Monday, December 10, 2007

Brown bag lunch

Irene and I are talking about our travels on Tuesday 18th at 1pm and I wanted a spot to place some useful links.

The events I visited were:

The presentations I gave were:

Bits and pieces I picked up:

Overall theme from all events - libraries are trying to use the tools that users are already using, (eg. google docs, CE6 ) and integrate library content into these.

QULOC and TAFE followed similar format - presentations to everyone before lunch, break into smaller groups after lunch. QULOC's focus on hands on workshops was great. The unconference was less formal than the WA unconference, with many sessions being "sit around and talk" sessions. Like WA, it was a useful sharing of information across library sectors.

QUT Creative Industries have use delicious tag cloud embedded into a web page as subject guide - and have embedded this into Blackboard / CE6 Learning Management System

Yarra Plenty Library System incorporates LibraryThing tags in its catalogue. See this example for Tim Winton's Cloudstreet.

QULOC

University of New England - received funding to create a social network for students, but beginning to conclude that it is not necessarily a case of "If you build it they will come". May be better to use an Open Source network or to tap into something pre-exisiting like Facebook - especially by making widgets to tap into this. Cameron Barne's presentation slides are here,:

Gina Velli is a young librarian working in legal deposit at the State Library of Queensland. She gave a presentation about MySpace / Facebook and concluded that MySpace is not what it once was and Facebook is preferred by more mature library users.

Andrew Bennett from UQ talked about using Web 2.0 tools as part of the IT Standard Operating Environment, citing the advantages of single sign-on, standardisation of tools, "light-weight accesss to heavy weight tools". Disadvantages - bakups and repository, scalability. **. Focussed on Zoho and Google docs.

Unconference

I went to those sessions I was most unfamiliar with at the unconference - so learned about how to offer services to youth, and a bit more about using chat reference.

TAFE -

Deb and Pim also presented about the Learning Common.

UWA Library have integrated their information literacy into Blackboard / CE6, but wanted to ensure their course content was more portable. At the moment it is very hard to reuse material from course to course. They are experimenting with using HIVE to store learning objects that can be access from different learning modules.

Kay Schneider's igoogle presentation was excellent.

Jody ex-Curtin's "start with google" information literacy classes. Demonstrated a search on google giving tips about using the + and site: operators. Then took same search to google scholar. Then went from google scholar into library databases...all the time talking about accessability, search strategies and academic validity of the sources.

IRENE
The event she attended and presented about at the Brown Bag Lunch is the Learning Futures Symposium .

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Here's a meebo chat box

Here's a meebo chat box as an example of how it can be embedded in any web page. I'm sometimes logged into meebo to access the Library Society of the World chat room, but more often am offline.

The chat box won't show up in an RSS reader. I have also embedded one into the sidebar of this blog


Tuesday, December 4, 2007

My other blog nominated for an Edublog Award


My other blog, Librarians Matter, has been nominated for “Best Librarian/Library Blog” in the 2008 Edublog awards.

To vote for me, click here, Best library / librarian blog 2007. Or, you may prefer to vote for one of the other nominees:


Previous library blog winners have been:
Library Stuff - 2004
Joyce Valenza’s NeverEnding Search - 2005
Hey Jude - 2006


I’m chuffed to see that West Australian Sue Water’s blog, Mobile Technology in TAFE has been nominated for three separate awards, and that Australian Jo Kay’s Second Life Island, Jokaydia, has been nominated for Best Educational Use of a Virtual World .

I'm hoping to attend the awards ceremony on 8th December in Second Life.