Podcasts

I have aged considerably while waiting for podcasts to load here at work, but I can see they are great stuff if your computer has the capacity to open them quickly.
I went straight to the ABC site and what a lot of time I could waste, I mean spend, there. There are so many interesting programs that I would never watch or listen to when they are actually aired, but that I would love to access at my convenience. Actually, I've been using the BBCs site for a couple of years to listen to radio programs that never get broadcast here, that I became a fan of while spending time over there, but it never occurred to me that there was a much wider potential for podcasts.
Well, I've just listened to a library podcast, from an English public library who's name I shall not mention (OK Manchester Public Library if you must know), and I have to say that we really need to put out a professional production if we want to get any listeners. It needs to be scripted, so there's no umming & ahhing as the presenter thinks of what he's going to say next, & if there's film it needs to look better than a home movie. The competition for attention is fierce, so we really need to hone our skills to be in the game. If we can produce quality podcasts, such as the series on Early Literacy from the Pierce County Library System, & advertise what we are doing to relevant groups, this could give us a whole new area for service growth.

Answer Boards

Welcome to the future! This is where librarians can really have an impact. Slamming the boards has a range of positive outcomes for the library world in general. Not only can we show how accurate & professional we are to a sophisticated audience, we can provide a universal service to vast areas of the world who do not have the capacity to provide it for themselves. After all, there are still some places on the planet where the libraries have card catalogues (I expect that most of the participants in web2.0 have never even come across such a thing). There are many people in such places who do have internet access & would bypass their libraries as being redundant. These are more likely to be the people with the potential to drive change in their countries & anything we can do to influence their attitude to the potential of libraries should be pursued.
Anyhoo, apart from my little ideological diatribe, we can highlight our skills through answeboarding and, although we would generally not be answering our own client's enquiries, hopefully there would be a general rise in consciousness re library services which will benefit us all.
For once this stuff is not completely new to me. I've been using the Lonely Planet's Thorn tree for years, where you can put specific travel related questions. I often have the kind of queries that are not addressed in guidebooks and have almost always found answers from other travellers that I couldn't otherwise have found out. When reading the answers to questions I think people would certainly take note if the signature indicated a librarian was at work & note the quality of the response.

Tagging

This is a great way to give our customers easy access to relevant information. Whilst we need Dewey & LCSH to catalogue our comparitively large public library collections in a meaningful way, tagging provides an efficient means of getting information on topics of broad interest.
Tags for currently in demand topics can be organised in a way that the public will identify with eg; as Sutherland & Clevland have with Art, History etc. These tags lead to a variety of informative sites which will be v. useful. The only danger is that the tags get overloaded with sites so that it becomes hard to sort through them to determine what is relevant for your needs. The ability to view tags as clouds, by frequency of visits, & specifying the no. per page, makes it v. user friendly.

Librarything is a lot of fun, if only I could be bothered entering my thousand books & getting all the benefits. I tend to be too busy reading them. The big advantage is networking with others & finding directions to other titles you might be interested in. The actual information that's provided about the titles you enter isn't so useful, unless you have a bigger collection. With only 1,000 books, I pretty much know what I've got & exactly where it is (being pedantic enough to have shelved them in general Dewey order).

Video easy

I must admit, I've been delving into youtube for a while. There are all sorts of gems there, including snippets from wonderful TV programs that I thought had been lost to my dim dark past. Oddly enough, I hadn't woken up to the possibilities inherent in online videos for professional use, but it's so obvious when you think about it & the excellent examples from the US and even Sydney libraries that are already getting into this are inspirational.
Whilst there are a variety of uses we could make of online videos in promoting the library & showcasing our services, the big challenge is to get the broader public to look at the videos. Being in a poor area, with a large aged population, an important part of what we do in utilising this new technology is to promote its use. This could become part of our regular internet training for seniors (which is incredibly popular), and also be highlighted in conjunction with the promotion of other services and events.
It's vital that we reach as many of our clients as possible. This seems to me to be a greater challenge than the actual production of online videos as any number of our staff are so computer savvy that they could probably get a great clip online with their eyes closed whilst handcuffed and under water.