#23 Congratulations!

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
Personally I thikn learning about del.ico.us. was the most helpful tool for me personally. I have tried out all the sites, resources and tools in this course. Many of them I will use. Delicous, however, is a tool that I immediatlly integrated into tools that I use frequently. have a large number of links that i can access quite easily and the list of sites continues to grow.


How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
As far as lifelong goals I think this course gave me new tools in which to examine our world, not only as a librarian, but also through the eyes of patrons. How will they use these tools?


Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
I was suprised at the number of tools covered in the course that I was already familair with. In many case my understanding of them was deepened through the course.

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?

If we offered another program like this in the future, would you choose to participate?
I would most certainly be very interested in knowing of any suich program and believe that I would most likely particpate

#22 Social Networking

From loking at the many websites listed under Social Networking Software " I saw a wide range of pratices that I believe could work in almost any library. Who are te friends in these friend lists? Mostly patrons, but definatly staff and administration. Also among the friends are other instiutions and organizations, thus on facebook or myspace all of these entities are on the same page literally and figurtivly.

The crowd that is the target group is teens. These facebook and other pages seem to be geared towards the younger crowd, with many libraries having their own sepearte YA blog or facebook page . Othwer pages try to appeal to all patrons. New books, library news, book group news, special events, andother information is shared with the friends of the library.

I don't believe that at this point facebook will overtake all your prominatinal needs, but it can make it much easier. Less paper perhaps. There is also an interative element to these pages. Pictures acan be posted, dissusions carried on and comments made.

#21 Microblogging & Mashups

I thought the idea behind Twitterholic was interesting at rating the top of the tweets. I guess essentially it is a popularity contest , but it is important to see who is popular

Twittervision to me seems interesting, however I do not see any practical application for this web site. It's sister site Flcker vision is interesting as it shows what is going on in the world at any given moment. It also seems to lack a practical application.

Do you Tweet? I do not Tweet although I do have an account. I find that facebook reneders twitter useless to me as I can see what my friends are up to that way. I do not follow celebrities so I do not have much interest in clebrties as I see it is important to some to follow that sort of thing. I follow blogs more than anything as there is much more substance there.

Microblogging seems to be for people who are "mobile" which I am not. Microblogging does not seem like something I would be interested in either professional or personally.

#20 Explore Twitter

I have explored twitter. I have used the feature to check what people are talking about. I have entered the name of a few baseball players and all I have recieved is a bunch of people making less than interesting comments as well as comments that are similair to other people. I find twitter rather boring. I find that people on twitter have little to say and are most times boring or complaining.

#19 Explore eBooks and Audio Books

Exploring the World eBook was interesting. I was suprised that they covered so many genres and topics. It seems that many of the books are older books that are rare and the information was nopt readily avaible. These type of books include history and geneology books that existed only on dussty shelves in some university. There were also children's books.

The library that I am part of has many E-books and audiobooks. I personally download audio books for personal use often. There is always a catch . After the two weeks expires the audiobook will erase itself off of the computer. Old practices apply such as holds and limits to the number of books you can have at one time. They also require software installation

Which is more valuable. This is a very difficult question. Are print books backup or vice versa. BOth are vulnerable. Ebooks can be erased, whereas print books wear over time.

#18 Discover some useful search tools for locating podcasts

Take a look at one or two of the podcast directories listed (or iTunes) and see if you can find a podcast that interests you. See if you can find some interesting library related podcasts here like book review podcasts or library news.
Add the RSS feed for a podcast to your blog reader account.
Create a blog post about your discovery process. Did you find anything useful here?

I choose to check out the NPR podcast page, becausr I had never visited before. I think the most helpful thing to find on this particular library of podcasts is book reviews. I subscribed to a book review podcast called NPR Books. What is great about this podcast is that they review books and talk to authors about books. This will be a good podcast to pass on to the patrons as they can can listen to a review before (or even after) thy read the books. It would also help for book clubs to gain more information about the book to make the discussion more interesting.

* #17 Discover YouTube and a few sites that allow users to upload and share videos

I typed in "library" and this is what I got. This video is from the official Sesame STREET YOU Tube site. There are tons and tons of official videos on You Tube. There are also tons of copyright infringement. Someone is policing it because many clips end up with the message "This video was removed due the insistence of such and such company. What vcan libraries use You tube for? There are a ton of instructional videos on everything from cooking computers. Linking to them mght be helpful. You can also upload to You Tube and perhaps record a few activities the library has done to generate interest