Curtain Call!

I have to admit that I've had lots of fun completing the course. Like Astrosloth, I liked it how you could work at your own pace. The activities were user-friendly and enjoyable.

I think the most important part, however, was that you had to reflect on the applicability of these applications to libraries -- in particular academic libraries... There's no use jumping on the technological bandwagon if users or staff won't find the applications useful!

The time factor wasn't too bad for me as I completed most of the activities during the Christmas/New Year lull -- I think if this were rolled out as a staff-wide activity, some thought would have to be given to how much time staff would need to allocate to each of the activities, and how this may affect other aspects of their job. Would staff be able to complete the course at a time of their choosing, or would they be encouraged to complete it at a particular time of the year?

While I knew about things like Facebook, Flickr, and blogs, I'd never actually contributed to a wiki, and knew virtually nothing about Delicious or Technorati.

In the spirit of finding something new to discuss, I thought I'd point out something I heard about at the recent ALIA Information Online Conference: vokis! See http://www.voki.com/

Basically vokis are animated avatars which can speak. You can create a unique look for your avatar and can record the dialogue he/she speaks. Not sure about licensing/costs etc, but it certainly seems interesting! Maybe they could be used in Subject Guides or in virtual tutorials. Although recording a real person, such as in this iResearch tutorial: http://elearning.library.usyd.edu.au/learn/plagiarism/index.php is probably just as effective.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to be a part of the pilot!

Googletastic

The Google Books initiative is very interesting from a library perspective.

Pros:

• Convenient, 24/7 access (don't have to wait for someone to return items, no overdue fees etc)
• Many books from the 'canon' are available in full text -- good for secondary students studying Shakespeare, for instance
• Have many more books at your disposal from impressive collections worldwide... negates some of the need for Interlibrary loan?
• As others have said, the search is a full text search, so topics which may not be included in Subject Headings will be picked up -- good for ephemeral information

Cons:

• People may not visit libraries as much even though they are using library collections (I guess this is still 'visiting', however -- just in a virtual rather than physical sense)
• Like Aqua, I'm worried about the charging issue. I guess for academic libraries, this is simply another type of subscription which can be funded by student fees and library budgets. But what about public libraries???
• Searching -- no Subject Headings, so potentially lots of irrelavant hits if doing a keyword search

Library thing is *so cool!* I'm always looking for new things to read, so by examining the libraries of people who have similar items to you, the chances are that you'll find new things you like :)

I can definitely see this being useful in academic libraries. For instance, students working on similar assignments (or even students doing group work) could examine each others' lists to see what materials are useful. I guess librarians could also use it to share good teaching materials (although a lot of good stuff is available online, so maybe Delicious would be more appropriate for this...)

I created an account and added the book I'm currently reading -- White Teeth by Zadie Smith.

Cheers,

Kate

Pod and Vodcasting

Wow -- it's been a while since I made a post. Damn all this O-Week business!

I found some Triple J podcasts which were quite cool. I just did a Google search for 'podcast*' and "Triple J" -- is there some better way for searching for podcasts? (I seem to recall Technorati was a search engine for blog posts, so just wondering whether there is an equivalent for podcasts).

I'm fairly well acquainted with YouTube, so checked out some of the sites that were mentioned. Last year when I was still studying, I remember reading that many unis/tertiary institutions are using YouTube as a virtual classroom... I think we'll see much more of this as time goes on. Since YouTube does have a lot of scholarly and relevant material for students, it is a bit of a shame that this site is blocked on all public access PCs. Perhaps the library could revise this policy?

Now for embedding a video clip...



I had the same trouble as Aqua in terms of copying the whole link... I ended up copying the code by clicking and dragging across it, pasted it into Word, and then pasted it into this.

I hope you enjoy Scuba Cat, AKA Hawkeye! I already shared this clip with quite a few people...

Didn't have any problems with subscribing to podcasts/vodcasts. Just found one that looked interesting, went to Google Reader, pasted in the URL and voila!

I think this type of technology has great potential in an academic library setting. You could make very short podcasts for students on basic library skills (the library had already done this -- http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/skills/). It's apparently quite easy and cheap to do, which is a bonus.

Cheers,
Kate