#12 (week 5) Summarise your thoughts

Wow! Congratulations, you’ve reached the last thing!

I hope this experience has helped to build your knowledge of Web 2.0 skills.


Discovery Exercise:

1. For your last and final post, please reflect on your learning journey and post a few thoughts about your journey through this programme. Tell us about at least one thing that stood out for you and what tools will be useful in your role or for customers.
   

Closing comments

In closing, I want to thank you all for joining us on this learning journey and taking time out of your busy schedules.

Last of all, a big thanks to our administration team: Jessica Aranui & Lisa Pomeroy who have spent the last five weeks adding comments on your Blog.

Jayne Gutry, professional development adviser, Auckland City Libraries

#10 (week 5) Social networks

You may remember that during the last program we visited some social networking sites such as Facebook and Delicious. Librarians worldwide are using Delicious to keep up to date with library best practise by bookmarking websites and sharing their Delicious account with colleagues and customers. Check out the ACL working team Delicious accounts which are located in the development plan on the training and development wiki.

For Thing 10 we are going to look at the other social bookmarking sites located on the ACL website. You can find them by choosing a recommended list and scrolling down the page until you find these icons:
The idea is that customers embed a link of their favourite recommended list to their Delicious, Facebook or social network internet account and provides computer users another entrance into the library website.

Discovery resources

• The second icon is Digg: Digg is a user driven social content website. Everything on Digg is user-submitted. After you submit content, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page for other visitors to see. Digg is a great way to find useful content that you wouldn't come across in traditional ways.
  
  
• Reddit, is similar to Digg. Reddit has a simple interface and little advertising. Many users love this simplicity.
  
  
• StumbleUpon discovers websites based on your interests. When users stumble, they see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended. People who are passionate about StumbleUpon say they like it because of the surprise factor in what they see next, and the fact that the product has such a high hit rate in delivering interesting new content.
  
  
• Newsvine is an instant reflection of what the world is talking about at any given moment.a social news where people can intelligently discuss news stories from mainstream USA sources. Users can write articles, seed links to external content, and discuss news items submitted by both users and professional journalists.
  
  
  Discovery exercise

1. Explore at least two of the discovery resources and sign up to at least one.
   


2. Comment on at least two stories and tell us about them.
   

Optional discovery exercise

1. Check out the rest of the discovery resources.

#4 (week 2) Genealogy

We are going to take a look at two web 2.0 sites that you could recommend to customers to help them construct their family tree, add information about family history, share photos and calendars.....and it is really easy to do.

What makes it so easy is that you can email relatives and ask them to complete the information in your family tree on your behalf. You can even find out which celebrity you resemble, create a celebrity morph, find out who your child resembles and much more!

Discovery resources

The Auckland Research Centre has has an extensive collection for family history resources. The ACL website also has the Kintalk blog and offers guidelines and tips to help customers begin researching their family history. Following are some web 2.0 sites that customers could use to create their own family trees:

• My heritage – family tree and photos
• Geni – family tree and photos
• Geni blog

Discovery exercises

1. Sign up and take a look around both My Heritage and Geni. Remember it is ok to use the same username and password throughout this programme. Please do not download the family tree builder in My Heritage as it will change your computer settings and you need to raise a Logit to fix it.
   
   
2. Choose the discovery resources you like best and create a family tree with at least 6 relatives. It is ok if they are ficticious.
   
   
3. Click on Embed to insert your Geni family tree into the sidebar of your blog (don't forget to click the small box "sidebar). If you chose to use My Heritage, cut and paste the URL address somewhere in your blog.
   
   
4. Write a post about your experience in approximately 50 words. Reflect on which site you liked best and why, tell us what you did.....how you could use this site in your role....will you recommend this to customers?....what surprised you....and what amazed you etc.

#9 (week) 4 Go animate

GoAnimate enables you to create your own computer animated stories that can be shared with others online. You don't need any specialist animation skills as this site has simple to more advanced features that you can play with to create a multitude of possibilities for customising your animations.

GoAnimate is easy to use. You can create animations, drawing from a library of characters, backgrounds, props, sound effects and music for use in creating their own unique animations. You can customise your animations with a number of tools and features that allow them to create truly unique works of expression.

You can link your animation to Flickr, Facebook, My Space, Delicious, send an email or embed it in your blog. Take a look at some of the animations I found, or find your own.

Discovery resources

You could use Go Animate to address issues such as losing books to our younger customers or you could run click and learn classes, run a competition and get youth to create their own animations. Check out some cool animations I found by other librarians.

• Redwood Middle School
• Lost library books
• Database
• Music library (althought not in english you still get the point)
  

Discovery exercise

1. Watch the Go Animate demo located on the home page.
   
   
2. Sign up and create an animation with at least three scenes using word balloons and movements and embed the link to your animation on your Blog.
   
   
3. Write a Post for week four and comment about Animoto and Go Animate. Tell us how you can use these two web 2.0 tools at your site or on the ACL website? Also tell us what you did.... was it easy.... was it hard... was it fun to do...... when would you use this.... and what types of customers do you think would find this fun etc

#8 (week 4) Animoto

Get those creative juices flowing by creating your own professional video clips online using Animoto. This could be useful for librarians delivering community outreach presentations to promote library services, marketing events or click and learn classes where customers get to make their own videos - I think this would be great fun for all ages.

Animoto is the brain child of producers from ABC, Comedy Central and MTV who definitely know their stuff. Animoto analyses your images and the music you use and pieces everything together to where it all flows perfectly in sync. If you don't like how your video turns out you can click the Remix this Video button and have Animoto automatically change it up for you or tweak it yourself. No two video clips come out the same which makes for hours of fun.

Example

Here is an example of one I did earlier to promote this program. If you want a clip longer than 30 seconds it will cost. But, you can make as many 30 second clips as you want for free.


Discovery exercise:

1. Create an account on Animoto.
   
   
2. Take a look around and tell us what you found and suggest ways which Animoto could be used at the library
   
   

Optional discovery exercise

1. Create a 30 second clip or Animoto Short, by uploading at least six pictures. (Note there should be no more than 10 pictures for a 30 second video)
   
   
2. Choose from one of the songs in Animoto's music library or upload your own music file to go with your clip.
   
   
3. Embed your new 30 second clip onto your blog. There is a special code just for Blogger that you can use.
   

#7 (week 3) Bookjetty

If you participated in the last web 2.0 program you may remember looking at LibraryThing which has become so popular that it now charges if you have over 200 books. There are other similar sites that you can use to catalogue your own library, list books you want to own or read or review books. Such sites include Booktagger, Shelfari and Goodreads. Several applications are also available on Facebook, such as iread and Visual Bookshelf.

In Thing 7, we are going to focus on Singapore-based Bookjetty. People can catalogue their own books and list things they are reading, have read or want. You can review books, tag them, rate them and add a widget to your blog.

But here’s the difference: if you want an item, you can be linked to Amazon to purchase it AND you can search library catalogues! There are links to over 300 library catalogues worldwide. The search there gives you the call number, and a quick click on that takes you to the library catalogue where you can see if the item is available and reserve it! How cool is that!


Discovery exercise

1. Set up a free account with Bookjetty and take a look around.

2. Catalogue a minimum of five books making some of them books wanted, some books read etc and embed a link on your Blog.

3. Write a Post for week three on your Blog, tell us about your experience with using Litlovers, Authors on the Web and Bookjetty. Tell us what you liked..... disliked..... whether you found this tool useful and would recommend these sites to customers.


Optional extra discovery exercises

1. Create a widget located in your profile and install on your blog so that you (and others) have access.
   
2. Find other libraries in New Zealand and also try finding bookshelves of other library colleagues.

#6 (week 3) Authors on the Web

Reader's advisory tools are great to assist customers in finding a book by their favourite author, title or genre or suggesting a new title. Web 2.0 functionalities make it easy for our tech-savvy customers to keep up to date with new releases by setting up RSS feeds to their favourite author, checking out the ACL website books and authors database or following the Books in the city blog.

For thing 6 we are going to take a look at AuthorsOnTheWeb.com

This site is useful for people looking for the next book by their favourite author or someone looking for new authors. It has a “Coming Attractions” feature that lists the new and upcoming books by month, and dates of paperback publication.

Discovery resources

You can link to the AuthorYellowPages to get the web address of almost any author you can think of. AuthorsOnTheWeb.com and AuthorYellowPages are put together by TheBookReportNetwork.com, which also created ReadingGroupGuides.com, an online community for reading groups, and Bookreporter.com, a great place to get to know more about your favourite authors, as well as several other reading-related sites.


Discovery exercise:

1. Visit Authors of the Web and at least one other site in the discovery resources above and take a look around.
   
   
2. Embed a link to your favourite site on your Blog and tell us what you found.
   

Optional discovery exercise

1. Visit the remaining discovery resources and take a look around.