Wikis

I've had some experience with Wikis before. Of course, we use Wikipedia for reference questions sometimes. It doesn't replace the Britannica for a lot of questions, but it is good for current "hot" topics and for pop culture kinds of topics. Where else can you get so much information about the television show Law and Order?

I've even made my own Wikipedia article about a great-grandfather of mine. It is weird that other people keep editing it, and I don't know who they are! I started by making a rather long article based on his autobiography. Someone edited it to be a much shorter article. Then someone else labelled it as a "stub" because it was so short! Then someone else added a picture. I had put in links to maps showing the place where he was born and the place to which his family emigrated. I was proud of those links - someone else took them out!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraabel

We also use a Wiki in the Reference Department to share all kinds of information. We've found this a *very* useful tool.

For the Learning 2.0 exercise, I added an entry about the Galapagos Islands under Favorite Vacations and a link to my blog under Favorite Blogs.

Rollyo

Maybe I'm missing something here, but this tool seems awfully primitive. All you get are a list of unclickable links without descriptions?

Library Thing

One of my many hats in the Library is that of bibliographer for the Children's Collection. Ever since we've moved to the 2nd floor, I haven't been able to spend as much time in the Children's Collection, but I still do enjoy reading children's books. In some years, I've tried to keep lists of what I've read, but it's hard to keep up with that well.

So Library Thing is great! It was so easy to type in the titles and let Library Thing pull all the rest of the information from Amazon. Then I decided to try making a widget to put in my blog, and that was pretty easy too! So now you'll see a random display of the children's books I've read in 2007 on the right hand side of my blog.

By the way, my favorite so far this year is probably Copper Sun.

RSS Feeds

The tutorials for this week's lesson are very good. I had set up Bloglines before, but I think that I really have the basics in my head now.

The tutorials also helped me realize why I haven't gotten into the habit of using my Bloglines links. They kept stressing how feeds could save you so much time because you wouldn't have to go to lots of different web page to see what new information had been posted there. But you see, I don't read blogs and web-based news anyway! So how can feeds save me time? At least now I understand why I haven't jumped on this bandwagon.

One way of using feeds that hasn't been mentioned is with library databases. For example, in the Electronic Journal Center, you can set up feeds for your favorite journals.