This is the End

WOW, I actually did it, got all the way to the end (go me). Having started the web 2.0 program so late due o illness I thought I would never catch up. But I did, yeah and quite enjoyed doing it too. When I first heard about exercise I thought, Oh that will be easy as I had deluded myself into thinking that I knew enough about the Internet already. However I was happy to be proved wrong as most of the activities and web 2.0 technologies were new to me and also very interesting and I can see them being useful in the future.

My favorite thing was LibraryThing, I love this website and can happily spend hours on it. I love the social interaction with other people and how you can build up your profile making it more and more personal which then leads you to more aspects of the site and things you might like. My reserve list is already filling up with their reading suggestions. I think that the social interaction and how it adapts to you and gives you suggestions are all the best aspects of web 2.0 and the ones I am most keen to see incorporated into our library.

While the Image generator sites and YouTube are a lot of fun I also really enjoyed finding out about the more educational ones. I really liked the Rollyo technology and I think I will come back to my personal search engine a lot.

Many thanks to the Web 2.0 Admin team for their helpful and encouraging comments and everyone else who took time to comment.

I feel a great sense of accomplishment in having finished, however I think I will miss it a bit.

Thanks for everything

Lizzie.

More Social Networking

the power of Web 2.0 for social networking is immense and I think that if done properly libraries can use this tool to reach out to more people. This has to be done the right way as we don't want to be invading peoples space or adding things to the library just because they are the new thing. I agree with the article on social networking software that the use of profiles on places such as Myspace and Facebook can be great tools for encouraging library. However these need to be more than simple profiles to really encourage interaction. For example, her idea that these profiles should encourage two way communication with the patrons, especially suggestions and questions is a great idea and for us something like an expansion of the already existing AnyQuestions could be a very useful tool.

If these new technologies can bring new people into the library, they need to be utilised but it is very important to use them the right way to have a major effect.

Social networking

I was already a member of Facebook before I started web 2.o so this exercise was easy for me. However I am not on Bebo or Myspace (and do not ever plan to be) so I had a look around those sites. After this I have reconfirmed by belief that facebook is the best of these sites. Bebo and Myspace are more for younger people, but it is great if they can be used to encourage people to use the Library.

Facebook is a great tool for keeping in touch and recently it has enabled me to reconnect with friends I hadn't seen for about 7 years. This personal side of Facebook is great and I am very curious to see how libraries will come to use these sites in the future.

ebooks

Ebooks are fantastic and I was very happy to read all the articles on how they are becoming more and more available. I use ebooks all the time for research at university and it is great as it lets everyone have a change to read it and not just the crazy people who start their essays two months early. With ebooks everyone gets a turn and there are no recall wars.

I searched for Jane Eyre on Project Gutenburg and I was impressed by their range. It's great that you can also download audio versions which I plan to try out for myself. Once you have actually chosen a book however, I found the print size and style very unappealing. It would be great if in the future they could become more readable.

Podcasts

Like with blogs I couldn't believe how many podcasts there were out there, people create them about everything. I found the Podcast Pickle the easiest site to navigate as it had good lists of categories and but I thought there should have been better summaries of what the Podcast was about, the site Podnova was very good in this respect. I found some good movie review ones, such as Kendall Weaver's Top five. Nice and succinct movie reviews.

One of My favorite authors Diana Gabaldon regularly realises podcasts of news and other information on her website that I listen to. I think they are a great tool as they are capible of so much variety, as you can listen to them anywhere. They are great for lazy people and have that added leval of personality which is nice.

YouTube

Web 2.0 Winners

All these sites are so fantastic and I had fun exploring a few of them as one was not enough. I was really pleased to see how many I already knew about from doing this program, really getting up to date with what is happening on the web.

I had a look a the books category as that is what I am most interested in and had a look at all the sites. I chose to focus on VuFind and I was very impressed by what I found. I love the social interaction of this site, how you can leave comments and tags and I think the link to Amazon reviews is a fantastic idea. I look at these all the time an they have been very helpful.

I think it is great that this is the direction that libraries are going in and it can't come soon enough.

I also really loved Onesentence, such a great idea and I spent over an hour reading the funny and poignant stories. I can see this becoming a great procrastinating tool in the future.

Zoho

Another great tool, yeah. This site is a great idea and I can see it being very useful. In the past I have always typed a document than sent it as an attachment in an email when I wanted to use it at another location or send it to someone. I can see this being a lot quicker and easier and I look forward to trying it out some more.

I found the site fun and easy to use, all the formats are similar to Microsoft Word so that made it simple. I had great fun playing around with the Zoho Show, great lot of templates and clip art and the Writer is a great tool.

Rollyo

This excercise was quite fun and I can see it being very helpful. When you type something in to Google you get millions of hits and often ones that are not usefull at all, so it is great to have a tool to organise your searchs. I had some fun searching the qoutes and photos pages had a good laugh over my favorite Oscar Wilde and Jane Austen qoutes. None of hte books I searched for appeared in the other two search engines, maybe I was beening to vague.

I decided to create a search engine that could be useful in my art history studies. I get most of my information out of books but I still use websites to get good colour representations of paintings and often short summaries of paintings to get me thinking. I put lots of the official art gallery sites as I knew they are trustworthy and fulled with interesting facts as well as links to scholarly journals and more amateur sites that I still like. Rollyo is a great tool that I think I will come back to again.

Link to my Search Roll