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 4 - RSS Feeds and Feed Readers

I am not sure why, but I have never been too excited over the whole "RSS Feed" phenomenon. I understand how they work. I understand how they are useful. I know a lot of people who swear by them. For myself though, I find them to be a waste of time.

I visit many different websites every day, reading up on important (and not-so-important) news and gossip. I've never found that typing in the individual web addresses (which are all very short and easy to remember) took up any more time than logging into a separate site like Bloglines to read a feed. When I view a blog or another site through a feed, I lose out on graphics and other little features that are unique to a particular site.

Where I feel RSS feeds come in handy is in the delivery of news and events about an organization that may not be a regular distributor of news (like CNN or NYT). For instance, a library website. We are not constantly putting out news stories about our organization. But when we want to annouce a particular promotion, or information about upcoming programs, we can put up a story that would immediately reach people subscribed to a feed (and who may not otherwise check the website constantly for the latest library news). In addition, having several different feeds specific to other not frequent (but important when they occur) updates, like the release of a book by an author a patron is following, or news about a particular library group, is great for keeping patrons up to date on the specific events, authors, and whatnot they rely on the library to provide.

So basically, my view on RSS feeds is this: quite useful in the library world for communicating with the public, but of varying usefulness in everyday life depending on one's needs.