LIBR 246-13 Building the Social Library Online

Although I embrace learning new things and enjoy new experiences, I was definitely out of my comfort zone in the beginning of this class. At first I was very uncomfortable with using Drupal. The good old blackboard seemed so right, so comfy and so familiar. But now I see Drupal as different and even better way to engage with the instructor and other students especially since our focus is social networking. Now, having to go back to blackboard just seems wrong. One of the biggest benefits of Drupal was the RSS feeds.

Trying to sell social networking tools to some colleagues is like pulling teeth. Sometimes it may be painful but in the end they’ll be glad they did it. I’ve been playing with lots of different types of social networking tools for several years (especially in this class). Sometimes I’m not too impressed and can’t see how it will be useful down the road but I like to be familiar with it for that “lightbulb” moment in the middle of the night.

Short and Sweet – that’s how I would describe the screencast I created. Needless to say this experience reminds me of why I did not go into the teaching field. I’m not great at teaching. But I’m glad to have used screencast in this class. I very much doubt I would have tried it otherwise.

What I learned: Aside from recording an interview for another class, I had not used any of the recording equipment or created mp3 files. I didn’t think that there was much to creating a podcast. Well after putting a lot of thought to what I wanted to create and having to face putting my voice “out there”, I was able to really come away with something that I plan to use this summer. I had the idea of creating book talks for our teen website and highlighting either book club selections or specials displays.

I took Libr285 last semester and we spent a lot of time on Second Life. At first I thought, “is that all there is?” because I was not particularly interested in meeting up with people in this virtual world but after spending lots of time there, I realized that there is something for everyone.

I chose to ask “What is the Gross Domestic Product per capita of Bahrain?”

I already have accounts both Facebook and Myspace. I chose to do my exercise in Facebook because even though I already had an account, I had not done much with it. I used the browse network feature for the first time and can see how this could be very useful especially in a educational setting. I chose to add the IREAD application to my profile and found it very simple and straight-forward. I was surprised to find that there are other applications for facebook  like librarything that provide a similar service.  It seemed like there was a duplication of efforts there...

I don’t know what I’ll do when I graduate. It is a great feeling to be studying things (such as social networking) that are happening now and that very relevant to librarians. Just today I read an article on the Yalsa journal about a place they had specifically for library students.  I assumed it would be another listserv and I decided to join.

Delicious has definitely made my life easier. In my previous position, I worked in almost every aspect of the library from reference to children’s to circulation. It was very frustrating to be caught at the circ desk with a reference question when all my best resources were at another desk. Then I discovered delicious. This not only allowed me to access my bookmarks from any computer but now I could share these resources with my co-workers.

I decided to go with Yahoo Pipes (thanks to Melissa). After watching the video, Pipes seemed pretty straight-forward until I started to deviate from the formula it had used in the example. It was fun trying to figure out what would work and what didn’t but I wished they would have provided more examples in the video about the other modules and what they can do for you. I looked at some samples and tried to make sense of it all but it took me longer than I first anticipated.