I am not doing a detailed review of these sites, just commenting after a quick look and in terms of how useful they might be to school librarians who need a way of displaying or accessing their stock from their website.

Also, bear in mind that our library stock is very small at the moment – only 2700 items. Out of the three sites, only LibraryThing asked for a subscription as it has a limit of 500 items.

So, here are the results of trying these out:

LibraryThing
On the site, widgets are very customisable, which is nice. The issue I have is that if you upload old books, then LibraryThing puts in a generic cover, if it cannot find the real one. The generic cover is not very pretty! I have, however, been able to upload the catalogue complete with the keywords – which have gone in LibraryThing’s “tags” field. As I originally exported the catalogue records into Excel, I was able to add the Dewey number into the “tag” field as well. With some books, again old ones, it cannot find details, so they are not uploaded. You can do lots of activities on LibraryThing, such as add reviews, join groups and so on. I had thought of using the site for my Reading Group then realised that, as most of them are under 13, the site rules say that they cannot join. So I am using a wiki for this.

GuruLib

Recent books from My Library

powered by Gurulib

Gurulib seems to be a lot more basic than the other two, some of the books were not recognised, but uploading the file went very smoothly and more quickly than the other sites. I have not yet spent much time exploring the site.

Shelfari

An interesting thing about making the Shelfari widget is that you have the option to choose a tag – this would enable a lot of flexibility. The site did allow me to upload the entire catalogue, although I did have some problems initially with getting the upload to go on to the correct “shelf”! Again, I have the problem with the unrecognised books that ended up with weird covers – but if I had the time, I could scan in the real ones.

What do you think?

I want to make this clear, because Yin has been generous enough to make me a fellow administrator, to help her with the Ning. My role, as I see it, is to support the development of it and assist new members to the Ning, if I can.

SLNers – A Network for school librarians in the UK

Membership

The Ning is owned by its members and they set the terms of who can join. All that has been said so far is that we do not want spammers or commercial members, so Yin and I ask prospective members to tell us something about themselves before we “approve” membership.

If anyone were to ask to join who we weren’t sure about, we would then ask the existing members to decide. We are not trying to be an elitist or exclusive club, but just protecting the Ning from spammers in the main.

Activities

Ning allows us to add discussions, groups and resources to be shared with members. Again, the entire membership will decide what they want on the Ning, but the general feeling so far is that, without being boring and humourless, we want to discuss and share things that will help us learn and develop as librarians.

So far, we have shared quite a lot of helpful things, such as Web2.0 tools, books that we enjoy, links with university libraries and book trailers. Members have uploaded photos and videos.

The US TeacherLibrarian Ning is a great example to follow – let’s enjoy learning together!

I talked about the use of Twitter in the previous post on this subject, in terms of communication. But a really amazing example of collaboration happened yesterday!  Using Twitter, around 150 librarians joined together to discuss the use of Web2.0 by our professional body, CILIP. We were able to follow, to some extent, the meeting that was taking place at CILIP’s headquarters in London and discuss amongst ourselves. By using the tag #cilip2 in all of our tweets, it was then possible to follow what was going on. I used Twitterfall to track the tweets really easily. If you want another way of seeing part of the discussion then look here.

#cilip2 – Twitter Search

It felt very exciting  and groundbreaking to be able to take part – and I have found a lot of colleagues from other sectors to follow on Twitter. In fact, I am beginning to feel that my Twitter community is becoming my first “port of call” for professional development and information these days – there are so many brilliant people out there! And I am developing a Twitter addiction!

Here is a Wordle based on the #CILIP2 tweets:

From Dave & Bry on Flickr

That leads me on to the second Web2.0 tool that I want to talk about here. Some years ago, when I still ran Strongest Links (for those of you who don’t know, that was a site I ran to support UK school librarians), I heard about wikis. I thought that a wiki would be a great tool for school librarians to use to share information and ideas. So, I set up a wiki and loads of people signed up – but, very few people actually put on any content. I think that it was a bit before its time.

SLNers – A Network for school librarians in the UK

Recently, a group of us took part in an online course (mentioned in previous posts) and, as a result, one librarian, Yin Doran, set up a Ning for us. Now – that is beginning to take off! I think that she chose the right technology at the right time – key to success! We can discuss things on the Ning and add files, photos and videos. I think that it enables a greater depth of discussion than can be achieved on a large mailing list like SLN. Also, so far, it has tended to attract librarians who are trying to work at a level beyond the basic stuff. Yes, we are all at different places in our learning curves, but we are trying to lift our eyes above the daily, mundane tasks, which we all have to do, and push things forward. I have also started a discussion on the Ning called “Twitter Helpdesk” to support colleagues finding their way on to Twitter.

Please, no Dewey questions!

A colleague, Caroline Roche in “Playing in my sandbox“, posted very wisely about this very thing on her blog – yes, I think that I am probably one of the “butterflies” in that I just play around with something for a while and then my attention is caught by a new thing to try! My husband has always said that I have a butterfly mind (wouldn’t mind the wings!)

Another librarian, Meredith Farkas in “Looking beyond the technolust“, has also recently written about those of us who are advocates for technology and our attitude to people who are maybe more measured in their approach to new things and ideas:

I think sometimes we all need to try and step outside of our personal feelings about these technologies, which isn’t easy when we think they’re the best thing since sliced bread. When we are talking to others about technology, we need to realize that what we find useful may not be useful to them (and that’s ok).

So, I need to think carefully when I advocate tools that I use myself – as many of you may not love them so much – and that is your prerogative!

The list here is very much a personal one. These are the things that are working for me at the moment!

Organising

To organise my working day, and sometimes my personal stuff I find Netvibes invaluable. I used to use Outlook and Pageflakes in my last job,  but we don’t use Outlook in my new school and Pageflakes got a bit flakey(!) recently.

The Librain’s Netvibe Pages

I have already posted about my use of Netvibes before, so I won’t repeat it all! But I do wonder what I will do if it goes!

Communication

Well, I still use email a lot – apparently younger people are moving away from it now. I don’t text very much as most of my family and friends don’t. I also don’t use my mobile phone very much either – this may cause some shock amongst readers!

I like email as I have a record of the correspondence, I can take the time to think about what I want to say, although I am known for jumping in a bit too quickly with it sometimes. I still have too many accounts – Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are old ones that I rarely use these days. My main account is Gmail, which I use for personal and semi-professional stuff and I also use the school official email. None of these are Web2.0, but email still forms the basis of my daily communications.

Twitter

Twitter is becoming a really important source of news, information, professional development, support etc. My Twitter network is growing, although I try to keep the number of those I follow to a reasonable number. I also stick to people who I think will be interesting and ignore those who lock down their tweets or who don’t have a profile. It will be interesting to see if I, and others, are using it to the same extent a year from now!

I am also experimenting with Meebo. I have this on my library website and have used it to communicate with some students – I am not sure about this and will think about the issues surrounding “chat” with young students. It was used successfully by a group of school librarians during a recent online course and I hope that we try it out as a group in the future.

Of course, blogging is also a way of communicating. I write something here and, if I am lucky, I get a response from other librarian colleagues that makes me think. Blogs are a wonderful way of sharing ideas – that’s why I have so many on my Netvibes page!

This post has been long enough and I will continue with other ways I use Web2.0 tools another day. I will cover collaboration, presentation, social bookmarking, note-taking, picture/photo sites, organising books, and maybe more as I think of categories!

I am sure that I will be blogging about this extensively later on, but I just wanted to point out here the really neat way they have used Netvibes to create a website. I have been able to copy elements of this over to my own Netvibes pages so that I keep track of the development of the course.

I am really looking forward to it as they have some great speakers again!

Why not visit the site and sign up for the course when they open registration?

Anyway, back to the presentation. Again, I don’t think that I found out a lot of new stuff as I have been using both Delicious and Diigo for some time. But it did remind me of some things and introduced me to some new terms. I have favourited it on SlideShare and will return to it at a later date to think about it some more. I was interested in the RISAL project and will certainly explore that more when I have the time.

The second presentation : “The Os of Web 2.0: Openness, Originality and Others” is in PDf format and I have downloaded it and printed it out to read. I find it difficult to read long articles like this these days as they take a lot of concentration and I don’t really get the space and time for that – at school, everything is very busy; at home – well, mayhem would be a good word! Also, I am not used to it – I think that I am out of practise these days.

Anyway, I have begun a bubbl.us to show my learning network (I have used this before to create a sitemap for my Library Online site – although this needs updating).

It has been interesting to read what others are doing, although I don’t feel that I have personally found much that is totally new to me so far. What is different is the ability some people have to use new technologies in their schools, either because they are teacher-librarians or because of the ethos of their particular school. So, I have heard of wikis etc before and have tried some of the tools myself, but not had much opportunity to use them in a teaching context – apart from the wiki I used at NCTC.

My present school is a very academic one and I am not sure as yet when I will be able to start encouraging the use of Web2.0. I did try with one department and gave them a detailed list and offered help – but there was no response.

I am supposed to be getting involved in ICT development in the school, when I have got the new library up and running – so maybe I will get more chance then.

|What I have tried out today is VoiceThread – this laptop has a microphone, so I was able to add some voice comments to someone else’s presentation. I would like to make one myself, so may try this out soon. Not sure what I will do as yet.

I am having a lot of fun with the school library website. It has been started as a way of tracking the development of the Library as it is refurbished and also offering a service to the school when the current library stock is not of a standard to really meet the needs of the staff and students. It has been gratifying that so many school librarians have seen the site and have used it as an exemplar of what can be done. I also think that I can use the site to create a bit of a “wow factor” by utilising lots of Web2.0 gadgets and widgets to catch the eye.

These are being used in an educational way (honest) but also as a bit of fun. I chose a theme for the site that has a sidebar at each side of the main page. That way there is enough room to add in a range of widgets. I have moved them around a bit and tried a range of services.

So what are the main Web2.0 services that I am using? The left sidebar is mainly about the Library Online website itself:

• The top two widgets are just text that I use to explain the site and put on the latest news about the site.
• Then comes a widget with my Twitter feeds. I have to make sure that I use direct messages for personal conversations as the Twitter feeds need to look professional for the site. They are a great way of adding instant news updates to the site. I am Dixie_library on Twitter, by the way!
• The next six widgets are those generated for a WordPress blog that enable visitors to see the page structure, recent posts, recent comments, categories and tags. These help a visitor to navigate the site.
• Under this is more fun stuff. I have found that our students are fascinated to see where the visitors to our site are coming from – this is especially important as we are have International School Award. So I have put in widgets from Feedjit and Clustrmaps to show all of this.
• Below this are a range of widgets. The Educator’s Calendar from Widgetbox is used as I wanted to show events from around the world. I am not entirely satisfied that this is the best source as yet. Then a weather widget (also from Widgetbox) for our nearest town – Hinckley – shows how cold it is today! A badge for the TeacherLibrarian network and administrative tasks finishes this sidebar.

The right sidebar is more about the Library itself and also the public library etc.:

• First of all a text widget which will show current activities such as the recent National Year of Reading and currently the Times Books for Schools.
• Secondly, a widget that shows the photographs of our Library that I have uploaded to Flickr. I have done this so that I can show the development of the Library from this baseline year going forward into the future.
• Below this is another text widget with quick facts about the Library.
• Then I have put in a box with a link to a Meebo account. This may be a bit risky, but I have been reading about libraries who are using Instant Messaging with their customers and I am trying it out. I may find that another service will give me more control as I am a little concerned about misuse. What do you think?
• In the absence of an online catalogue, I am using LibraryThing to show the books that we have at present – the only issue I have is updating this as I think that I need to delete all records on it and re-import them regularly as we are buying a lot of new stock and withdrawing a huge amount at present. Anyway, this is shown in the sidebar.
• There are then some other reading-based widgets with favourite authors, a link to reading development websites tagged on Diigo, and a book review finder – which is a Google custom search engine.
• I have also highlighted our local public libraries in Leicestershire and Warwickshire (where most of our students and staff live) with links to their online catalogues and to the online subsciption services that they offer. Our local branch is also advertised here to encourage use by our school.
• Following this are three more widgets – firstly showing our Delicious tags: I have built these up over a long time and am in the process of adding new ones to support our staff and students. I use Delicious now for our curriculum and Diigo for professional links. Next is a link to SlideShare, where I upload any presentations that I think would be of interest. Last of all a link to Wordle, which I find fascinating – I keep trying to get teachers to use this – but no luck at the moment!

So, this has been a very long post, but I wanted to explain what I am trying to achieve at the front end of the site. Ideas for development are very welcome – please let me know if you have found better alternatives!

If I decide that this is the way to go, then I will spend more time on it:

The site is at: http://library-online.org.uk/

I have chosen a hosted WordPress site and used a theme that I like a lot. The theme colour goes well with the school logo and colours. Also I can add widgets with lots of lovely Web2.0 stuff.

The idea is to have something that looks professional, can take links and resources to help students and staff and can be editing very quickly and easily from any computer.

I also want a bit of a Wow Factor!

Does this work?