Thing 20 YouTube

You can always rely on a cat video to entertain

Thing 16 igoogle

Just created a page on Igoogle. It was advertized as possible to complete in 30 seconds which was handy considering my accellerated learning pace at the moment. I added gadgets from maps, books, docs and wikipediea. Also saw that there were other gadgets for currency converters and tools I should be able to use at work. Overall all easy to use, except for transfering my bookmarks from explorer to the igoogle page - had to download the latest version of the toolbar to transfer my Favourates. I only wish some of their news sites were a little more respectable - why not the Age or the Guardian?

Things 13-15 Google Maps, Docs, Books and Scholar

Have been a regular user of Google maps for some time , particularly when reviewing real estate. Always impressed by the ability to shift from map to terrain and satellite. Unfortunately strong use of Google maps by our students does not help our internet charges. A recent development has the addition of Google street. I am still amazed at how all these street level images were obtained.

I utilized Google Docs and uploaded a document then managed to share it with one of my colleagues. Easy access to Google docs without having to use a specific application or connect to an individual network is a great advantage. Templates and calendar are also good and easy to use. There are still some issues, however, with having corporate content loaded onto a third part resource such as Google Docs, even if the resource is secure.

Google Books – growing resource and part of google’s strategy to scan anything that moves. In 2006 Google signed agreements with five great research libraries—the New York Public, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, and Oxford's Bodleian—to digitize their books. The jury is out on whether this is a great advance in information sharing or cornering the maknowledge market. At least with Google Books search the preview options are a great way to assess the thrust of a work.

Google Scholar is a very powerful tool covering a mass of data. Using the Scholar Preferences' allows me to find books in the VU Library Catalogue and direct links to articles in full-text from our databases. The tool still has some problems in that the results are not always easy to interpret and it is not always easy to know what sort of document has been retrieved. I also find that unless you use some of the advanced option, science orientated results can dominate your hit list.

Thing 12 Myspace and Facebook

Have been exploring Myspace and Facebook over the last couple of days. These are powerful tools for social networking although the library pages on Myspace look a little staid and out of place. During the mid-year staff meeting Philip presented his paper on Web 2.0 commenting about how people bring their existing networks onto social networking sites rather than use these sites to create new networks. For this reason I think we need to be cautious about the idea that a presence on Facebook will automatically advance the cause of liaison or information literacy. Depsite this limitation, I think social netowrking may have possibilities for some team-based work groups and there may be advantages in providing our resources as applications for these sites.

I have also just created a facebook account at
http://www.facebook.com/people/Adrian-Gallagher/1077351939?

I had been interested in creating an account for some time so it was good to have an incentive.
Eventhough I am a library manager, I was still able to find a few friends. It is surprising how many staff at other universities are completing 23 thing programs.

Thing 9 - RSS

Created an account on Google Reader. - subscribed to Digg.com. A few years ago RSS was a major flare on the horizon but now no one is talking about it and I think it will pass away as a transitional application. When working at Parliament we thought it may have some value as an alerting service but the need to use aggregators and poor integration into existing browsers has reduced the effectivity of RSS. I think interest is likely to decline further.

Seached for Library blogs on Technocrati - did not find it a very useful tool for identifying 'meta' blogs in the library area as it just threw up 11,000 results in a fairly indiscrimminate way.

Thing eight - Library thing

Successfully created a little library on Librarything http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Adrianga

I have probably lost the cataloguing impulse to enjoy this sort of activity but it could be a uselful tool for a small discreet collection. Suprised that the searching options were a little clunky. Not sure what the social networking opportunities would be in this context.

Thing 7 - Image manipulation

Piece from Imagechef representing the transient nature of Information Resources

Thing 5

Posted two photos on Flickr and had a quick look at the slide show and mosaic products. Left reasonable impressed.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27998021@N06/?saved=1

Australian Library and Learning Commons Projects

Following projects of interest featuring innovations in learning spaces, service delivery and collection access

University of Sydney Scietech Library

University of Wollongong Library

Bond University

Macquarie University

University of Melbourne - Eastern Resource Centre

Learning Commons Exemplars

Blog to post learning about 23 things program with some reference to the Learning Commons journey along the way