Exploration 9 - What's Next and Looking Back

"Remember how encouraging it was to see that first comment posted on your blog post?"

Sniff...I'm still waiting for mine!

Aside from the loneliness, it's been rather fun learning about the many possibilties that exist with web 2.0. Before the project, I usually just thought of web 2.0 in terms of what I was already familiar with: YouTube, MySpace/Facebook, blogs, tagging and folksonomies. Granted, all of those things were wonderful but at this point, they are old hat to me. I'm experienced with them and I've gotten to the point where I see the value, but believe that our technological limitations here in the library prevent us from using them to our full advantage.

While this project gave you the opportunity to explore those sites if you had not already, I enjoyed how the focus was on other less talked about tools of this revolution: online desktop publishing software, web-based "libraries", and social bookmarking were all things that I had heard of in passing, but never really explored in terms of thier usefulness here in the libraries. After exploring them in the name of on-the-job research, I see their value as more than just a time-waster and am seriously considering how I could use them in my day-to-day duties.

In addition, I came to appreciate other sites in a different way. Before the project, Flickr was the place (along with Picasa and Photobucket) was a site I went to to to view pictures from a friend's trip or night out. Now I see that fellow librarians and major institutions (such as the Library of Congress) are taking advantage of it as a way to reach out to others in their field, or simply use participatory culture to both aid their research as well as open up their collections to a whole new audience.

Though I haven't decided yet if I'll keep updating my blog, I do plan to continue utilizing and looking into the possibilties of web 2.0 in our library. I still believe that we need to do more to improve the technological capabilities and capacities of our system in order to support new technologies. At the same time, I now realize that there is plenty out there that we can handle with our current setup and use to the benefit of our patrons as well as each other.

Exploration 6 - Online Office Tools

I have previously fiddled around with Google Docs, so I was somewhat familiar with the advantages (and disadvantages) that come along with using online office tools. Obviously, they are great for creating and sharing basic word processing and spreadsheet documents. Friends of mine have used them for collaborating on group papers, not having too many complaints despite the limited features and other little quirks that go along with using a web-based program.

What I liked about Zoho was the ability to place one document in many different files using tags. I don't recall Google Docs having this feature, but it's one they may want to ad. I have had the problem of wanting a document to appear many different places, but having to re-save it in many different places when I edited one particular copy. I also dig how it will link up with many blogging serviecs to that a person can post to their blog from the program. Offline editing capabilities can also come in handy when you are (shock!) without internet but need to work on that web-based document you've created. The limited features aren't too noticible (except when it comes to font selection), though there seems to be a bit of a lag in response time when you click on commands. This is likely just due to the slow connection here in the libraries.

As the 2.0 blog pointed out already, web-based office tools are great for our patrons, who otherwise would be without things like Excel and PowerPoint in the library. They are also great for working on projects with people in other locations. Though there are probably a few kinks to work out (and a few features the creators may want to add), these programs are pretty solid and will likely stick around, if not dominate the office tool field in the next few years.