Technology (week 7 #17)

The old adage says you have to take the good with the bad. This certainly applies to technology. I'm older than most of the current technology. My kids can't conceive of life without the technology with which they have grown up. We didn't get our first TV until I was about 10 years old! I survived without a lot of technology as a young person certainly. However, when I look back, I realize how totally dependent upon it I have now become. Any time of the day or night I can go online and be instantly gratified. I can transact all sorts of business at my convenience and without waiting in lines. I can play games. I can watch videos, listen to music, browse blogs! I can find the answers to questions that pop into my head. I am seriously annoyed when my Internet connection drops! I feel isolated. Technology has also improved health care and quality of life for millions of people. Through email and social networking friends and family are able to stay in regular touch using only a few minutes of their time if that's all they have available. Next door, across town or across the world. It makes no difference.
iHCPL has shown us some amazing technological resources.

That's the good stuff. Unfortunately, with technology the increase in fraudulent activities and identity theft is staggering. The horrible results from online interactions with strangers is frigthening. Technology has also made it much harder to communicate with real people when we need to interact with places of business. How many times do you feel like you're running in circles when trying to work your way through automated phone systems?! (By the way, I have found that almost always, regardless of the options presented by phone systems, if you press 0 (zero), you'll get through the a real person.) Those readings we did on Internet safety at the beginning of iHCPL are important to remember.

When it comes to quality, I think technology has lowered expectations especially with regard to information. Such a huge volume of material gets returned when you do a Google search, for instance, that many people don't bother trying to evaluate what they are reading and decide if the source is a reliable one or not.

After all is said and done, I think technology has changed the world for the better.

Wikis (Week 7 #16)

Probably everyone has used Wikipedia and is familiar with the concept of wikis. I can see there potential usefulness in libraries. The approach is great for compiling information and resources from various directions. Staff with a common expertise or responsibility (e.g YA staff, children's staff) can bring together resources of specific interest to them. Or, resources based on subject areas (pathfinders, suggested reading lists, general reference resources) can be brought together. Often the discovery of these resources takes a lot of effort. A wiki can give the opportunity to save and share the results of those efforts.

The thing about wikis that has always made me approach their content with a degree of reserve is that they can be edited by all and sundry (or, at least, all and sundry who have permission to do so). Unless it's an area in which I am already somewhat versed, I'm never really sure how accurate or authoritative the information I'm reading really is.

Library 2.0 (Week 6 #15)

The article by John Reimer (To Better Bibliographic Services) raises some valid issues regarding access to information in libraries. The days of a collection of physical materials contained within the walls of a library are long past. Information is now provided to our users through a wide variety of electronic resources. Access to these resources is generally handled by having to visit each resource or group of resources that may be provided as a package and searching each separately. If the users even knows that these resources are available, the process of multiple searches is cumbersome and time consuming. Providing access to electronic resources through entries in the library catalog is useful approach as the reources are then retrieved along with the physical materials in the library when a catalog search is done. This works reasonably well for individual items (ebooks, downloadable content, ejournals, etc.) but it does not provide access to the contents of resources such as online databases. Technology such as Z39.50 and federated searching helps with the ability to search across multiple resources but, in the end, multiple searches are still necessary. We are providing service to users who are used to doing Google and Yahoo searches and retrieving data from a wide variety of sources. Frequently a single search will return all the resources they need albeit much of it is of a questionable quality. Libraries must continue to move toward far more inclusive searching and recovery of information.

Technorati (Week 6 #14)

I think I'm becoming overwhelmed with all that we've looked at over the last few weeks. As I was looking around in Technorati, I found myself thinking, "Ho hum! More of the same." However, as I think about this and the iHCPL program, I realize that this is really the point. No, not to make use jaded and bored! Technorati is "more of the same" in many ways but it is an example of another resource that's available. Our exercises of the last few weeks have shown us that no two resources are quite the same. Anyone who has used Google and Yahoo to search should have already expected this, of course. Not surprisingly, the sample search "learning 2.0" retrieves significantly difference results depending whether you do the search on blog posts or on tags or on blog directories. This is a refinement feature in Technorati that I don't recall seeing in other resources we have looked at, or at least it is not so fully developed in other resources.

I did claim my blog on Technorati. Now I just have to figure out how that will be useful to me!

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Del.icio.us (Week 6 #13)

I can see that del.icio.us could be very useful for anyone who really wants to be able to "catalog" the web resources they have found and to which they might want to refer again. I see it as similar to LibraryThing but for web resources instead of books. I did create a del.icio.us account and added a few things to it. It is interesting to explore outward through the tags used. Looking at other resources that have the same tags can reveal other really interesting stuff. It can also lead you to things that make you scratch your head. Clearly, one person's choice of terminology doesn't always mean the same thing to someone else!

Library Elf

Another cool tool for library users. HCPL's custom programming that sends out pre-notices for materials about to be due and for holds waiting to be picked up partially diminishes the usefulness for HCPL customers but it's still cool. Since you can have multiple library cards registered, it looks like you can get notification on all the materials and requests from any of the libraries you use, as long as that library is registered with Library Elf, of course.

LibraryThing

Oh wow! Now this is a very cool tool and that's not just the cataloger in me talking! You don't even have to own any books to get benefit from The LibraryThing! You could include books you've read but don't own. The tagging would be really helpful when you don't remember the title of a book but you remember the content.

It was a bit of a challenge getting the widget created. A combination of the comments by iStar and clarification from fourdogmom got me through it.

Avatars R Fun

Well, this was fun! It seems that my imagination wasn't accommodated by every image generator I played with. I definitely liked Meez the best. It gave me the best options to customize what I was trying to achieve. If I had been able to pick and choose options from various image generators, I could have created the avatar that I really would have liked. But that's life, isn't it?

Finding Feeds

I checked out all the resources posted. For one thing, it's mind boggling how many feeds there are and on what topics! I found all the reources reasonably easy to use. I think the deficiencies are mine not the theirs! I searched the same topics on each site so I would have a better basis for comparison. The variety of returns was interesting with totally different results on different sites. Also some returned much more that others. I found that Feedster seemed to have a number of dead leads. In the end, good old google proved a very rich resource for finding newsfeeds.

Working with RSS Feeds

It took me a while to wrap my mind around this concept but the light finally dawned. I'm not a blogger and I think that's why I was slow on the uptake. I can see how using a service like Bloglines would be an efficient way of monitoring blogs for activity if you are an extensive user. Clearly it is more efficient to go to one place where you can scan to see if any of the blogs you use have new postings than to check each one individually for activity. If I ever get into blogging, I'll use this kind of service.