Week 3 - NSW Public Libraries Web 2.0

I was intrigued by this cat being in the correct position to be riding a bike when there is no bike. I think it is funny because the author looked carefully at the picture to see what it could represent. The photo was taken by Grant Clail and was downloaded from Flickr.


I thought that it was interesting to see what photos Mosman Library had on Flickr. When I entered "Mosman Library" I got there are no results... It worked OK when I removed the " ". Our library also has many author visits and at Country Music time we have well known singers doing storytime including the Wolverines riding in on their Haley Davidson bikes. We have some great photos of the author visits as well as most special events like cooking demonstrations and the time we had 200 visitors to see a lecture on the Art of the Di Vinci Code. Many of these would be great to share on a flickr account.

I was shocked to see over 10,000 pictures available when I searched for my home town Tamworth. Then as I looked through them I found that many where from Tamworth in England...great pics of castles. When I searched for Tamworth Australia there were still more than 6,000 which was very supprising. Many of the photos were related to country music but that was OK.

It was interesting to see 36,845 images on Picture Australia from Flickr.

There is a wealth of pictures on Flickr, they teach, entertain and are lots of fun.

Week 2 - NSW Public Libraries Web 2.0

The 23 things course the State Library has put in place is a great idea. I love using computers and am often responsible for working on and updating our library's website. The problem is that running a group of 14 libraries keeps the staff extremely busy. So by doing this course I hope to that by dedicating my time and effort working through a structured course will allow me to learn many areas of Web 2.0 that I don't know much about. By learning more I will be in a much better position to work out where we could use these tools in our library service. I feel even now that there will be many uses for Web 2.0 in our library but would like to work further through the course before I would make concrete decisions where to start. Blogs could be used to host an events page where regional staff could post up the events they are hosting at their own libraries without having to send these into me to post to our current website. I this way posting for promotional events would happen in a much more timely manner. Flicker could be used to host pictures once events have completed. I am sure that we would find many more uses for the web 2.0 tools as we went along. Lifelong learning is something that I believe all people should make a habit. It is a great way to keep your mind sharp and it is often fun finding out new things. Variety is the spice of life and learning new things keeps us from getting to deep in a groove.

There are many excellent blogs out in cyberspace and they are great for providing information in a neat and well structured way. Since I am in Toastmasters I have a strong interest in all things to do with speaking. This site on humour is a marvelous site which conveys lots of interesting information on the subject http://www.humorpower.com/blog/2007/10/a-toastmasters-speech-contest/. I presume that your interest in the subject of any blog will make the difference between it being valuable or interesting to you or not.