#blog12daysxmas Post 7 #anz23mthings Thing 6 Youtube+Screencasts

I am not really much into video creation, I must say.  I have been using Youtube for years and I really love the use it has for archival material.  It is great to preserve and disseminate film footage and sound archives.  These play a very special role in family and local history, and any sort of history really.

I have had a Youtube channel for a few years, but I have usually used it for videos that I have made using photos.  Sites such as Animoto and the late lamented Pummelvision have been ones I have used to document things, such as my year in photos, my uncle's life when he died, a trip to Shanghai and others.  Yes, cats have definitely featured.  But that's the web.This is my Shanghai video:




I can see a real use for this in family and local history to document a series of photos about a particular place or person. This is a very brief one I did when my uncle died, but I would like to experiment with doing some local or family history focused ones.




While doing this Thing I signed up for Vine and was amazed at the very large number of my friends who were on it.  I was also interested to see that one of the trending topics was cats.  I am a great Henri and Simon's cat fan so this was heartening to me. I haven't loaded anything to Vine yet.  I think this has a lot to do with my real aversion to jerky handheld video. For the library profession, I think it is important that we don't produce amateurish stuff that gives a bad impression.  I am sure that many members of the profession do have these skills - just not me.

And I did do a Vizify twitter video of my account today.  That showed me who my golden followers are.  You can see it here.

The Atomic Cafe

This an example of a full length movie I have blogged from Youtube movies.

Real Sophia Vembo on Youtube!

I have been pretty slack about keeping up with my Greek course on LiveMocha. I know the trigger for that was when the Greek course, like the others, added an oral component that was required to pass. I had been going great guns there until then - and surprising myself by being ok with the aural. However, the oral element was added and I slacked off using as an excuse that I need to get a new microphone for my PC. And I got that weeks and weeks ago but haven't quite got to the Greek again.

Today through a fairly circuitous route which will not add value by description I ended up on Youtube and happened to go to my subscriptions which I am equally slack about checking. And there were two little Greek gems there. They are both quite short scenes from a 1938 film, I prosfugopoula, and show Sophia Vembo actually performing songs, Poso i zoi ine orea, and Zito na se xehaso.






I have long been a fan of Sophia Vembo and have her on many vinyls and one CD but had never seen her perform in the flesh in her prime. There is a bit of footage on Youtube which has her performing in the 1976 which I had seen and favourited before and dates to the time when I first started to know about her and really when she was experiencing a revival. Finding these two clips today makes me realize, as if I hadn't before, just what gems are hidden on Youtube and also continually being added. I need to be vigilant!

Mikis Theodorakis in East Berlin 1987: 22 Sto Perigiali (Arnisi)

My sister tells me that practising another language is a great way to exercise my brain. Today I decided to try to mash up my Web 2.0 skills with language learning to help me with this. And I found this absolutely fabulous little gem on Youtube: it features Mikis Theodorakis himself singing his own composition based on Giorgos Seferis's poem Arnisi (Sto perigiali). As this is one of the few Seferis poems that I understand the words for, I was overjoyed to find it.

I have previously done some Sophia Vembo hunting on Youtube but must remember that Youtube is a great source of assistance for language maintenance and language learning. Now to dust off my Seferis and try to read some of his poems in printed form? And I could see if one of the onlines tools I experimented with earlier in this blog now does Greek? They didn't before.

#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.

#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.