Wikis

I love the idea of a community wiki, especially one through a library website. I like the idea of opening it up to the community to edit. Just the other day I was looking for a good restaurant suggestion that delivers, a community wiki with restaurant reviews,would have been a great place to search.

I also love the idea of a subject guide wiki for the library. An example is the St. Joseph County Public Library's Subject Guides wiki. It has both fun and useful information as well as links to the library catalog.

Finally, I also like the idea of using a wiki to add customer reviews to our library catalog.

Web 2.0 & Library 2.0

Uploaded on February 12, 2005
by jm3

Library 2.0 both excites me and makes me nervous. I'm excited by all of the new ways to access information and by all of the new information that is available. I'm nervous for several reasons, including my fear that our customers aren't quite ready for some of the changes and I know it is going to be difficult to help some of them deal with the inevitable changes that are going to occur.

Another reason I am nervous is because I am a keeper. I hold on to things even when their usefulness is questionable. My at-home library is very much a "just in case" collection. Rick Anderson talked about libraries no longer building up a large "just in case" collection of print materials in the OCLC newsletter Issue No.2 2006. One reason this worries me is the lack of understanding by our customers, especially our student customers and their teachers, that materials available through library databases are also "book" resources and are not the same as doing a Google search and picking the first website on the results list.

I love the idea of integrating catalogs across library systems, but , again, I'm afraid this is ahead of many customers' understanding. Even now, if they see an item in our catalog they assume it is at the branch they are in, it will be even harder for them to understand that not only is it not in our branch, but it isn't even in our state.

Some of my other concerns include:
If we go to where customers are, how will we measure their use, in order to justify funding? Will we have to go to private as well as public funds? Does that mean advertising? If yes, do we then loose credibility?

Technorati & Tags

I think tags are an amazing tool. One of the best ways I saw tags used was on Del.icio.us. A user had bookmarked all of their favorite recipes and had tagged each recipe by its main ingredients. Their list of tags was a great index for their recipes and made it very easy to find the perfect recipe for ingredients you already have on hand. I also think tags are great for photos. They were very useful on Flikr.

As I said before, I don't follow a lot of blogs, so I didn't find Technorati very useful. For the few blogs I do follow, I receive updates as RSS feeds.

Del.icio.us

I think Del.icio.us could be very useful for many people. I'm not sure I am one of them at this point. I only use one computer, but for someone using computers in many different places, I think this tool would make their lives much easier.

Rollyo

Recipe Search

Select Search Engine...Recipe SearchSearch The Web

Powered by Rollyo

For my Rollyo, I rolled all of my favorite recipe search sites. With searches I am conducting on the web, I usually want to search more broadly than I would on Rollyo.

Merlin and Blog Searches

I was not familiar with Merlin before starting 23 Things. I have not gotten in the habit of reading blogs, even since starting 23 Things, so I did not find any of the blog search tools that useful.

LibraryThing

I liked LibraryThing, but did encounter some difficulties. I added all of the books that we have read in the bookclub I facilitate. When I tried to add them to my blog it would only add five of the covers. It only allowed me to add all nine titles if I included text with the cover pictures. So, to see all nine titles, please look at my sidebar.