Podcasts

Plenty of useful and interesting material here but much more time needed! Haven't quite got the RSS feed sorted yet!

Rollyo meets Del.icio.us

At first encounter I thought Rollyo was going to be another interesting but not terribly useful application. But the more I think about it, the more potential it seems to have. Created a Rollyo to harmonise with a group of my Del.icio.us bookmarks and hey presto I can search my customised list. Very neat - now it would be good if Rollyo would allow me to quickly import my Del.icio.us tags, rather than having to cut and paste them

Wikis

Great concept and there are some really attractive and easy to use options for creating wikis available. Huge time saving for libraries with little IT support. Have come across Library Success: A best practices wiki before and of course Wikipedia. Wikis are ideal as staff collaborative spaces and mnay libraries are using them for staff intranets,procedure and training portals. One of the best I have seen is https://wiki.lib.umn.edu/ which makes good use of graphics and colour. The wiki blog combination works well.

Library 2.0

A lot of the commentary on library 2.0 is now 2+ years old . Great to see the advances that some libraries have made. The toughest barriers to using Web 2.0 seem be the loosening up of control by institutions to allow user participation and the dilemma of how much time to spend checking out new applications to find something useful to add to service delivery. Few libraries seem to active strategies for investigating/trying new applications...(and it does take time!)so blogs like The Librarian in Black are great time savers.

Del.icio.us

I'm a big fan of Delicious, its easy to set up, customise and use. Would just like a bit more functionality - ordering links by most recent additions is about the most useless sort point I could imagine....The word cloud seems useful on huge sets of links but on a modest list there is nothing like a well controlled list of subject terms to aid navigation. Found several examples of library sites, which like SLT, pull in Delicious content and build it into their own webpages. Not hard to do with a little IT support. Stanford has an impressive collection with very interesting colour scheme!! https://www.stanford.edu/group/ic/cgi-bin/drupal/delicous

iGoogle

Fun to play around with, and easy to add components but ultimately found that what I really use most is the nifty little Google search box that sits in my toolbar. Really don't have time to wait around to sign in (on some pcs)and then for iGoogle to load up and that's on broadbands!!

Google Books

Getting a little Webbed out! Have been so busy investigating new products that there has been little time to blog about them. Google Books was a bit of a non event for me - could think of other resources that would give me book info faster and more comprehensively. I do like the interlinking with Worldcat though. Maybe when it gets bigger and more connected I could have more use for it.....