Online videos and Podcasts

The craze on YouTube has not caught up upon me yet, but with our discovery activity on this exciting video sharing tool and the likes, I am beginning to get interested. I had the chance to see the short videos from the Marymount College website and I thought they are very good starting point for prospective students to get information about the college straight from the people that teach and the people that learn - teachers and students. I checked other school sites that produce similar informational videos about their libraries and I was thinking this could be a good way of promoting our library - who we are, what resources we have, and what services we do for the college community.

del.icio.us

I have become an online shopper because of the accessibility on the Internet of the goods I want to buy. Never mind that I can't touch them, it gives me the feeling of shopping conveniently without leaving my house or driving and wasting expensive fuel. Now, I can bookmark sites and save them on del.icio.us and just go back and do the shopping later. I want also to be able to store articles and tag them as recreational/professional/humorous or other headings that would easily take me to them.

P.S. to Google Docs

I found out the other day while getting ready to go to work that I needed to call a student worker immediately. I didn't have her cell number with me. It occurred to me that if I had the contact sheet for the Library student workers saved somewhere not in my H drive at my work computer, then I could access their numbers easily where a computer is readily available. I just made a list on Google docs and sent it to the other librarians for whatever purpose they might need it in the future. Also, I copied the student workers' schedule onto the Google docs spreadsheet for the same reason. I just found out a use of Google docs for myself.

Wikis

After two weeks of being absent in the blogging scene, I am trying to catch up. Wikis - I am ambivalent about a lot of things in Web 2.0 and wikis is one of them. Wikis are in constant state of instability, entries are unpolished, validity and reliability are absent. They say that wikis are chaotic and I don’t accept chaos most of the time, but being in a territory where change is constant and new technologies are an everyday occurrence, I will have to accept it. I have to remember that I don’t render service for myself but for a particular type of clientele and their needs and satisfaction are my foremost concerns. These feelings stem most likely from ignorance and fear since my experience with wikis range from little to zero. I am not discounting the fact that once I learn the intricacies of creating, editing, and maintaining wikis, I might change my mind. I am looking forward to that.

Why is it that everytime there was an activity to do, I couldn't come up with a finish product until I sit at the reference during my desk schedule? I have spent several hours on Web 2.0 activities at home but never came up with good results. All five exercises were accomplished while I sat at the reference desk. Mary, I hope that the exciting activities keep coming. I had so much fun playing with the image generator at the ref desk that now I feel guilty for being so engrossed with it; I was oblivious of the noise and the students around me. I hope no one attempted to approach me that needed help and walked away because the librarian was so disengaged.

RSS Feed

So I skipped the discovery activity for Thing 9 because like always, I have a difficult time making up my mind on what to post. Today, I found two that I want to share, ACRLog, a site that "promote current awareness skills and resources" for academic and research libraries and Stephen's Lighthouse. I chanced upon Stephen Abram's blog two years ago and it's the only blog that I have been visiting regularly. Stephen Abram is the vice president of Innovation, Sirsi Corporation. I have great admiration for the person. He's an international librarian and in 2002 Library Journal named him one of the key people who are influencing the future of libraries and librarianship. He is a frequent keynote speaker on issues that affect libraries, their communities, and librarians. His articles and presentations can be viewed at
http://www.sirsi.com/Resources/abram_articles.html.

Google Docs

One of the most difficult thing for me is getting started - whatever the activity is. For the discovery exercise on Thing 11, this is what I want to share - how do you keep usernames and passwords safe and easily accessible. I want to ask fellow MCPV bloggers, how do you keep your passwords organized? With all the accounts were signing up, it's hard to keep up with which password I used for what account. Right now, I am just storing them in excel in my H drive in our MCPV account. How do you manage yours? Maybe Google Docs is the answer.