Nicole's Weblog

Social bookmarking and tagging

nicoleack — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:30:55 +0000

I’ve set up an account with delicious and find the idea of accessing ‘my’ websites from any PC very useful. I’m trying to organise these links using tags and find this difficult. In typical librarian manner I’d prefer a hierarchical order, ie folders and subfolders. On the other hand, being able to create my own set of ‘controlled’ vocabulary (even if only I control it…) is rather interesting.
I can see how delicious could be a very useful service within the library – offering a selection of relevant links to free resources to a particular library user group. Although, what’s the difference of having them on the library website? I guess it’s easier to maintain…
I haven’t set up an account with flickr although I’m a very keen photographer. I’m already with another online provider – snapfish. I can’t tag the photographs there but can arrange albums in neat chronological order Below are a few of my photographs… I was eager to try inserting them in a blog post. I like the advanced features of adding borders etc.

RSS

nicoleack — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:07:23 +0000

I’m really glad I’m doing this Learning 2.0 course as it’s encouraging me to try out a few things I’ve wondered about for a while. RSS is one of them. I had a rough idea what it is but never actually investigated any further, not to mention set some feeds up. I’ve now created an account with Google Reader and fear that it’s addictive. Although I understand that it’s a tool to organise news in a time efficient manner I worry that I’ll spend too much time keeping up-to-date with things. I even subscribed to our Library’s RSS feed…

Wikis

nicoleack — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:11:36 +0000

We covered wikis last week. This is another one of the web2.0 tools that I have only had limited experience of. Of course, wikipedia was known to me as a reader and it’s quite prominent in librarians’ discussion regarding the reliability of information found on it. Can we trust information that just anybody puts on it? Well, I won’t enter this discussion just now… Just this much – a quote from wikipedia: ”As of today, there are 2,488,610 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles [...]“. Worrying, I find.
But not all wikis are as influential.
I’m beginning to see how it could be useful to share the editing of content in a work environment, let’s say for example a FAQ page for staff working at the enquiry desk. Personally I can see the potential of wikis to share my photographs with friends and family. But, before you start looking, I haven’t done so yet…

A new page!

nicoleack — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:44:07 +0000

I’ve created a new page – have a look at ‘Links’ – not too much contents yet but it’s about creating the page not what’s on it… We all have to start somewhere.

My blog post on blogs

nicoleack — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:04:35 +0000

Blogging is a very new activity to me. I’ve never felt the need for a personal blog and, until now at least, didn’t see the usefulness of blogs in libraries.
The vast amount of blogs out there brings with it the difficulty in identifying useful/interesting/up-to-date blogs. I had given up before I properly started. To hear about the existense of blog search engines was news to me. It might encourage me to have another look… maybe.
Blogs in libraries may be useful to meet the needs of some of our users. However, I still see the problem in duplicating information – websites, newsletters, wikis, intranets and blogs. Does anybody know about a study covering the usefulness, perception etc of library blogs?
I’m currently involved in a blog for our NHS users and finally I can see how library blogs can be useful – reaching out to a specific user group by summarizing particular services offered to them.
I regard myself as being rather sceptical of blogs, personal as well as work specific ones. But I’m warming to the idea.

My first blog post

nicoleack — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:45:46 +0000

This is my first blog post.