Week 8 Exercise

Exercise 1 - Pick a mashup… any mashup. Write about the Mashup you found on your blog.

I first did a search on health and found the Walk Score mashup. You can enter any address and it maps what's near by, essentially giving a "walkability" score. I was excited to see that when I entered my work address, my health care library is included in the list, along with grocery stores, restaurants, movie theatres, parks, etc. This would be great for people who are moving to a new area or even for travelers who want to see what's near their hotel. I then did a search on library and found LazyLibrary, which only lists books that are less than 200 pages. While at first glance that might sound trite, it could actually be helpful for a consumer health library to find shorter books that aren't so overwhelming to patrons.

Exercise 2 - Search librarianblogs on Rollyo for privacy. Browse the results and write something about what these bloggers said about privacy in your blog.

The bloggers covered different aspects of privacy, including one's personal privacy vs the public nature of what people post on social networking sites, the privacy issues brought about by government legislation, privacy vs politics in ALA, and a report on the privacy policies of the major search engines. All very interesting!

Mashups in general are quite interesting and a fascinating use of technologies. I can see uses for libraries, I'm just not sure how I would use them at this point for my library.

Week 7 Exercise

Week 7 Assignment: Write a blog entry discussing how you felt about the experience of using YouTube and what you think about this service. Do you see any potential uses for Podcasting in the library? If so what and why?

There are definitely many uses for podcasting and YouTube videos in libraries. I think they're great for short instructional audio/video clips. I'm not sure I'm ready to use them in my library, but I could eventually see posting a short clip about how to get started doing healthcare research. I agree with the comment posted by another student in this class that we librarians must reach out and communicate to all of our users in the ways that are most comfortable and familiar to them. For those of us of a "certain age," that means stepping out of our "print comfort zone."

YouTube video

I decided to combine my love of cats from our photo exercise with libraries, and I searched YouTube for library cat. I found Browser, a library cat in Pine River, Minnesota. Here he is walking along the top shelf:

Week 6 Exercise

Week 6 Assignment - Online Photo Sharing: Blog about the process on your personal blog for this course and share how this concept might be used in your library.

This assignment assumed that one has the knowledge to download digital photos! Although I have a digital camera, I'm not very experienced at downloading. However, I managed to muddle through that part and get my two photos on Flickr. I added the photos to Facebook, but not through Flickr, just using Facebook's photo download feature. It was quick and easy. I also added one of the photos to my blog, and again, I tried to do it from Flickr, but the photo didn't show up, just an empty box. I'm behind on my assignments, so I'm going to move on from this one and explore Flickr more later, as it looks like a great way to share photos with family and friends.

At this time, I don't see much use for photo sharing in my library, except as another class we could teach our patrons. We could also post photos of the library itself.

Photo of my two cats

Holly, the orange tabby, and Gracie, the calico, are six-year old sisters. They were born feral but were rescued and tamed by their wonderful "foster mom." We adopted them when they were 10 months old, and they have brought us countless joy and laughter. They love sleeping in cardboard boxes -- must be a throwback to the six weeks they spent outdoors. :)

Here's the link to these photos on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/25830489@N08/

Week 5 Exercise

Assignment for MLA CE Web 2.0 class

Create an entry in your course blog for Week 5: Web Office Tools and respond to the following question: Is this the future of all software products? What do you think?

These collaborative web-based tools are amazing! I think they will become more prevalent as their features become more robust. Although they tout their security, I don't know if companies will give up having office applications on their own servers. I think there would be major concerns about security breaches and leaking of confidential information. I don't know if these new tools will ever completely supplant the MS Office juggernaut, but I think they may give MS a run for their money in the future.

Week 4 Exercise

Assignment for Week 4 of MLA CE class

Social Bookmarking: Create a blog post about your experience and thoughts about this tool. Can you see the potential of this tool for research assistance? Or just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere?

It was great to have a reason to make myself look at del.icio.us. I've heard and read about it a bit but didn't really "get it." Can't say I totally "get it" yet, but I'm closer to understanding. I can definitely see applications for social bookmarking in a work setting, for creating sets of bookmarks on various topics. I think it would be useful for our patrons who use our public PCs and can't bookmark their favorite sites since they never know which PC they'll get to use. del.icio.us is certainly a great tool for accessing one's bookmarks from anywhere, but it has many broader uses than that.

I find the tagging aspect of del.icio.us somewhat confusing. I think I need to spend more time exploring it, but it seems so random. It seems like you have to put in so many synonyms because of all the different ways one might search for a bookmark. I can see though if you consistently use a particular tag to group things that that would be useful.