Facebook and Libraries

Facebook can be a useful tool for libraries because:

• It is in the space where the users are and therefore likely to get noticed;
• Images, videos, blogs, postings and many more things can be uploaded to push information to "fans";
• Libraries are a central location for socialising and collaborating on group assignments. Why not use social networking to connect to other users and peers (and to librarians).

There needs to be set guidelines on what is posted on Facebook. If there are too many postings and members are getting lots of news feeds, it can be quite annoying. There is always a blog for more detailed information. Facebook postings should only contain highlights of things happening in the library, like significant changes. The point is not to overdo it with too much information.

Now ticking off Things 13 and 14.

Thing 12 - Images

OK. So I was a bit lazy to grab a camera and go and take some pictures. I had a look on my PC and found this image of me giving a presentation. A bit of an "action" photo.

I had difficulty getting the Images link to open in Explorer to upload this image, but it worked fine in Firefox.

I had a Yahoo account as this is where I created my Avatar. So I loaded some library / work related photos on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/library2009/. I added some contacts to view the photos and I joined a group called Libraries and Librarians with over 31,000 members. I added my library / work related photos to this.

I also have a Picasa account (the Google equivalent) to which I have uploaded photos from flamenco shows. I do like Picasa as you can embed the photos into a website (see previous post on flamenco dancing).

Thing 11 - Social book-marking and delicious!

I already had a Del.ici.ous account and had imported my bookmarks from Internet Explorer as well as adding more to it. I like the tag cloud as I can see which tags are the most popular in my collection of bookmarks. I haven't added any bookmarks since last year, so I need to update this. I also like to see how many other people have bookmarked the same site to see how popular it is.

Thing 10 - Social Tagging and Search

Del.ici.ous
The phrase I searched was Flamenco Dancing. Del.ici.ous found 117 results. What I like is that you can filter your search by tag (eg. Spain) and it also displays other phrases you can limit your search by, such as history of flamenco dancing, flamenco dancing video, flamenco dancing pictures, Spanish flamenco dancing and flamenco dancing lessons.

Anyway, as I noticed not all the sites I am checking out are general, some are specialised, I chose another term to search across them - mental illness.

Del.ici.ous retrieved 5,934 results with limiters like types of mental illness, mental illness symptoms and mental illness statistics.

Connotea
The searching part was quite slow. Then it came up with an error message as there are technical difficulties. Perhaps I will try again later.

CiteULike
This is great. The search retrieved more than 800 articles. There is also an RSS feed to keep up to date with the latest information on your topic. It lists groups interested in your topic.

I would like to have been able to arrange the articles by date, I didn't see such a feature, although at least you can keep up to date with the RSS feed. I like that you can choose a citation style (eg. APA) and it gives you the reference (although not always acurate if bits of information are missing from the record). People can write reviews of articles, which is great. Users have rated the articles on a star system and you can export references in the style you need. I haven't registered, but could this be useful for undergraduate students?

ACU Library Catalogue
I get 1, 062 results. I like that the results are ordered from the latest publication. I also like the cover image and Google information about the book.

Google
9, 700, 000 results? Who looks passed the first or maybe the second page of results? I prefer to search some of the other sites that filter information for quality, or that have been chosen by people for the integrity of the article / information.

Zuula
Try sifting through this lot! The results from Google alone was practically double, 17,700,000. Yahoo was worse with 42,400,000. I don't think I would bother going to the other search engines. At least these search engines give you the choice of narrowing your search by doing a related search on things like types of mental illness or mental illness symptoms.

KartOO
I like this one! I like the concept style map option displaying the results. Hover the mouse over and you get some information from the website to see if you want to look futher. It has updated information in the bubble from the site and there is also a section on the left with the latest news. I don't know the number of results retrieved, and it is UK oriented, but great! The thumbnails are useful too.

Other useful sites
I won't go into these in detail, you can explore for yourself, but they are also useful sites for quality information:

• Intute: Gateway to subject catalogues with links to high quality Internet sites, selected and described by specialists from within British academia. www.intute.ac.uk/
• Infomine: INFOMINE is a comprehensive virtual library and reference tool for academic and scholarly Internet resources, including Web sites, databases, ... infomine.ucr.edu/

Booktagger

I find Booktagger frustrating. Any book I entered in the search just wasn't there. Also it was really slow. The Facebook application is also not as good as Social Bookshelf. I think I will give Booktagger a miss for now and stick to using Library Thing.

Library Thing

Hi again,

I have been a lifetime member of Library Thing for several years now and have added all of my personal collection there. If you want to see it, i have added a widget to this blog.

Library Thing is useful to the ultra organised, and for booklovers looking to see who else has read your favourite book and what other similar books exists that could be of interest.

One way this could be used is for a teaching staff member to make an account and share with students, via a funky widget, what books would be useful to the unit - students can add their reviews! It's another way to get invovled in web 2.0.