Videos Online : YouTube about Twitter

More Google

I used Google translate to discover the word 'librarian' in many different languages. For example: bibliotecario = Italian, библиотекар = Bulgarian, 圖書管理員 = Chinese. This could be a very useful tool in a library with a largely multi-cultural clientele. The web page I translated was Amazon.com and I translated it into Arabic, a very different look! I wish we had such a tool on our website for our customers. It would be brilliant if they could translate our catalogue and instructions on its use into
their own language.

Google books can be very useful for Reference work. For example a search for 'Nazism' brings up many books with preview or limited preview. Searching through the available pages gives access to some great information.

iGoogle is both cute and useful and I use it at home but at work my home page is our team blog and from there to the library service own home page.

Google calendar is useful due to its accessibility but like so many workplaces as yet we are bound to Outlook. I hope there will soon be a future where we can use these tools more readily in the workplace itself, not just at home. The google calendar can be installed onto blogs and websites and could be used on library web pages to advertise events on certain days. It could also mark training days and could enable;e customers booking their own PCs or attendance at workshops etc.

Google maps are used by our service to show the correct roads our Mobile Library must take to get to its many destinations most efficiently, and it also enables pictures of the vehicle itself at each stop so customers can see exactly on the street. So it is used by both staff as a guide to driving and by patrons as a guide to stops.

I hope to have enough time to get back to this with my owngoogle mash up map!

Browsers

I've not used Safari or Opera but I currently use Firefox and sometimes if I want just a quick hit I use Chrome.

I was interested in the video comparing the top 4 and pleased that I agreed with the verdict of Firefox being the top browser. I didn't know that it was the most secure though, so that was an added bonus. Explorer is so far behind that I have removed the shortcut icon to it from my desktop and only have quick access to Firefox and Chrome.

I like the way Chrome has an opening page of websites frequently visited. I just go into that and quick click into the sites I use daily. I use the address bar as a search tool in both of my favourite browsers though I hadn't used boolean terms so far but will try them from now on. Tabbed browing is so much better but of course Explorer now has this as well. Firefox Add - ons which I like include Shareoholic, Fast Video, and Glue.

Zotero is a good add on for helping students with their bibliographies. As we only use Explorer at work I would advice them to add this add on at home. Clipmarks is great for selecting the parts that you need out of the whole page and printing only that part, not printing off the whole thing, so very useful at the reference desk, if only we used Firefox :-(

Podcasts and Audio

I've had a good look at the many podcast directories and can see podcasts are a great way to keep up with the latest information about anything. I particularly like the way we can catch up with anything we may have missed or program our PCs or phones to catch any podcasts we may be especially interested in. I've not bothered investigating them before so now I downloaded Juice so I could get a feel for how they work.

I subscribed to an ABC podcast on language 'Lingua Franca' and one on 'learning to meditate'. The ABC is a weekly podcast which could add up quickly, using a lot of disk space. However the meditation podcast is streaming which means I listen in realtime so don't use too much memory. I can save it if I want to.

The other side of this topic is actually creating my own podcast. As a Reference Librarian I'd like to do one on helping our customers find and use our databases. This is something I repeat often to people telling them how to go about it once they get home. I would like them to be able to listen again when they get home so they are sure about what to do. I would like the link from our Home Page where it can't be missed. There are other areas as well. Info podcasts at our public internet PCs would also be an advantage for staff as well as customers.

Marvellous Mash-Ups

This has been an interesting topic. I've been using and enjoying mashups for ages without realising just what they were and what was happening to make them work for us. Love them!

I especially like the New York Library's images of historical buildings on a google maps but with the modern day building visible on street view. Fascinating!

So I decided I'd mess around and try and make my own little mash up using Google maps for my street, right into my yard and add some pics of the nearby river and some pics of my family and the house etc (kept it all unlisted though, didn't want it searchable). Plus I wanted to include links to info about the Brisbane River and the history of the suburb etc....big plans! Anyway it's going very slowly as I'm having a frustrating time getting my URLs from Flickr etc to link properly onto my map! I'm obviously making the same mistake over and over again and I'm too tired to see it. So I'm giving up for now as I want to get on with the course, However I'm definitely going to come back and do it!

Our tech expert at work is presently making a mashup linking Picture Ipswich to the streets of Ipswich from where the pictures were originally taken, and when she was talking about it all I thought it was a brilliant idea and would be great for our library patrons to see this history so literally, but didn't realise it was a mash up!

Just read ahead to our other topics (1 advantage of being so late getting into this!) I discovered that the Google Maps mash up is covered again in More Google so I've decided to leave my personalised map until then.

LT2D - Part 2

At last, only a couple of months late I finally am sitting down to continue with this course and after several days of concerted effort, actually complete it! There is no time available at work and at night, at home there's lots of thing I need to do or I'm just feeling lazy. So almost nothing has been done on Part 2 to date! Now it's happening.

The one thing I did do was the google docs 'Discover' task. However I'm yet to comment on the rest of the applications we learned about this time. I like Slideshare. I found one about Twitter produced by the library at Swinburne Uni and I've embedded it in our work blog . It's a Twitter basics powerpoint and it has just the right info for our workplace, namely just why we should bother using Twitter at all.. I can see big advantages in slideshare just due to its being available everywhere there's internet, just like google.docs. Great for taking info literacy skills to the classrooms from our public libraries.

I wish I'd known about the file converter several months back when I had a customer who needed it and we only knew of rather more 'serious' converters which only our systems guys could download. This will be bookmarked by me from now on.

I had joined a SLQ tutorial using Saba Centra and as a participant found it great to use and very simple. I joined Dimdim just to see what it was like and it seems to have any number of uses for collaboration among library teams and branches.