Virtual networking

There are two main ways that public libraries can benefit from social networking applications such as Facebook and My Space; by promoting library programs and services and by bringing together in the virtual world. I have a Facebook account and I've made friends with a librarian in the United States simply by being fans of the same applications.
Both these applications are simple and effective way of reaching young adults particularly, it should be standard procedure for all libraries to use these applications.

Wookies and Wikis

I've never paid much attention to wikis, I didn't like the idea of an article that had no authority, I've only ever used Wikipedia as a last resort.

If it wasn't for this training I certainly wouldn't have investigated their potential. I'm now quite excited about the idea of a locked down wiki for our staff intranet, imagine being able to up date your intranet as soon as you had the information!
I'm going to play around with one and see if it would be a better alternative than a blog for our reference, homework help site.
I can't help myself, every time I think of wikis, I think of Chewbacca the Star Wars wookie.

I joined Wikipedia and I contributed to an article about my local area. The article had listed the surrounding villages, but I noticed that they'd missed one, so I added it using the same double square bracket "[[" before the entry and "]]" after the entry. When I saved the changes I noticed that the village had become a hyper link, so naturally I clicked on it. It was an interesting article on the village, but it had a basic mistake, it was listed as being 25 kms north east of the main town. This was a little difficult as the main town is on the east coast, so naturally I changed it read 25kms north west of the town.

I still have my concerns about the authority of wikipedia but I'm impressed with how easily wikis work, they certainly have huge potential for library services.

Working away

This is what I want Learning 2.0 to support by giving me the skills to build a reference blog.

I envisage that the blog would help staff and the public by providing library resources, internet sites and databases to answer particular school and general reference enquiries. I would also like to build into the blog a list of useful internet links categorized in a way that groups like things together, but without using Dewey. I've had a look at Del.icio.us and I was a little disappointed with the type and number of sites listed, perhaps it will improve with time, or perhaps I wasn't using it properly, which is quite possible.
Working away, originally uploaded by colgateuniversity.