New website

I haven’t posted in awhile because I’ve been working hard trying to finish up the new Distance Learning eLibrary website before classes start.  If anyone has any constructive criticism, I’d love to hear it.  I did manage to incorporate some Web 2.0 technology into it though.  Instead of creating a page listing recommended search engines and websites, I created a Kirkwood Library account on del.ici.ous.com.  I distributed the username and password to my fellow Kirkwood librarians, so now we can all modify the list without having to change the website itself.  Check it out, see what you think.  If you like it, del.ici.ous is free and super easy to use, especially if you install the toolbar addon for Firefox.

Flickr

Ahhh…Flickr…

I’ve experimented with it in the past, but got frustrated by the amount of time it took to upload the photos and the limit on the number of photos that I could upload using my free account.  At the time I was trying to upload the photos from my wedding (all 1000 of them) so I got frustrated and quit.

I think I might try it again, especially now that I have discovered that Walgreen’s (and Wal-Mart and probably many others) allow you to print digital photos on demand.  In fact, last night, I had one of my wedding photos printed as an 8×10 and picked it up 2 hours later at Walgreen’s for only $3.  I like the idea that my friends and family can find a photo they want on my flickr page and then order a print online and pick it up in the store the same day.  Hooray for technology!

This is a photo I found on Flickr that combines my two great loves: libraries and Harry Potter.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bom_mot/199087876/

Wikis…continued

I can understand why many teachers/faculty “ban” Wikipedia as a source for student research but I don’t agree with it.  Wikipedia can be a very valuable source for background research and Wikipedia references often provide students with a starting point to begin their research.  Wikipedia is much easier to keep up-to-date than any other encyclopedia, book or journal article.  I like to think of Wikipedia articles as subject guides with an easy to read introduction.  If I were a professor, I would remind students that the information on Wikipedia is not reliable and needs to be confirmed through another source and leave it at that.

For the Thing # 4 module, I edited the All Together Now wiki.

Wikis

Whenever you have a group of people, (small or large) and you all want to be able to view AND edit information on a website, wikis are a great idea.  I experimented a little bit with wikis for my Information Literacy class, my first semester in library school.  We used the wiki to review resources we had used in our research projects.  I think wikis have great applications to the library world, especially for resource guides and reviews.  In fact, my employer is maintaining a “What we’re reading” blog that might be better organized as a wiki.  I browsed through the recommended wikis for the “All together now” module and some seem better than others.  Mostly, I have a problem with the lack of organization.  I think every wiki needs to have a table of contents type listing to help users find subsequent pages.  While browsing I found a wiki that lists some of the librarian blogs called LISWiki, so if you are looking for librarian blogs, check there.

My Favorite Podcasts!

Here’s a list of my favorite podcasts…so far.  I hope to update the list as I discover more library related posts.  If any of you have recommendations for either podcast directories or library related podcasts, please leave a comment.

NPR: Book Tour
NPR: Books
NPR: Fresh Air
NPR: Movies
NPR: Music
NPR: Talk of the Nation
NPR: Technology

Podcasts

As a library student at the University of Iowa, I took an amazingly helpful class, “User Education: Multimedia”.  As part of this class I learned how to create my own podcasts using Audacity.  For some reason (lack of time, most likely) I did not explore existing podcasts at the time.  So this is my opportunity.  I used the  selected links for podcast directories, but became overwhelmed quickly with all the choices, so I subscribed to a few NPR podcasts, just to get started.

I have a Mac at home, so I’m excited to get home and try using GarageBand to create a new podcast of my own.  I’m tingling with anticipation thinking about all the library applications for podcasts.  Go go book reviews!!!

RSS Feeds

For at least a year now, I have been using Google Reader as my RSS reader.  I have not experimented with other feed readers, mostly because I have been so satisfied Google Reader.  Since I already use iGoogle and the Google toolbar, its really easy to access my reader from anywhere.  In particular, I like to consolidate my feeds into category folders like “Fun Stuff”, “Library Stuff”, “News”, and “Friends & Family” so I can read posts from several different feeds in the same window.  Using a feed reader has been critical to my efforts to keep up with new information in my field.  Does anyone have any librarian blogs that you would like to recommend? or recommendations for other feed readers?  If so, please leave a comment.