Saturday, October 10, 2009

Week 6: Things 13, 14, and 15



I can see the potential of Delicious as a research tool. My personal list of bookmarks at home is not too long, because I try to not sit around at my computer when I am not working or doing my grad school stuff. At work, my list of bookmarks has grown. After putting some websites onto Rollyo last week, I was glad I kept the bookmarks because Rollyo was so slow. Delicious adds another step for me when I find a new website that I like, but it is a good way to organize all the sites that are saved. They can be bundled into topics, so I save time by not having to look at all of them to find a particular topic. Of course, this makes sharing information easier because I don't have to be at my own computer to access my bookmarks. As a librarian and educator, I can share my bookmarks and let coworkers and students see a particular group of websites.

Library 2.0 means to me that information is now a two way communication, rather than something that the reader had transmitted to him/her through reading and comprehending a written page. As I read about Library 3.0 and 4.0,

Dr. Wendy Schultz
Infinite Futures

To a temporary place in time...

in the OCLC Newsletter blog Next Space, I started to wonder when the down time occurred for people when they let ideas take shape in their minds. Sometimes I wonder if we are teaching students how to think, or just how to access lots and lots of information. I saw at the end of the Library 4.0 entry that the benefit there was to be able to sit quietly and maybe just read something. School librarians must help ed ucators to decide how to best use technology to give students access to information but also be judicious in not allowing constant, frenetic information gathering without critical thought.


The idea of Creative Commons is one whose idea has come. This dovetails perfectly with a 2.0 society where ideas and concepts are formed collaboratively. There is such an abundance of ideas made available on the Internet that the idea that each one can be completely protected is silly.

Michael Casey made some excellent points in his chapter of the book Library 2.0 and Beyond, about how a library could use a system like Amazon's to have patrons rate books. I'm not like this, but lots of people enjoy blogging about a genre they like to read. The more methods a library can employ to get people interested in communicating with each other about its materials, the more effective that library can be.

Casey, M. (2007). Looking toward catalog 2.0. In N. Courtney (Ed.), Library 2.0 and Beyond (pp.15-23). Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

2 comments:

Cathie Ruble said...

Hi Martha,

I don't browse the web much myself. I sit infront of a computer all day at my job and just want to be away from it other times. All these tools are very cool but, aside from Google Reader, I don't see myself using them at this time. I am sure I will be able to utilize them more when I become a librarian. I also agree that we need to remember to teach kids what to do with all of the information out there.

Lesley Farmer said...

remember the "If you like Harry Potter, you'll like..." bookmarks? In addition to librarians doing this, Amazon and "my library" shells can do the same thing -- instant book buddies!