Answer boards and social searching

It is great to get feedback on the collection and slamming the answer boards may just achieve that. The collection is after all for our clients! Slamming the boards on activities like the @ your library campaign will not only give us immediate feedback but will also help us in planning future events. Topics that might work well for answer boards could be HSC topics and ofcourse one on childrens educational sites would be interesting.

Library Thing

Would be great for book clubs!

del.icio.us fantastic tool

This is indeed a fantastic toool for reference enquiries. This tool makes for time efficiency when it comes to doing a reference enquiry especially for school projects. If staff have already gone through the links to a particular topic, it becomes really easy for the next staff member with the same enquiry. del.icio.us is the way to go! Our library already has a del.icio.us account.

Flickr zeitgeist

The Daily Zeitgeist is built in Flash, and displays recent photos from Flickr.

Video's online - I love them!

This video was created for library staff in service day at the St. Joseph County Public Library in South Bend, Indiana. Set to Madonna's "Ray of Light," and inspired by the video of the song, this video details a day in the life of a thriving public library system, highlighting the faces and places that make the library the library.

Mr Bean at the Library. Always makes me laugh.

The Calgary Public Library's award-winning television commercial.

You tube and google videos are great ways to promote events at the library. Snippets from The Living Library would be great on you tube. Promoting subscrption databases through You Tube would definitely reach a wider audience, especially the high school students.

WiKi's - cooking pot of ideas/information

The following three wiki's were interesting.

The St Joseph County Public Library SJCPL Subject Guides wiki
The Mint Museum, North Carolina wiki
Library Success A best practices wiki

I think that a subject guide Wiki would really raise the profile of the nonfiction collection. The St Joseph County Public library have links from their wiki to their catalogue and also to other web sites. For example under the topic of cooking they have links to the resources that the library holds as well as staff recipies and links to local cooking schools etc. What a savvy way to bring the community together.

Ideas come and go, but if it is jotted down in a wiki there is always the possibility that someone out there will act on those ideas. The library Success Wiki is a great place to contribute your bit to the greater Library world. It is also a place where you could dip your hand in for ideas. Afterall there is no point in reinventing the wheel!

The Mint Museum - what a great way to collaborate on a project!

The Library is definitely a community hub and Library Wiki's may just then be the ecommunity hub. A few Wiki's that I think would work well are subject guide wiki's, readers advisory, local studies, homework help for primary age children and ofcourse a reference wiki. The ability for staff to build ideas on the @ your library camapign through a wiki would be a fun and inclusive project!

RSS feeds - What's in it for us?

Tools like Bloglines make it possible to have a one stop news/update pick up point.

From a professional point of view the following are a few of the RSS feeds that I have subscribed to.

ABS for libraries http://abs4libraries.blogspot.com/
Helen Blowers http://librarybytes.com/
Designing better libraries http://dbl.lishost.org/blog/
ALIA http://www.alia.org.au/rss/
Library Journals http://www.libraryjournal.com/learnrss

It is great to keep up to date with the latest in professional development and library trends. It is always good to have a vision of the bigger library world and subscribing to RSS feeds in a way gives me opportunities to think of the bigger picture.

Some of the feeds that I have subscribed to for leisure are the following.

Dilbert http://dilbert.com/blog/
Rocco Bloggo SMH http://blogs.smh.com.au/newsblog/archives/rocco_bloggo/index.html
Powerhouse Museum http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/imageservices/

RSS feeds would be great to let our clients know about events such as author talks, notification about new items, monthly @ your library campaign, holiday activities etc... It would be a good medium to promote the various library resources on a topic which might be the flavour of the week or month.

The Mosman Libray blog looks interesting. http://refdesk.mosmanlibraryblogs.com/