Week 7, thing#23: Final Thoughts

Personnally I think this is good learning experience. Because I am late to the program it gave me the opportunity to test many updated versions of social media sites and tools. I found the following sites and software are most useful to me and have great potential to be used (some of the function may have alreay been incorporated in our web pages) for better serving our customers. Those sites and programs are: Bloglines, Flickr, RSS feeds, Online image generators, Wiki, You Tube, Podcast and OverDrive. Mastering those tools to a certain degree, one can produce pretty decent blog pages or host a web site to communicate and socialise with similar minded individuls or groups. I think online productivity tool, although improved tremendously in the last couple of years, still has a way to go if it wants to compete with Microsoft for real business. It can not be denied that they are great as free tools. One surprise factor, at least, to me is that many online guides and web sites are not well maintained, probably because of lacking of staff or time. My feeling is that it may be easy to set up the program but to keep it current with all new information and technology would be a challenge. I think the instructions and guidance to the participants for the learning program provide Maryland Learning 2.0 is excellent, I especially like the suggested excercises. Although according to the instruction, I am supposed to spend 45 minutes for each "Thing", I think I routinely spend far more than that.    

Week 7, thing#22: Downloadable materials

OverDrive site is pretty good in design. You can search any material by keyword, title, author and ISBN. You can also perform advance search by combining different search categories. I first search the title "That Used To Be Us" by Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, but the title is only available in Adobe EPUB format and only available to some 9 countries other than US. The site provides bookstore search so you can buy the reading right there. In this case through search, I found an Australia store called "Read without Paper" (http://www.readwithoutpaper.com/29E80417-A4BF-494D-9DB5-8863D1081C2C/10/130/en/ContentDetails.htm?ID=0cb6dc3a-0b81-4361-ae6b-7a2d13cba53c) that has the e-book so you can purchase the read right for AUD32.03.

In order to test the download function of its website, I choose a title named "The show must go on" by Jane O'Connor. Since I have the title information, I used advanced title field search and get 3 results immediately which includes 2 audiobooks in MP3 and WMA format, and 1 ebook. At this stage, you can listen to the sample to see if you really like it. If you do, you may decide if you want to buy from a bookstore or borrow from a library. If you want to borrow from your local library, you first need to do a search to see if your local library is on the owner list. If it does, then you can select your library on the list. The zip code search is really helpful and effient way for the customers. Once you find your local library, in this case, it is Montgomery County Public Library and its branches. When you click on the library on the list, it will take you to the Maryland' Digital eLibrary Consortium website. You then can check out the e-audio or place a hold by using your library card.

Week 7, thing#21: Podcasts

Podcast.com has a clear cut approch with topics grouped in categories such as Arts, Business, Education, etc. but no detailed index. At Podcast Alley, you can add your own podcast to the site by being a registered user. You can also do keyword search in addition to genre category search. Hits of podcast titles will be listed. However when you click on one of those titles you will not get podcast directly. You need either download podcast software or go to Podshow at http://www.mevio.com/ before you can actually listen to them. So in comarison, Podcast Alley is just a search tool while Podcast.com provides one stop shopping experience. The following is the link to Lincoln City Libraries Podcasts which is listed in my Blogline account (http://dashboard.bloglines.com/privatepage/1#23_things), giving good example of how libraries can take advantage of this technology to better serve our customers.

Week 7, thing#20: You Tube

You Tube site is easy to use and navigate. The quality of videos are vast different. Depending on your time, interest, search skills and tast, it will take some time to get really good, relevant videos on your research topics. There is no question about the entertainment value of the site, especially when you just want to relax and watch some interesting movie clips.
The video I choose for this project is entertaining and beautifully shot and with great music.

There are many ways for the system to use You Tube to enhance our customers' experience with various library services. For example, in-house produced training, policy and procedural videos can be uploaded to You Tube and our web site to accompany text document, providing better communication tool and let County residents know the core value of our service.   

Week 6, thing#19 : Web 2.0 Award Sites

The list is a little bit outdated (published in 2008) so I choose a top ranking one by Google search. The site is http://www.seomoz.org. The site tool can crawl customer site each week, identify performance issues and notifying the user. It also monitor rankings for all the keywords customers care about. It gives actionable recommendations for customer website and helps user not only understand where things may have gone awry but gives them clear instructions on what to fix. It uses Keyword Difficulty tools to analyze the current keyword landscape, provides customers with a detailed analysis of the top ranking pages for guiding content strategy and prioritizing keyword optimization. The SEOmoz Toolbar is easy to use (which is available for both Firefox and Chrome) to access a wealth of information on the web. You can review metrics like Page Authority, Domain Authority and link data without leaving a single page. The things I don't like is that it is a commercial product and costs $99 per month after 30 day free trial period.

Week 5, thing#18: Online Application Tools

The layout and tool bar of Zoho Writer are clean and easy to use because they are smiliar to Microsoft words but more. In my opinion, it is more intuitive than Words.

The unique feature of tags-as-folders is a very good idea which makes the document available in mutiple folders according to sugjects! We can click on "Tag Folders" in the Sidebar to view all tag folders.

Zoho Writer responds to the basic human need to connect with others - share a document with others & allow them to work on it. One feature of that is "inline comments" to particular paragraphs/sentences of a document. If you write a report or training plan, team members and bosses can add comments in a document you are collaborating on.

Online Thesaurus is very convient for me to find synonyms and related words. Of course spelling check is also a plus.

Week 5, thing#17: Wiki Play

BP Wiki tour and PBwiki Vidio Gallery are no longer available. PB Wiki tips have many good suggestions.

Week 5, thing#16: Wiki

Library Success: A best practice Wiki has a good design and is comprehensive in tools and guides to help beginners to participate and practice Wiki writing and editing skills. It also provides many resources to help paticipants to sharpen their skills. Librians and staff can use wiki tools to cooperate on various projects. SJCPL Subject Guides is a good example that demonstrates that Library system can develop a wiki page for various projects so they can get input and participation of county residents who are interested in the topics. Participants can add, edit or delete content. Tracking tools within wikis allow you to easily keep up on what has been changed and by whom. Wikis are a great way of collaboratively developing a website, but they are not suitable for every web-based project. While some websites might benefit from the insights of the community, others function better under tighter control. If a library is looking to develop content that requires input from people inside and outside of the library, a wiki is a the ideal tool to solicit that content.

I think we can use wiki tool to make the library's website the online hub of the community with a one-stop-shop for variety of information including but not limited to scheduled programs and workshops. Want to know who the best mechanic is for fixing old Toyotas? Check the automotive reviews on the wiki. Want to know when your child’s next Little League game is? Check the team information page the coach set up on the wiki. Want to find the spiciest Thai food in town? Read the member reviews in the restaurant section. Anyone could add new informative content. The library could team up with other local organizations to develop, maintain and add content to the wiki, but the bulk of the content will come from average member of the community. Opening up a community guide to the public allows a wealth of information to flow in that can make the library’s website a true community resource.

Wikis can also be used internally in libraries. In an average week, the number of emails that travel between colleagues in a library is astounding! When we’re working on a specific project with our colleagues, it can be difficult keep up with the flow of conversation in emails. Wikis are an excellent space for collaborative group work. Everyone can make changes to the wiki. If the group is working on a document, it can be edited in the wiki rather than having different versions of a word processing file going back and forth through email. It’s simply a better way of organizing the group’s efforts and keeping track of where everyone is in the process.

Libraries have increasingly been developing intranets for their staff where the administrators can more easily disseminate information. Making the intranet into a wiki allows both administrators and staff to easily add relevant news and other content. Putting policy and reference manuals into wiki can makes them accessible to all staff members and makes them easy to update on the fly. We don’t have to make every wiki document open to editing by all users of the wiki. We can set up different previlege levels.

Week 5, Thing#15: Web 2.0

Several web 2.0 tools are useful and can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of library operation. For example, through RSS feeds, we can package and push their content to county residents' preferred places. The data can be customized and offered for a wide variety of parameters, including classification ranges, allowing users to compile and subscribe to the sources they find most useful.

Library services also might be enhanced by the Read/Write web and operate in a climate of collaboration. Our virtual service already uses Instant Messaging to answer customer questions. Building Weblogs and wikis as resources can further the mission of the library, and mashes up content via API (Application Program Interface) to build useful Web sites. We may also use Google map mash up of branch libraries just like Chicago library system did. Librarians may also create MySpace profiles and participate in other thriving communities build connections online where their users live.

However, the master of web 2.0 needs many resources (time, computer tools, training and try and error) many staff lacks. For the benefit of efficiency, we need one dedicated position in the system whose primary responsibility is to be an expert for this tool. He or she should be tasked to develop all web 2.0 related tools in our site and to coordinate various projects with componets of web 2.0 tools and served as resouce person to help other staff to develop and use those tools in their subject area.

Week 5, Thing#14: Technorati

When I did keyword search for Learning 2.0 at Technorati, there is one hit in the blog/post search and resulted in some outdated posting (2006). There is no hit in the blog directory search. Tag search is pretty interesting way to glace over the topics you are interested in. Through tags people use in their blogs for the past month, you will find out about general interest of bloggers in this site.