So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye!

Today is my last day here at West Ryde library.

I've been here for about four months, and I have to say every day has been enjoyable. It's been great getting to know the team here and they've done a great job showing me the ropes and getting me acclimatised to library life. Hopefully in return I've managed to pull my weight.

So, thanks to all at West Ryde. I'll drop you an email as soon as I've started in my new job!

libraries and internetz

An interesting thing happened today (or maybe not so interesting) with regard to the internet here in the library, and the policy of only having webmail accessible from one computer (for a $2.60/half hour charge).

A lot of the people that use our PCs use them for internet research and typing up assignments, and i would say that a few of these people don't have internet access at home. So today a couple of school-aged girls booked time on the PCs to type up assignments, which is fine. Except that all of the research one of the girls had done was accessible only via email, or in other words, she had emailed herself all of her research either from home or school. To access this she would have had to access her email (for $2.60), then dump it onto a usb drive then go to the other computers. Now, this isn't really a major hassle (the girl ended up going home to finish her assignment) but it highlights the different ways that the internet and email is being used, and how quickly these changes happen.

For me, emailing of files is pretty essential. The computers at TAFE are constantly being infected by viruses and therefore the only way to get files out of the TAFE network is to email.

So, maybe libraries need to have a rethink about internet policy. Not that the email policy is a bad one, but the way the internet is used is changing, and libraries need to change with it. Just sayin'.

del.icio.us!

We just had a look at "Tagging, folksonomies, delicious and LibraryThing" on the learning 2.0 program.

I've had a del.icio.us account for a while, but seldom use it. It's one of those things: I would love to share links and sites of interest with people, but I always forget that these sharing applications exist... Like my RSS reader, it sits there and gets ignored, with a flurry of activity occurring maybe twice a year.

There are other things I really like though. LibraryThing looks brilliant. I'd been using a similar application on facebook (BooksIRead or somesuch) but found it a little frustrating and amateurish. LibraryThing seems to have a lot of info professionals and librarians lurking around to make sure that things are kept ship-shape and librarianly. The idea of having an online catalogue (properly catalogued!) of all of my books really appeals to me.

Technorati: meh, can't really see how it would be relevant unless you want to sell something to people who like buying things from blogs. Most of the blogs we checked out were thinly disguised fronts for some commercial outlet or other, disguised as a personal blog. Fortunately these are pretty blatant. There is some good stuff on there, but nothing you couldn't find by doing some minimal research elsewhere, and if you're looking for subject-specific information you're honestly better off just going with google.

NEWS: in other news, I'll be leaving West Ryde in a couple of weeks. I've been offered a job in the Westpac Business Information Centre (read: corporate library) as an "Information Specialist" (read: researcher). It's a great opportunity to use some of my research skills without having to abandon all of the experience i have in customer service, and also a chance to work in a special library which isn't in a law firm. I figure these things don't come around too often so I've jumped at it.
I'll miss West Ryde and everyone here. It was a great place to have my first experience in libraries and I'm very grateful to everyone here for showing me the ropes. With any luck I may end up working with some of them again down the track, who knows?

online video n that

There's been a veritable flurry of web 2.0 activity here at West Ryde. Having just completed wikis yesterday, I've now done the tutorial on online video. Huzzah!

So, I've been a regular user of Youtube and the like for some time, pretty much whenever I've had access to broadband. I really enjoy watching compilations of accidents and pratfalls, a-la funniest home videos. My brother and I will often chat via MSN, sending links to progressively more painful-looking sequences of accidents. Not for the faint-hearted or squeamish, and you really have to know when to stop... It's also great for nostalgia: thanks to those geeks who sit around going through old video tapes looking for ads from the 80s and 90s and uploading them for our viewing pleasure. There's so much old stuff on there you could be watching for hours, if not days.

So, how can we use online video in the local library environment? My colleague suggested that we could get some of the younger borrowers to produce their own video book reviews. That could be a heck of a lot of fun, or a disaster. I thought the idea of an employee orientation video was interesting, but could really be quite cheesy if not done well. The one from Charlotte/Mecklenburg walked a very fine line, bordering on tele-evangelist tackiness. Still, you have to start somewhere, and I'm sure they'll get better with time. If we had the time and inclination we could also throw together some tutorials on how to use the various databases we have at our disposal. Whether this would pay off on a time/effort versus patron interest comparison would be another story. If only one or two people were going to use it, making said video tutorial would not be worthwhile. Unfortunately, shooting and editing video takes a lot of time, even with all of the technology at our fingertips.

So in the meantime I'll keep watching old ads and ridiculous accidents.

wiki-ness

Yesterday afternoon I went through the wiki section of the Learning 2.0 tutorial. I learned a bit about the whole wiki thing, and saw a couple of uses it could have in our library.

The only wiki-type thing I have ever really been exposed to is WIkipedia. I understand how it all works and have had a bit of fun looking at some of the flame wars that happen with regard to contentious facts and the various interpretations that the contributors may have. What I hadn't ever really thought about was how wikis could be used on a much smaller scale.

In the back room here we have a whiteboard on which staff members can make suggestions as to discussion points for the next staff meeting. We thought, "hey, we could make a wiki that staff can access to do this, instead of the white board!" My colleague also pointed out that this would mean we could have a permanent record of suggestions that we could keep and look back on.

Another useful application for wikis could be to replace the daily diary we keep at the front desk. This diary is used to pass on important information to staff, and is particularly important in alerting weekend staff (who the weekday staff sometimes never see in person) to issues that may have cropped up during the week and need ongoing attention over the weekend. Use of a wiki in this circumstance could create on ongoing dialogue between the staff who work different shifts and hopefully result in better communication between all staff.

As an added bonus, we also modified the Wikipedia article on West Ryde! Where it previously mentioned "Ryde library", we changed it to "West Ryde Public Library"!! I really feel like I'm making a difference on the information superhighway.

Findability vs tagging vs traditional cataloguing

We have a collection here at Ryde which consists of Chinese books that have been donated to the library. Because they are a bit of a mixed bag with regard to quality and content, they all get grouped under the title "Chinese donation", saving on time and expense in cataloguing them properly. A problem arises when someone takes a liking to a particular book and wants to know if we have any more titles similar to it in our collection. Unfortunately we have no way of searching the donation collection through keywords, title or author.

This is where user-generated (or even library staff-generated) tags could come in handy. By tagging a book with a keyword it would make finding similar books a lot easier. Obviously you then get problems of people using inappropriate or irrelevant tags, but this would be a small price to pay to have books searchable, and the tags could be checked on occasion by staff.

Just a thought...

Tell me why I don't like Mondays.

Yes, Monday is upon us and all the 2.0 in the world can't help.

I'm hoping to have the internet connected at home some time this week, delivering me of my net-free status. Maybe once that happens I can post something of interest, because right now I have nothing. Nothing at all.