#23 Is this really the end? No, it's a new beginning...

I started off on this journey with the avowed aim of exploring Web 2.0 particularly in relation to my private and public passion, local and family history. As I progressed through the course I was diverted into more general applications for Web 2.0 in libraries. I was familiar with a lot of the Web 2.0 tools but only as a passive user. E.g. I have been looking at other people's blogs, other people's MySpace accounts, Youtube, and other people's Flickr collections for ages. The key thing that the Learning 2.0 program did for me was make me become an active user, rather than a passive one.

However, as the course progressed I also became so much more aware of the huge number of possibilities out there. This course for me has definitely been the beginning of a journey. I feel that what I have done so far is like the tip of the iceberg. It will take me a long time to reach down underwater into the lowest crevices, particularly as parts will melt, and new bits will freeze up as time goes by.

What were the specific highlights for me?

• Bloglines is something that I am now using every day. It has been particularly interesting to use it to chart the progress of Boroondara staff in the Learning 2.0 course, but I also use it for a number of library and book related feeds and as well as for news links, ABC podcasts, new and programming links, and Flickr sites and friend's and family's blogs. I can't imagine not using Bloglines! Firefox makes it so simple to add to these feeds. You can find the link to my Bloglines on the side of this blog.
  
• Del.icio.us is another tool that I can not imagine not continuing to use. I am not at this stage using it to its fullest extent, but simply to keep track of my own tags. So there is room for further advances there. I was pretty cynical about Technorati when I first used it but have since found the need to use it, and have signed up and claimed my blog on it. I also installed the Technorati link on my blog so that people can add Hecuba's story to their favourites.
• Wikis also offered a range of prospects for use in public libraries and for local and family history. I had used Wikipedia for ages and am not in the least worried about the "unauthorized" nature of the information in it as some people are. However, I had not thought about using a wiki for a reference desk manual or creating my own wikis for various topics I am researching in local and family history. There is a lot of food for personal thought and action here.
  
• The web-based applications, such as Google docs and Zoho, seem a fabulous concept and I will explore them further. I have put up a biggish spreadsheet about Collingwood hotels and invited someone else to add material. At this point in time I must say that I think the software is a bit clunky, though the idea is a great one. Someone told me the other day that there is even a translation tool in Google docs - this would assist in getting feedback from people who read a range of languages.
• One exciting finding for me related to e-audiobooks and the implications for LOTE users. I was very excited to find Chinese, French, Portuguese and a multilingual site at a very cursory glance. Alas, Greek does not seem available. I did a search on Kazantzakis and came up with his work in many translations but none in the original.
  
• Other tools such as Librarything, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, podcasts and Youtube were useful and fun but not things that were unfamiliar to me, except in that I had not previously joined them.

During the course, I have regularly read the blogs of my Boroondara colleagues and those of some of my colleagues from other libraries and have tried to comment where appropriate. I have been amazed by the excitement out there and by the possibilities that are being thought of in terms of Web 2.0 and public libraries. Some staff have fully embraced this program, while others have had difficulties getting started or difficulties keeping on with it. We set up a system of mentors in each Boroondara library using people who had finished early and this peer support has helped many Boroondara staff on their journeys. One library is rumored to be using chocolate bribes (aka encouragements) so we will see if that affects their completion rate ;>).

The real issue is where to now? I know for myself what my learnings are and I can identify tasks that I need to pursue. What I am really interested in at this point is the "where to now" of this Victorian Public Libraries Learning 2.0 program. I hope that the course blog will stay up and that our staff can continue to access the training after next Monday. I am sure that Boroondara will have some staff who have not quite finished and who would like to continue. I am very happy to take over registering their blogs and doing the staff tracking. I am sure that other staff, particularly those who have been mentors, would also be happy to help with the monitoring.

Now that the program has been set up, I would also like to encourage into the program other Boroondara staff who for whatever reason could not participate within the existing time-frames or parameters. Some of this course could easily be incorporated into our induction program, and it would also be useful if staff could just access particular modules. E.g. when we are working on developing podcasts, it will be useful for staff who have done Learning 2.0 to go back to that module as a refresher and for staff who have not done the course to do that module. There are many ways that we can use this program in Victorian public libraries in the future.

#22 Audiobooks (or the end is in sight!)

The idea of providing online audio-books to library users in such a way that the subscription stops after the nominal end of the loan period and there is no fuss, no overdue notices and no fines sounds wonderful. I explored the various collections identified in this task and downloaded a Shakespeare sonnet from one site and some Rudyard Kipling from another site. They both downloaded swiftly, but I don't know how long a whole book would have taken. That is something to be explored at leisure.

I became particularly interested in the benefits of this sort of technology for users of languages other than English when I spotted sites for e-audio-books in Chinese, French, Portuguese and a multilingual site. These will all be good to explore further and obviously one of the many tasks I will need to set myself when I review this programme. One of the real challenges for libraries providing collections for our aging populations who speak a language other than English is that usually the populations of those languages do not support the same large print and talking book publishing industry as the English language does. So this was a real discovery for me. The success of our Chinese computer classes for older people indicates to me that for the Chinese community at least this could be a real goer.

#21 Podcasts, Smodcasts

Topic #21 is Podcasts, Smodcasts. I took a look at the suggested podcast directories,

• Podcast.net
  
• Podcastalley.com
  
• Yahoo Podcasts

They all seemed pretty straightforward to use. I have been listening to podcasts for a while but hadn't subscribed to any properly. So I went to the ABC site and got some of them linked to my Bloglines account, The Health Report, At the Movies and Mornings with Margaret Throsby. It was as simple as that! Now I will get them fed to me and not have to go hunting for them if I remember! This was another Duh! experience for me.

In terms of libraries, I think there is huge potential for the use of podcasts and have been saying so for some time, so that Boroondara staff think I'm a broken record. Aside from providing links to podcasts from other sites and people, we can use them e.g. for our Chinese storytime so that this is available to the world 24/7, or for other programs such as booktalks. In terms of local history, we could use them to provide oral history over the web, for providing podcasts of talks, for giving informational sessions, like Helen Blowers has done in this course, but on a local history topic like where to get started on how to trace your house - these could be for staff and the public. So there is lots of food for thought here.

Menzies Bust Unveiling - Kew 15 July 2007

This is an example of a video I found on Youtube that relates to the history of Boroondara, namely a video of former Kew Mayor and one of Boroondara's 150 significant people talking at the afternoon tea after the unveiling of the Menzies bust at Kew Library earlier this year.

#20 You too can Youtube

Like other tools, I have played around watching things on Youtube often. This task made me focus on the potential use it might be to me as a librarian and particularly the use I might put it to for local history, particularly as it appears to be enjoying a massive explosion of use for people of all ages and backgrounds.

I enjoyed watching a number of the videos about being a librarian and particularly enjoyed two clips that my colleague at Melbourne Libraries put up her Infosleuth blog. Searches for Hawthorn and Collingwood mainly resulted in videos about football, but I hit gold with Boroondara and found a couple of videos relating to a function I attended at Kew Library earlier this year, namely the Menzies bust unveiling. Once I had found them, I wanted to store them as favourites and share one of them on my blog, so that meant I needed to sign up to yet another site. After a seemingly abortive attempt at signing up, I realized that I could log in using my Google account. Duh! Then it was plan sailing and I was easily able to create a link to my blog so that I could post the Mayor and Gerry Petrie to my blog as I will in the next post. Of course, I may now be signed up twice, so I had better clear that up too.

This tool obviously has potential use in terms of searching it for items that are of local interest, like this one and some other ones I found of gigs in local Collingwood hotels. But we can also potentially use it to put up our own videos.

#19 Web 2.0 awards

This was a fun topic. I was interested to explore all the different categories and was pleased to see that in the course of Learning 2.0 I had explored quite a few of them already. Certainly it gave me lots to go back later and explore. With the Organize category it helped me with my frustration in the previous task with Zoho. For this task, I decided to focus on social networking tools and joined up Facebook.

Like many of the other tools I have explored here, I knew and had talked about Facebook but no action! So I signed up and used it to explore the profiles of various politicians, as I was doing it yesterday between voting and watching the election results. This is a link to my local member, Linday Tanner's Facebook. It was interesting to explore the different categories of "friends" he has, to watch his Youtube, and to see his photographs. I was particularly interested to see that we shared some favourite films and TV, and indeed that Kevin Rudd and I did too. Kevin 07 is also fond of Vivaldi, and has a cat named Jasper, so the Hecuba in me liked that. John Howard seems not to have used this tool in his electioneering, though there are some made up profiles for him.

I am amazed at the number of links to others that are available using Lindsay's Facebook as an example. I could link to see who else was at his address, who else had a Master of Arts, who else had Life of Brian as a favourite film just to give a very few examples. Facebook has lots of potential for developing communities of interest. I made a few additions to my stump of a profile and found that there were a few people on Facebook who had breast cancer as an interest, and others who are interested in family history and/or local history.

For comparison purposes, I also took a look at MySpace and of course checked out the topical, namely Kevin Rudd and his Kevin 07 campaign. Kevin's MySpace site seemed to provide a bit more scope than the Facebook site in terms of customization. You could also search and view the sites without signing up, though you couldn't comment. This was a disadvantage with Facebook.

In terms of my aim to discover tools that are potentially of use for local history at Boroondara, I will have to think about this further. Obviously as individuals need to join personally, I am not sure what the extended use could be. Yes, one could use it to develop communities of interest, say in the history of Hawthorn. But I tried adding "History of Collingwood" to my Facebook profile and ended up with lots of people who were interested in the Collingwood Football Club as well as History. So I think the usefulness of this tool for local history needs a bit of reflection. But it is good that I have finally signed up and now know more hands on stuff about Facebook and MySpace. At the very least, I can now use this information to make an informed decision when next we talk about it in terms of local history at Boroondara.

#18 Google documents again

I have been exploring this tool a bit further. Previously I tried uploading a word document, and then publishing it on my blog. This worked well and seemed not to lose formatting. I have just played around with creating a presentation. The software is very clunky and I also discovered that you can't upload the presentation document to a blog. I also experimented with uploading a biggish excel file on Collingwood Hotels. This seemed to work fine. Again, the Google spreadsheet does not have an option for loading to blog.

Continuing to play around with this has been of use to me in terms of discovering a practical and immediate use for this. I am working with a team of people from the Collingwoood Historical Society to update material about Collingwood hotels. I have the master excel spreadsheet of information on my desktop. Now I have it also on Google documents and will be able to invite the others to add their comments there directly. I notice there is also a chat facility. So my next step will be to invite the other team members to make their additions to the spreadsheet on Google documents. I am not sure how that will display, ie will we know who has made what changes? I presume that won't be like track changes, but will appear in the list of versions which seems to track even the most minute change. The first trick will be to make sure that the people I invite to share don't dismiss my invitation for spam. This happened recently with a new blog I set up! They just don't know me as Polyxena.

#18 Web-based applications: they're not just for desktops

I've had very mixed results with this topic. I can see that the concept of taking emails to the document, rather than attaching the document to multiple emails is a great concept. At work we manage this for shared documents by putting them on a common drive and all doing our commenting and editing there. But it would be very useful for moving things between work and home and vice versa and for material that needs looking at by people who are all in sorts of different places.

Ever obedient to my instructions ;>), I first went to explore Zoho and was excited by the prospect of a site where I could write, use a spreadsheet, notebook, database, planners, create a wiki, do mail etc. But that's where my excitement stopped. I tried to sign up and crashed Firefox three times attempting this. At that point I gave up and moved on to #19 which explores the Web 2.0 awards. I was interested there to note that in the Organize category they gave Google the first prize and Zoho the second. Why not try the best as the second-best didn't want me?

Using Google was completely simple from a sign in point of view as I, of course, have a Google account and it just welcomed me and identified me. Google documents allows one to create or upload documents, spreadsheets and presentations, others can be invited to join in either to read or write, and publishing is possible to your blog or to a url. I was particularly interested in uploading, so I uploaded a word document from my desktop. That seemed to work very well and to keep all the formatting. Then I successfully uploaded the document to my blog, and also to a website. These both seemed to work very well. I have since deleted that post as a long document on Foy & Gibson was not likely to be of interest to most who would be reading this blog ;>). I'll do some shorter ones when I finish this post. Experimenting with the presentation part was more problematic. I tried uploading several Powerpoint presentations from my desktop and none of them seemed to work very well.

So, my reflections on this topic are that it is a great concept and could be very useful. However, it does not seem to be working perfectly for me at this point, and maybe Google documents need developing more. It might work better with documents created internally as almost inevitably something is going to happen to formatting etc if you are transferring them. Zoho, I can't comment on except to say @#$%.