Wikis

I have to say, I use Wikipedia quite a lot. I'm not going to reference it in an essay, and I'm not going to provide it as a source for a student who comes to the reference desk - but if I want to know about something in a nutshell, Wikipedia is the first place I turn.

It is great for local information, like about places or buildings. Great for the finer points of philosophical ideas - I have been using it a lot lately when I git a new idea in Heidegger - just to get the gist. And it is great for popular culture references - some of my favourite Wikipedia articles are about the use of Chinese Language in the Science Fiction show Firefly and the history of brothels and in the Wild West town of Deadwood, and how the television show by the same name differs from the actual history of the town.

There are also beautiful gems of writing. One of my favourite pieces of writing ever comes from a Wikipedia article: "Although there are still large areas incapable of sustaining regrowth due to the acute slopes and lack of soil formation, the rate of vegetation recovery will render the mythologies arising from the appearance as only partial truths in time.".

Someone at my husband's work was looking up something about American History on Wikipedia and came across an article that was basically a history of America from the Mormon perspective. Not at all factual, it disappeared within seconds, and someone else came along and flagged it. Luckily before it disappeared, she managed to print it. In some way preserving a cultural artefact that only lasted a moment.

So it is reassuring to know that there is quality control of sorts in such a collaborative endeavor. But I also find Ellen's comment (on the reference list, or maybe a working group meeting) that only a small proportion of internet users actually participate in this sort of collaborative work.

I belong to several wikis that are used for internal communications purposes. Better than a group email, better than a conference call, they allow you to keep a record, revise, track changes etc etc.

Will have to do the rest of this post later.

RSS feeds changed my life

I feel very guilty that I am very far behind with my Learning 2.0. Not so much because I am intimidated by the technology, probably more because I am too busy using it.

I have been very very busy at work, and keep meaning to do my 2.0 assignments at home in the evening - but instead find myself uploading photos to flickr, adding links to delicious, reading all the craft blogs I have on bloglines, talking with my friends on facebook etc etc. I'm using it all, but neglecting to make the time to talk about how it relates to libraries.

I love my bloglines account. I started it to keep track of all the interesting library 2.0 blogs out there, but soon clodded it up with craft and design blogs, which send me sweet little capsules of whimsy to inspire and motivate me to get home and start sewing/or clean the house!

When I do use bloglines as a professional development tool, I find that I use it in tandem with delicious, tagging things of interest as they come up, organising them to refer back to later.

This is the thing that I have always found annoying about blogs - the fact that the information is fleeting, a new blog post always comes and then you forget all the great ones that have come before. Using Delicious AND an RSS Feeder has finally given me a way to organise and store all the interesting blog entries I come across. Bloglines has a feature for saving posts as well, but it only lets you save in folders - you can't tag posts - so it's not very useful.

We have created a googlereader feed for Readers Advisory Blogs on the NSW Readers Advisory Blog - which is great. I think that Libraries could use feeds like this on their website to promote their blogs, especially if they have several like Manly!

Hint - don't sign up to a feed on bloglines if you are never going to read it - it will completely clog up your reader and just become a nuisance. Be discerning and only link the feeds that you actually read (or would like to read) daily!

Week 3

Looking around Flickr and exploring the photos on Mosman's flickr page (you do a great job, Mosman!), I really like the way that Mosman shares its local history photos on Flickr and would like to try something similar at my library.

I will probably need to explore the potential copyright issues and write down some guidelines first, but I think the bottom-up approach at Flickr might be easier than trying to create a stand along Local History image database - and Flickr has the added benefit of being connected to a ready-made and ever growing community (some members of which probably live in this local government area and might be interested in local history photographs but never visit the library!).

On a personal note - I do like the serindipitous nature of online communities, especially Flickr.

I spent my childhood summers in a small valley on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand. The community at the mouth of this valley is called Cronadun, but it is far from a holiday destination! One summer the local policeman walked up to our holiday house (a run down ex-miners cottage in the middle of a couple of paddocks) and said hi, simply because he had been searching earlier in the year online for Cronadun (just for curiosities sake, to see what would come up) and came across my personal blog, which mentioned our holidays there and my Mum's flickr page, which had some beautiful photos of the valley. We made a new friend, because a stranger looked up something that he cared about, found some other people who cared about it too - and then realised that they lived next door - in the middle of nowhere!



I imagine that occasionally people might, just out of interest, search for things online (or on flickr) that are in our Local History collection - and if we put them out there, so that they are easy to find, maybe more people will find them (and, by extension, find us!).

Readers Advisory suggestion for today's exercise: Always Coming Home by Ursula K Le Guin, because reading this book set in a hummocky valley in Northern California, during the summer I was 15 (in my hummocky valley in New Zealand), helped me shape my landscape values.

Week 2

Last week ran away from me and I find myself not actually writing my second (and first official) blog post until now.

I'm loving the Learning 2.0 program so far, but what I am loving most is how much people I work with are talking about it, how much it is raising awareness of opportunities to integrate online interaction into what we already do. What I am learning (and what the people around me seem to be learning) is that there are implications beyond this Learning program for libraries that we are just starting to see.

I am hoping to learn through the program exactly how Web 2.0 ready my library is. I can see how we could use a lot of the tools that Web 2.0 offers to connect with library customers and our community, but what I don't actually know is how capable our set up is.

I think it will take a bit of strategic planning - a vision for the best ways that we can use this technology to connect with our particular community, and than an action plan for how we can make this happen.

Things that I think would work for our community include:

A library flickr page that promotes our library activities and programs, but that also celebrates the local community, its cultures and a sense of place.

workshops for the local community. I would love to run a flickr workshop, but would also love to team up with an organisation like ICE (Information and Cultural Exchange) to run a workshop for the young afghan community on blogging (now that Blogger lets you blog in Persian!)

A community events/cultural events blog with a library focus. The library I work for is a community hub, and I think it would be great to be able to promote all the wonderful activities and programs that other organisations run, as well as the library offerings. I think that this approach might attract a wider readership than just a straight library blog.

That's all my thoughts for now.

Readers Advisory suggestion for this week: Bellwether by Connie Willis (because it has some nice library moments and is all about trends and fads).

Week 1

This blog is my learning log for the NSW public libraries Learning 2.0 program. Each week I will be commenting on the exercises that I do, what I have learned from them and how I can see the implications for libraries.

The first week's exercise was to watch two videos on Web 2.0.

The first, Mike Wesch's The Machine is [Using] Us video, blows my mind every time I watch it. I like the ethnographic approach - emersing yourself in the culture that you are studying. Whenever I discuss Web 2.0 with those who doubt its effectiveness in the library world, I can't help but think about Wesch's approach. How can we understand the relevance of new technology and new social behaviour unless we are ourselves familiar with it?

I love that he says in the video that we will have to rethink copyright, privacy, intellectual property, governance etc, but is not negative about this. One of the reasons that I find Web 2.0 exciting is that in a way it makes the internet utopian, a permissive space that allows all people to contribute equally, to free up information and create the beginnings of a new society. What we do on the internet will change society and the way we live our lives, but we have the power and the ability to contribute to those changes.

The second video contained Stephen Fry talking about Web 2.0 and the implications for culture and entertainment. I would have liked to hear a bit more about tagging and the organisational aspect of Web 2.0 content in the Stephen Fry video, because this is where we as the users really have power to make the content that is available relevant and useful, but realise that he was talking about another aspect of the phenomenon.

Next week I will talk about what I hope to get out of this training.

Readers Advisory suggestion for todays exercise: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.