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/

Flickr- one more for your viewing

Su Blackwell is another artist whose work I really appreciate. This one is titled "While you were sleeping". This installation of paper is so delicately beautiful that it feels like the artist has physically been able to release life into art. If you are interested please visit her website at http://www.sublackwell.co.uk/

Flickr - just imagine

Hi Everybody,
I'm back after a bit of break.

Flickr - what an amazing tool that can be used by us librarians to promote ourselves as the happening hub of the community. It is extremely motivating as well as very humbling to see what other libraries are doing. I look at Flickr as a sharing of ideas/storytelling through images. I have certainly spent a lot of time browsing the Flickr site, especially the ones that focus on book sculpture.

"Good as Gold" named after Joseph Heller's novel is a 500 pound sculpture by artist Donald Lipski. It is located at the Kansas City Public Library. This amazing sculpture is a continuous loop of books resting on steel feet with holes drilled into the books and strung onto the steel bar. Just imagine the possiblities of creative explosion with books that have been weeded from the collection. Participation could be sought from local artists, students... and all their creation could be publicised through the library/Flickr. Win Win situation for all!!!

Getting started

I got so carried away with blogs that it looks like I'm an addicted blog surfer. There are so many bloggers out there blogging about special interests as well as the usual mundane stuff. This makes me wonder as to whether some have been issued the 40 hour day card! Just kidding! I'm sure to be one of them as I progress through this training.

Anyway it is great to finally get started on the WEB 2.0 training and more importantly to see how best to use it both personally and professionally. I think that the dynamic two way interaction which the blog lends itself to is ideal to bring the community together either on a special, local or on a global level.

As we already have a number of special interest groups within the library, it would be best to start with them and then move outwards. These groups include those who come for author events, book clubs, summer reading club, family history and of course the very popular volunteers of the library. Also would it not be great to set up a blog for the home library borrowers! It might also be good to set up a blog in languages other than English which are spoken by a lot of people in the community. What a perfect way to better promote our services to a select interested target audience.

Well I am going to say bye for now but watch out, it is time for the web 2.0 super librarian to take over. Also cheers to all those out there doing the web 2.0 training! Hope you enjoy Elaine at her best!