Week 9 - Wikis

The library staff at Stoughton have already made use of wikis internally (thanks to our progressive and fearless leaders). In one instance a portion of the staff all needed to add their input to a particular document. If I am remembering correctly, the edited portion was a different color. My memory fails me as to how we differentiated each of our edits.

Here are two comments based on my experience with wikis that were also stated in the lesson:

1. Start with a skeleton of a document that all involved can then edit.
2. Make the time allowed for editing finite, shorter rather than longer.

Week 8 - Tagging & Social Bookmarking

The idea of tagging can be a bit unnerving at first - everyone picking their own subject headings. Yikes! And viewing tags on del.icio.us can make your eyes go a bit buggy (nasty format); but then you come across a site where tags are nicely utilized and you say "Aha!" The tag clouds are very eye catching. They tend to draw you in and make you want to click on one of those tags. I think they might especiialy draw in the YA's. Tags might also be useful if you had a ready reference section to your library's webpage. Patrons could quickly connect with online resources that cover their subject headings of interest; and they would know that they were getting credible websites which were hand-picked by their trusted librarian.

Week 7 - LibraryThing, again

I seem to be having trouble uploading this image from Flickr while I am in Blogger. So I thought I would post it to Blogger while in Flickr. Hmm...not sure how I did this for last week's lesson. Darn that short term memory!

Week 7 - LibraryThing

My present reading log consists of a Word document, accessible from one computer. Need I say that LibraryThing is a quantum leap beyond this? Now the task of entering "all" of my past reads into LibraryThing. Whew!

Strengths of LT: You can look to others tags for help in tagging your titles. Love the Suggester feature. Keying in one of my reads - Love Walked In generated Sunday List of Dreams by Kris Radish, amongst many other titles. Yet another way to add to my list of books to read.

Weaknesses of LT: The tagging is rather subjective; but I guess this helps distinguish what you liked about the book.

Question about LT: This really pertains to any software application that allows for tagging - are there tagging conventions, ie. do you separate tags with a space or a comma? do you enter a multiple word tag as one strung together word? do you worry about capitalization?