Saturday, March 6, 2010

Week 6 - Starting with Del.icio.us

I haven't yet been able to discover the origin of the name of the website, but it is a very useful tool and I've only just begun to add my bookmarks. Great for research - enabling you to have easy access to multiple sources/sites, whether from your own bookmarks or others, thanks to the shared tags.

Joining Technorati wasn't a whole lot of fun, since it wasn't clear how to claim my blog without using a paid service. The links on our learning programme seem to need updating; "claim" for example, didn't work. I see the benefit of using Technorati, having access to multiple blogs via tags, but the list is then laden with an incredible amount of random blog entries which aren't necessarily relevant or helpful. Too much to wade through. After these exercises I did go back to tag my blog entries.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading all of the articles and found them inspiring and a "call-to-action." I already see evidence at ACL of quite a few of the recommendations regarding embracing Web 2.0 tools. And there's room for much, more more. I enjoyed imagining the following:
  1. Emphasis on asking the right questions: How best to use the new technologies to create a useful service for putting users together with the information and the experience that they seek? Creating a "living, breathing technology plan," which incorporates creating a "user-centric" service.
  2. Coordinating multi-institutional metadata creation & collaborations/consortiums, beyond the public library sector to include universities & other storehouses of knowledge.
  3. "Users add value" - Patron participation on a wider scale, adopting features of Amazon & Google into the library services: submission of reviews and scholarly commentary, list sharing, tagging.
  4. And when all is said and done, and while I thoroughly embrace the technological changes and advances, I adore the idea of the "library spa", a WiFree space - since everything will potentially be accessible anywhere online. I will enjoy immensely having the library serve as a retreat once again!

1 comment:

  1. Well done! Though these technologies are constantly changing, and can at times be frustrating, It's good to see their benefits and relevance to your role! Library spa roll on! :-)

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