Podcasting and YouTube
I guess the easiest part to start with is the use of podcasting in libraries. My library currently has a project called Research First Aid in the works. What it is, is a collaborative effort between the main campus library and our health sciences library to inform our users about the different resources and services that both libraries provide. You can find out more by going to http://www.ecu.edu/laupuslibrary/researchfirstaid.cfm. Podcasting offers libraries new ways to market their services. Another project our library is engaged in is providing podcasts for our history of medicine lecture series.
When it comes to YouTube, I find it very useful for people who can’t place things on the University servers due to bandwidth issues. It might even be the best place for users to find videos created by the libraries because they are on YouTube more than they are on our pages.
Here is a video I found interesting.
Photo Sharing
This week, I played around with Flickr a bit. I’m still a bigger fan of Picasa because it works with my computer at home, and links with all my friends in gmail automatically. So, basically, Picasa works for me because I already have the account and can easily use it to share photos with my friends.
I do see the advantage of Flickr, though, since I did not have to download anything to my computer to use it. It was very simple.
As to library uses, I think of photo sharing as a way to advertise events or for digital collections, but can’t think of many other possible uses.
Here’s a link to my flickr account if anyone is interested. MAC 2007
Doc sharing is the wave of the future
So, I have just finished my exploration of Google Docs. I’ve actually been using yahoo docs for a bit in my MAC committee work.
I didn’t realize how much fun Google Docs could be. I had a couple of my gmail friends play around with it, and we discovered that we could all be in the document at the same time and tell that we were all editing at the same time. The greatest part was that it didn’t seem to cause any problems. My friend said she could see my stuff appear, which I guess took place after I saved.
I think this will revolutionize the way that collaborative work is done. I dont’ know that it’s quite ready to replace the desktop, though.
Now, I did also look at Zoho and Microsoft Live. Microsoft Live is pretty much the same as Google docs from what I could tell. Zoho has a lot of bells and whistles, but doesn’t really seem like something I would use at this point. I wanted to play around with the web conferencing feature, and might do that at a later time, but for now, it didn’t seem worth the time.
Google Docs
I made the following presentation in Google Docs for fun.
De.li.cious and social bookmarking
To be perfectly honest, the first time I heard about social bookmarking, I wasn’t that impressed at all. I didn’t see a need to sign up for yet another account with another password that I would likely forget.
However, a year has gone by, and I’ve completely changed my mind. I love the idea, now. I like that I can tag my favorite webpages and add notes, and I look forward to looking at other people’s social bookmarking accounts in the future. I think this can be a really great way to figure out what other pages people are looking at, and I think I will use it for tracking those blogs that don’t have an RSS feed with them.
