Wiki - Discovery

Wiki's are intended to be quick and easy to create, edit and delete. This is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that the learning curve to produce is low, the time from thought to product is short. However the curses are more numerous.

1. Anyone can alter a post, which has resulted in vandalism of sites. I saw a request for email confirmation on just the few sites that I visited.

2. Quick and easy to do, doesn't mean that it will be a sustained and continually updated page. Many of the pages were either incomplete or outdated. Nothing had been added for a year or more.

3. The idea that everyone is going to contribute often means that no one does.

4. I think they may be useful for collaborating on projects with a tight time line where people need to communicate and update a paper quickly with a defined group of people. The idea of a wiki of book reviews was good, but it changed to having the book reviews attached to the cataloguing record. The small number of reviews in the wiki compared to the number of the books library means the chances of you finding a review would be very small indeed. I think it would be a project that might get some support for a while, but would be hard to create the will and support for a long term effort.

Library 2.0

Libraries are constantly changing and it will only continue. Our one constant is change. We have explored cooperative purchases, collections and cataloguing. The methods have changed from sending photocopies of catalogue cards to inputting data in Innovative's ContentPro for the sharing of Western Libraries special collections. The article by Tom Adam about Western winning III's ContestPro challenge highlights some our recent achievements.

New technologies will allow for new and different cooperative ventures. In the past the ventures were usually between libraries, then libraries and publishers, companies, in the future it may involve more of our patrons - both phycially in the library and the virtual ones!

The goal remains the same to serve all our patrons to the best of our ability.

Technorati

The variety of topics and the number of people who are viewing and reading the blogs is amazing. I did not have as much luck finding blogs of interest. The volume of blogs is huge and I think my interest level was limited for the amount of time it takes to find things.

Del.icio.us and Tagging

I found the exercise interesting on a lot of different levels. My first impression was that the topics and the categories were too broad to be of much use. In viewing the tags listed with each of the articles, again the tags were too broad. I think you would be successful more by luck than by design, unless you had arranged for a group of people to work on a set project.

I gained a slightly different view after reading "Social Media for Business - Who's Doing it Well & How" by Lidija Davis on Read Right Web . The grouping of people into categories and targeting your message is not new, however the desire and opportunity for people to interact is new. I expect it will be a gradual shift to exploring opportunities. The social media exist because a large number of people have a desire to interact and it is new. It assumes people have the time and desire to so.

The last line in the article I think would give someone pause for thought. "And her final tip? "Realize that you will have to give up the fallacy that you have control"".

Rollyo - discovery

I tried the program Rollyo which allows you to create your own search engines from your favourite URLs. I tried to use library catalogues and discovered that it really only wanted to search web pages not databases. It is a Google alternative.

After trying a few searches under the various Rollyo search options I found the resulting lists long and not very useful. The use of quotes to create a phrase did not change the search results. Since the search results were not useful I would not use Rollyo.

LibraryThing

I found that I could spend a lot of time with LibraryThing. It allows you to catalogue or keep a list of books that you have read - or even want to read. It was easy to use, however I found that adding titles by using Amazon.com took 11 minutes to load while load a title from the Library of Congress or one of the libraries from the list took just a few seconds. It was interesting that several University library catalogues are available to choose from but not UWO's. London Public Library's catalogue is also available. This is something that I might actually use.

Image Generators - Site to print Graph Paper

The The Generator Blog has many sites that produce images to try. The one I found interesting was incomputech was for printing graph paper. Besides the standard graph paper (useful for layout garden designs) it includes papers for calligraphy, music, accounting ledgers and various circles, triangles - even guides for writing Chinese characters!