Week 11: e-books

I wasn't clear about joining up to the World Ebook Fair site & paying $8.95 (US) or whatever....there was nothing there that really attracted me. I couldn't find any free downloads there as was suggested in the discovery exercise. The Australian site of the Gutenberg Project is much more interesting http://gutenberg.net.au/#ebookreaders It has a good overview write up on the ebook readers that you can get for portable reading rather than reading from your lap or desktop computer. Pretty pricey... I have a flyer that I picked up at last year's HLI's conference day from DA Information. They can sell you an iRex digital reader that is a bit bigger than A4 size for $1,149. I was also interested in reading on the Gutenberg site that you can become a proof-reader for the Project. They send you scanned pages to proofread because they can become distorted in the scanning process. There are strict guidelines on how you proofread, and another person surveys your work before the book goes online for everyone else to access.
I've just found the "parent" home site for the Gutenberg Project, which is a better place to go to than the World Ebook Fair site for totally free stuff (no $8.95 required). http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page I found some nursing books there written by Florence Nightingale.

Pheew...here is Mr Bean at last

Had to have the Edit Html tab activated in the create posts box. Then cut & pasted the embedded stuff on Youtube. I won't do the same for Chaser War on Everything's Crazy warehouse spruiker guy at the library. You can look up WOE videos yourself...there's a few of them.

Week 10: Glitches

Somehow my links to my embedded Youtube videos do not work ....found this at home and at work, so I'll have to have another go. I was pretty tired when I did them last night but not sure if that's good enough excuse. I notice that others of you managed to get the picture screen up for your videos rather than just a link....I'd like to know how you did that. Will go back to the drawing board but that may not be for a couple of days. OK, I've just found the Add video icon in the compose box here. I'll try using that later, but have to do some work right now. Have a good weekend everyone.
Right, I've also discovered that there's a Youtube gadget in "gadgets".....how hard could it be?
Plenty of options here for me to use.

Week 10: Youtube

Well, I've found a couple of funny library videos & posted their links. I haven't spent too much time in Youtube testing and searching out things and so I'm not really in a place to comment about its features. As usual it seems to be a case of getting used to each site's terminology e.g. their Community tab is about the folks using Youtube rather than the larger community out there. I'd like to have look at TeacherTube too, but it's time to go, ...I've got square eyes & need a good night's sleep.

Week 10: Podcasts...hear, hear!

I found some good, sensible sounding podcasts to do with surviving in libraries in one of the directory links in the homework and tried to get them downloaded into the Juice program that I downloaded, but without any success. I don't have many IT genes I'm afraid. Then I read what Roz had done & so I also went to the Odeo directory type site in search of a simpler solution. http://odeo.com/ There I found that I could directly embed a podcast straight into my blog by using the HTML gadget in the blog customize thingy. I chose a podcast called Peter Cundell & Kostya Iszyu thinking that I'd be in for a bit of garden biffo entertainment! That's when I discovered how the directory descriptions given these podcasts can be a bit misleading. It was actually an ABC conversation hour interview firstly with Peter Cundell and then with Kostya Tszyu...how disappointing....but the LIBRARY link is that Peter Cundell started out his career in Australia as a librarian!
I've learnt that RSS technology is also used to move audio files around...not just headings & text. I was looking for the RSS symbol on the directory page, because the homework said "add an RSS feed for a podcast to your blog reader"....lack of those genes again, it seems. At least now I'm pretty right with "embedding" without blushing.

Coming down the back straight...(though not galloping)

Congratulations to those of you who have finished your exercises...what you've discovered and written about is helping me get on with the last tasks. I'm also happy to see that other bloggers are continuing on and I hope that we all get there in time. Thank you Fiona for persisting with us "late-ies". I've been doing some work on the podcasts and will write up on it in due course. I've gained much more confidence to "have a go" at this web stuff that sometimes seems to have the assumption that you should be able to follow what it's all about...how hard could it be? I've found that it raises more questions and quirky twists than appears on the surface, but ultimately that just adds to the breadth of the learning and a feeling of accomplishment when it starts to make sense and I can identify an actual useful application for the tools. See you later...

Week 9: Rollyo

I've created a search engine called "Aussie recipe sites" in Rollyo containing only 3 sites and managed to get a search box for it up on my blog, but I did find that a challenging task. Anyway, the search engine works to an extent, but I get a lot of irrelevant hits. I searched for "banana cake" and was taken first to actual recipes, but then other hits included pages where the term "banana cake" was mentioned in other contexts, so I will have to refine my search strategy. The big problem seems to be that Rollyo doesn't offer an Advanced Search option whereby you can cut out a lot of the non targeted stuff. Maybe it has but I haven't found it yet.
I can see that at work I can put together Rollyo search engines for the various student groups we have tailored toward their subject specialities and post it onto our learning management system that is coming "soon". Recently a health librarian on our library listserve asked if any other librarians could refer her to good free websites to do with pathology & anatomy with illustrations (I think...I'm working from home & can't check work emails) and she got some responses that she compiled into a list that she shared with the rest of us. I'll have a look at it and maybe it could be the basis of a Rollyo search for our pathology students.

Week 9: Wikis - not as quick as the name makes out

The exploration of wikis has taken me some time . I wondered why as part of the homework we have not been required to start up a wiki, but as I've looked at them, they are a bit more technical than a blog. It seems that special wiki markup language is required when contributing for most of them, and I notice that YPL's wiki has changed into a blog! Does this mean that the wiki editing protocol is a bit too much for the average Jo Blow? Yet, Wikipedia seems to get plenty of input. I think a great use of wikis in the library environment is for knowledge management within the organisation...policy & procedures etc. and general knowledge sharing that would otherwise be stuck in some one's head. A good system of indexing or built-in search engine would make the wikis easier to use. A good, well used wiki is the ALIA "Summer reading club" where public librarians share ideas about program promotions of all sorts (like Library Week). Wikipedia's entry on wikis has very useful tables of comparison of the scores of wiki software providers...it seems to be a minefield with free software & paid for services available. As a tool I think the best application of a wiki is for collaborative works. There seems to be a variety of ways that they can be accessed ...entirely open or closed to just a few people who have the right to edit while other people have read-only access. I haven't had a go at making an entry in a wiki yet...some of them provide a "sandbox" where you can practice & play around with the markup language without fear of messing up anything important. Until I do some playing around in the sandbox I'm not sure if I will be enthusiastically embracing wikis as a tool. I would like to get one going for our family as a place for us to record family history & things that we remember from our childhoods based on subjects. That's a bit further down the track, I think. The spell checker kept on wanting me to change "wiki" to "Kiwi", but I think it's now given up.

Week 8: Delicious - and mostly tasteful.

As with some of the web.2 tools it's taken me awhile to get the point of Delicious. I've transferred my work Favourites to my Delicious account. My Favourites folders are quite well organised, so I wondered what I would gain from having tags etc. What I've worked out is:
1. At least my Favourites are now saved in another place. My work computer once crashed and for some reason my Favourites list wasn't backed up on the server, so I had to start all over again.
2. Sometimes I can't decide which folder is the best one to file an URL in ...a few could be applicable but it seems that in Explorer you can only save an URL once and not in multiple folders. This is where the tags are really useful in Delicious.
3. Delicious can be used like a filtered Google search. The websites that are included in Delicious are ones that other people think are worth visiting and therefore you can cut down on the amount of sites you have to wade through.
4. I have set up an RSS feed from a search I did on a genetic syndrome that I'm gathering information on, so this will alert me if other people having a like interest add a new site to their bookmarks.
5. I like the concept of bundling together tags on a website and I plan to organise this for my library clients when our new website at work gets up.
So this is something that I shall use, but the thought of going through all my Favourites and adding tags for each site is a little daunting. Still, using other people's tags as a basis will make it somewhat easier. Times have really changed since the strict rules of forming correct, hierarchical and consistent subject headings...now we can just use "cool" descriptors like "fun.stuff". How I will miss "Recreation - mental exercises".