Still kicking

After years of neglect I'm posting once again.

A few things I am currently enjoying.

Playing the trombone and guitar.
Reading Sam Hawken's blog.
David Simon's Treme.
Trail running.

Twitter - NYPL and Stephen Fry

I had a bit of a look around Twitter and discovered a couple of accounts that peaked my interest, that from the New York Public Library (NYPL) and Stephen Fry's Twitter account. I had a spot of trouble locating relevant Library accounts - I found a few but some hadn't been updated for a while. In the end I settled on the NYPL due to its sheer number of interesting tweets. I chose Stephen Fry purely because I'd heard so much regarding his prolific tweeting - coupled with the fact that I think most of what he does is bloody brilliant.

During the Academy Awards in March, the NYPL tweeted a number of quotes attributed to scenes from certain films set in the Library. I thought this was a nice way of linking the Library to the world of cinema and the Awards in general (even if the films mentioned were not themselves nominated for Academy Awards). As a fan of Ghostbusters (and the scene in question) it gave me great pleasure to see it get a mention.

I thoroughly enjoyed Stephen Fry's tweets on his attendance at the recent-ish unveiling of the Apple iPad. While I might not share his extreme enthusiasm for the product in question, I found it hard not to get caught up in the excitement he displays in these tweets (something akin to a small child experiencing their first 'proper' Christmas).

Getting back to Twitter and libraries - I'm not well versed in Twitter but can see its benefits (if used properly). Par example, promoting upcoming library events, alerting users to collections, new purchases and so forth, sharing ideas with other libraries - and allowing users to follow all of this.

answer boards and librarians

I found week eight's focus on answer boards interesting, particularly regarding 'slamming the boards' and its ability to demonstrate the reference skills of librarians. Looking at some of the "exemplary answers" listed on the Answer Board Librarians wiki, the attention and detail that has gone into answering queries is quite impressive....with a significant number of librarians taking part the potential is huge.

Feedback from library users regarding collection content or services offered by the library could work well provided users were adequately informed as to how to go about it. Customers could review books in the library's collection based on their usefulness (for research purposes, for example)....a link to reviews could then perhaps be added to the an item's catalogue entry...

delicious etc

It took me a short while to understand delicious and what it offers users....I think its application does going beyond simply being just an easy means of creating bookmarks accessible from any computer (although this in itself is a fantastic tool). As the the Learning2.0 notes implicate, delicious is extremely user friendly as a research tool, however, you would need to combine its use with other more established means of research...
In terms of display, delicious is straightforward to navigate. Searching options don't require much explanation and the tagging of bookmarks assists immensely in locating relevant information. I guess to a degree you are relying on other users adequately tagging bookmarks if you're to find what you're after...
technorati I found more difficult to navigate than delicious and I'll admit it took me some time to fully grasp....

regarding wikis

While familiar with wikipedia as something of a research tool (bearing in mind that not everything is 100% accurate) I'd never edited a wiki prior to this week's exercise... At this stage I'm still waiting for the invite key so that I can contribute to the nsw learning 2 wiki but I did have a look at a number of the wikis mentioned in the week 5 notes.
Wookieepedia is a fascinating wiki if only for the seemingly endless amount of information regarding the most trivial aspects of the star wars universe - that said, star wars seems perfect content for a wiki given the information available through films, books etc....most people outside of devoted star wars fans would probably feel a bit intimidated contributing to wookieepedia, but then I'm guessing that's who it's aimed at.
I thought that the BookLovers wiki was a great idea for public libraries - it gives members of book clubs a wider scope for discussing their books outside of face-to-face meetings and would be especially useful if individuals weren't able to make face-to-face meetings and still wanted to enter into and contribute to the discussion.
Obviously with some wikis, as can be seen by the Mint Museum wiki, who edits the information is decided by the people responsible for the establishment of the wiki. As we've seen with wikipedia, information can and has been added incorrectly (often blatantly) - so perhaps this isn't such a bad idea (although it does kind of run contrary to the whole idea of a wiki as being freely available to edit)....

week four - rss

I found RSS to be a great tool - the exercise was largely enjoyable, searching for feeds to add to my bloglines acount. The ABC News: World RSS feed is one that I added, for reasons of self-interest perhaps but also as it was a feed I knew would get daily updates...
I didn't spend a large amount of time looking for RSS feeds, I had a rough idea of what I wanted to add in addition to the requisite powerhouse museum photo of the day feed....One is a feed from the official website of a professional sporting team - entries here are displayed with images. It is a much, much easier way of reading the latest news regarding the team than going to the website itself....

berowra to apple tree bay

I had a little trouble getting a photo from flickr onto the blog so here's the link instead

**Link removed due to the photo no longer being available

The photo was one of the official Oxfam photos taken during the trailwalker and was not taken by me (I did have a camera with me on the day but fatigue quickly replaced any thoughts of taking photos along the trail)