I want to congratulate Josalyn for her proposal and the (already created!) wiki about her library's 50th anniversay.  Both the proposal and the wiki itself are interesting and exciting to look at.  And obvioulsy the wiki will be very useful as your library will have a very busy time for the next few months.  I was not able to post these comments directly to your proposal page, but I hope, Josalyn, you will see them here!

 Fantastic learning experience.  Thanks to all oranizers and participants!

Keep up the course!  And let all who have completed it have lurking priveliges in the future.  :-)

Five Weeks to a Social Library:  Proposal for implementing social software tools in Sandia National Labs Technical Library 

During the Five Weeks course we explored wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, social bookmarking, social software tools such as Flickr, Myspace and Second Life.

      I am not the only person here interested in these new social library tools.  Several of my colleagues are lurking in the shadows of this course. :-)   

      One of our IT folks has created a mashup, providing photos of the book covers to illustrate our New Books List. This list, with the appropriate pictures, is dynamically generated by a query to the catalog. The user provides date range and/or subject parameters and the New Books List is created for his query. 

Oh goody, finally something that might be immediately useful for my library.

In our library (Sandia National Labs) some teams collaborate using MS SharePoint.  We have an "umbrella" site for the entire Technical Library and there are subsites for various teams, such as reference, user education (marketing), knowledge services, process improvement and the technology roundtable.  It's this last group to which I'll report my learning from this class.  Our company purchases licenses and provides tech support for users of SharePoint.  I am the site admin for 3 of those sites.  Getting everyone to use them is a problem shared with the proponents of wikis.  This type of commercial software has lots of bells and whistles that a wiki does not.  I know that in most academic and public libraries there are great advantages to choosing free and easily managed wiki software.  I am not sure whether I am going to recommend wikis for our library teams, however, since we are lucky enough to have corp funding for the purchase (and IT support) of commercial tools.  On a similar note, I probably would not recommed wikis for communicating with our library customers.  Since we have a library staff member to manage our website, we are able to change things practically on the fly.  The web admin uses Dreamweaver which is also supported corporate-wide.  The library webpage is a subsite of our corporate intranet and we have corporate server space and IT support for it.  So even though the web-pages are more complicated than maintaining a wiki, the site does not really cause us any severe pain.  Our library web page is actually visible to the public.   http://infoserve.sandia.gov/  We don't provide services to the general public, so we don't really need ways to collaborate with outsiders. Internally we can receive requests through email and via web-based forms (plus phone, fax, IM and walk-in). We have many available communication channels.  Do we need another one?  Probably not right now.   I believe that changing any of the webpages to wiki format would cause the staff more work instead of less work.  The possible exception is to change some of our extremely dense "Subject pages" into wiki-based pathfinders with RSS feeds to keep them frequently updated. *That* would save us some work and provide a much more "current" website.

I ran across the book Wikinomics and the Wikinomics website today.   http://www.wikinomics.com/

I have only begun to explore the authors' ideas but the site is certainly interesting so far.

Engineering Village recently provided for tagging of items located in a lit search.

http://rafaelsidi.blogspot.com/2007/02/folksonomy-meets-taxonomy-introducing.html

This week we participants are asked to establish an account with del.icio.us -- but the buttons for my IE browser just bounced off our firewall here at work.  So I will have to try this part of the assignment from home.  Last week I had problems watching the webcasts from inside the firewall.  I really appreciate that the administrators are posting these webcasts for us to watch after the event.  I am having trouble viewing the presentations that are in the blip.tv format as well.  Sigh.   I *was* able to set up some Google RSS feeds using the Google Reader inside my new Google portal.  So I am making some headway with this new stuff.

My workplace intranet Homepage uses portal technology which users can customize to include portlets with news feeds. Each person must customize his/her portal to include a portlet for each newsfeed that s/he wants. I set up two of them for myself: Science Now and Dialog's database Bluesheets.   I have been reading them for a few months now.  I also tried and like the feed from Science News, but it's similar to Science Now, so I do not subscribe to both of them.  I am not sure how many employees here have actually used the RSS feed portlets on their personal portals.  <