Youtube Video

Here is the link to the youtube video I produced showing how to set up a laptop and display it on an LCD screen.
(How embarrassing!)

E-Portfolio

We have just started to create our own online E-portfolio using Mahara. While doing this I discovered that the existing Blog link is only for a blog created in Mahara. To actually access your external blog you must create a RSS feed to it.

First go to the Edit Profile View page.

Next click on External Feed Link.

Drag the External Feed Icon down onto the page where ever you want it. A small External Feed Configure window will open and you can fill in the name of the box. Leave this window open.

Open another window to your actual blog and click on the Subscribe to: Posts(Atom) (usually down the bottom of the page)
Copy the URL from this window and paste it back in the External Feed Configure window.

Hope this helps.

Rollyo

I have just subscribed to Rollyo. This site gives you the tools to create your own search engine and allows you to add up to 25 URLs to your own unique Search Roll. My user name is Tigerquollsmum. I have made two separate Search Rolls. The first is called Library Quest and just combines The State Library of Tasmania, UTAS and Trove. The other Roll is called Useful Library Blogs and combines:

Connectinglibrarian.com
Librariesinteract.info
Oedb.org
Libworm.com

Libraries Interact Blog

I thought I had better look at some home grown blogs. Here's what I came up with.

CW, Fiona Kathryn, Peta, Snail, Michelle, Morgan, Techxplorer (2010), Libraries Interact,Australia, viewed 5th April 2010, http://librariesinteract.info/

The blog was set up by a group of Australian Librarian bloggers but they only give their user names and there doesn't seem to be any qualifications or authority provided. Apparently anyone can contribute, you do not have to be Australian, a librarian or a blogger. The site does stipulate that your posts do need to be non-commercial and relevant to the scope of the blog. The scope of the blog seems to be fairly general and includes any library related reflections, job postings, notifications of events, links to interesting sites and discussions of the biblioblogosphere (I love that word!).

The site is well designed and provides very flexable search options in the form of a general search field, an archive month search field, a categories search field and a Thali tag cloud. A link to a list of Australian library blogs is also provided. This blog is more relevant for Australian library employees as it covers both the local industry and general library issues.

Librarian.net Blog

West J (2010) Librarian.net,Vermont, USA, viewed 5/4/2010, http://www.librarian.net/

This is an authoritative and well designed blog produced by Jessamyn West. Jessamyn has worked in the library industry since 1994 and is a former member of the American Library Association council, a current moderator on Metafilter, an author of many library related books and articles and has her own entry on Wikipedia. This blog was voted number one in the Top 25 Librarian Bloggers on the Online Educational Database website in 2007. It has been established since 1999 and is active and frequently updated . Jessamyn is known for her unconventional views on her profession and is very politically active and aware. She states she is anti-censorship and pro-freedom.
The blog has links to a "Frequently Asked Questions" page, a comprehensive "About" page and to her "Talks" page. The blog covers a range of issues related to the library industry and in pariticular the political pressures in the USA.

Draw backs are that the blog doesn't provide a list of subjects covered or a search field to enable you to search the blog for your subjects of interest.

Teachertube: Worldcat video

Just had a quick look at Teachertube, the educational version of Youtube. I have decided to do a critical evaluation on this video

McCormack A (2009),Multi Library Search at WorldCat, Teachertube,USA, viewed 4/3/2010,-http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=102155&title=Multi_Library_Search_at_WorldCat

This video sets out how to search the Worldcat site for an item in a library nearest to your actual location. There isn't any information provided about the authority for this video. Anne's tutorial is clear and concise, she speaks slowly and clearly and gives you plenty of time to follow the links that she uses. The actual visual is a little fuzzy but not enough to create a problem. I used the steps that she outlines to find a book about Tasmanian Tigers in the State Library of Tasmania.

Planet Cataloging

Baxmeyer, J, Clarke, K, (2010) Planet Cataloging, viewed 3/4/2010, http://planetcataloging.org/

Planet Cataloging is an automatically-generated aggregation of blogs related to cataloging and metadata. There are approx 59 cataloguing blogs on its list. The site was named one of the top 10 Librarian Blogs to Read in 2009. Subscribing to its RSS feed permits subscribers to collect recent postings from all 59 blogs. While some of the blogs listed are regularly updated, many are not, and some had been inactive for quite some time. Even with these problems it is a great site to find and connect to cataloguing blogs.

Catalogablog

Bigwood D (2010), Catalogablog, Texas, USA, viewed 3/4/2010
http://catalogablog.blogspot.com/

This blog is written by David Bigwood an Assistant Manager for Libary Services at Lunar and Planetary Institute, a research institute funded by NASA. It is recommended by several other blogs as an excellent site for finding out what is going on in the cataloging world. The blog commenced in 2002 and has been consistantly published since then.

The site has alot of articles dealing with the various aspects of cataloguing ie MARC, RDA, Semantic Markup of Bibliography. David provides a lot of links to current conferences and up and coming events in cataloguing.

British Library Podcasts

British Library (2010),"Whats On" British Library Podcasts, London, U.K., viewed 3/4/2010 http://feeds.feedburner.com/BritishLibraryPodcasts

These Podcasts are produced by the British Library, which gives them great authority. They cover a wide range of subjects but mainly concentrate on British literature and history. There are three main categories to choose from -
The Curators Choice- the Curators best picks ie. "Messiah concert in the British Library", "Beowulf", "Untitled Beatles lyric found"
Exhibitions link takes you to podcasts related to present and past exhibitions at the British Library i.e. "Henry VIII", "Ramayana", "From Parchment to Pixel".
Talks, Discussions and Interviews takes you to interesting talks such as - "Book Makers: British Publishing in the Twentieth Century", "Essential Shakespeare Live Encore", "Cheryl Tipp introduces 'British Mammals'"

The Podcasts are of a high quality and are presented by a variety of well known and respected professionals. I highly recommend these podcasts as there is something of interest for just about anyone.



My personal favorite podcast was the "The Lady in the Tower: The fall of Anne Boleyn" by Alison Weir, one of Britain's most respected and read historians. This talk concerns her next book which is a detailed account of the controversial imprisonment and execution of Anne Boleyn.Great stuff.

Wiki

I have decided to use the LISwiki to do a critical evaluation on

Hubbard, J (2010), LISWIKI,USA, viewed 31/3/2010, http://liswiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

This Wiki is an attempt to copy Wikipedia but in the niche subject of Library related material. Its creator, John Hubbard, is a Librarian at the University of Wisconsin who has a keen interest in web 2.0 technologies applications in libraries. LISwiki stands for Libray and Information Science wiki. The concept is very good but the wiki seems to have had only a luke warm reception. It was begun in 2005 and still needs lots of work by library employees and knowledgeable contributors, since many of the articles are just “stubs”. Some of the better articles are found under the categories of Cataloging and Classification. Each has a link at the top of the page to the other, so once you’ve located one, it’s easy to find the other. Cataloging has 52 articles and 3 sub-categories (Authority Control, Cataloging Elements, and Catalogs) each with several articles of its own. Classification has 26 articles. Many articles have a link to the Wikipedia. Another particularly good article is "How to Apply for a Library Job"

Overall I think there is probably more complete and active wikis available than LISWIKI.

Libworm

I cant help myself! I just found this site and I didn't want to lose it so I'll just do a quick post.

Dolan F, Rothman D (2006), Libworm, viewed 3/4/2010 http://www.libworm.com


LibWorm beta is intended for library employees and those interested in libraries. The site collects updates from over 1500 RSS feeds, including over 800 biblioblogs, LIS journal Table of contents and many other information sources. You are then able to search the contents of these feeds, and the search results can then be accessed as an RSS feed that the user can subscribe to either in his favourite feed reader or in LibWorm's built-in reader.

Some of the major subjects covered are:
Academic Libraries
Book Reviews
Government Libraries
Humor
Law Libraries
LIS Journals
Listservs and Groups
Medical Librarianship and Libraries
Personal Blogs
Podcasts : Academic Libraries, Government Libraries,Law Libraries, Librarianship,
Public Libraries, Special Libraries, Professional Associations, Public Libraries, School Libraries, Uncategorized Feeds, Vendors
Wikis

Users can submit their own feeds to be added. Other features include tag clouds, aggregate feeds by category, pre-set subject feeds and search operators that let the user drill down into exactly what she wants to see- then be notified any time LibWorm sees it.
This is a great RSS feed search engine that accesses authoritive sites. It is simple to use and navigate and takes a lot of the hard slog out of searching the bibliosphere for library related feeds.

Using an Image Generator

I have just been exploring The Generator Blog. This is a really fun blog to explore and muck about with. It has lots of links down the right side to Image generator sites. I chose the animated Neon Sign - as you can see. I am getting a bit tired now so I will do a proper evaluation of the blog later. While not strictly Library related it is fun, so I thought I would sneak it in.

iSpecies Mashup

Page R (2010), Ispecies, Glasgow, Scot., viewed 28 March 2010, http://ispecies.org/

This mashup was developed by Professor Roderick Page who works in the Faculty of Biomedical and Life Science at the University of Glasgow. iSpecies is a great example of a science "mashup" that uses various sites to make a separate information web page for each species. The data displayed is generated "on the fly" by querying other data sources. The main home page is very simple just a search field and a cloud of the last 20 species search terms.
For each query term iSpecies provides a definition from Wikipedia, genome information from NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information), up to five images from Yahoo, a species distribution map from GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), and relevant article links from Google Scholar. Where availbale the iSpecies will also give links to authoritive sites like
Catalog of Life
Encyclopedia of life
Animal Diversity Web
Mammal Species of the World
Integrated Taxonomic Information System
Arctos Specimen Database

Although this is a scientific site you can search using the common name or the Latin classification but there isn't any spell check or suggestion mode, so if you don't have the name exactly correct you won't come up with any results. This site makes a great starting point for anyone conducting research into any of the world’s species. You can retrieve a great deal of pertinent information about the species in question from the one site. Occaisionally the site will get tricked and an unrelated image will be displayed usually because of an amibiguous tag.

Here is an example of a search result for Sarcophilus harrisii (Tasmanian Devil).

Library-related Flickr Mashup

I have been desperately searching the net for an interesting Mashup involving Flickr and a library. Eventually I have settled on the State Library of New South Wales Flickr Mashup

Hagon P (2008), State Library of New South Wales Flickr Mashup, State Library New South Wales, viewed on 28 March 2010, http://www.paulhagon.com/blog/2008/10/01/state-library-of-new-south-wales-flickr-mashup/

Paul Hagon has developed a Mashup using historical images from Flickr commons and compares them with their modern day images on Google maps. He has worked for various National Museums and Libraries since 1999. At present Paul is a web develper who works at the National Library of Australia. The Library of New South Wales has joined the Flickr commons and Paul has developed this mashup for them. The website home page is fairly simple with a very brief description of what the site is about and some tabs at the top right of the page to home, blog, work, about and contact. By clicking on the "Check it Out" link you are taken to a new page which is divided into two halves. The left half is a Google map of New South Wales with little blue speech bubble links indicating which areas have archival photos.By clicking on one of these little links an archival picture of the place opens up, similtaneously a modern Googlemaps street view of the area will open up in the right half of the screen.

At present the number of areas covered is limited, as not a great number of photos have been geotagged. Paul states on his site anyone can go in and add tags so that eventually it will evolve into something useful over time. It is difficult to know how accurate the matching of the archival photos to the Google street view is. Some places have changed so completely that it is difficult to compare one photo to the other and there is no indication which direction the archival photo was taken from. A couple of Archival photos trialed had no corresponding modern street view.
Overall an interesting site to play around on but not particulary usable at the moment. I would be very interested to see the same mashup done by the State Library of Tasmania

Image from Flickr

IMG_1825
Originally uploaded by Tigerquollsmum

I just love this photo of Janey pretending to be hard at work!

I am experimenting with the different ways to post an image. I posted this image by using the "Blogg it" Link on the actual Flickr site. The previous picture was posted by actually cutting and pasting the Html manually into my blog.

Flickr

I have just been uploading some photos onto Flickr. Hopefully here is one of my photos.

iLibrarian Blog

Hi,
I have just been searching for library related issues on Technorati, an online site for searching and ranking blogs.Here is my annotated bibliography on the Ilibrarian blog.

Kronski, E (2010), Ilibrarian Blog, Online Education Database, USA, viewed 15 March 2010, http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/

This blog is owned by Ellyssa Kronski, an Information Services Technologist at Barnard College as well as a teacher of emerging technologies at two other Universities. Ellyssa is also the author of Web 2.0 for "Libraries and Information Professionals" and writes a column for the Library Journal's Acedemic Newswire. This gives the blog a very authoritive source as well as the fact that it has been going since 2007. In 2008 it was listed in The LISNews 10 Blogs To Read.
It seems to be well written and researched.

The blog is very active and has a quite a number of regular posts. The blog is orientated towards the more technical aspects of library web 2.0 applications. Ellyssa includes alot of bright and interesting images, charts, links and slide shows. The blog contains numerous topics that are directly related to my library course. e.g Information literacy, mashups, micro blogging, RSS feeds, social networking, tagging, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 isssues. She gives alot of links to other related sites and blogs.

Connecting Librarian

I have been checking out various blogs that deal with library related issues.

Mclean M (2010), Connecting Librarian, Casey Cardinia Library Corporation, Victoria, Aust., viewed March 2010, http://connectinglibrarian.com/

The Connecting Librarian is an interesting blog that is written by Michelle Mclean, an Information Librarian, who works for the Casey Cardinia Library Corporation in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. In 2006 she won the Ramsey and Reid Scholorship, which enabled her to conduct a study tour of USA libraries that offer cutting edge virtual services. She lists her main interests as Web 2.0 technologies, virtual serices and reference services. I found her writing is mostly concerned with the growing development of Web 2.0 applications in Libraries. Her blog is well set out and easy to use. I particularly liked the links to other library related blogs that she follows. I think that the owner of the blog being Australian makes the blog information really relevant to our working environments.

Her most recent posts concern the VALA (Victorian Association for Library Automation) 2010 Conference that was held on 9-11th February in Melbourne. The theme was "Connections, Content and Conversations". I think it sounded really applicable to what we are all learning in class. Of particular interest was Michelle's own conference presentation called Evaluating Web 2.0: user experiences with public library blogs which she has posted on Slideshare.

Exploring Meebo

I have just had a look at Meebo.com which I must confess I hadn't heard of before. This Web 2.0 site allows for instant messaging across all the major networks like My Space, Face Book, Google Talk, Windows Live Messager, Yahoo! etc, right from your own browser. Meebo provides a taskbar that you can customize to your requirements. You can also create your own chat rooms, which you can make public or private. The site seems quite user friendly and easy to use. There is a user forum, FAQ, and support page for any problems . You can also download a widget onto your webpage or blog so that you can chat to visitors.

Many people find it difficult to keep tabs on the multiple on-line identities that they amass, but with Meebo you can access all your accounts with just the one Meebo ID. There is no software that you need to download and you can chat from any computer with internet access. The site also states that "you can transfer files through instant messaging to any friend and you can save your conversation history so you dont lose valuable links and contact info".

This site seems a great solution to the problem that unless all your friends are on the one network you can't chat together.

and so it begins

I have just set up this blog as part of my Library/Information Technology Diploma course. I will be looking at Web 2.0 applications and their uses within the Library industry.