Thursday 12 May 2011

That's a wrap!

Feels good to be at the end of the course. I found I learnt a few new things, even though I had covered a lot of 2.0 stuff at uni last year. I think certain aspects of 2.0 would work for Cambridge like blogging and Twitter however to make it work they would need to be constantly updated and promoted.

Week 10 - Geocaching

Today I actually found out what geocaching is and it's not at all what I though it would be. Reminds me of a high tech version of the orienteering we did at school. I think it would work well in institutions with multiple library locations however as Cambridge is on its own it might not work here.  It would be good to see geocaching adopted  by the Town as a way to encourage people to use the nature reserves and parks.

Almost done. Hooray!

Wednesday 11 May 2011

Week 9 - Podcasting

Hello.

I like the idea of the library podcasting snippets of guest speakers or perhaps restreaming educational tutorials or reviews on the library's blog. I don't really listen to podcasts all the time however when I was travelling I downloaded a lot of podcasts to my ipod, mainly radio comedy shows to make the long bus trips less tedious.

There are a lot of podcasts on the ABC website including ABC Radio shows such as

Film Guide with Marc Fennell, triple j

(Duration: 2 mins, filesize: 1 MB, Updated weekly)
triple j's film and dvd podcast.

Tuesday 10 May 2011

Week 8 - Online video




How cute is the sneezing baby panda! I use YouTube a lot to look up music videos and funny clips. The library could use online video to deliver tutorials to library users on services that are available in the library such as requesting books and searching the library catalogue. It could also be used by staff to produce book reviews and recommendations - if one had the time or the inclination.

More panda.

Week 7- Social Networking, Facebook and Twitter

Please be my friend !

Request the friendship of Verity Du Maurier if you have a facebook account :)

Facebook and Twitter are good ways to stay connected with your friends and family, especially those living overseas. I deleted my previous facebook account because of privacy and copyright issues and because my feeds were becoming clogged with posts by 'friends' from school who wanted to share every single moment of their lives. Yawn.

Moving on to online video - hooray.

Week 6 - Tagging, Delicious and Library Thing

Hello loyal readers.

Have a look at my Library Thing widget (at the bottom of the page). I hope to continue using Library Thing as it's a great way to keep track of my reading and discuss books with other book lovers. Here is a link to my LT catalogue http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Verityr . I think it would be a good idea to have a Library Thing widget on the library's blog with staff suggestions.

Bye for now.

Monday 2 May 2011

Ants in my butter!

Don't leave out the butter by verityr
Don't leave out the butter, a photo by verityr on Flickr.

I have a million housemates at the moment! NOTHING can be left on the counter.

Week 5 - Wikis

If you are a fan of pugs check out my wiki here :) -

 http://pugloversfromperth.wetpaint.com/?WPC-action=invite.

While I like the look and layout of some wikis (Wikipedia and our library wiki) I found the wetpaint wikis were too busy (too many advertisements) and harder to navigate. I like our library wiki as it looks clean and there are no ads for Glee popping up constantly! A wiki is a great way for a group of people to collaborate on something, perhaps in a few years email will become obsolete?

Toodles.

F1000013

F1000013 by verityr
F1000013, a photo by verityr on Flickr.

Seabird sunset

Week 4 - RSS

Greetings readers!

After a few frustrating moments looking for little orange symbols in blogs I finally managed to add some to my Google reader. Here they are -

http://theworstofperth.com/
http://www.pitchfork.com/forkcast/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog
http://blogs.abc.net.au/thebuzz/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog

I like that the reader helps cut down on the time spent visiting each individual blog. It's good for browsing through articles (kind of like an online newspaper full of all your interests) and the design is simple and easy to follow. I wouldn't want to subscribe to a blog that was updated too frequently though as it would fill the blogreader with too much information.

In a library context I think a blog reader would be useful to clients if they could subscribe to Cambridge's blog entries and stay updated on the library's events without having to check the blog every day.

Cheerio