O.k so there isn't really a Week 13 but a colleague sent me some web-sites that she found while working on her Librarianship studies relevant to the course and this seemed the most logical place to put them and my thoughts on them so that I could share the sites at my workplace. Thankyou KF.
The first article I read was in regard to
Sirsidynix which to me was like trying to read a foreign language and when they started quoting API this and API that I got a bit lost until I consulted the friendly librarian available at the end of the phone, thankyou GM, I was told that it is of course Application Programming Interface, which I should have known but you know what it is like when you feel completely over your head anyway, things you should know fail you as well. This article talks about Web 3.0 as well quoting the
Croquet project that involves multi-user virtual world applications with avatars and furniture. This just about pops my head because I was struggling with 2.0! A little warning when I went into the links for
Enterprise portal Solution and
Horizon Information Portal I sort of got stuck in so much as I was not able to Back out and had to change screens etc to get out of it.
Another article I read was written by Jack M. Maness also about
Library 2.0 theory this was an interesting article speaking about all the things we looked at in the Library 2.0 course over the past 12 week. It was encouraging that I could understand this article and I thought it had some relevant thoughts on the subject. One paragraph that particularly caught my eye was the following :
"Libraries may do well to continue adopting this technology as it evolves, as it allows reference services in an online media to closely approximate the more traditional services of the physical library. The time will almost certainly soon come when Web reference is nearly indistinguishable from face-to-face reference; librarians and patrons will see and hear each other, and will share screens and files. In addition, the transcripts these sessions already provide will serve library science in ways that face-to-face reference never did. For the first time in the history of libraries, there will be a continuously collected transcription of the reference transaction, always awaiting evaluation, analysis, cataloging, and retrieval for future reference."This made me think of the "My Tutor" program that we have recently made available to our Student Public at our Library. The
My Tutor peole are taking advantage of this technology and in the future why not us in the Library itself.
The scariest thing about these two articles to me was that they were both written in 2006 which puts me at least 2 years behind in what is happening out there and that is an huge head start for this type of rapidly advancing technology.
The third article I read was a blog about
Learning 2.0 and talks of the 23 Things, which frightened me at first because I thought it meant there were 11 more weeks of learning out there to be done to really complete the Library 2.0 course. However, the 23 things basically include all the applications we have done using some different web-sites in some cases but still included flickr, del.icio.us, and Library Thing to name a few. The 23 Things were to be learnt in 9 Weeks for this course. The most interesting thing I found in this article was that Melbourne's
Yarra Plenty Library had been one of the first libraries to take this course on board. And again it was 2006 that they began. The course was offered as Daily Lessons so they obviously had time on their hands. I wish I had known about this blog when I was working through the course.