Week 3 - Social Networking

This was an interesting week. Like the wikis, I think that these networking tools could certainly be used to facilitate and organize group and committee work. I don't see our library having a facebook or myspace page any time really soon, but as time goes on and this develops as a social trend, who knows? If your clientele is using facebook or myspace, by all means try it. I thought the Denver Public Library and & Brooklyn College myspace pages were great.

I have 2 teenage daughters. One is a college freshman and she seemed to be thrilled that I had signed up for facebook. She told me she prefers using facebook over email. It is definitely an easy way for students to communicate with each other. My younger daughter was less pleased that I was present on facebook (surely I was just there to invade her privacy).

I'm not sure at this point that our patrons really need for us to communicate with them through these channels, but I am glad to know something about the trend and technology.

week 2

It seems to me that a wiki is best for documenting projects or creating some kind of group-authored document. A blog is essentially a web page that visitors can add comments to. I think a wiki would be great for drafting and policies and procedures manual or documenting a specific group project. A blog could be used more to convey information, but in an interactive way. My niece is getting married and the couple is using a blog to communicate information to friends and family, share pictures, travel plans, etc. It seems to me that in a library context, wikis might be more internal documents, while blogs might be more useful to communicate with patrons.

Finishing week 1

As week 2 begins, I am finishing up the steps outlined for week 1. Wow, I had a lot more in my Google Reader account this morning! But I did pick up several interesting things. I think I will be keeping some of the new feeds in my subscription list.

My feed from pubmed worked just fine and I added one this morning for the current issue contents of NEJM. I wanted to do this at work since we are recognized by ip address, but I suppose this wouldn't have made a difference so far as just setting up the RSS feed.

I'll continue playing with this ... I'm looking forward to getting started on the wikis content.

Web 2.0 class - week 1

I have used rss feeds in a limited way for my own current awareness and I think it is a very useful way of getting news. I subscribe to a few medical librarianship blogs and for this assignment I've added some others that are more general, but still library-oriented. I find the reader (google reader is what I've used) to be less time consuming than keeping up with listservs, etc., although I use both. I think the key is to be very selective and monitor your subscriptions. I have deleted a few that I didn't think were that useful to me, after all.

I can see applications for RSS in providing sdi to patrons. I still need to set up my journal toc feeds since I want to do it from my work computer and I am at home today. But I would think we might be able to use this technology to replace our old paper-based tables-of-contents service. We discontinued that service because of the amount of photocopying involved, but we do have some patrons who have said they miss having it. I look forward to experimenting and will see if we might want to re-institute that service using rss. I'm enjoying this course, though I've waited until the end of the week to do my exercises and add this post. I will continue tomorrow! Thanks

Hello!

A new blog! Actually, I did this once before using the other blogging tool mentioned, but it has been quite a while. At the time I was looking for a way to have a web page for the library that anyone could get to as opposed to the rather limited page we are able to have on the intranet. I didn't really pursue this because I felt there might be some objections from IS. I don't know where this would fit into the policies and feel they probably would not approve. So the blog really has to be more of a personal nature. That's the way I will look at this, but I am trying to learn more so that I can enhance communication with our community of library users. My first experience using blogs was a few years back when my daughters teachers starting using them to communicate homework assignments, etc.