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.