Week 14: Social networks

Social networks facilitated by the Library would primarily liaise clients sharing similar interests and information needs. This would allow exchange of knowledge and experience in the specific subject areas, often at the much higher level than the one that can be offered by the Library staff, who as librarians are not subject experts per se. I can see them being particularly successful in such areas as ML research and family history, but naturally they can have a much broader application. This sort of communication would help us to define better our clients profiles, understand more our audience needs. It would also allow us to further develop our own knowledge of the collections and build up our subject expertise.
Library based social networks could also be very successful as a marketing tool, allowing us to communicate our services to very specific groups, and act upon the feedback received from network members.

Week 13: Online applications and tools

Week 13 has passed. Merry Christmas!

I can not really see any application of online software such as Google Docs in my working area. We have already other technologies in place that allow us to share and work internally on documents. This sort of technology might be useful if you have a network of people, not necessarily locally based, working together on a particular project or document.

Week 12: Mashups

I’ve been thinking about mashups technology in the library context and frankly the only application that comes to my mind is in the area of mapping resources available in different Australian and overseas collections in our Research guides.

Week 11: Podcasts and audio

I am very positive about podcasts application in the library service area. Our library organises so many truly interesting events, talks, reading sessions, exhibitions worthwhile of broadcasting and recording. Podcasts technology would not only make these available to the remote clients, but also could be applied as an archiving tool. We could also use audio podcasts to advertise all the coming programs and activities, inform about acquisition of unique materials. And what a potential does this technology have in the reader education area! Not only we could clearly explain what we are all about, describe the collections and services, but also could record subject specific talks, such as family history methodology, business research, HSC subject guides, etc.

Week 10: Answer boards and social searching

Slam the Boards is an interesting information literacy teaching tool. I can't however see its immediate application in our organisation. We already have in place several electronic communication channels which are client specific. The budgetary constraints determine the scope and geographical service area and the Internet communication opens the doors to the wide public, far beyond our client target. For this type of service to be effective, it would be necessary to address the proper staffing issue. I believe that there is a danger for this service to be mistaken for another form of Inquiry Service (which we already have well established via Ask the Librarian, and the Online Information Request Service). The only function that social networking type of an operation could possibly play is the very basic first port of call directional communication. I also can't find any real significance of answer evaluations. There could be some room there for the customers to provide feedback on the service operations and the rating and reviewing of the collections.

Week 9

So many months have passed since I have created my last posting. I went overseas in June-August, and after my return it seemed that there was so much of urgent work piling up, so the idea of continuing with the program was always pushed away for another day, another week. Recently I looked at the program again, and tried to see how much I retained of what I have learned so far. I am sorry to say that it took me a very long time to get where I was before. But I did it! So I created some posts as a matter of practice, which I later deleted, because they had nothing to do with library environment, I have also added some bookmarks and did some tagging on delicious. Thus the Week 9 was really a 'Catch up week'.

Week 8: Tagging

Just experimenting with del.icio.us. Managed to open the account, set up buttons, and create link to it this very simple, humble blog of mine.