staff
* sharing our storytime programs and planning new ones
* developing policies and procedures
*We could create a virtual book discussion group, starting with the staff and then inviting the customers.

How exciting!

RSS Feeds

Well, it has certainly taken me a while to get back to this- I initially found the concept of RSS feeds confusing and there is nothing like confusion to aid and abet procrastination. I like the idea of all the useful blogs being collected in one place. I chose the obvious ones- Helene Blowers blog (isn't it attractively presented!), the Powerhouse photo blog, the NSW Readers Advisory blog, ABS for librarians, and just for fun, the brand-new Manchester National Year of reading blog. It seems that Manchester is launching the National Year of Reading on Saturday 26th April, and this is what their website http://www.manchesterreads.org.uk/ had to say about this event:
The National Year of Reading is a year-long celebration of reading in ALL its forms. It aims to help build a greater national passion for reading in England - for children, adults and families.
In Manchester, there will be events and projects to do with reading happening all over the city, throughout the year - and this will be the place to find out about them!!
National Year of Reading will launch on Saturday 26th April with National Join-a-Library Day.
Library staff will be out and about all over the city - making you an offer you can't refuse - a FREE library card, your own Welcome Pack, and the chance to have your name entered for a prize draw.

Sounds like fun, doesn't it? The idea of the blog is that people will start their own blogs as reading diaries and connect via the main blog, talking about reading and the events in the Year. So it will be interesting to watch this blog grow.

The main point of RSS for me will be to save time, and keep up with information. Having the RSS feed on your library's blog would be an extra service you could offer time-poor customers.