Monday, September 28, 2009

I have attended sessions for most of the program. And undertaken the required exercises, doubtless with varying degrees of success and certainly with varying degrees of interest. I have picked up some useful information along the way (importing images, learning about useful reference tools such as Library Thing etc. etc.)

I would make the following comments. A lot of the people coming into the library are students simply using it for study purposes and a lot of them are already familiar with the technology. I have never been asked about any of this on a reference desk. Similarly, there are a lot of people like myself who take what they need from technology but have no great interest in it for its own sake. There will always be a need for staff who have collection/subject based knowledge working alongside the young (and not so young) guns who are right into the technology. The very nature of this institution, with the unique collections it holds, means we will always attract users wanting staff expertise in these areas. Technology is not a substitute for lack of collection knowledge.
I've added a Google map and an image generated tag to my site.
A brief exploration of Twitter suggests there is an awful lot of rubbish on it. One would need to explore further to work out how to find any useful information. I searched under Kevin Rudd and Brendan Fevola and found a lot of opinions but not what I would call particularly useful or reliable information.

Probably a sign of my generation, but I am not interested in placing myself on Facebook - I think there are real privacy issues, not to mention concerns about relying on online social interaction rather than the real thing. Still, it seems to be the way of things for people under 35 so provided it is used responsibly, good luck to them.

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Wednesday, September 16, 2009

http://catalogue.slv.vic.gov.au/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=1782699

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Today we looked at Tagging and Library Thing. As our facilitator wisely said 'You have to spend quite a lot of time on this'. Re Tagging, I can see the benefits if one is engaged in a particular research project such as postgraduate study. And I could easily spend a lot of time in Library Thing. The problem is my core job simply does not require it and core tasks simply don't go away. All very interesting though to see how it works and the benefits to certain groups.