Slamming the boards

The internet has changed all aspects of the World and our lives, nothing seems to remain untouched. We are an instant society and I guess that libraries have to keep moving to remain relevant.

Slamming the boards is one way that libraries can hang in there, stay involved and promote reference services. I don't think that people who have grown up with the internet being ever present have the patience to attend a library, present a reference query at an interview and wait for an answer. Now that I think of it, I can remember the last time I sent off a subject request to our reference librarian. Having a site that librarians can demonstrate their skills and provide answers along with sources to questions posed would give a guarantee of truthfulness and accuracy rather than an opinion. Answer boards allow libraries to remain pertinent and to retain their niche in the knowledge market.

I am sure their are many librarians in our library system who would love to participate in answer boards, it may be the future for reference questions. As always, with staffing issues finding time from the day to day activities is another matter. We would need major senior management encouragement and acceptance.

LibraryThing

I have found all of the sites that we have been taken through over the last few weeks interesting and useful. But LibraryThing, oh! what fun. I particularly enjoy being able to check out the books that like minded LibraryThing users recommend and also find the list of books suggested by LibraryThing quite intriguing.

I will spend and endless amount of time on this site, reading reviews, posting entries and being guided by suggestions. As yet, I haven't posted a review but I do intend to, nor have I entered one of the discussion groups but I have had a little peek and once I am more confident on the site I am prepared to dive in.

Bookmobile

Keyword Bookmobile in Technorati brings up seemingly endless posts. Doing an advanced search means you can refine these hits to more relevant posts or posts that have been tagged with bookmobile.

At first I had no success searching for nswpln2008 until I noticed the top left hand corner of the screen had posts, blogs, photos, videos and then I was able to bring up all photos that had been loaded on to Flickr in a prior adventure activity.

Social bookmarking

Del.icio.us, what a great resource for research. Having looked at Sutherland Shire Libraries tag cloud and Cleveland Public Library's tags I found the first page of Cleveland to be more attractive to me. This is of course because I hate change and a list is more the format I am comfortable with, the cloud presentation seems messy to me - so I am going to step out there and force myself to do some more research in the cloud format. I must keep moving with new technology and formats and not let myself be bogged down with old methods.

You can't help be more impressed with sites that have had more hits. Who knows where you can end up following other people's tag. It's a bit like patrons taking a book from the returns trolley rather than the shelf, the idea being that if someone else has read it, it must be good. I did some research on a music site looking for specific titles, following tags has taken me to some fascinating sites and unknown territory.

There are many benefits in being able to keep all your bookmarks in one place, have them tagged for easy sorting, being able to stretch into similar tagged sites and I see huge potential for use in the library.

If only we had a video camera

I have in the past watched the odd things on YouTube and Google video but hadn't thought of it in terms of how we can utilize it in the library.

After coming across Olive Riley returns to Broken Hill on You Tube I realised what a fantastic way to record oral history. Olive was over 100 when she returned to Broken Hill and because she is such a character and her memory is so good she relates many stories and anecdotes from a bygone era with zest and wit.

I loved this video. I have an elderly neighbor who can spin spellbinding yarns for hours, if only we had a video camera at our library!

The new employee orientation video is a great idea and could be a time saving and therefore cost saving introduction. To be of benefit I think these videos need to be library specific rather than generic and be of a simple format that would allow economic, regular updating.

I also enjoyed the 2006 HSC art express video Stagenoise. The artists interviewed were confident behind the camera and I found YouTube a great vehicle for Year 12 students to display their works.

We have had some great storytime guests at our library, a drumming session, ukulele player and flamenco dancers. I wish we had thought to share this experience with others online.

Woolworths in Mullum?

I was able to find the following video on YouTube. It is exciting to find people well known to you just by doing a simple search. Once again the topic is Woolworths coming to Mullumbimby, these people are certainly passionate in their opposition.

Telstra site Mullumbimby

I found this on google video. The town of Mullumbimby was shocked to find out that our local Mallams store has been sold to Woolworths. There is very vocal opposition to Woolworths coming to town and the purchase of the Telstra site by Council was seen as a victory for this group. It adjoins the block that Woolworths will be building on and restricts the chance of their future expansion.