Week #7 - PB Wiki

This exercise was pretty fun. There was a moment where I was wondering why you would want to create a sandbox wiki but then I remembered those Friendship Books we used to write in Intermediate... I still remember agonising over who to put as my MOST FAVOURITE CRUSH!!! (Jonathan Brandis from SeaQuest DSV if you're curious..) And I see the similarity in the sandbox wiki :D

So I added my blog to the list of favourite blogs, numbers and holiday places and discovered that eeevery little change is tracked. And emailed to subscribers. It's a lot easier to use than I thought it would be though. My experience with the wiki we used for Library School made me a little jaded - I assumed that wikis would be a little hard for newbies to find their way around as our one was pretty barren and not so user-friendly. This one is much easier though, and the links to creating new pages, comments and files are nicely obvious. And I like the colour scheme :D

Week #7 - Wikis

The St. Joseph County Public Library wiki is amazingly detailed. I really like how you can track changes and to the wiki although there aren't as many nifty screen names on the SJCPL wiki as Wikipedia.. It's not really about the wiki, but their Ask a Librarian page is fantastic - you can contact the librarians by email, phone, in person, or Instant Messenger! So cool! Although it took me a long time to realise that 'asksjcpl' was not just random text but rather 'ask st joseph county public library'...

I liked the idea of this Web 2.0 programme from the very beginning - it's such a good opportunity for everyone to get involved and help each other out with the tasks as well as making us more accessible to our patrons. But I've discovered a very lovely side effect. I heart libraries. More than ever. It's so great to see all of these examples of other libraries jumping on the bandwagon, leading the charge, upping the ante, mixing the metaphors...

Even Library School is getting jiggy with it. Our class last semester on Digital Publishing had a course blog and wiki. And our wiley profession ensured that we learn how to use the wiki by making us post our presentation topic there. Not that I think any of my Dear Readers will follow this link, but my topic was Google Book Search. It was pretty cool to track the changes as I was posting my entry - and reassuring to see that someone else presenting on the same day was also editing their page at midnight...

Week #6 - Library 2.0

We covered a lot of the 2.0 technologies in one of my Library School papers last semester, so most of this course has been relatively familiar to me, but I had an interesting experience yesterday. We had to visit the Philson Library and search for the answers to a list of medical reference queries for my Health Information class using the textbooks available at the library...

Now, until then, I would probably have added a little bit more icy coldness in support fo the "just in case" iceberg mentioned in the first article. It just seemed so wrong not to have a physical collection as well as a digital one. But wow. Those anatomy textbooks are SO UNWEILDY and horribly heavy and replaced every couple of years with new editions. I actually found my fingers twitching as I trying to hit 'cntrl + f' while searching one page for the phrase 'arteria labialis superior' in the ginormous Gray's Anatomy.

I am now firmly of the opinion that every reference text should be digital :D

Week #6 - Technorati

11,672 results for the 'Library 2.0' search in Technorati. Heh. I wonder how many ACL 2.0 bloggers have posted that. Poor acl elgar blogger, you must get so tired of reading the same things oooover and oooover again.

Oh wow! But they have little graphs with how many mentions by day there are for your search term! That's so cool! People went crazy around Halloween... Teehee and you can even post the chart. Yoink!

English posts that contain Library 2.0 per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Aaaaaand

English posts that contain Julia per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

There were some pretty strange choices for most popular blogs, searches and tags. Ron Paul? Eh? The tags wouldn't really work if everyone's not consistent though. Our library for example could be Auckland_City_Library, aucklandcitylibrary, ACL, Auckland_City_Libraries or aucklandcitylibraries... or are we Auckland Central Library... *throws up hands* too many! I wasn't able to find this 'Blog Directory' mentioned in the instructions for this week either. I'm assuming it's somewhere horribly obvious, but for the life of me I can't find it :(

Week #6 - del.icio.us

The PLCMCL2 page on del.icio.us confused me so I thought I'd create my own del.icio.us account but was stymied by the 'install these icons into your toolbar now' bit. The site is more dogged than a car salesman though, so despite only completing two of the registration steps I was emailed the link to confirm my account. It takes a while to manually add websites, but I'm not sure that I really want to add another couple of icons to my already cluttered toolbars at home though, so I may leave it as it is.

My great list of three websites: http://del.icio.us/superslyceily

I loved how you can search for tags by just entering them in the box at the top though and *insert geekyweird moment here* I don't quite know how to explain it, but it's like entering a message in Millennium and seeing it appear in the screen behind you as you write... you enter it in the box, and weee! there it is in the url... *end geekyweird moment*

Ahem. But yes, I also like their colour coding system. I've yet to come across something dark red though...

It's a pretty neat system, but I rely on changing computers/losing all data in crashes to cull my list of favourites. Having to start again makes me choose what I really want to use... and unless I'm supremely bored, that's the only time the favourites list gets tidied. An online version... that would never die... It would be tagged ANARCHY.

Unless you could sort by most frequently used...

Week #5 - Rollyo

I really liked this one. They were really pushing creating Rollyos so that you would be able to search 'sites you trusted', but I liked it more for the fact that it's combining so many sites in one. I created a Rollyo for World of Warcraft sites, but I might create one for my sister too - she's crazy about the NFL at the moment and checks quite a few different websites pretty regularly.


I had a bit of difficulty creating the account (I managed to create the Rollyo before creating an account so I ended up with two of the same Rollyo..) and it took me a while to workout just where to go to add other sites to my search list once it was made. And it weirds me out that they don't have a 'save changes' button when you're editing your Rollyos though. Switching pages and just having faith that it will be updated is so *twitch* uncomfortable.

I've added the wee rollyo search box to my blog though. *pets it proudly*

Week #5 - LibraryThing

I've already got an account at Goodreads so I don't think I will use LibraryThing as well. They seem pretty similar though - you can create, export, sort, message, set up RSS feeds, create widgets and catalogue to your heart's content. LibraryThing is maaarginally prettier, both were very user friendly and not too cluttered, but LibraryThing loses for having an error message up when I was trying to add books to my catalogue... And for some reason it's taking a lot longer to add items to the catalogue than it does in Goodreads although they both search through Amazon.com

Here is my mini catalogue though: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/supersly