sorry, i lied

THIS is the last post. i forgot about that I wanted to impose some monster truck action upon you all. as demonstrated below, anyone can on YouTube post poorly filmed and unedited videos for the world to see. please excuse the grunts that you may hear on some of the video clips, that wasn't me, it was one of my friends who was getting drunk on the spirit of monster truck mania (unrelated to previous cocktail posts).

[yarra people if youre looking at it from work you wont be able to see it so go to a public access machine...not that it will really be worth your time in all honesty]

monster trucks [26 sec]::




demolition derby [13 sec]::



batman [19 sec]:



click here to see the exact same scene that was posted from an audience member sitting at a different part of the stadium. im now getting stalked by monster truck freaks.


laser intro [71 sec]:

final post

i got an email from the cocktail builder guy (thing 19?) saying that he will consider a spinoff cocktail site using detergents: "how to poison your loved ones". so i am looking forward to that and am pleased that my voice has been heard. this course has greatly enhanced my hospitality and bartending skills as i have learnt that there is an infinite spirit-infused world beyond the cosmopolitan and the g&t.

many libraries have some time to go before we can incorporate these technologies as service offerings. for example, at yarra we cant use delicious tagging - basically any 3rd party application - because they pose a real security risk, and there are understandable bandwith issues for podcasting and youtube. but at the very least our council IT department now understands that libraries are pushing for these things and will continue to do so.

my suggestions for enhancing the course would be to update the 'things' for forthcoming courses to include things such as the concept of vodcasting inthe youtube section, and social networking sites such as facebook which have come good library related applications. also to provide (or look into at least) alternatives to track staff progress for staff who do not wish to blog, because this has perhaps been one of the biggest hinderances to progress and a point on contention for some people.

most importantly i have enjoyed reading my colleagues' blogs. there is such a diversity of interest out there. i hope that they continue blogging about things that they are passionate about. maybe the SLV could create a listing of staff blogs across all the vic public library services who wish to share their blogs with each other and continue writing?

Lynette and Leslie - a pesonal thank you for your work in getting this set up and your monitoring of progress i can see that it really is an enourmous task and victorian public libraries have been really fortunate to have had the opportunity to do this course, even though I moaned about a couple of things.

#22

i dont have anything interesting to say about audiobooks so i will leave it as this. i do like them, though, and they will increase in popularity.

the podcast post

on my first day of radio journalism, less than a decade ago, each student was handed a reel of tape, a cutting blade, and some joining tape. we used to sit in the studio for hours splicing and joining (and crying when we accidently destroyed the key part of our interviews) to get rid of the umms and the ahhs to make subjects appear eloquent and succinct.

with digital audio technology things have changed. podcasting is the new pirate radio. however I think the same rules of producing need to apply - that is understand your audience and their limitations. just because you can produce a podcast it doesnt necessarily mean that you should. i read somewhere that as a guide 30 min should be the maximum length of a podcast cause the audience will loose interest if its too long.

here's a list of podcasting libraries. many great ideas for libraries here such as reviews and talks.

RSS feed of the day

ive taken a recent interest in council matters as I also live in the area of the council that pays my salary. so whenever i hear anyone complaining about exorbitant council rates, parking etc i quickly set them straight [hoping for employee of year award].

when I was delivered this site of japanese manhole covers, each which reflects the unique identity of the town/city (with a bit of whimsy thrown in) I immediately began to think of the exciting possiblities of a city of yarra manhole cover.

here are my suggestions, which I am thinking of submitting to staff the roads department, of which I now have direct access. if anyone else has other ideas please submit.

• culturally diverse yarra: johnston st fiesta - a bullfight scene with a local paint sniffer becoming confused about what is real and what is an illusion
• street vitality in yarra: guythrowing up on the sidewalk after a big night
• yarra pets and children: kid milking cow at collingwood childrens farm. how cute!!!
• intellectual yarra: young guy (wearing some sort of ethnic scarf) casually studying manuscript in cafe on brunswick st, preferably marios

the image I have chosen here, for nostaligic reasons, is the manhole cover of osaka city my second home after my beloved perth (which is always a better place to live when I dont actaully have to live there). as an example of the whimsical nature of the japanese, the cherry blossoms in the image only come out for about 2 wks a year, for the remaining 50 osaka is concrete jungle and little else.

you looked better on myspace

ive had an on again off again relationship with 'statement t shirts'. they were kind of cool in the 90s indie music high period, when you could make some kind of political/ironic statement though a single, simple,word emblazoned on your raglan sleeve bonds T (ie "slacker"). we used to make our own with iron on lettering bought from the local haberdashery store, thinking that we were really alternative. however, once Dangerfield starting mass producing "im a princess" "vote for pedro" and the like I that they became a bit lame.

so now i proceed with caution when i see slogan t shirts.

however, taking the long meandering route to get the the crux of this post, here's an exception, which found this on a powerpoint presentation about teens and 2.0.

you looked better on myspace alludes to the double lives that we can live in the 2.0 world. i think i read something somewhere about people's avatars (online pictorial representation of oneself) seeping into their real person. scary.

the exclamation mark post

!!!!!! [jo and i are figuring out why she had to remove every single exclamation mark from her last post.] we will get to the bottom of this.

friday night drinks

the dragonfruit, pictured, is also known as pitaya or huo lóng guo. it is the fruit of a cactusy looking tree thing in southeast asia and in the right season you can pick them up at asian grocery stores in melbourne. they are really tasty and make the perfect accompaniment to a fruity summer cocktail on a balmy night.

this cocktail builder [click on link] takes what liquids you have around the place and tells you what cocktail you can whip up. i found it on the web 2.0 awards site, where it won first place in the 'fun' section. and deservedly so.

however, one small flaw that i noticed in this 2.0 application was that it only accepted legitimate beverages into the cocktail equation. that is, when i tried to enter 'detergent', 'bleach', 'shampoo', 'nail polish remover', 'grey water' and 'molotov' into the text field i was summarily rejected each time. yet it accepted coca cola, which is arguably more caustic than all of the above combined.

which means that the site won't be of help when i want to invite my neighbour who has loud parties which last until 5am in the morning on schoolnights for cocktails.

the web 2.0 directory is out of control. it's quite daunting. i probably have heard of 5% of the applications, maybe less than that. but knowing what you want is a matter of reading what more informed people have to say about particular applications, and also relying on sites like the awards site which filters the good from the bad. thats where rss feeds and tags come in handy.

google docs

im writing this post from google docs. I LOVE IT! im also trying to find ways to add more bling to this blog. wish me luck.

i have a question. how many times one read a post on how great and life changing rss feeds are before they become completely and utterly over it? i would like to state that I'm not dissing RSS feeds, blogs, and the like - they are invaluable tools for our profession and everyone needs to be aware of them at least. but I am detecting a small pocket of resistance to blogging about them. I know that people are more than happy to do the learning, but not create a blog entry about it. i wonder if there is another way to measure staff progress on this course?

the whole point of a blog is to engage one's audience in a meaningful and open dialogue. it's social software, and a good blog is one that has readers responding to particular posts and coming back to it again and again. if you are not the type of person who likes doing this type of stuff then it can be a pretty painful exercise...

for the record i would say 5 is my limit.

Communism - A Love Story

Author talk at Carlton library Oct 2007.

war of words in wiki world

i read an article in the age newspaper today which talked about the two camps which have emerged in the1000 strong wikipedia administrator field, namely the 'deletionists' and the 'inclusionists'. having recently watched the lord of the rings and also being in the middle of a david gemmell saga the thought of two waring factions in the quest for 'truth' caught my attention. so I decided to investigate.

according to the article and various web sources, the rise of the deletionists - who assert that wikipedia in not a dumping ground for facts, that standards of notability have to be upheld - is threatening the 'wa' of an otherwise democratic and peaceful world ofwikipedia. inclusionists say that all information should be included even if it is of interest to just a few.

i did a quick seach on the meta-wiki, the site which discusses how to manage wikipedia, and discovered there is this whole seething underbelly of debate and discontent going on. so if you think that you are 'wasting time' by getting addicted to online cartoon avatar lookalikes of yourself (my favourite is the southpark one, btw) then go and check this out and feel a bit better about yourself. ie "Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgements About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are In Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn't Mean They are Deletionist".

= Wikipedia adminstrators who don't seem to understand the concept of brevity in writing for the web. nice, also, wtf?!

for me anyway, this adds a new dimension to wikis. for the purpose of comic relief I am posting the entire set of 'wikipedian philosophies' below. enjoy. but in all seriousness, it highlights one of the biggest problems in managing a wiki. that is, if everyone has a different philosophical approach to information management, then who is right?! and how do we deal with deletionists and inclusionists with fundamentally opposing views?

Darwikinism
Deletionism
Delusionism
Essentialism
Eventualism
Exclusionism
Exopedianism
Immediatism
Inclusionism
Incrementalism
Mergism
Metapedianism
Separatism
Wikidemocratism
Wikithoritarianism

hawaii 2.0

hawaii has been responsible for many wonderful things in the world, such as pizza toppings and tv police dramas. the latest of these good things is the wiki. wiki means fast in hawaiian. and to keep true to that spirit I am going to type this posting really fast.

i think that wikis are great online collaboration tools. as shown from the examples they have myriad uses in libraries like documenting library procedures, or for book recommendations. wikis take the concept of online interaction a step further than blogs as participants have the opportunity to not only comment on existing content but create new content for themselves. they accord an increased level of trust (ie not to spoil or stuff up the content or deliberately misinform...speaking of which I remember that there was some nice work in this field for our PM recently) in the user.

the ways wikis work are user friendly, so errors are easily fixed, as i discovered when i added my blog to the plmc learning wiki. I also a new 'favourite web tools' link on the sidebar. i think that once you understand the general concept of adding links and images then its pretty easy to transpose this knowledge to many online social collaborative spaces.

i also couldn't help by add my favourite sports star to the sports pages, who also happens to be hawaiian...

ALOHA

to the or not to the - that is the question

my rss feed reader delivered my some news this week that i wish to share to anyone who cares about catalogue records and indexing, especially margaret who may be reading it because i am sure that she would understand, being the dedicated and thorough cataloguer that she is.

The annual Ig Nobel Prizes are meant to honor scientific achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think,” according to the founders at science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.

What grabbed my attention this year was this year’s Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize, which was awarded to a Japanese (who else) scientist for developing a method for extracting vanillin from cow dung. Previous society-changing award-winning achievements from Japan include the invention of karaoke, which received the Peace Prize, and the Tamagotchi, which received the Economics Prize. Imagine a life in Japan with NO KARAOKE.

But onto the library related information which is the point of this post, the ig noble award for literature this year went to Glenda Browne of NSW Australia for her study of the word “the” and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.

I think we have all encountered this problem when trying to find DVDs for patrons...

To be more informed, read the article, which examines rules and practice relating to the filing of ‘The’ at the beginning of index entries. It recommends that the definite article should be accorded ‘more respect’.

I used Technorati to find 59 posts on the ig noble awards, which are all very deserving.

thing 13 is delicious

i use delicious for when I come across an internet article that I want to read, but don't have time at that moment. delicious allows me to tag the site with the click of a button and come back later. and when I come back to review my collection of tagged sites i have the chance to either keep them it if they are worthwhile, or delete if not. i use it as a reading list, rather than a 'favourites' list. but i think that's ok as there is no particular way to use delicious.

im a bit embarrased to share my list though, cause there's a wide range of sites that probably won't appeal to any particular person unless you are me. for example, in my current delicious set I have train timetables for central japan, handbag enthusiast blog sites, stuff about creating southpark avatars, alia links, and various social technologies articles.

so unless you are a handbag collecting southpark loving podcast learning wiki adding japanophile, then you may not appreciate to the fullest extent my set of tagged sites.

in summary, delicious is one of the few 2.0 tools that I do actively use.

it's all 2 much

last week i got all confused when I had two copies of a melways street directory to consult. what if i chose the 'wrong' copy and took the wrong directions to my destination? my life would have been so much simpler if there was just one copy on the shelf.*

same applies to a lot of this 2.0 stuff. for example, on facebook there are about 10 book sharing/recommending [what librarians call reader development] applications. using them all is not practical. so which do i use? which do i recommend to patrons/friends?

i once recommended Shelfari to a patron who wanted to keep track of what she had read. i probably should also have told her about librarything. personally, i would be spewing if i had signed up to librarything then found out that all my friends were using shelfari. dammned if i am going to recatalogue all my books.

i guess what i am trying to say is that we should take some time when choosing what 2.0 tools libraries use and recommend to patrons. research. know your demographic and what they are using. have a plan. give informed options.

onto the actual question required from this post: library 2.0 is a nice term for the libraray profession to adopt and everything, but from an end user(our patron)point of view, what we [can] do in library 2.0 land is really no different from shopping on retail sites such as ebay or amazon.com. in my opinion it's web 2.0 hijacked and pimped up by us librarians. but having said that, it's semantics, and all good in the final outcome of what we are doing by using this stuff.

*in the end I chose the most thumbed through melways copy, thinking that if more people had read it it was probably more accurate than the other one.

ryo

checked out rollyo. rolled my own. did some sample searches. got frustrated with the results in the pre rolled examples but was happier when i customised my own. nice to know about and to have if you don't have acess to the really powerful tools like factiva or lexis nexis. not essential.

have added search bar to blog of various newspapers that I consult when really important issues in my life arise, such as chris mainwaring's tragic drug overdose, what the chaser have done to get arrested this time, the internet crackdown in burma, or who got voted out of australian idol

Stephen Abram, leading international librarian and ‘lighthouse thinker’

The TS posse had a mini field trip to check out what Steve Abram 'international librarian and lighthouse thinker, had to say to us. Amongst the many things that he said (I think I missed some though, because he spoke really fast and my brain wasn't able to process everything), I found this diagram very interesting. click on the image for a version that you can actually read

Basically, from a Forrester survey of US internet users it shows what each age group is doing online. have a look for yourself and see if you are up with your US counterparts.

another interesting point he raised was about our library management systems and ipacs. we librarians think they are the best thing, like, ever invented. but does the end user necessarily agree? i doubt it. mr average library user doesnt care what an ipac is, nor how it works. for all intensive purposes, it's the interface which allows him to find a book.

embedding a library ipac in social software that people actually DO care about and use, such as myspace or facebook, is something that has been done by some libraries in other countries. it is something tht we should also consider.

Library Thing Eleven

LT seems to have a really wide appeal to many librarians, but personally, I don't find LT that useful for my own reading development. All the book covers look nice and pretty and everything, but I'm just not into checking out others' bookshelves.

I prefer to hear my colleagues and friends talk about books that have really moved and inspired them, or to read blogs and author reviews, like for example, what our fellow blogger "Stuff'n'Nonsense" does very well. And what others here have done in lists on their blog sidebars.

Library Thing is just one of several flavours of book sharing social software available on the internet. Shelfari is also very popular, and really recently, as in this month, Google Books released My Library. Read this recent Wired blog post about Google Books and My Library. The cool thing about Google Books is that you can search for a book and also check out which libraries have it. I think that this will be one to look out for as it becomes more developed, especially for us in libraries.

LibraryThing and similar tools have the potential to be great reader services tools for our patrons who prefer online interaction. For example, we could open up our personal bookshelves to patrons so they can see what we, as 'expert' readers, are reading.

thing ten

i didnt have to think hard to bring you my favourite image generator.

the card catalog generator is fun. it's old skool. its application in libraries? none, really, except that it looks like a library card catalogue. The Melbourne Athenauem Library, where I used to work, still has a card catalogue in the library space. It hasn't been in use for a while, but it's a beautiful thing to look at and be reminded that once upon a time we didn't use computers...

really simple syndication

There was a time in my life when I had a huge list of bookmarked sites, and, to see when each had been updated I had to manually check each one. rss has solved that issue.

In the past I've experimented with different types of feed readers - the third party applications which need to be downloaded and installed on your pc, and also the web based ones. My personal preference is with the third party applications because they seem to deliver the content in a more streamlined and user friendly way.

The one I use, FeedReader, also delivers images with the text, something that my web based ones such as Google Reader don't do. But the downside of this is that you can only access the feeds from the computer with the software installed...which is only a downside if you are one of those people who needs their updates every minute of the day. (Yarra doesnt let you download third party aplications so don't bother trying yourself - I've already tried) .

Libraries and RSS?
Having a dynamic, rather than static, web presence is something that libraries should do if they are serious out their online patrons. RSS works for sites that change on a regular basis.

For LPD purposes, RSS feeds are pretty useful too. The only problem is deciding which of the myriad library blogs you want to read...

Library Etiquette is my favourite library blog and I have it in my feed reader. I pretend that it's professional development, but it's more entertainment.

Anonymous Lawyer is my favourite non-library blog that i subscribe to, also more entertainment than contributing to my professional development. if anything it is the opposite.

My geeky computer friend is a podcaster and this is his science blog, which is pretty much a gratutious plug to get more listeners. It's #2 in the iTunes charts, which in the blogosphere is like being in the Australian Idol Opera House Finale.

technology for chicks

my techie interest ['thing 7 required blog post] is the stuff that sparkles and has glittery dangly things hanging from it, for example, this Swarovski USB stick.

suspended from a beige silk cord, this heart pendant splits into two parts, revealing a hidden USB memory key. Made of polished stainless steel with fully faceted, asymmetrically-cut Silver Shade crystal, the two halves are held together with a pin. There's 1GB of data (which is about 250 songs or 1,000 photos) with password protection and high-speed USB 2.0 interface.

a recent saatchi and saatchi survey of british internet using females concluded that only 9% of respondents thought it was important that their gadgets look feminine. this was supported by qualitative feedback from opinion leaders and consumers who felt "patronised" and "offended" by the abundance of pink products available at the expense of the sleek and beautifully designed and packaged products they wanted to see.

as a proud member of the 9 per cent minorty I wish to reclaim all that is pink, or pearlised, or has hello kitty emblazoned across it.

flickr not fun

flickr is all well and good, until you try to merge a couple of old accounts and lock yourself out altogether. which i recently did.

so instead of extolling the virtues of flickr i am going to have a major bitch about how I emailed the 'help' desk about 3 weeks ago to ask them for assistance, and have yet to hear back from them. i'm taking bets that my email went into their 'inbox' never to be seen again.

technology is wonderful and amazing until it fails you. just like i can never rely on the spine label printer to work every time (which it never does, guaranteed) one should also not count on things in 2.0 land. especially those which are free.

how does flickr fit into our library service? in short, at present it doesn't, we don't have an active enough online patronage to warrant it.

but that doesnt mean that librarians should ignore it, however. there may be a time when it will be useful. on a personal level it's a great photosharing tool amongst friends. it's also a nice tool for librarians who like to network beyond physical boundries. as you can see in the image above, i have done my bit for team librarian and made my own librarian trading card, many of which are featured on flickr. They are all pulled together from disparate photo albums with a unified tag. i simpsonified myself using a simpsons the movie online image generator. i think it's a good likeness.

On my trading card I've quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. to read the quote you need to click on the image to enlarge it. Fitzgerald mentions sobriety and being in the library - he's clearly never been to Yarra (moot point: he's dead and american).

the seven 1/2 habits

i have just realised that the seven habits theme has been taken from steven covey's best selling self help book seven habits of highly successful people/teens/families/whatever next? it has given me inspiration.

three goals
my goal in this ten or so week exercise is to have critically analysed 2.0 in the context of our organisation.

i will also aim to stop rolling my eyes at those who have made Second Life their first. though i may not achieve this goal.

and finally, my last goal shall be to formulate the definitive seven habits of highly effective librarians. if successful, this will be my greatest achievement to date. input welcome.

one life
not sure what it means, but it sounds good.