Week 7: Item 16

My knowledge of wikis was limited to the Wikipedia, so this exercise was very eye-opening. I love the idea of wikis for library conferences. They would really enhance the experience for conference goers, particularly when visiting an unfamiliar city. It doesn't look as though there are wikis for the Maryland Library Association or even for the Public Library Association annual conference in 2008. I hope they get one going, as I see there's talk on the PLA blog about it.

This category offers many ideas for enhancing libraries. I particularly liked Princeton Public Library's Booklover's Wiki. It was attractive and easy to navigate, and it was a nice combination of staff and customer comments. Library Success wiki is a wonderful site for best practices. I looked at the teen programming since it's especially relevant to my work.

Week 6: Item 15

This section on Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 was one of my favorites. The video by Wesch, "The Machines is Us/ing Us" was very fast-paced and jazzy. I read all the various perspectives on 2.0 and was intrigued by the changes that are here already and those that are just around the corner.

Examples of topics that particularly interested me were: the decline of our traditional print collections, my need to read "OCLC Pattern Recongnition and User Perception" which is sitting in my office, tagging and e-journals for WorldCat, people who are talking about 3.0 and 4.0 and I'm still learning 2.0 (!), the phenominal school library in Michigan with many e-books, TVs, computers, etc. and which has a budget of only $100,000, the capability of checking nearby libraries for materials yours doesn't have (Santa Monica Public Library), OCLC PICA, and the growth of OCLC from its inception, when I knew it, into a mega-database with over 64 million records representing 111 countries and territories. It's all very daunting and exciting.

Week 6: Item 14

Technorati is another useful tool for scuba divers because it's organized by format. Divers like to see videos and photos of sites, besides narrative. It really helps to get a better understanding of what a dive site is really like. Of course there's the usual extraneous and downright silly, useless stuff too. Example: A man posted his video of his cat, Hawkeye, scuba diving. That's right, a cat went scuba diving in his owner's swimming pool. The man created scuba equipment for the cat and and the cat went diving in the pool with the man for over an hour. Crazy...
There is valid and interesting information too, though. I read on Technorati that the world free diving (NO scuba equipment, just using lung capacity) championships were held last week in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, a world class dive site. The winning man has free dived to 112 meters--phenomenal.

Week 6: Item 13

I've learned about Del.icio.us and can see that it would be very useful to use it when I'm on a scuba diving trip and have access to the Internet. There's so much travel information one has to carry in paper form. It's cumbersome and annoying to carry books and printouts. If I use Del.icio.us I could reduce the weight in my suitcase and organize my travel information in a much better format. Good idea!

The explanation about tagging was very good and convincing since, I admit, I was a skeptic at first. I found a site called divesitedirectory that I hadn't seen before. It had very useful information.

Week 5: Item 12

Hah! Things are picking up! I created my own "Red Sea Diving" search engine with Rollyo. I had no idea it was so easy. What a great way to find very relevant sites and group them together. The only trouble is...now I REALLY want to go diving in the Red Sea (sigh).

Week 5: Item 11

I'm fascinated with the whole concept of Library Thing. I went through the site but did not want to sign up for it. I have yet to catalog some books. I think I'll check some participants' sites first to see what they did. More later...

Now that I've had a chance to look at Library Things on other participants' blogs, I decided to sign up and create my own list of scuba books, in keeping with my diving theme. It's great fun! Check out my (albeit short) list at www.librarything.com/catalog/m-ann.

Week 5: Item 10

With some help from a colleague, I created a specialized ticket for diving in Saba. I used ticketgenerator.com because it didn't require a user name or password.

I had looked through the online generator sites and really preferred to created a little scuba avatar. However, I'm somewhat reluctant to do so because of the need to download Java or other software and to sign up via user name and password on specific sites.