One more thing or two: Library 2.0 Activity #29

I'd like to know more about location-based services using Google Maps have become very important to a lot of people (for example, tracking your delivery packages in real time, finding businesses in a certain area, or plotting where your ancestors and friends lived or traveled on a map). I'd also like to know more about online privacy and security services. People are always complaining about viruses, malware, adware, cookies, spyware, worms, phishing, etc., which impede their computer's performance. If they post content online, they need to know how it can be protected. I also wonder about doing more outreach to gamers. So many come only because our PCs will give them access to online games. We don't carry this media in our collections, except for published guides and educational software. How do we reach this audience? How about online vendors which offer music and movie downloads? I would also like to know about search engine optimization, improving website visibility, as well as measuring traffic. We need to know how to increase visibility for online services, especially the expensive databases we pay for, as well as our physical collections.

Summary: Library 2.0 Activity #28

I enjoyed the stretching and exploration this program encourages. The activities, for the most part, weren't difficult and, in almost every case, introduced me to resources which I hadn't tried before. I will admit I have a certain amount of anxiety about learning new technologies. Although I grew up in Silicone Valley, I will admit a certain amount of Luddite sympathy. But I'm committed to helping people with their informational needs, and I want people to use their local libraries. So, I will learn what I need to know to keep my workplace relevant. I like to read about new inventions, but tend to shy away from instruction manuals. I'm glad I finally started blogging and playing with the digital camera my spouse got for me over a year ago. I'm finally making the transition from film. I'm starting to benefit from using RSS feeds instead of aimless surfing. I want to be more creative in my choices of information resources and even add some content. I want to make more use of social networking. I've been used to bookmarking and sharing sites via email. Deli.cio.us, Technorati and Library Thing are much more useful for this purpose. I would like to make more use of online office software, too, since I'm tired of the roadblocks created by Microsoft's usage rights. Above all, I've been encouraged to do more exploration of what's out there. Plus, I can finally communicate with my stepdaughters and other family, since almost all of them have MySpace pages. Now, if I could just get my texting to work...

Netlibrary: Library 2.0 Activity #27

I use Netlibrary and Overdrive (via the County Library website). I find Overdrive easier to download and copy to an MP3 player than Netlibrary, which has to work through Windows Media Player and seems to incur Digital Rights Management warnings whenever I perform the operation incorrectly. It has always felt more awkward to me. They also download as one long file. Overdrive breaks the files up into 1-2 hour segments. On the other hand, I don't have to wait to download a book from Netlibrary. Overdrive seems to license only one copy at a time, which seems absurd for a digital download portal. The collections don't seem to overlap. I haven't tried downloading to my mobile phone yet; ebooks would be probably easier to read on that, with a larger screen, than with my MP3. I do like the audiobooks, in any case. Although the initial downloads to my PC have a time limit, the copies synced to my MP3 seem to stay indefinitely. While I always wish more of my favorites were available from the two sites, I can usually find something worthwhile. And both vendors are getting surprisingly new titles. While not all books lend themselves to audio formats, I'm able to do much more reading this way, since I do a lot of listening while walking and doing data entry at my other job. It's much more convenient then schlepping large containers of cassettes and CDs around with you, which may or may not be damaged, and which can easily go missing. More patrons need to be aware of this service. It would, of course, be very nice if these and other services worked with Ipods. I hate the way DRM obstructs the sharing of information, discourages patronage, and ultimately stifles potential commerce.

Podcasts: Library 2.0 Activity #26

I've known about podcasts, and Internet Radio, for a long time. Podcasts remind me of the Video on Demand feature when I had cable. It's nice to be able to go back and catch a show at one's leisure, rather than stay glued to the transmissions or streams whenever they go out. I found quite a few podcasts for my esoteric music interests, Learning Company-type lectures, and geospatial information systems that interest me, besides the library-oriented sites. One of the hardest things to find these days online for me is a book review source besides Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble, or familiar news sources like the New York Times. I realize that our periodicals databases have quite a few, but they require more digging. I can find movie and music reviews quite easily, but book reviewing sources seem more scattered. Podcast Alley seemed the easiest directory to search, with the most hits. I settled on The Great Read Radio Show podcast. I am definitely going to use podcast resources more frequently. It looks like some have been used to record entire books in audio format. I've always wanted to volunteer at some place like KRCL. I realize that I could be podcasting to a larger audience online.

Library related blogs: Library 2.0 Activity #16

I used Topix years ago, mainly to browse the news. It has become much more sophisticated as a news feed, obviously. I like its ability to focus on news from particular types of media for a specified locality, or just a given locality or source. It tends to search general news blogs and news media outlets, not as many of the specialty blogs. If one can search for a topic and click on a bread crumb trail back to Topix's assigned headings, one can then find an RSS feed. Syndic8 has a traditional hierarchical approach, and seemed to have more limited offerings. It had no graphics. The site was down when I revisited it tonight. I like the graphics and tag-intensive Technorati site, which has the most sophisticated means of searching blogs, including separate tabs for photographs, blogs, postings and video content. I frankly prefer the simplicity of Google Reader's interface when it comes to adding subscriptions to specific blogs. Topix and Technorati offer more opportunites for knowledge discovery, for culling information from a variety of sources. I do like Topix's searchability and customization features, though it's a bit rigid with its directory. I liked Technorati's ability to subscribe to particular search results and its links to related tags, including an option to search non-English authorities. I liked Syndic8 the least, because of its limited descriptive information.

Fun with Image Generators: Library 2.0 Activity #17

I tried dressing like Dumbledore for the Deathly Hallows launch party last July, but the heat was too much for the mask. The robe and cap were about all I could handle. Actors have to have a lot of stamina to put up with all the makeup and costuming under those hot lights, let alone exert themselves like they do in films. And we don't get to see all the different takes and preparation beforehand.
Anyway, I liked ImageGenerator.net for its simplicity. It had the least amount of selection, but it was the easiest to just get on and create something. From looking at other sites, I gathered some other ideas for more creative layouts. I have an old story set in medieval times which I'd like to redo to look like an old manuscript. The Cool Text generator definitely has given me some ideas to pursue, as can be seen in this example:

Flickr mashup activity #14

At last I have foresworn all pretense against self-promotion.

You Tube: Library 2.0 activity #25

It's a very fun site, and easily addictive. I like grouping works together by the same person, so it's a little harder to get proper sets together. Since it's mostly clips, one can't really get a sense of the integrity of a work. The clips would work well for instructional purposes. One also has to pick and choose among duplicate versions of the same video that have been posted. There is, of course, no authority control for tags, which can limit how well one can find things at times. I miss not having credits, as one finds on imdb.com. Too bad there couldn't be some sort of merger between the sites. In the future, one may be able to click on a movie in progress and get instant metatag information about a given actor, with external links to other movies. What I especially like about it is that one doesn't have all the media player compatibility issues one encounters when, say, emailing a video clip. It is easy to share and comment on video clips. It is easy to post one's content, though You Tube owns the rights. It is already very popular with library patrons, so I would see it as a way of promoting library services in a creative sort of way. I like the filtering options, too. I chose Prangstgrup's Library Musical because it is simply a classic, because it was filmed in a library, and it is one of the first streaming videos from left field I ever saw on the Internet:

Web 2.0 Award nominee: Library 2.0 Activity #24

After browsing several, and getting a site whose domain was taken over by another, I settled on esnips.com. It bears many resemblances to flickr and de.li.cio.us, but what I liked about it was that it catered to literary and painting, as well as performing arts, content. It allows different sizes for viewing the images. It also offers customizable widgets, which makes it easier to share playable files, without the usual itunes/media player incompatibility issues. Above all, it offers 5 GB of free online storage. Many library patrons on our PCs have problems losing their files when the PCs time out. The PC may not have any office software installed. Or they may not have a thumb drive or flash drive to upload their files to. It makes sense to create everything and store it online, where it can be accessible from any PC, any time, with plenty of storage space to work with. I like the community categories, with opportunity to create more. My main issue might be with privacy (one person complained that her folder had been snapped up by another tagging site) and the amount of advertising on each page, though their pages are considerably less cluttered than those of MySpace. I think library patrons should be made more aware of web services, especially online storage and content posting and sharing sites.

Some Google Labs experimental applications:Library 2.0 Activity #23

I tried loading Google Web Accelerator, and my system seemed to freeze up. It didn't seem to speed up my searching. I decided to uninstall it after that. I tried Code Search, and realized that I would have to have a better knowledge of what I was looking for (though I understand that one can doesn't have to do original programming so long as one knows what code to search for). As far as the Experimental Searches go, I particularly liked the Timeline view (since I often want to limit my searches by time period) and the Keyboard shortcuts (I often like to use shortcuts via my keyboard in preference to mouse clicks). Google Trends was somewhat fun, though I had a hard time understanding the relevance of the links that were displayed (I tried, for example, to get a comparison between "pornography" and "genealogy" in terms of their relative popularity as searches on the Net). I thought Google Suggest was the easiest to get used to. It came up with a limited number of hits when I typed in "Casady", though I was familiar with the links. This one might be ready for prime time, especially if they could improve the linkage. I did come away resolving to visit this page more often. I have become particularly excited over all the Firefox extensions Google and others are coming up with. I looked at the Google Transit (one of the Labs Graduates) and hoped UTA would be using it. I haven't evaluated Google Talk or Accessible Search, but feel that much more needs to be done to open up the web to those with impairments.

Library 2.0 Activity #22

Amid the wandering sky
I sensed a light greater than age.
A fell traipsing, dashed beyond hope.
An illusion crashing,
Defying my pursuit.
An emblem of mockery,
Dispelling all pretense,
A shadow of nakedness,
Quells in its tolling
Rogues solemn in display.

Online Office Application Tools Library 2.0 Activity #22

I work with large spreadsheets and MS Access files on a daily basis at my full-time job. I can't say how many times we've been frustrated because our proprietary office email won't handle our files. We send large files of images (in our case, of thick gazetteers) back and forth, and sometimes have to store them on an external hard drive and hand carry it to someone in another building because they are too large for our in-house network. We also work with geographic information system hardware, which can have compatibility issues with MS Office. None of the online applications featured has something comparable to MS Access. However, for just about everything else, we could use these online apps. The prospect of sharing our information online from any computer is very intriguing. Everyone has had problems emailing attachments which won't open on someone else's computer because a certain proprietary software isn't installed. We talk a lot at my work about the "silo effect", about the need to break down hierarchies and departmental barriers. This software, I think, holds the key. The difficulty is getting everyone to use the same communication medium. There will always be security issues with posting sensitive internal communications online, or getting everyone to agree to use the same software. Some people don't like signing up with an online vendor, even if it is free, because they don't want to register any personal information to register. I believe the momentum, however, is shifting in favor of open source, collaborative applications. The price is right. No software is entirely bug-proof, but the collaborative nature of open source products make correcting errors a faster and simpler process. The monolithic, corporate approach has not been keeping pace with specialized needs. Rather than one size fits all, the future lies in tailoring products to specific niches. Many people are more open to the idea of storing and sharing data online, because the workplace is increasingly mobile. The idea of LOCKSS (lots of copies keep stuff safe) is at play here. If the mobile storage device is lost, or the hard drive damaged, where is the backup? Why lug your mobile device around, with its limited storage capacity, when you can look up your files on the Web, anywhere, with theoretically limitless capacity? What is the logic, say, of squirreling away all all your family history information away on a hard drive, instead of posting a version of it online for others to augment or revise? Many have had their lineages extended, their research dead-ends broken down, or even anonymous photographs identified, by sharing their information online. In collaboration there is strength.

Search engine comparisons: Library 2.0 Activity #21

I decided to settle on Mooter, Exalead and Clusty as my search engines to use in my experiment. I was trying to remember a case I had looked for earlier, involving the courtroom shooting of an accused child murderer by the victim's mother in a German courtroom. I finally found it after I had tried just looking for "accused child murder shot by victim's mother in German courtroom" in Google. It was about the twentieth result, and was actually about a play on the subject, currently being performed in Canada. I learned the shooting victim's name was Klaus Grabowski and the shooter's name was Marianne Bachmeier. I typed in "Grabowski Bachmeier" in Mooter, Exalead and Clusty, to simplify the comparison of results. Clusty and Exalead displayed results like Google. All three cited Wikipedia articles, but not in the different order. I liked the graphical representation of results in Mooter, though there are clearly some language-recognition issues. Mooter clusters results under "der", "die", and "den", which are indicative articles, too common in German to be useful headings. Results cluster under separate surnames, "Mutter" (for "mother") and "movie" were a bit more useful. I learned from the last cluster heading that a movie had been made about the subject. I liked the thumbnails of web pages, along with the "preview" feature, in Exalead. Clusty's results clusters were less relevant than Mooter's, even totally off the subject. The fourth result was an ad for one of those paid personal data search services (in other words, completely irrelevant). I came away deciding that I need to try out Mooter, Exalead and other search engines, and not depend so much upon Google for my research. I've felt that way actually for years, but haven't implemented it. The main thing to always keep in mind is that you never really see all that the Internet has to say about your particular topic, only what the search engine's algorithm can retrieve. And what it retrieves may still not be relevant. I would like to look at engines which score the results. It also comes down with how well the search is formulated, utilizing syntax and codes peculiar to each search engine. Gravee, by the way, seemed to freeze up in Firefox when I used it. I don't think I'll bother with that one again. I'm willing to try Clusty some more, but will be more skeptical of its results.

Librarians on Library 2.0: Activity #20

What constitutes "a library" these days? What is a librarian's role in a community? What constitutes a "community"? With the Internet and increased digitization of resources, these terms are more difficult to define. Traditionally, librarians have seen themselves as the gatekeepers of knowledge. They want to help people find the information they're looking for. But they also want to expose people to a variety of perspectives. They also want to preserve a certain canon of culture for posterity. To this end, they have cataloged materials, selected materials for their collections, and deselected materials because of space limitations. Some libraries maintain only a popular "core" collection, weeding what becomes worn or obsolete. Some take on a more archival or research orientation, where space and obsolescence matter less than collection comprehensiveness. Some libraries have been highly specialized, serving a more rarefied community.
Now, because of the World Wide Web, every library has the potential for a limitless collection, serving a potentially worldwide audience. Libraries have become more peripheral to general information-gathering. With the potential of downloading what media is requested on demand, librarians no longer need to guess what people will want and risk buying and storing a lot of materials which won't move. Librarians risk marginalization, or being seen as irrelevant. Library 2.0 offers ways in which the librarians can become part of the process, again. They can connect with the online community using social networking software. They can spur digitization efforts, particularly of local history collections. They can promote standards for metadata and digital preservation, keeping efforts like Google Books honest. They can maintain an online presence, publishing guides to the best websites, blogs, or tips gleaned online. They can archive online content, which might be lost when someone takes down their site, supporting efforts like the Internet Archive. They can provide 24/7 reference service online. They can coach people on using software, managing and producing their own content. They can promote information commons, like the Open Archives Initiative, and institutional repositories. They can support greater access to public records online, less restrictive copyright legislation (such as public domain status for orphan works), and freeing up digital rights and patent protections for products which hinder the sharing of information. They should also be championing open source software alternatives, keeping the major vendors honest.
However, much of what I've described is still theoretical. Not everyone has equal access to the Internet. If I have a DSL , T-line or a cable modem, for example, I can download an audio book file in a few minutes. If I have a dial-up connection, the same download would take several hours. Although many mobile phones are capable of browsing the Internet, service providers have been slow to permit customers to browse the web anywhere, at any time. Wireless Internet services have not been as widely deployed in urban areas as their promoters originally envisioned. For rural areas, the closest broadband option is via satellite. The fastest fiber optical networks remain out of reach for most Americans. For the poorest, dial-up and Wi-Fi are often out of reach, even at their underfunded public libraries. Not everyone has adequate mobile phone coverage, let alone landline coverage. Libraries should also be lobbying for local access networks for underserved areas. If private companies won't bring broadband to rural communities, the communities should be allowed to create their own broadband utilities. I like the idea of private enterprise, but I also think the marketplace needs some regulation. I like the idea of librarians providing mentoring and guidance in the marketplace of ideas. I like the idea of librarians being publishers. I also like the idea of librarians promoting, as well as devising applications for, new technologies. We know from history that librarians have championed technology which would help spread information. The general public, on the other hand, has the media stereotype of librarians as cranky old Luddites. Library 2.0 initiatives will help dispel this misperception. The opportunity is here for making our case.

Countries I've Visited: Library 2.0 Activity #19

create your own visited country map
or check our Venice travel guide

Map of States I've Traveled Through in the US: Library 2.0 Activity #19

create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide

Using RSS feeds: Library 2.0 Activity #15

I've subscribed to e-newsletters for years, or frequented sites which I know are updated on Mondays, Thursdays or Fridays, or the first part of the month. I've heard about RSS feeds for years, and thought that would be too much to read. But I spend a lot of time checking news sites during the day, which is a big time sink every time I load the page. It's a waste of time if there are no updates to peruse. Plus, I may just want to know if certain kinds of news is updated. And some sites don't update on schedule. So, using RSS is a time-saver in the long run. One can also visit many sites on related topics, expanding one's interests, and tell by quick glances which are worthwhile and which ones aren't. I may be braver and get more feeds from particular blogs after I've had more experience. I just wish I could get notifications when there is an update to the staff email, since I'm not logged in to it when I'm away from the library.

Great shot of hall from Seattle Library: Library 2.0 Activity #13

With all the glowing comments about the Salt Lake Library, it's good to see what others have done. While I love the use of light and glass at our location, the bold use of color seen in this shot at http://www.flickr.com/photos/theta444/16800827/ demonstrates other aesthetic possibilities. Plus, I like the color red. I should have attended the U. Visiting the Flickr site reminded me of the power of photography in this day and age, and the many, many talented people using it as a form of social communication. I took some art classes years ago, with the vain aspiration to be a graphic designer. Along the way, I lost my nerve and decided that wasn't my forte. However, with the evolution in graphics software and image sharing sites, I realize that I, with limited knowledge and expertise, can have a shot at it, too. Plus, this is an easier way to share documents of daily life with family. I know that many people have old family photographs with no names, places or dates to identify them. Posted on social networking sites, many people have been able to identify their pictures through the input of distant relatives and local historians, people whom they wouldn't have otherwise known or met, who happened to visit the sites.

Library Thing: Library 2.0 Activity #12

What a fun site! I first heard about this some years ago, and it has really grown. What better way to connect with like-minded people than through their reading interests (especially since other sites emphasize music, movies, games, pictures). The practice of copy-cataloging and union cataloging survives into the 21st century, in a style much simpler than MARC. I wondered years ago what benefit the Net was without general access to utilities like RLIN and OCLC. Before WorldCat, you took a step back by having to search each library's website individually. I've had a large library of books and recordings for years, with no easy access to it beyond my personal memory (which is getting faultier each year I get older). Now, with LibraryThing, I can actually inventory everything and perhaps interest people in my obscurata.

Working with Technorati Library 2.0 Activity #11

I read about Technorati and blogs years ago, but didn't know if I wanted to spend the time on it. Now, since I realize that I get to say whatever I want to here, as much as I want, I can do this for therapeutic purposes. Browsing through the website, I realized that the number of hits varies, depending whether one searches blog postings or just the tags. I looked up "biowarfare" and got the most hits when I typed it in as a general keyword search term (160). I got much fewer hits just under "blogs" and "tags" (about 32). When I looked under the tag "bioterrorism" under popular tags, I got different hits, but it was also a smaller number than with "biowarfare" the first time. I also realized that this site can be very addicting. No wonder people are abandoning the conventional news media, or that reporters are adding blog content to websites sponsored by news syndicates. The drawback of blogging, of course, is that facts can be easily misrepresented, since there is no editorial control. Andrew Keen has pointed out that journalists in the traditional media seemed to get sued all the time, and are even jailed, for what is said on the air or printed. Bloggers haven't quite achieved that level of notoriety yet.
SLCPL2.0

Social bookmarking: Library 2.0 Activity #10

I remember the trouble I had trying to create a reference collection for a book conservator. There were so many photocopies, so many possible access points, to file, along with books, journals, and supplier catalogs. When I created my wiki for the intranet at my other work, I found all sorts of websites, assigned to various subject headings, with brief annotations. I've wondered how to get more visibility. I find so many interesting sites on the Net, but have wondered how to keep track of them. I've used a free service called Backflip.com occasionally for posting my favorites online, but don't use it often. Tagging services like de.licio.us are a godsend, by comparison. There is so much information that seems so intractable, so miscellaneous, under old, hierarchical systems of classification. I've noticed that the name of S. R. Ranganathan gets invoked more and more these days. He was glossed over in my library school course on classification systems, but his faceted approach now seems prophetic. The biggest problem remains authority control. There are so many different ways to describe graphic images and three-dimensional objects. I remember Benjamin Whorf's anthropological study, where one group of children sorted beads by shape, another group by color. Many remember Rashomon, as well as the many plots it has inspired, including the current film, Vantage Point. How do you corroborate witnesses' testimony? How do you build consensus when there are so many synonyms, so many different aspects to look at? The trouble is, most people can't see the value of using subject descriptors, since the World Wide Web isn't cataloged. I wonder whether the "Invisible Web" may be growing faster than the rest of it, simply because of inadequate tagging and searching. In spite of "The Long Tail", people are still researching using the distribution models of Zipf and Bradford. Google's rankings remind me of how the scientific and scholarly community used the Institute of Scientific Information's citation indexes to determine who had the most influence in their professions. With an uncataloged World Wide Web out there, deli.cio.us and other such bookmarking sites are the best approach we're going to get, for now. I've always liked promoting lesser-known writers and musicians. Now I know how to reach more people more quickly, without being a spammer, huckster or peddler.

On MySpace and Libraries: Library 2.0 Activity #7

I often resent it when people consider libraries to be archaic remnants of the Luddite revolt. Libraries, to me, represent the ideal of knowledge for all. Libraries championed the machine-readable catalog clear back in 1967. But that was then. Like the publishing industry, with which libraries have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship for over a century, we have to find ways to reach out to consumers who have found numerous ways to communicate outside of the bibliographic world. Social networks like MySpace have made the telephone, CDs, DVDs and email seem antiquated in terms of their limited functionality and interactivity. While my stepdaughters have email accounts, they much prefer texting and chatting via MySpace or other IM utilities. Its the multimedia capabilities and expansiveness that intrigues them, I believe. They started using MySpace 4 years ago, and haven't looked back. My wife, rather than belittling it or issuing cautionary edicts, has her own site, and is probably keeps more current with what's happening with her kids and their circle of friends than she ever did before. With one daughter in the UK and the other about an hour's drive away, MySpace is an intimate way of staying in contact. It certainly has its negatives. I, like many, am concerned about pedophiles, stalkers, identity thieves, malicious hackers and other social deviants using MySpace to victimize others. One of our hard drives was ruined by viral infection, which we believe came via a "friend." While youth have always faced risks (remember the "Personals" ads?), sites like MySpace pose additional risks. Patrolling the floor, I don't catch as many people looking at porn sites as I used to. Singles dating and MySpace-type sites, although not pornographic, come across as tantalizingly risque enough to satisfy libidinal urges in public settings. I certainly wouldn't want my kids to meet up with most of the patrons I see frequenting them. It's sad to think that it wasn't so long ago that MySpace started out with just a young adult audience in mind. It wasn't that long before it was getting more hits than Google, and NewsCorp came wooing. Its framework is still set up for young singles, rather than institutions, which I find a bit artificial. While social networks generate a lot of traffic, I am not convinced that they produce that much revenue for their investors. Youngsters, I believe, find the "long tail" shopping experience satisfying enough, without the added baggage of purchased goods to weigh them down on their homeward journey. The intangible value of goodwill seems greater than that of exchanging gifts. Free downloads and samples, where there is almost infinite variety, also seem to do the trick. I worry about long-term preservation of digital content, but is all of it worth archiving? If I were younger, I would have a hard time forming long-term attachments to any particular digital content, since there will always be much, much more where that came from. I have the illusion of ownership in cyberspace; with so much plenitude, ephemerality seems more like a blessing than a curse. With so many bands online, for example, how does one rise above the heap and build a large following? How can one expect to still sell albums, when 30 second samplers seem too long to listen to? Staying power becomes an issue when there are so many sirens calling from so many different shores, luring surfers to delight or doom. In the final analysis, I like the concept of social networking. They bring together people of like interests from all over the world. In library school, we talked about social networking among scholars and scientists. Journal publications were a distant shadow of all the informal communication which preceded it. But scholars and scientists had to do a lot of letter writing, expensive conference calls and junketing to accomplish this. MySpace, Facebook and other networks bring folks together cheaply and instantaneously. They are the latest wave of the future. Libraries might as well follow the traffic, for now, or face futher stigmatization, however unfair, as being "irrelevant".

Wikis: Library 2.0 Activity #5

I have done a wiki for the staff intranet at my other workplace. It's a list by category of technology-related sites of interest to librarians and archivists. What was challenging for me was to keep the external links up-to-date, delete dead links, keep my annotations brief, and add new material. I have never worked with RSS feeds, which I think would be a great time-saver. My site wasn't interactive and did not have much visibility. I think that every library should have a wiki, inviting patron recommendations for materials selection and useful web pages. The primary concern is security. I noticed that one wiki required user authentication, which I believe is important. I'm reminded of what can happen when there is no mentoring or refereeing of posted content. A large genealogical database that I am familiar with ended up widely discredited as a source, because so much dirty data was entered. People saw years' worth of research, which they had submitted, drastically edited, revised and deleted. Heated controversies in families about names, places, dates, livelihoods, paternity, skeletons, etc., led to multiple versions of the same lineage, or tampering with existing submissions. I like the flexibility of wikis and the democratic marketplace of ideas they provide. As with my example and some of the controversies surrounding scurrilous postings in Wikipedia, there has to be someone minding the store. I feel that the Internet provides librarians additional opportunities for mediating knowledge; wikis and blogs are a great way to achieve this in a proactive fashion.

My first post: Library 2.0 activity #3

I've often thought about creating a blog, but wondered about the time commitment and when I would find Internet access. Now that I've got the PC at home online, it seems like the most natural thing to do. Kudos to SLCPL for encouraging staff to take this venture.