Google Maps

Oh, this site is VERY interesting! I watched the YouTube presentations on Google Maps' features: add a place, edit the map, driving instructions, street view and transit.

Add a place: This is particularly helpful for new businesses who can add their locations on the map for the world to see. In the library environment, we can add specifics such as the locations of the central and branch libraries, including their addresses and write perhaps a few words about the services offered.

Edit the map: We can add new information, make corrections or edit details, update places or even remove or delete info if no longer relevant (like a library having relocated to a new location).

Driving instructions: Well, I'm sure this is familiar to most people who drive.

Street view: I like this one. This allows you to view street level photographs, take virtual walks (pan, rotate and zoom), explore cityscapes, landmarks, points of interest, and find shops, restaurants, parks, hotels and more. I can imagine how useful this will be for the Community Information Librarian and the Local Studies Librarian.

Transit: This is pretty much like the Driving Instructions where you get directions from one place to another, EXCEPT that Transit is really for making public transport easy. Transit gives step by step directions for the entire route (journey) whether by foot (walking), by train, or by bus. You can see exactly where you have to be. It also gives travel times and transfers for each leg of the trip.

In Google Maps, I entered "liverpool, nsw, australia" as my search engine and was rewarded with the map of Liverpool (and neighbouring places). Within the map are the following options: Get directions: To here-From here; Search nearby, Save to My map. I clicked on Search nearby and typed in library. There were 2,157 results and first on the list was Liverpool City Library. I clicked on Liverpool City Library and there it was on the map, complete with its address. Within the map itself are the following options: Write a review - more info, Get directions, Search nearby, Save to My Maps, Send to phone, Edit. I immediately saved this to My Maps. Just right above the map are the following: View in Google Earth, Print, Send, Link to this page. I sent this map via email to the nswpln team by way of testing if this really works.

The top right corner of the map itself showed the following: Map, Satellite and Terrain. All three gave different views. This feature will definitely be very useful for our Council people in charge of mapping the area, for our customers interested in viewing Liverpool in different ways, and very specially for our historical society and Local Studies library staff. Great website!

Big Huge Labs

I have created three mashups using Calendar, Badge Maker and CD Cover.

Immediately following the finished product (mashup) these actions were listed:

Edit badge, Start Over, Save, Upload to Flickr, Share, Email

We do need to save our work to make uploading to our weblog easy. And that's what I did with my Calendar and Badge Maker. I saved these to my computer and uploaded from there to my weblog. I experimented with Upload to Flickr for the CD Cover. Check out myflickrville link to find out what the CD Cover is. I'm sure one of you will be pleasantly surprised.

I have always wanted to do A Calendar of Multicultural Recipes. Shhhh, don't tell anyone... And now, I've found out how to do this!

There are so many ways that we can use mashups in our library. For one thing, we can have a Calendar of Library Events and give this out to our customers in December as part of our marketing strategies. We can also start using CDs/DVDs to document our special events, programs, activities, projects, and even policies and procedures and have the appropriate CD covers for them. We can use the Badge Maker for our customers involved in Book Discussion Groups, Volunteer tutoring, Friends of the Library and the like, to give them a sense of belonging, and therefore raise their self-esteem. These three (Calendar, CD covers and Badge Maker) are the only mashups I've tried so far. And to think that there's more!

It is really amazing what you can do with Big Huge Labs!

Yahoo!7 Answers

Just for signing up, I've been awarded 100 points. And there's 1 point given for daily log in.

I have posted 3 questions, one of which was in my language - Tagalog. I discovered that one can ask questions and give answers in languages listed in Answers International. Here are the questions I've posted:

1) Does choko really help lower cholesterol level? So far, I only got 1 answer.

2) I was told that bitter melon (ampalaya) is good for people with diabetes. Is this true? For this one, there were 2 answers.

3) (Tagalog): Kailan ba ipinagdiriwang ang tunay na araw ng kalayaan sa Pilipinas ngayon? Translated, this means: When is the true independence day in the Philippines being celebrated? So far, no answer.

I answered the following questions:

1) Is buko juice good for you?
2) I want to learn Tagalog and how to pronounce it correctly?

My total points as of now: 95. Why did my points come down instead of up? The Points Table say that 5 points are deducted for every question asked. And I've posted 3 questions. But I've also earned the following points: Choose a best answer for my question: 3; Answer a question: 2 points each answer; Vote for a best answer: 1; Log in to Yahoo! Answers: Once daily - 1 point.

I really had fun looking at the questions and the answers given. Some of them are quite funny.

Slamming the boards

The background information described "Slam the Boards" as an attempt to get reference librarians to provide answers on popular "Answer Board" sites to show their question-answering skills to users who may not realize that librarians provide reference services. In the original posting of August 2007, again, the emphasis was on the reference librarian community. I would like to think that the writer of this background info refers to the reference skills of librarians no matter what the job title at work is. After all, we, at the library, were trained at and do reference work.

It will be good if our Reference Librarian can join the next "Slam" on Thursday, 10 April 2008. Great for marketing purposes! I will log in just for the experience.

Our Web Team is presently working on ways in which our customers might rate or review items in our collection. Rating or reviewing our services online? This has not been thought of ... just yet. We do conduct user survey of specific services, and feedback forms are given to participants attending special events organised by the library.

Shelfari and Gurulib

I have signed up with both Shelfari and gurulib just to find out how these tools work.

Shelfari is another social cataloguing website whose members are able to catalog, tag, review and discuss books. Gurulib does the same thing, except for some added features. One can add not only titles of books but also movies, music, games and software. Gurulib has provided links to other social bookmarking tools, such as: Blinklist (http://www.blinklist.com/), Furl (http://www.furl.net/dot), Spurl (http://spurl/net), and RawSugar (http://rawsugar.com/), amongst others. It will take sometime to check these out. But for now, I will settle for Del.icio.us and LibraryThing.

LibraryThing

The link to our Learning 2.0 account did take me to the 'cover view,' which is slnsw2.0. I clicked on 'list' view and was shown seven titles, the first of which was "All that swagger", by Miles Franklin. Down the line, I was curious about "My brilliant career" because it has 255 members under the column shared. I clicked on this title and had a look at the members. And what do you know??? slnsw2.0 is listed!

I have set up an online catalog of my all time favourite books (see the link here). And I took note of the number of members for each title. The Fountainhead has 5,517 members while that of The Purpose Driven Life, a book on spirituality, only has 2,852 members. Very interesting!

Technorati

I did a keyword search for "bookmobile" and got 1,250 results. When I used the Advanced Search feature and chose the Tag Search, only 56 posts showed up. What a big difference in search results! Does this mean that out of 1,250 blogs on bookmobile, only 56 included bookmobile in their tag list?

I entered nswpln2008 as a search term and came up with six results, including five from my weblog. But I noticed that the videoclip that I have embed in my weblog was not included in the search results. I wonder why!!!

Del.icio.us

I had a look at the account that was created for this exercise and noticed that tags are formatted differently when viewed as a cloud and as a list.

I have set up a delicious account = http://del.icio.us/CarmelMortillero but was not successful in downloading the toolbar icons. I tried twice but didn't go any further because the computer I was using wouldn't do it. I spent much time trying to link my delicious account to my blog as asked in the exercise but it wouldn't work as well. Just for practice, I bookmarked 5 websites and was able to link one to my blog. By link here, I mean that when I click on that website, it directs me to my blog.

Delicious is great for research assistance. It's a wonderful tool for finding websites and online materials in response to users' information needs.

www.asknow.gov.au is a fine example of a website using delicious as a social bookmarking tool.

Easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere? Definitely!

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

This videoclip gave a very clear presentation on the subject of social bookmarking. So easy to understand! In summary, there are only three things that one needs to do to start bookmarking socially. First, sign-up with delicious.com and add two buttons to the browser: My del.icio.us button and Tag this button. Secondly, start bookmarking sites and tagging. Thirdly, be social. By default, everything posted to Del.icio.us is able to be viewed publicly. However, a user can mark specific bookmarks as private... which defeats the very purpose of social bookmarking. After all, the focus is not on having a private list of bookmarked sites but a shared one.

Promoting Reading

Videos online

I found the video "Olive Riley Returns to Broken Hill" very interesting and the star of the video inspiring. It is a fine example of a live oral history. There's no reason why our library can't make a similar video featuring our residents ...long-term, newly arrived and those who have given so much to the community.

Maybe we can also have something similar to "We love our NJ libraries". Or we can focus on a specific library service, say the Special library services which deliver books, DVDs, etc. to nursing homes, retirement villages and housebound customers. But the video on "New Employee Orientation", I find boring. And I didn't like that video on "Reference and Research Assistance" because it claimed that this section or service is the heart of the library and the first place to visit for information. I would argue that it all depends on the information you're looking for.

Just out of curiousity I searched for Mosman Library in YouTube and, of course, didn't find any. But when I typed in Mosman, there were several videos available starting with "Chaser's War on everything: Mosman Mosque". As I was sure this was going to be funny, I watched it. Mosman Library was mentioned in passing - that the Mosman Mosque would be built close to the library.

Then I went to Google Video and searched for Mosman Library. There I found several videos of their author speakers. I watched Noeline Brown (because I remember her being a contestant in Channel Seven's Dancing with the Stars). She gave a funny anecdote on how she applied for a job as Assistant Librarian at Marrickville Library at the age of 15 and was instead offered a job as Library Assistant. That was classic!

I also had a glimpse at James Valentine's (he of Channel 7's It takes two fame) video but the sound didn't come out alright. I also watched Caroline Jones' video only because I've read her book about the "Search for Meaning" a long time ago...so long that I can't remember what THE meaning is!

Well, this sure is good. As long as you have a computer. But if you don't have access to one, then you miss out on these wonderful talks (unless you were physically present at these events). I guess the library could also have produced a DVD featuring all these author speakers and make the DVD available for loan or be able to be watched at the library.

Adventuring into Liverpool, NSW wiki

Editing the entry on Liverpool, New South Wales, was easy. You don't even have to sign in. The last time this page was modified was on 24 February 2008 at 9.18 am.

Yesterday, I edited this page and added three more schools: Macarthur Community College, Liverpool U3A: School for Seniors and University of Wetern Sydney English Language Centre. And voila! Three three items showed up under Schools.

Wakey...wakey...wakey... it's time to do a Wiki

I've heard about WIKIs a long time ago and visited the website twice maybe in the past. But I never gave it so much thought, much less of what use it can be in a library environment. Having gone through all the links in this lesson, I realised that there's so much potential 'hidden' there.

The Wisconsin Heritage Wiki and the Montana History Wiki will be very useful guides for our own Local Studies and Historical Society, if and when they decide to create their own wikis.

In checking out the Library Services: A Best Practice Wiki, I found out that there's nothing for Adult Literacy. There's a section for Information Literacy but this is different from Adult Literacy or ESL. I also checked out the Blogging Libraries WIKI and found only one NSW public library listed: Mosman Library. Good on you, Mosman Library.

Perhaps the NSW Public Libraries Literacy Working Group can have this "setting up or contributing a section on Literacy" in Library Services: A Best Practice Wiki as a project.

I can see that the Wiki can be another powerful tool for promoting our library services, programs and events. But this is going to be a collaborative effort for the library team. After we (the staff) finish this lesson, I can see us working on our areas individually and putting all these together under the library wiki.

Bloglines, Feeds and Google Alerts

I must admit that it took me a while to do this exercise.

I was able to set up a Blogline account using my gmail address. And started subscribing to other blogs and adding these to my feeds. But I realised that the two options given in Blogline (Bloglines and RSS) gave me different results. When I chose Bloglines, the selected blogs will appear in my Blogline account. When I chose RSS, the blogs go to the FEEDS next to Favourites in my computer's internet site. I also used Google Blog search and all alerts went to my gmail. Bloglines, RSS and Google alerts do the same function, notifying you of what's new in your chosen topics.

The good thing about the feeds is that one is kept informed of the latest development in one's area of specialty or topics of interest. Beautiful!

An inspirational, spiritual book trolley

An inspirational, spiritual book trolley, originally uploaded by Jalen22.

I did it again! This is the second photo that I've blogged from Flckr. I guess I should do it more often to get the hang of it. And I will be blogging the ones from other participants that I that've taken fancy to (as long as there are no copyright issues and the like). Boy, this is so much fun!