Week 3 Discovery Exercise

Assignment: Blog about your impressions and experiences with social networking.

Social networking not new to me. Even though I started out keeping things personal (not "friending" colleagues and such), it is now a mesh of personal and professional. This means that I have to be careful with what I post! I wouldn't even dream of posting illicit-type things anyway, but knowing my audience does make me pause before adding certain Facebook applications or saying something silly on MySpace. In the social networking world, there are not only privacy concerns, but audience concerns. I just don't put out anything about myself that I wouldn't want the whole world to see.

All social networking sites (even Ravelry!) are blocked at work, so we have never considered having a Facebook or MySpace page. At this point, I don't think it's necessary. If these sites were available to us, we might consider it.

Overall, I enjoy social networking sites. They're a fun way to connect with people, as long as you are aware that others may be watching you as well.

Week Two Discovery Exercise

Questions: What is the difference between a blog and a wiki? What sort of things might be better suited for a blog and better suited for a wiki?

Blogs are online diaries...the writer(s) report on one subject or many, and posts are viewed in reverse-chronological order. Archives are often available.

Wikis are dynamic web pages that can be easily edited. They can be ongoing (such as the Muppet Wiki) or something with a defined time frame. For example, last year I coordinated a summer reading program and used a wiki to allow everyone to post their reviews. In addition, many people posted their reviews to their blog, as it allowed their readers to see what they've been reading lately. It worked really well!

Week One Discovery Exercise

Questions: How do you think you could use RSS feeds at your library? How do you think patrons could use RSS feeds?

The topic of RSS has been briefly discussed amongst library staff. Currently, we use RSS on our home page (providing a feed for the "what's new" section) and via Onfolio to gather news feeds for the In the News section. At least a couple of the librarians use Bloglines to keep up with library stuff as well as health-related news. We are definitely up for figuring out other ways to use RSS!

I've taught some residents to use Bloglines for PubMed searches and journal TOCs. They seemed interested, but only one (out of six) came back to ask further questions as he set up his account. Keeping up with searches and TOCs will likely be what draws our patrons to using RSS in regards to medical information. I'm not sure at this point how many of our patrons are using RSS for personal stuff.

Introduction

Hello other medical librarians! This blog is used for the purposes of the MLA CE class Web 2.0 101: Introduction to Second Generation Web Tools.

I'm Cynthia and I've been a librarian for almost seven years. Wow. Seven years. :)

But enough about me...I've got a post to write to fulfill my week one assignment!