Testing LibraryThing..

I'm trying out LibraryThings new Bookcover service.

These are the intructions...

Take an ISBN, like 0545010225
Put your Developer Key and the ISBN into a URL, like so:
http://covers.librarything.com/devkey/KEY
/medium/isbn/0545010225
Put that in an image tag, like so:

And your website, library catalog or bookstore has a cover.

And this is the one I did:



Hey it works! This was pretty easy. Thanks LibraryThing!

Here's the link to the instruction page...you also need to set up a Developers Key with librarything...it's not so easy to find

Linking to LibraryThing bookcovers

It's been a while...

but I just haven't had much to say. Sadly no real progress on implementing any web 2.0 strategies in the library, but in updating the website, I've discovered an issue I'd like to throw open.

We discussed the need for adding web 2.0 to our presence, but what about the old stuff? How much of that do we need to keep? Most of us have lists of useful websites and search engines on our websites, but do we really need to?

One thing I'm really wondering about are the directories, like the Librarians Internet Index and the Open Directory Project. Is anyone still using these with Wikipedia around? I never really found them all that useful before, but I think they must be quite out of date now. Is it a bit daggy to have these on your website? Do I need to go out and get a whole new wardrobe? Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Finito!

Well, this certainly has been an interesting trip. I've tried a lot of new things, some I'd heard of, some I hadn't.

The best thing I've discovered personally on this journey is Flickr. I'm so glad that Learning 2.0 inspired me to take the plunge and join up on some of these sites. I love Flickr, and I love that it has resparked my interest in photography. I've also enjoyed blogging more than I thought I would. I always thought that I never really had a reason to do it. This has shown me that you don't really need to have a reason, a blog can just be for yourself.

I'm also very glad I finally had a good look at the tagging type thingy's. I've seen all those little buttons all over the place, but never really took the time to understand how it worked. I like Del.icio.us, and I'm still using it now, so I can see myself continuing with that.

On a professional level, I think the most important thing I'll take away is the need to play, and keep up with things as they develop. I'll be taking my 15 minutes a day from now on! I don't want to miss out on any great new tools.

I've go no plans to stop blogging now, so I'm keeping this blog open, perhaps I'll post on our progress with using these technologies in our library. I am hoping we will have some to show you!

I'd also like to thank everyone on the Learning 2.0 team. It must have been a massive job, and I've greatly appreciated the opportunity. Thank you!

Downloadable audio

Ok, I've failed step 1 of this exercise. I searched, I clicked, I got a password screen. So, I've gotten kind of bogged on this one. Needless to say I've found these pages bit difficult to navigate. I went to the Gutenberg page, but I ended up with text files, not audio.

In the past I've used a site called Librivox, which I found pretty easy to use.

So if you're a bit thick like me, maybe you could try that.

Podcasts

I'm used to using iTunes, which I really like, but it does have one drawback in comparison to the other search options I looked at which were Podcastalley and Podcast.net. That is, that the search results are displayed by episode, rather than by podcast program, but on the plus side its easy to browse by genres, so it's good if you're not really looking for anything in particular. The other two displayed lists of programs, but I found the searching a bit hit and miss. Podcast.net found 9 results for "libraries" and podcast alley found 29.

There would certainly be uses for this technology in libraries, like this one which I heard about at the Spun Conference I attended last week, from Coffs Harbour City Library

Voice Of Time Project

Like all of these things, its a matter of having useful product to offer.

Cookies please

What's not to like?

YouTube is one thing I'm already pretty familiar with. I don't have a TV, so I tend to find a few bits and pieces on Youtube instead. Most of the videos are short, so you never get stuck for long like you do with TV.

As for using it in libraries, I'd be afraid of doing it for the sake of doing it, not because it really needed to be done. As a form of user interaction, or an art project it might be fun, as we saw in some of the examples from Helen Blowers presentation at the State Library, but I'd want to be sure there was a good reason.

There's certainly lots of handy tutorial material already on Youtube, which could be used to help people with common computer problems. I thought the one we watched about wikis was really helpful.

And why did I choose this video? I was a seventies baby. Cookie monster was my friend. I was also avoiding more cat references, despite the fact that there are oodles of super funny cat videos on youtube....Ok, if you insist I'll just link to a couple (tee hee).

Cat does dog tricks

Mean kitty song

Kitty capers accompanied by sunshine happy song in Japanese

Picnik

This exercise has been just the cure for my wiki weariness, and my document dilemmas.

Some good clean photo fun!

I'm very glad I clicked on the Photography and digital images section of the Web 2.0 awards list.

No 1. Flickr - yep, got it covered, love it!

No 2. Picasa - got it, it's handy

No 3. Picnik - Aha!

I knew more of these type of things had to be out there, but I'd had no luck finding anything useful on my own, and now, here is Picnik. Where have you been all my life?



Picasa is good for basic editing of photos, and it's probably still better than this for doing serious stuff like changing colour temperatures, adding gradients, stuff like that, but you can't add text in Picasa. Enter Picnik, it's definitely designed to do the fun stuff like adding speech bubbles and text, shapes, zombie heads, that kind of stuff you want to do all the time.





But you can still do most of the stuff you can do in Picasa, colour temp, contrast, exposure, saturation, but another real plus is an easy resize option:




If you can resize a photo in Picasa, I'm yet to figure out how.

I was suprised to see it had only recieved four stars for interface and design, when Picasa got 5. I think this application has one of the best interfaces I've seen for while, it even tells you its "sprinkling seeds" and "planting trees" while the page is loading. I love the grass, I love the dandelions. This was a breath of fresh air and fun too! See?



Try it here

Warning, danger Will Robinson!!

I'd never heard of Zoho before, so I signed up and created a document. I quickly found the little delays in pulling down menus and backspacing over typos a bit annoying, and the features are more limited than in your regular word processor, so I don't think this will be replacing Office for a while yet. Like the other things we've looked at, it might have a place in sharing documents at a distance, or if you were travelling, but otherwise I think I'll stick with the status quo for now.

And then I uploaded my document to my blog, and look what happened! Disaster!

Note the big orange rectangle floating on top of my blog banner. Argggh!!

And then I tried adding another post to see if the orange blob would move, and behold!



And now even as I enter this, all I can see before me is a HTML string, not a picture, I've cut and paste the Html, I hope I've got the right bits!

So if you're going to attempt this make sure you don't have any fancy bits in your document, this seemed to be the result of adding a layer.

So, me and online apps? Methinks not.

Valuable training

Last week I attended a training course with a colleage which I found extremely worthwhile, and I'd like to recommend to everybody.

It was a 2 day Mental Health First Aid training course, which is aimed primarily at recognising when people are in times of crisis, and what to do when you recognise or suspect that someone is in crisis, or is developing a mental health problem. It was very practical information, mainly as regards awareness, but also in courses of action. I think it well worth a look!

Below is a link to the website:

http://www.mhfa.com.au/

Uuummm....What was the question again?

Ok, so I didn't go and read a book. I'm off to the SPUN conference next week, then I've got a weeks leave,(Yay!) and I won't have much time for homework, so here I am. I had a look at PBWiki, and I left my blog in the sandbox.

Wikis seem to be more about content than pretty templates and wigets (doh!), so I found it hard to really play, without having a raison d'etre, so to speak. But there was certainly some good examples in the material of how they can be used. Again, I feel like this is just a small taste, and I'd really have to do some heavy research and practice with how you add pages and link them etc. before I could really attempt to set something up for library purposes.

Maybe after my holiday...