Video

Found some great videos. Olive Riley returns to Broken Hill - great idea for Local Studies Libraries to video personal histories of local residents. Also thought the video on Reference & Research assistance was good. Useful to have on a public library website to show what services and facilities a Reference library has to offer. I loved this video about Barbie's bookclub.

Wikis

I have just had a look at some of the wikis on the list. I was a little confused by some - don't seem to be interactive and therefore I wonder whether a blog would be more appropriate. I love the Book Lovers Wiki - this is where I think Libraries can make good use of wikis. My Library runs a number of book clubs. I think it would be great to set up a wiki so that the members of these book clubs can share what they are reading and add reviews. I also think a wiki to do with Local History could be successful. Inviting the public to contribute to a wiki to draw together historical information about an event, building, school etc in a local area.

RSS

One good thing about RSS is that it is so easy to use. A great way of getting all the things you want to read in one place - my problem is remembering to logon and read them. Besides the Powerhouse Museums's picture of the day blog I have added feeds for the ABC Book Show, NYT Book Review, Tennis.com.au, About Contemporary Literature, ABC News and Yahoo News. Hopefully I will get time to download some of the broadcasts from ABC Book Show and NYT Book Review on to my IPOD.

I think it would be great to use this technology on the Library webpage to allow customers to feed in to book reviews and a blog of library events. I had a quick search and found some interesting blogs on marketing for Libraries which could be very useful.

Flickr public search problems

I uploaded some photos of my library to Flickr which was very easy. Even though I had made the photos public they were not being retrieved in a public search. Consulted a Flickr Help forum for some advice. The trick was to click on the 'Flag this photo' link and make sure the box 'Hide this photo from public search' was not checked. Obviously mine was. I made and saved the necessary change to each photo and now they are being retrieved in a public search. Took me quite a while to figure this out. I also requested my account to be reviewed (this was another suggestion from the forum) but am not sure whether this was a factor in the problem being solved.

Flickr uploads

Have just uploaded photos from Flickr to my blog. Very easy. Had a few problems positioning the photos and the text so need to go back in and change the layout a bit when I have more time.

Great North Walk

Found these photos on Flickr of a walk I did recently. The walk was much longer than we thought and we were carrying backpacks for overnight camping. Obviously these photos would have helped us get a better idea of what we were letting ourselves in for. Beautiful scenery but very difficult terrain.

Success

Success - I have posted the blog. Unfortunately I forget all the intelligent things I wrote in the first post. It am finding it difficult to keep up with the program at work so I am having to do it at home. I am keen to complete the program as I know it is increasingly important for Librarians to keep up with the new technology. The other day I ran an Internet training session at work and I was amazed by the questions I was getting about Web 2.0 technology. Everybody seems to have heard about blogs, wikis etc - they don't know much about Web 2.0 but they have heard the words and want to know more! How can I help them if I have not taken the time to learn myself!