Podcasts, Video and ebooks

You Tube

Today I checked out Youtube and some other similar sites like Vimeo. I liked youtube and I thought it was a great forum for people to post information. What I didn't like about it was that some of the videos posted on there were such low quality that they were hard to watch. Conversely, some of the videos were such high quality that they uploaded really slowly and so were hard to watch. I've embedded a video below of an interview with Cecily Von Ziegesar, the author of the teen series of novels Gossip Girl. I thought libraries could use youtube, in that they could post relevant author talks/clips on their book club blog to enthuse their book club members.



Podcasts

Today I explored podcasts. I am interested in music so I subscribed to the Indie music blog Indie Kids Bible which I found through podcastalley.com pod directory. I watched the podcasting in plain English post on youtube and found it helpful. I guess TV on demand is a kind of podcast in a way. I looked up teen books inthe podcastally.com directory as well and found some good book review pod casts and podcasts which specialised in interviewing authors.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheBookcast - this podcast provides interviews with authors of new, bestselling books.

e-books, e-audio-books and downloadable media

I looked at Auckland city libraries digital collections for ebooks and e-audio books. The collection of e-audio books is not huge but my guess is that it is growing. I did manage to find an e-audio book of The Canterbury Tales, nice. There are a number of e-books available on the auckland city libraries catalogue and some of the digital databases have e-books as well. This is great if you are in a book club and you want to read a book but you can't find a physical copy in the library (because all the other book club members have taken them). Now you can just read an e-book of it.

I made a netlibrary account and added five e-books and e-audio-books to my page. I noticed there were cliff notes available on the site which I thought would be good for students. I have linked to it here http://www.netlibrary.com/FavoritesAndNotes.aspx

What did I think of the ACL web 2.0 programme

I enjoyed this web 2.0 programme, it is a good way to keep up with fast moving technologies and in turn be able to keep up with our customers. I particularly enjoyed exploring you-tube and the pod-casts. I run a teen-book club at my library and I think some of them would get a lot out of listening and watching author interviews on-line, especially as some of them are budding writers.

One suggestion I have is that links that are provided on the Web 2.0 instructions blog of sites to look at etc should pop up in a new window. It is eternally frustrating to have to keep reopening a new tab for the web 2.0 instructions while you are looking at a website it has linked to.

Thanks!

On Line Applications and Tools

Today I joined Zoho Writer and created a document which I have shared on this blog (see below). Zoho seems like a great way to share documents and is especially good for people who want to create word documents but don't have word on their computer at home. This is where Zoho is better than google documents - ie there are more file format options in zoho than in google documents.




Last FM

From the Web 2.0 award nominees list I chose to explore Last FM. I thought it was a really great site for music fans. It is easy to use and gives you recommendations of other bands/artists you might enjoy listening too based on the artists/bands you have in your library. It also connects you with other users who might have similar music taste to you. Choice.

Week 7 - Wikis

This week I checked out the various Wikis on the web 2.0 page. Wikis seem like a great way for people to share information and make culmulative lists for things like book recommendations. I thought it would be great to have a recommended teenage fiction Wiki on the Library website, where any Librarian could edit the page or add more books. The only trouble with Wikis especially ones where anyone can edit the information is that sometimes the information doesn't end up being that credible. I have found this for example on Wikipedia.

I added my blog to favourite blogs on the ACL PB Wiki and also one of my favourite books "Leaving the World" to the one of the favourite books pages. I thought PB Wiki would be a good tool to use if you wanted to set up your own wiki for work or play.

Rollyo

Rollyo has been undergoing maintenance for the past three or so weeks so I have not been able to do the task until now.

I joined up to Rollyo and made a personalised search engine for teen fiction. I thought this would be good when I am looking for reviews of teen books for my teen book club. I have pasted a link to my teen fiction search engine below.

http://rollyo.com/orangejuice/my_teen_fiction/

Week 6 - Tagging, folksomonies & social bookmarking in Del.icio.us

Today I joined Delicious, I book-marked a bunch of sites that I like as well as some that I found through searching the popular tags section in delicious. Delicious seems like quite a good research tool, though in terms of finding information from information (or linking) I still prefer to read an article or something and get a link from that as opposed to looking through tags on Delicous. Delicious would defintely be very helpful though if you were travelling and using different computers and you wanted to save your bookmarks.

I also joined up to technorati, and claimed my blog. I searched "learning 2.0" in the tags section, and the blogs section. It was quite surprising that I didn't find many blogs about this. This site seems very amerocentric, all the most popular posts seem to be american.

I read some of the articles about Library 2.0. Personally, most of the ideas surrounding library 2.0 sound sensible and practicle considering the way people are constantly evolving with their use of technology and the way they get information. Libraries can either sink or swim.

Week 5 - Searching and Cataloguing

Today I joined Library Thing (see some books from my catalogue below). It seemed like a good website - I particularly liked the local tab or section. I thought this would be especially good if you were travelling and wanted to find out if there were any literary events happening in the town you were in. It would also be a good way for Auckland City Libraries to promote their events.

Week 4 - RSS Feeds and Twitter

Today I explored RSS feeds. I set up a blog-lines account and subscribed to a number of feeds, some of which were blogs like "Scooper" on the Auckland City Libraries website. I thought this would be a good way to keep up with the latest news in the developement of libraries. I was a bit dissapointed to find that some of my favourite blogs didn't have a subscription option, for example, Simon Reynolds music blog, Blissed Out. I thought RSS feeds would be a good way to deliver library news, or could replace traditional news-letters. For example library patrons could subscribe to the "library news-letter blog" to keep up with the latest news at their local library.

Twitter

I joined Twitter today as well and added as people I follow a few bands and artists that I like as well as the National Library. I am fine about using flicker to follow institutions or public enterprises but I don't like the idea of using it for my personal life. It seems like an invasion of privacy, as does the way it collates information and trends. I like a bit of mystery.

Here is a link to my twitter page http://twitter.com/butterpeanut1