Wikis

A wiki is any collaborative website that can be edited by anyone. It thus becomes a central location where a community, organisation (such as a library) or group of individuals can communicate, coordinate and share ideas and activities. It can thus reduce the need to send out information etc to all concerned individuals by having the individuals all touch base at the one location. For project management it could be invaluable as it provides a venue for brain storming ideas and coordinating activities where the individuals concerned may not have the opportunity to get to gether physically.

I feel that in the library situation that wikis would be of most use as organisational staff tool. Especially where there are many branches and staff are spread geographically. It is a good way for people to put their ideas and experience into a place where everyone concerned or interested can access it. Wikis could also be used to coordinate patron group activities such a book groups, interests groups etc.

Library Thing & Delicious

I suddenly realised it is nearly next week and I still haven't written anything about Library Thing or Delicious.
Library Thing is a facility that I think that every library should make use of. It seems to be a site that any library user that likes to share the experience of the books they like to read and talk to other people that like reading would love to use and have acces to. It could also be of use in encouraging younger patrons to read or to read more broadl,y by putting them into touch with other kids with similar interests. LibraryThing could also be of use to aquisitions librarians to get an impression of the types of books people are reading and enjoying. People with large personal collections could find the site useful to keep a record of what books they have and what they have read. To be of true use to the library patrons they would have to be educated in both its existence and its use.

Delicious on the othe hand, I see to be of less use. It seems to me to be just another search engine with an online bookmark facility. If you are the sort of person that likes to share their list of liked websites then I suppose it may be of use. I don't think that there would be any significant benefit to have a link on library websites. If you have too many links available then patrons will simply get confused and not use any of them.

My Weekend

Well for once I have had a weekend to talk about. Kevin, Pat, Chris and I went to canberra for the weekend. The motivation was to see the exhibition at the national library, Handwritten. It was great! "This extraordinary exhibition features 100 unique manuscript treasures from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin State Library). Spanning more than 1000 years of history, the exhibition includes exquisite illuminated manuscripts, rare letters, sketches and documents and priceless musical scores, each handwritten by major figures in literature, religion, science, music, exploration and philosophy. Beethoven, Galileo, Goethe, Kafka, Michelangelo and Napoleon are just some of the many names represented in this exhibition." Unfortunately for you this is the last week of the exhibition.

While we were there, in Canberra, we also visited the rennaisance exhibition at the art gallery and got up at 6 o'clock (something I would never normally do) and rode my bicycle (something I rarely do) to the lawn in front of old parliment house to see the ballon festival. Quite a full weekend.

Well today we are looking at tag clouds. I think they are a great idea to make searching easier and more user friendly. They are not really very different to a list in a navigation panel on the side of a home page. Tag clouds are more visually eye catching and may make your home page appear more dynamic. However, it is important that it is not over done and kept simple. Some clouds I have seen are much too busy and this makes the items hard to find. Particularly if you are looking for one of the lesser, unemphasised tags. I find the tag cloud on the Kiama Library site, http://www.library.kiama.nsw.gov.au/ , a bit overwhelming and not easy to use. It moves as you move your mouse and scrolls the tags around so they may not be immediately visible at all. The only advantage that I can see is that it allows there to be more tags presented without an enormous clutter. In libraries, where keyword searching is a valuable tool, tag clouds could have enormous potenial in simplifying usage, especially in commonly used subject areas. The danger is to not over crowd or complicate the cloud.