Week 8: Mashups and API

Mashups are an interesting idea and a new concept to me. Before I took this class, I didn't know what they were. From the Mashups awards web site which you can filter by date and by category, I visited: Site volume, 2itch, and Social Scan.

In Site volume it was very interesting to see how words and phrases are used in five different websites: Digg, You Tube, Myspace, Flickr and Twitter all at once, the graph type display makes it easy to read.

I also liked 2itch, a good guide for finding information on restaurants, stores, gas stations, etc. a good place to visit while planning a trip.

Social Scan was another cool mashup to visit for checking a website link popularity among other popular social sites. I checked my library website against all these and I didn't see it was a very popular site!!

Rollyo Librarian blogs

The concept of privacy while using the Internet is almost non-existent in my opinion. The Shifted Librarian and Librarian.net bring excellent issues on why a user has to be careful while posting information in the Internet and even though you don't post your personal information yourself, records that have your information can be stolen or by mistake made available to other parties.

We read in the newspapers over and over again that certain credit card companies or retailers have "lost" their users personal records by mistake.

Another interesting issue is the way Google handles personal data which again in my opinion this privacy is also non-existent. From one stop website where you can check e-mail, type a document, do a scholarly search, shop, check for maps, read the news, search and personalize your computer information using Desktop, Goggle can store all your information in its server and keep it or sell it to other parties (this nobody knows but we all suspect it happens).

Custom Searchroll

I created a searchroll on Toxic Information.

http://www.rollyo.com/beatrizv/toxic_information

I would like to thank MLA and all the wonderful instructors for giving me the opportunity to take this class. I attended the spring MLA Webcast on Web 2.0 where a lot of applications were mentioned but it wasn't until I had the opportunity to explore these resources that I felt more comfortable using them.

I hope in the future MLA offers an advanced Web 2.0 class and I would like to see other topics offered like Evidence-based Medicine and Public Relations and marketing tools.

Again thank you for offering this class.

Week 7: Podcasting and Online Hosted Video

Accessing You Tube was a fun experience. Video sharing of thousands of videos on different topics available for free 24/7 is certainly a great concept.

I think exciting library applications like library orientations and teaching classes can be efficiently done with You Tube. The visual aids are usually very helpful in teaching.

Certainly the input that students and library users can contribute to these videos makes it easier to communicate with the librarians. Users can post and tag videos, watch videos posted by others, posts comments and initiate threaded discussions.

Podcast is an interesting concept. Initially I thought iTunes and MP3 players were only limited to listening to your favorite music but more and more libraries are using this technology to develop tutorials in how to search databases, or how to find electronic journals as well as provide a brief introduction to the library.

Advantages of using Podcasts:
available 24/7
users can play the Podcasts an unlimited amount of time if they desire to do so.

Disadvantages:
Some users may prefer a person or personalized class or library introduction.
Need to be updated every time services change or every time the databases gets updated or new database features are available.

Oregon State University Libraries

Week 6: Online Photo Sharing

This is a fun week, working with pictures and being able to share them with friends using Flickr or Facebook is very easy. Handling pictures used to be complicated in the past because you will have to worry about size, quality, resolution, etc. Now the image sharing services can take care of these issues for us.

Image sharing may be used at my library in the historical collections. We have a Historical Research center and our archives include a wealth of information. Photo sharing can help fill in the gaps when the information is missing.

I like the project the Library of Congress is doing with Flickr and I believe that is probably one of the main applications in a library, although I am sure museums can also benefit from using Flickr for the same reasons listed above.

Week 5: Web Office Tools

It was very interesting to work with Google Docs and have access to the same tools as Microsoft Office with the advantage that they are free. More and more companies are developing this type of software free of charge in the Internet.

Some of the advantages are: you don't have to pay for it, easy to use, easy to save and can have it ready anytime you need it.

Disadvantage: you always need Internet access to retrieve your information, even though the document is deleted it stills available somewhere in Google or Zoho servers, need to register to use it.

Users that can not afford to purchase this kind of software can work on presentations, create documents or spreadsheets in a very easy way.

Zoho is amazing, it has multiple applications ready to use!!

Microsoft Live allowing you to save your documents and presentations on the web and being able to access them anywhere is in my opinion the response to Google Documents.

Webex also offering similar services for a fee.

In my opinion, a fee- based software will have to be available to take care of security and confidentiality of these documents since there may not be a strict control storing all this information in the Internet for free. Users will have to pay for a secure access until someone figures out how effectively do it for free.

Week 4: Social Bookmarking

I found delicious a wonderful tool to access your bookmarked sites from anywhere in the world as long as you have a computer with internet access. My bookmarks in the browsers are getting too long so delicious will solve the problem of knowing what I have bookmarked. I use both IE and Firefox.

The SJLibraryLearning2 site is a wealth of information. I found several excellent sites that I bookmarked in my delicious account. I noticed that IE displays the tags of SJLibraryLearning2 site in a more organized way than Mozilla and I am not sure why maybe it is the font size.

Tags are a very organized way to keep track of your bookmarks to find them right away, and bundle tags can save lots of time when looking for the bookmarks.

I bookmarked Bloglines and I was surprised to find out that 7,739 people have done the same!!

I believe delicious has the potential to create a social collaboration among librarians and researches to exchange information in a very timely manner.

This was a great lesson--I have heard of delicious before but never tried it. CiteUlike and Connotea are also a wonderful collaboration tool among researchers.

I am learning so much. Thank you very much for these valuable lessons. Now I believe our jobs as librarians is to disseminate this information to our users.