Friday, March 30, 2007

LibraryThing is my thiiiing & Technorati is alrighty

Technorati provides a pretty neat way to search for tags out there in the blog world. After reviewing the different ways to search (i.e. through blog posts, tags and the blog directory), I (of course) discovered that searching for a term that shows up in any blog post turns up the most results for "Learning 2.0" and "kcls27things." However, if I wanted to search for something with more relevance, then bloggers who wanted people to find them based on certain tags they've set up or the way they've registered their blog with Technorati are easier to locate by searching through tags or the blog directory. I went ahead and registered my blog out there just to see how many hits I get based on the tags I used. We shall see...

The really exciting thing for me this week was LibraryThing. I've always wanted a neat electronic way to organize the items I own at home and share comments on them with friends and family. LibraryThing makes this incredibly easy! What a powerful and fun tool to find interesting books, share comments about books and even find commentary about certain editions, thanks to its use of Amazon. I'm so happy to have my own account on LibraryThing and I can't wait to tell people more about it. KCLS departments at different branches should consider setting up LibraryThing accounts to suggest items to patrons though the KCLS website is already chock full of good recommendations. At least with LibraryThing, patrons can give feedback too.

Monday, March 26, 2007

"Del.icio.us"Recipe for Research

After exploring del.icio.us via KCLS27things' list of popular bookmarks, I think this is one of the best web technologies we've encountered in the past weeks concerning a helpful tool for research. Like Amazon user reviews, del.icio.us offers an easy way to see how others categorize websites and what others really think about a website. For instance, imagine you're doing research on youth and the popularity of MySpace. You do a tag search for such terms and you come across an article entitled, oh let's say, "Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace." Without even having to skim the article to see if it's useful, you can quickly read through user comments to find quick abstracts of the article. Once you've seen comments that suggest the article is a scholarly write up, you may (or may not) want to read the article for yourself. The best part of such web research applications is that users from different nations post their comments. KCLS is chock full of patrons from many countries who have a lot of difficulty researching in English as their second language. With del.icio.us, they can find commentary in their native tongue!!!

Libraries and E-Communities

After reading through the articles on the massive growing popularity of e-communities, I find myself overwhelmed by the number of issues the articles raised. I especially found Stephen Abram's article insightful because he enumerates the social issues raised by the popularity and very existence of such e-neighborhoods. He brings up the fact that many of our social norms are altered in these communities. Relationships, safety, education, possible discrimination based on age, identities all change shapes in the virtual world.

Of course, this week's question was less about those changes and more about how libraries should exist in these virtual spaces to serve the public. After all, if the public has changed in a virtual world, and the purpose of libraries is to serve the public, then it stands to reason that libraries must change to serve their altered audience. I think David Lee King's brief article on 2 libraries' use of MySpace accounts and the article titled "Second Life and Libraries" both illustrate marevelous ways in which libraries and librarians can take part in these very real virtual communities. For instance, King mentions some libraries that use MySpace in order to appeal to teens and young adults who look for music and social events in which to participate. I also liked the idea of librarians in Second Life acting as virtual "travel guides," answering questions about where to go to find certain information. I would also add that libraries could give advice about setting up accounts in these spaces as well as offering information about how to use them safely.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

"Feed"ing Frenzy

So after my RSS feed searching (aka "Feed"ing Frenzy), I'm excited to report that I found a number of provocative feeds simply by using the feed/blog search engine available on Bloglines and the Google Blog Search. While I had no trouble finding RSS links on my favorite websites yesterday, today's search provided me with feeds for things I had not thought to check. I found a great feed for Google Librarian Central which discusses all-things-librarian. I also discovered a blog entitled "Library Marketing - Thinking Outside the Book," devoted to exploring innovative techniques for marketing libraries to the public. I even found a daily snippet feed called "Library Link of the Day." I'm impressed with the amount of feeds that are available out there in the WWW and I'm looking forward to learning more in a future feeding frenzy.

RSS for the rest of USS....???

Regarding the use of Really Simple Syndication (RSS), I'm not sure how much a general population of library patrons would get out of it. For me, RSS feeds provide a great source of up-to-date news at one easy spot rather than visiting multiple sights to find information. Maybe other tech-savvy individuals enjoy using an RSS reader to get access to all their news and friends' updates on blogs but many of the patrons I see daily seem a lot more interested in checking their email.

One way in which RSS would be helpful (and I believe other KCLS Learning 2.0 participants have mentioned this) is as an update for library events or better yet, topic-specific events within library systems. For instance, an individual might have an RSS feed for all the new author events in the Bellevue area on his/her reader. A way in which employees might find RSS updates useful is to subscribe to feeds regarding weather emergencies or other emergency closings, special events or even substitute openings at various branches. I see this as a way to avoid mass emails that often go to people who have no interest in the subject matter of the email.

Overall, RSS seems to overlap on a number of other web uses. In fact, it overlaps so much that I'm not sure that I find it all that useful at all. Grim ending but true for me.

Thursday, March 8, 2007

Mashup Experiment


Cherry Blossom Experiment
Originally uploaded by sammy.chowdhury.
Here is an experiment that I tried out using a mashup program called the "Hockneyizer." The mashup basically takes your flickr photo and breaks it up into a collage-like image. This experiment used a photo I found by searching for "cherry blossom" as a tag.

inside UVa Library


inside UVa Library
Originally uploaded by DiuNghiem.
Alrighty, here is the picture that I referred to earlier regarding my old library job at the UVA Science & Engineering Library. Again, this picture indicates the library's history as the University's Law library. Yay for Flickr's tags allowing me to find a great picture like this one!

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Smashing Mashups

I'm really intrigued by the idea of "mashup" applications that combine information from different sources. I think that the flexibility of APIs has really allowed people to come up with fun and useful programs. After exploring some of the Flickr related mashups, I think my favorite mashups are Mappr and Montagr.

With Mappr, I decided to test where in the nation photos of cherry blossoms appear. I anticipated a lot from Washington, D.C. but I was pleasantly surprised to see pictures with that tag appear in Washington state and Texas. To me this ability is a powerful way to see the not only the things we expect but also the unusual things we share across the country.

Like Mappr, Montagr allows one to see multiple images with the same tag at once. Rather than mapped out by location, however, the images are randomly sorted into a mosaic template. Running the cursor over images allows one to view the image in a slightly larger view and see the original image's title. I enjoy the aesthetic appeal of this application and I believe one could create some fantastic mosaic images of photo albums as gifts.

Monday, March 5, 2007

A Tale of Another Library...


The UVA Science & Engineering Library's Entrance from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/diunghiem/175994394/


This is actually a photo of a library in which I used to work as a college student at the University of Virginia. With flickr's option to search for tags like "UVA" and "library" I was able to find this picture that captures the heading over the Charles L. Brown Science & Engineering Library at UVA. Rather than sifting through junky images through Google-searching, I can find filtered images at flickr that are precisely the ones that I want. I have to admit that as I was searching through images, I enjoyed checking out the other related tags for the same images. I was reminded of my lovely college days.
The sign indicates the history of the library. Originally it was the University's law library.

Friday, March 2, 2007

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

This is the first post of my new KCLS-oriented blog. Today is neither the best nor the worst of times here at Bellevue Regional but I felt I should stay with my titled theme. As for thoughts on the use of a blog at work, I'm intrigued by the idea of posting messages on a blog for library employees to stay up to date on news at the library. Getting a massive amount of emails to sift through is pretty annoying.