Week 7: Podcasting

My experience with podcasting has been pretty limited to this point. I haven't done much beyond downloading a few library 2.0 related podcasts from iTunes and listening to them. I know my library has done some work with podcasts, creating a few podcasts for educating patrons on library resources. My experience with streaming video has been purely on a user level. I watch videos on YouTube a lot.

I browsed the 'Health' section at podcastalley.com. It seemed like a broad category, with more consumer health related podcasts. There were podcasts on exercise and alternative health in addition to some podcasts recorded by health professionals. I didn't see anything at first glance that looked helpful to me in my library setting, but these podcasts may be useful to someone working in a public library.

I had never heard of Odeo before, so it was interesting to poke around the resource and learn about it. After I signed up, I did a quick search for 'medical library'. The results I got were pretty scattered, it doesn't look like the podcasts are tagged or cataloged, so the search just looked in the podcast description for any time 'medical' or 'library' was written. I had a little trouble browsing the site: a lot of the links loaded extremely slowly or not at all. I subscribed to a podcast called 'KidneyNotes', which is a podcast on "medicine, science and technology from a nephrologist in NYC".

The potential for using YouTube in the library is enormous. Libraries can create videos with programs like 'Camtasia' to screencast instructional videos for using their catalogs or databases. Libraries can videocast library events such as book clubs and lectures, allowing distance learners and outside parties tune into the library. The library could also use YouTube to introduce patrons to their staff and services, conducting Q & A sessions with librarians about library services. These videocasts increase the library's visibility, which is always important.

For example, Eastern Michigan University has an account on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/emulibrary). This account has videos touring the library, teaching users how to search databases such as Google Scholar, and how to use library resources (ex: requesting books via ILL, locating books in the stacks, accessing course reserves, etc.).

Week 6: Photo Sharing

I've used Flickr in the past for personal use: vacation pictures and family get togethers. Here's a link to my account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/46627964@N00/

It had been a while since I'd uploaded pictures to that account, so I uploaded some new ones from some of the student association events I'd helped plan this past year. One of the things that I didn't like about Flickr the last time I used it, and this still holds true, is the limit on the number of pictures you can upload per month. This makes sense considering it is a free service, and they have to keep server costs low, but it's still frustrating to have to choose only a few pictures to put online every month.

I've also used Facebook's photo service quite a bit too, both for personal pictures and student association event pictures. I've uploaded one of the latter here:


This is a picture from when our student association (DUSLA) visited the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.

This application could be used in the library to publicize library events as well as to instruct users about the libraries (by posting pictures of areas of the library).

Week 5: Office Tools

Step 1

I had already created a Google Docs account before the start of the class, so I used my existing account (attached to Katherine.ruth.fischer@gmail.com) for the assignment.

Step 2

I have 10 documents saved in my Google Docs account, which I’ve started either for school, work, or personal use. It was easy enough to start a new document. I saved my new document as the first line I typed into it: ‘Test Google Docs Document for MLA 2.0 101 Class’.

Step 3

I uploaded a spreadsheet I keep of the student workers I manage for my job. The spreadsheet contains names and contact information in case I ever need to get a hold of any of them while I’m not at work.

Step 4

A while back, I planned an informal instructional session for the student chapter I run on Google Documents. For this session, I created a brief presentation on Google Docs, more to show how it works than anything. Instead of sharing this presentation, I shared a document containing meeting notes from the last officers’ meeting for my student group. I shared the notes with all of the attendees so that they could make any changes they saw fit.

Step 5

I like the Zoho application a lot, I think it’s a better example of a complete online office tool than Google Docs is, just because its applications are a little more segmented, making it a little less confusing to navigate straight off the bat.

Microsoft Office live is useful just because it was created by Microsoft, and so probably has the best compatibility with documents created in offline Microsoft applications. However, at least in Google Docs, I haven’t had too many problems uploading existing Microsoft documents.

Step 6

While I think eventually this may be the future of office products, I don’t think it will happen anytime soon. It may be because the examples we explored were all free, but they did not have the versatility and capabilities of offline products such as Microsoft Office. Features in Microsoft Office such as outlining, creating macros, mail merging, creating templates, and hyperlinked tables of content, are not available. I personally use these features often, and would be frustrated by the limitations of the online office tools if they were the only options available to me.

In the immediate future, I definitely see an online component being added to traditional office tools. It is too useful a feature for collaboration and creativity to leave out.

Week Four: Social Bookmarking

I’ve used delicious in the past for work and for school. I like to create delicious accounts for the classes I take online to help me keep track of helpful bookmarks shared by the professor, and links that I turn up in my own browsing. At work I tag links I find helpful for answering reference questions, and links to sites that I might need to access from home. The tagging feature helps me organize my links as well as access them quickly and easily.

When I first started using delicious, it was mostly as a repository for links that I needed to access over and over from different computers. Emailing the links to myself, or remembering how I found them, was incredibly tedious and time consuming. Delicious made keeping track of noteworthy links very simple. Now I can use it to come back to interesting articles and to share articles and sites with others (via the “for:” function). This feature makes it an invaluable tool to researchers. Although difficulties may arise when password protected sites are tagged, Open Access, and other free, sources of information are easy to tag and return to later.

I even prefer using delicious on my home computer than to saving links to my ‘favorites’ folder. This is because delicious’s tagging features allows me to organize them so much more clearly than a Favorites folder. The ability to bundle tags means that I can go from looking at a long, comprehensive list of tags to a short and focused list.

You can take a look at my delicious links: http://del.icio.us/krf26.