Exercise 7

Investigative Exercise 7 Podcasts

Find a podcast in any Australian library. Post to your blog a short summary of the podcast. Include the library’s name, title of podcast and link. Make certain you label your post.

A podcast from the State Library of New South Wales, Australia

I found a podcast from the events and talks podcast section (http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/podcasts/events/index.html). The podcast I chose is called Anne of green Gables (http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/podcasts/events/anne_green_gables.html). In this podcast Susannah Fullerton, the author of two books about Jane Austen, explores the lasting appeal of Anne of Green Gables, which now celebrates its 100^th year of publication and analyses the life of its author, Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Ms Fullerton begins with an interesting excerpt from the famous book, followed by a close analysis and focus on how the author’s life impacted the characters and storyline. She mentions that the book transcends the age line, being a novel that is able to be read by both adults and children, with a mix of both romance and realism. Ms Fullerton also describes the Lucy Montgomery’s ability to write books which cross cultural borders and are loved all around the world; Anne of the Island was sent to polish soldiers in WW2 as it was thought to be an uplifting read to prepare them for war, in Japan Anne of Green Gables has been taught to generations of children, a musical production of The Blue Castle was an absolute hit in Poland, and Ellen Montgomery received fan mail from around the world, including letters from Australia. Many modern writers have been greatly influenced by Ms Montgomery’s incredible books, journals, short stories and poems.

 Anne of Green Gables concerns itself with sibling Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert who own the sprawling Green Gables estate on Prince Edward Island. Marilla, who is cautious, religious and has no tolerance for nonsense agrees that the best way to maintain the property would be to adopt an adolescent boy. When Matthew arrives at the train station, and the child waiting for him is freckle-faced, red-haired Anne Shirley, he realizes there was a mistake, but can’t bear to break the heart of the ecstatic orphan who somehow found her way to Prince Edward Island. Marilla agrees for Anne to stay for a trial period, and at first her rapid tongue, dreaminess and knack for finding trouble seem to suggest she will soon have to leave. Through trials and tribulations, Anne does win over those important to her, including Marilla, who cannot even imagine what life would have been like without Anne.

Exercise 2

I decided to do the John Oxley Library Blog as my blog post.( http://blogs.slq.qld.gov.au/jol/)

This weblog appears to be about the State Library of Queensland. This blog interested me because at first sight it is well set out, with a modern and imaginative design and has a variety of information already on the front page. Since I am moving to Brisbane after my son has completed his HSC, I would love to learn as much as I can about the Queensland State Library, after seeing the magnificent NSW State Library.

The eye-catching links on the sidebar lead to Floodlines, Tea and Me, Asia Pacific Design Library, Australian Library of Art, Indigenous Voices and SLQ today. Interesting Topics on the front page included the passing of the first Aboriginal person elected to an Australian state parliament (Eric Deeral), the New State Library’s Indigenous Language WebPages, as well as a post on Family History Week. These topics caught my eye, as I realised that the Library appears to value the integration of the aboriginal community, encouraging viewers to learn more about Indigenous Australians. 

The post concerning Vale Eric Deeral http://blogs.slq.qld.gov.au/jol/2012/09/11/eric-deeral/ interested me particularly since as a European, Aborigines are a new topic for me and I love learning about different cultures, especially ones that I know nothing, or very little about. It’s great to see that the State Library of Queensland has implemented an Indigenous Languages Project, which is sure to spark the interest of many people, who like me, want to learn more about Indigenous Australians. 

Exercise 1

Write a paragraph on your blog describing your understanding of Library 2.0. List three Web 2.0 applications commonly used by Libraries.

Library 2.0 is a service derived from Web 2.0, which has focused on the web services as a platform for information sharing and collaboration, coupled with a user centred design. These aspects have been translated to a library service model that reflects a new era in the way information is presented and delivered to users. Library 2.0 attempts to engage the customer in the design and implementation of various library services by encouraging active feedback and participation. This facilitates the constantly evolving and changing dynamic of contemporary service delivery while promoting a participatory role for library users. This has been epitomised in the Online Public Access Catalogue, with features aimed at greater user interaction and participation with the system, such as tagging and reading or posting reviews.

         

   In addition, Library 2.0 provides a multi-media experience, with collections including a wide variety of video and audio components to complement written texts. Another application of Web 2.0 innovations in the Library 2.0 interface is the inclusion of communication platforms such as instant messaging or wikis, through which users cannot only communicate with each other but also library staff. These also allow for professional development and collaboration, whereby librarians from different branches can communicate through chat sessions. Wikis on the other hand can be used to make library staff manuals or procedures for various system or database applications readily available or even conferences and meetings. Image sharing, another prominent feature of Web 2.0 has facilitated promotional activities for libraries in particular, such as record building projects that involve the community, author visits and special library displays. By extension, video sharing can be used for training, promotion, tutorials and lectures. These also often take the form of podcasts, through which author talks, seminars or storytime recordings are distributed, which can easily be viewed on many platforms, including mobile devices. 

Web 2.0

Examples of Web 2.0 technologies which are widely used:

Blog (short for Weblog)

A blog is an online personal journal that enables the writer to write, reflect and comment daily- it is the most common web 2.0 tools. Blog software includes Word Press, Movable Type, Blogger and Tumblr. Blogs are generally used for News/Events, professional Development, Marketing, Newspaper columns and TV shows.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

RSS is software which can be used for delivering regularly changing web content. Used especially by news-related sites, weblogs and online publishers. Examples of RSS feed readers include Bloglines, Google Reader, Feeburner and FeedDemon. The General uses for RSS are in Articles, Newsletters, News and Events and Presentations.

Instant messaging (IM)

A messenger that allows the user to have a live conversation with people around the world via computers connected to the Internet, allowing almost instantaneous responses. Features include Buddy Lists (Listing of trusted friends and family), Chat Window (the window in which communication is done) and Status Indicator (a notation of being, e.g. ‘At Lunch). IM services include examples such as Yahoo, Windows Live Messenger and Skype.

Wikis

A Wiki is a Web Site developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content. Examples include PBWiki, Media Wiki and Wetpaint.

Image Sharing

Websites such as Flickr and Picasa allow people to share photographs online, with features that allow images to be tagged and browsed.

Video Sharing

A video hosting service allows individuals to upload video clips to an Internet website. These sites are increasing in popularity, with websites such as Youtube, Blip.TV, Google Video and Yahoo! Video becoming more and more prominent among internet users.

Podcasts

A podcast is a multimedia digital file made available on the Internet for downloading through an RSS feed. Podcasting is made easy through software such as Audacity, @Podder, iTunes and Garageband.

Social Bookmaaring

Social Bookmarking enables users to save and organise links to favourite websites to share with others. Organisation methods include tags or descriptors. Examples of Social Bookmarking sites are del.icio.us, BlogMarks.net, Digg and PHPDug.

Folksonomies and User-based Tagging

These go hand in hand with social bookmarking, in which subject descriptors and tagging make things easier to find. These functions enable users to catalogue their own Libraries, organise their favourite bookmarks, classify image collections and share their information with other people. An example of a Tagging site is TagCloud.

Social Networking

Social Networking is the use of a Web Site to communicate with other members of the site by posting messages, photographs, etc. Features that users experience when Social Networking are: User profiles, friending, groups, individual messaging, announcements, individual message boards, photos, blogs or journals, searching and privacy controls.  Popular examples include Facebook, MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn and LiveJournals

Mashups

A mashup is a website which uses content from more than one source to establish a new service. Examples of such websites include Google Maps, Biowizard, Delicious Library 2 and Rivers of the World.

Widgets

A widget is an application that enables a user to perform a function or access a service, using embedded codes in web pages to grant access to the weather, news, time, polls etc. Examples include Polldaddy and SurveyMonkey.

Exercise 3

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheenalashay/7032706093/in/pool-libraryofcongress

Photo from the Library of Congress, USA- This photo depicts an image of the Library of Congress building, with particular focus on the ceiling. Graceful columns form arches which supports an intricately decorated balcony, along with cherubs and angels. This draws the viewer's eye to the ornate ceiling, adorned with patterns of golds and browns.

Exercise 4

Exercise 5

Write a post on your blog about why you think it is a good idea for a library to participate on a social networking site, or why not. Make certain you label your post.

An involvement in social networking sites allows libraries to reach out to a broader social specrum and especially engage younger people to visit the library and kindle their enthusiasm for reading. Statistically, youth make up a large percentage of social network users, making it an ideal platform to engage them. Furthermore, a social networking profile allows libraries to quickly communicate information about upcoming events, for example a facebook post about a new book club starting up, or certain library resources being out of order due to maintenance work. In conjunction with other community profiles and council pages, social networking allows one to promote the other. An active presence on social networking sites also communicates that the library is ‘up-to-date’ and representative of other online resources it may possess, such as access to journals.

Exercise 6

Write a post on your blog commenting on the usefulness of these reviews. Do you think libraries should be providing this service? Does the library you use have this option available on their catalogue? Make certain you label your post.

I believe it is very useful and informative for patrons to have access to reviews of books before purchasing or borrowing these. While my local library, City of Canada Bay Library, does not offer this service, I personally always look up and read reviews for books I intend to borrow and having such a review system integrated into the library catalogue would be very convenient and appealing to me. Furthermore, people may feel encouraged to sample new authors or genres by reading reviews, expanding their literary horizon. However, on the other hand, these reviews may be rather subjective, and a negative review, especially when highlighted through an integration in the library catalogue, may discourage patrons from reading a certain book. One possible option would be to present a myriad of reviews and aggregate ‘score’ for each book, similar to Amazon’s review system, where each item receives a mean score out of five stars sourced from user submitted reviews. This would be more representative of popular opinion of the book as opposed to the view of a single, possibly biased individual.