Rachael52's Blog

week 7, wikis

rachael52 — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:24:55 +0000

Hi. I’m behind due to a job search in my dept… but I’ll try to make a dent. I thought I’d mention that the Common Craft video on wikis was excellent. Even though I’ve used wikis several times for collaborative work (esp. writing an article), I didn’t really understand it terribly well but these neat instructional videos really help!

week 6, #11 – technorati

rachael52 — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:44:41 +0000

I’m in overload, I think. I don’t feel like signing up for another thing right now. Plus I’m not that proud of my blog! But one thing I do know is that our library’s blog is being indexed or crawled through by google because I sometimes come across our blog articles when I’m randomly googling for something. So you don’t always have to register with Technorati, as you did point out to us.

week 6, social bookmarking (de.li.cious)

rachael52 — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:22:22 +0000

Well, interesting. We were asked:
Can you see the potential of this tool for research assistance? Or just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere? How can libraries take advantage of social bookmarking sites?

I can certainly see it can be useful to access your bookmarks anywhere. For fun, I created a de.li.cious (can’t get punctuation right) account and put some vegan sites up there any my lib’s home page. I saw that another library in our area, STCC, has its own de.li.cious account and they have included my library’s site on their own,which is interesting.
We have research guides, that take a lot of work, and in some ways, that’s how we share great web sites with our patrons. I don’t think I’d want to do both; and research guides do a lot more than that.
As to research assistance, helping patrons, or teaching it to patrons even, in terms of helping them find relevant web sites, I think it could be useful, especially in terms of very narrow topics. On the other hand, they’d be more likely to turn to google. I’ll be interested in what other librarians have to say on this topic, on their blog posts.

From week 5, my avatar

rachael52 — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:48:43 +0000

All this new stuff is hard! So, with yahoo avatar, you can make it your avatar for yahoo products but nothing else. Still, one of you was able to at least get the picture into their blog, perhaps by putting it in Flickr first… or not. Anyway, here goes.
Also, with inputting tags, you just type a bunch of tags, right? No punctuation?

How can I add my avatar?

rachael52 — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:43:20 +0000

OK, I created a (fairly uncreative) avatar via yahoo, per the homework suggestion. I gather that the avatar will appear next to any comments I add to others’ blogs,once I tie it to my blog. But I don’t know how to tie it to the blog. I’ve looked on Dashborad, Media, Links, Appearance. Can anyone help me? I will add this to the form. Rachael52

PS – I’m using WordPress

week 4, #9: rss feeds on bloglines

rachael52 — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:38:01 +0000

I used bloglines and the following are the feeds I check every day, first thing in the a.m. It takes me almost no time at all and I always feel good if I find a little nugget to pass on to my colleagues. The first one, below, is our library’s blog. Diane on our staff gets the credit for keeping it going, but I’d love to know if it gets used. At any rate, several on my list are good at highlighting new technology in a way I can understand it. I did have a little bit of a hard time adding a feed with the orange button since it didn’t give me an option of creating the feed in Bloglines. Apparently Firefox DOES offer you that option. But a colleague reminded me to cut and paste the URL into the Add Feed feature of bloglines and now all is well.

week 3, #7: comment about technology

rachael52 — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:46:39 +0000

I had an interesting discussion with someone about what technology might just be fleeting and not very useful in libraries and which might turn out to be really important and useful. It seems that things change and evolve fast, but some, such as blogs, have been around for longer than we think. I think I want to open my mind to uses of “new” technology and skim over the surface, fixing on certain things to use for a few projects of the year, but not getting into depth on too many. Since it’s not possible to know if Flickr will be totally passe in 5 months, I can take the attitude that it’s here for a while and use it if there’s a neat and easy use for our library. And not feel disappointed when I hear, a year from now, from a student, “Flickr? No one uses THAT any more.”

Rachael’s Mosaic_Page_1

rachael52 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:08:32 +0000

Rachael’s Mosaic_Page_1

Originally uploaded by Rachael52

This is a very bad mosaic but at least I’m doing my homework.
It was harder than I thought (Always is, the first time). Rachael

Flickr

rachael52 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:06:13 +0000

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Lesson 3: More on Flickr

rachael52 — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:19:10 +0000

After viewing other’s blogs, I thought I’d try to actually include an image from Flickr on mine.

This is Northampton, where I live, photo via Flickr by bunkosquad.