Library 2.0-Why Our Customers Still Need Us (Week 6: #15)

Dr. Wendy Schultz's article called "To a Temporary Place in Time" was very good. I think her statement about tour guides is important to remember. It may seem that librarians are no longer needed but that may be more media hype than fact. It appears that many teens, twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings know about some online tools and services. Usually, they know a enough to get whatever they want done. Those wonderful blogs, websites, podcasts we see online are created by a small number of people who really understand a certain tool, have an idea and combine both. There are millions in this country and billions of people in this world. Compare those numbers to the number of Second Life users or Facebook users and you will see that most people are barely involved. That will change-especially if someone takes the time to inform people about what's available and what meets their needs. The library offer information services like some companies offer their products. Instead of giving the same book or website to answer a certain question, we should help customers to tailor the information to their needs..



Think about an ordinary reference interview, a customer in the seventh grade asks for a book or a website about energy. It's an assignment several of the schools in the area give every year. You give the customer the same book or website that you have given twenty other customers in the seventh grade that day. What's wrong with that? Nothing-except why is the same book or website appropriate for all twenty customers? Among those twenty, one may be visually-impaired, another may read on the level of a third grader, and one may attend a magnet school for engineering. The format of the information needs to be adapted to the specific needs of the customer. What if you could suggest a library database or website that had an avatar that was interactive. The avatar could ask the customer the type of format they would like-audio or visual. The customer could specify how loud the audio is and whether a female or male voice is used. The customer could also change the text color, size and font without messing with toolbars or having to use the Accessibilty Options in Windows. What if the customer could tell the avatar that the information is hard to understand and click on every word they want defined. A small pop-up would appear above the word with a simple definition or synonym. Tagging, embedded video, podcasts and visual search engines would help those would want more information. Many of these things exist as separate tools now. But what if one day, when you guide a customer to information that all of those tools are automatically a part of the package. That would really be something to see!

Technorati (Week6:#14)

Technorati Tools are interesting. There are apps for browser buttons, widgets that get your link count, authority and other things. These tools would not be used by someone who is not a "committed" blogger. It's not worth the time if you're just dabbling in blogging. There are interesting blogs under WTF and Popular. Don't expect everything to be like "Boing Boing". Some blogs are people discussing random topics and sometimes just ranting. Whether the information is correct (or coherent) isn't the point here but how many people surfing the next like your site.

If you search for something on Technorati, remember that you will get different links for tags, blogs and posts. I did a search on "Learnig 2.0" First blogs listed have a higher authority than tags or posts.

If you want your blog to appear on Technorati, you need to claim it like I did (http://technorati.com/blogs/storyworldborder.blogspot.com). I also created used FeedBurner to tag my blog (http://feeds.feedburner.com/StoryWorldBorder).

Tagging and Del.icio.us (Week 6: #13)

I watched the Otter Group Del.icio.us tutorial. It was okay but a little long. It covered the basics about Del.icio.us and some ways it can be useful. I thought "Several habits of highly successful Del.icio.us users" was useful except for Habit Three: Use the inbox. I could not find the inbox on Del.icio.us. All I can say about "Us.ef.ul - a beginner's guide to Del.icio.us" is that small print made me want to hit "Delete".

I have my own Deli.icio.us account. Importing your bookmarks is easy. FYI-you may get vague tags this way (i.e imported or personal favorites). No problem! You can rename tags without editing each bookmark or even better-delete the tag from your bookmarks and keep the bookmarks.

I like that you can access other people's items that are tagged the same. You can quickly find other interesting sites this way. Some of the sites might not be exactly what you want but you may finding something interesting that you didn't know before.

Here is the link to my subscription on Fair Trade.

http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/fairtrade