CPL 2.0 RSS

I had no trouble signing up ith Bloglines. and no trouble adding feeds to it. It is going to be a very convenient way for me to keep track of the different blogs I like to follow. I subscribe via email to a number of genealogy blogs and I like that way of keeping track of them, but not all of the blogs I like have that option. Bloglines is going to allow me to keep track of all of those blogs and I will be able to check them from any computer I use. The inability to have my RSS feeds available at all the computers I use was what was keeping me from checking on my favourite blogs. Bloglines is going to be a great tool.

Google Universe

I used the Google books product. I have used this in the past to find titles for research for customers and in my genealogical research. I really like this application. Google books includes full text of some titles but it also includes citations for items that are not full text. It also has a link to find the title in a library and includes reviews, when they can be found.

Google books is very useful for finding references to obscure and unindexed information in books. Given that we answer some fairly obscure questions at the reference desk, I would most definitely recommend this to my colleagues.

The discovery of the Google books app has led some of our more intrepid customers to request titles not available in full-text through our interlibrary loan service.

The only thing I wish was different about Google books was that more of the titles were full text, but that opens up a whole new can of worms, so to speak.

CPL 2.0 Social Networking

I like Facebook. My sister lives in another province so I can keep up with her family, see pictures, and even chat with her if we both are online at the same time. I also use Facebook to record what I am reading and I find that I occasionally use it while I am at work when I do Readers' Advisory. It's a way of keeping track of the books I read (and also the books that my friends are reading) that is immediately accessible.

I can see the disadvantages of social networking as well. There are tons of ways to waste time on Facebook. Because your friends often share your interests you can find quizzes, websites, all kinds of things to distract you. For me, however, Facebook is a useful tool.

CPL 2.0 Wikis

The "corrections" I added were citations to two facts in the article about the Calgary Public Library. It was relatively easy to do but I didn't want to monkey too much with the page so the facts I cited are still showing [citation needed]. I understand from reading the editing help that these things are checked and we shouldn't worry too much about formatting. Most of the errors I found (and I didn't find many) were the same, lack of citations and some grammar/spelling changes. There weren't a lot of those though.

I didn't find too much stuff that needed edits but I certainly have found some very erroneous information in the past. Because I am a researcher, I know that an uncited fact is not a fact at all. What I do like to use Wikipedia for is for the citations. If an article contains references to books I will often consult those titles to double check the facts or to look for further information.

CPL 2.0 Delicious

There are great advantages to saving bookmarks online in a public space rather than on a private server. People who use Delicious will be exposed to our bookmarks and may become curious about other things the library offers. Delicious also offers us the ability to put many tags on a single entry.

The only drawback is that the vocabulary used to tag entries is not controlled - we need to make sure that we are consistent in our use of tags so that all sites related to a topic will file together. A personal user of Delicious may not care if everything comes up at once when they search "Genealogy" for example, but the way we use bookmarks requires that we be able to access all of our sites under one fairly specific term - as well as being able to search more broadly.