Week 11 Library Things

I found several libraries which make use of LibraryThing. Seattle Public was the first that I found. Then came Edwards Public Library in Southampton, Massachusetts, followed by Danbury Public. These seemed to have added Library

Thing widgets to their OPACs to create links between related books.

Week 10 Social Networking

Social Networking Haiku

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Social Networking

My Space, Facebook, YouTube, and

"You're my friend, right?"

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I found that websites other than libraries are using social networking to communicate with their viewers. For instance, the state of Virginia offers the following ways to stay connected: Live Chat, RSS Feeds, Podcasts, Virginia YouTube and Get and Share. Get and Share is a Virginia widget that can be added to web pages, blogs, or social profiles. On California's website one can subscribe to podcasts, RSS, Text/E-mail, Accelerators, and Bookmarks (Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, and many more including Yardbarker). Vermont's website has RSS, Twitter, Linked In, Digg, Delicious, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Google.
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Universities are also using social networking. The University of North Dakota offers Facebook, a Flickr album, ITunes UND, UND RSS feeds, and YouTube-Updated. The University of Oxford has RSS, science blogs, a Facebook group (OxSciBlog), and is heavily into video and audio articles.

Week 9 Podcasts and Video

Scientific American has 60-Second Podcasts. It
is located at http://www.sciam.com/podcast/.
Episode 623 for February 23, 2009, is entitled
"Earths Common as Dirt."
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Other Earths Haiku
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Let me count the earths
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7...
Oh my, infinite!

Week 8 - Online Applications and Tools

Libraries Haiku

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Bewildering sites

Gutenberg's offspring beside

Space age equipment.

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According to the February 15, 2009, issue of Library Journal, Cambridge Information Group acquired a minority stake in LibraryThing in January. Tim Spalding, LibraryThing founder, will retain majority ownership. Cambridge Information Group's Bowker will become the exclusive distributor of the LibraryThing for Libraries. The article pointed out that LibraryThing for Libraries has already been added to over 100 library catalogs.

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In the same issue of Library Journal is an announcement that LibLime has brought an open source approach to cataloging by launching Biblios, which is an open source, web-based metadata tool and Biblios.net, a hosted version of Biblios with social cataloging features. Because it hopes to build one web page for every book which has ever been published, its reliance on everyone having publishing rights, a sort of Wikipedia approach to maintenance, should make the upkeep of the database easier.

Week 7: Collaboration

There are all kinds of wikis, sites which allow others to edit the content of the sites. An example is Foodista.com, an encyclopedia of culinary information. Probably the best known of the wikis is Wikipedia.

I found a site, last updated in 2005, by Darlene Fichter of the University of Saskatchewan which explored wikis and libraries. One of its links was to Writely. Google purchased Writely in the spring of 2006 and renamed it Google Documents (Google Docs.) Today, this site allows one to create, share, and collaborate online.

Week 6: Social Media

I read a very interesting article on Web 2.0 on
Wikipedia. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has a very interesting

comment about whether the term Web 2.0

can be used with any significance. He believes that much of the technological parts of it have been around since the World Wide Web began.

The article uses Amazon.com as an example. Amazon.com has allowed its users to publish reviews of its books since 1995. Others in the article are concerned about a repeat of the dot-com fiasco in 2000.

The Web 2.0 image is from Wikipedia. It is a tag cloud.

Social media sites can be about entertainment such as Second Life, or they can be about communication such as Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, or Youmeo. Wikis are all about collaboration as are social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and StumbleUpon. Photobucket, Flickr, and YouTube are some of the multimedia sites available on the Internet.

A library site which uses Flickr is http://www.flickr.com/photos/clearly-unbalanced/489320825/.

Week 5: Communication

I have looked at several image generators; most seem more appropriate for My Space accounts. Examples are below; they are from ImageChef.com .


Eric Zino, who teaches workshops on virtual reference and e-resources, wrote a very interesting article about virtual reference in the February 1, 2009, issue of the Library Journal. He expressed his dissatisfaction with the quality of virtual reference sessions since he thinks that too many are simply referrals to computers and lack in-depth responses.

I did a search on meta-search engines and found a very informative table done by the librarians at the University of California in Berkeley (www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/MetaSearch.html). This site states that Berkeley suggests directly searching each search engine for "the most precise results." They suggest using the following "at your own risk" : http://www.clusty.com/, http://www.dogpile.com/, http://www.surfwax.com/, and http://www.copernic.com/. Then their PDF on "Getting Started Creating a Custom Search Engine" focused on Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) at www.google.com/coop .

Week 4: Photosharing and Editing

I learned that common formats are RSS and Atom.
The link to Marion County Public Library System's RSS is below. The Nature Conservancy also has a RSS; its link is below. In addition, there is a RSS for the National Wildlife Federation site. The Library Journal has a RSS at http://www.libraryjournal.com/RSS.
http://www.marioncountyfl.org/RSSFeed_Library/mcbcc_latest_Libraryevents.rss
http://www.nature.org/pressroom/EPR/rss1.xml
http://feeds.feedburner.com/NWF/nwfview