Overall though, I had very few problems with the Web 2.0 Adventure and really enjoyed exploring the new technologies over the past 6 weeks.

The interaction with our groups made the experience even richer. It was great to read what others thought about the same new things that we were learning. I would often read a fellow group members’ blog, and think ‘Hey, I didn’t know I could do that!’ and would go back and try to find out how to do certain things that I hadn’t discovered about the same tool. It was also nice to read when others in the group had similar problems (e.g. not having friends on Twitter yet or struggling to find a Wikipedia entry that they felt confident enough to edit) and also to get advice and opinions from the other members, for instance a reassurance that the applications in Facebook only want to access your information to make them work (although it still hasn’t convinced me to go down the Facebook applications road again!). I think that communicating via comments on blog posts worked really well. It allowed us to look at, think about, and communicate about each others’ blog posts in our own time.

One interesting experience I had during the Web 2.0 Adventure, was when Fergus from CiteULike commented on my Week 4:CiteULike blog post. It made me realise that although I was only doing my blog for the course, that other people out there do occasionally take the time to read my blog posts. However, if I had of followed the instructions in Week 1 of the Web 2.0 Adventure properly, I would have set the privacy settings so that my blog wasn’t visible to everyone, including search engines!

Around this time I realised how much I enjoy reading the blogs of other library professionals, and decided that I will endeavour to maintain my blog even after the Web 2.0 Adventure finishes. Admittedly, without the necessity in blogging for assessment reasons, I’m not sure how disciplined I will be in posting new information! We’ll see.

I found all of the new technologies that we explored very interesting. Admittedly I had already come across some in my personal life (mainly Facebook and YouTube), as well as through the 23Things task that we completed through work last year, but a lot of the technologies were new to me. Some seemed to echo in life after I’d started using them. Within weeks of blogging about Delicious I started noticing people mentioning it, and after learning about Twitter, I saw mentions of it in a variety of news articles. It was reassuring that I now knew 1) what these people and new articles were talking about; and 2) how to use these new technologies!

I think that it is all very relevant to my future career as an information professional. These web technologies are being used more and more, and it’s important that as information professionals we know about them and how to use them. For instance, some public libraries have Facebook pages, some institutional repositories use Twitter, Delicious is brilliant for bookmarking when you may be in a job requiring hot-desking, RSS feeds can be used to keep you up-to-date with trends in the industry, Google Maps are very useful for work related website creation, and knowing how Wikipedia entries are created and edited can be important for explaining to library patrons why Wikipedia is not the infinite truth!

I worked in 2 healthcare libraries in central London from 2007 to 2008. One was free for anyone to use. The other was for members of a nursing organisation. Both libraries had quite specific collections: one was nursing and one was healthcare policy and management. Although both libraries had extensive information on their specialist areas, often people would have queries where we would need to refer them to another library, for instance people would come in to the healthcare policy library looking for information on cancer care, but it was outside of the collection scope so we would need to know where to direct them. Sometimes we would direct them to another health library, or sometimes to an organisation that specialises in the area that they were interested in.

What would have been incredibly helpful would have been a mashup of healthcare libraries in London. That way, we could open a webpage, search by topic or location and find appropriate libraries to refer people to, opening hours, maps and a brief overview (just a sentence or two) on the types of information available and who can use the library.

My ideal mashup for this would be quite similar to the way that Mcity is created. It would start with a main page with search functions. At mcity, the search options are: places/events, but for a healthcare library mashup the search options could be: topic/location/library name. And it would be useful to embed a Google map of tagged healthcare libraries in central London on the main page.

As with Mcity, the search results could show in a list, with Google maps available for each and a link to a page for that particular library.

The library page would ideally have: address, phone number, opening hours, Google map, a link to the library website and also a very short sentence or two about who can use the library and the scope of the collection.

I would also like to see options similar to Mcity kept on these pages: for instance, Mcity has ‘Review this’, ‘Add to Favs’, ‘Wishlist’ and ‘Add photo’ options. Similar options would be very handy for people to make comments on particular libraries. For instance, what they found there, what the staff were like, etc. ‘Add to Favs’ would be very handy for library staff to open a list of libraries that they often have to refer people to.

I really like the Blogs section on each venue page in Mcity, so that people can link to blogs that they’ve written. This could also be useful for libraries.

Additional features that I think would made the mashup even more helpful for users would be an  ‘Other libraries nearby’  list, and also a London transport  Tube Service updates box embedded, and possibly even a Journey Planner, so that people can figure out how to get to the libraries.

I would hope that all of the above would be possible in a mashup, as it would be a very handy resource for information management professions working in health libraries in London, and would also potentially be extremely useful for healthcare professionals in London trying to find resources.

Having just returned from an Easter weekend with family in Sydney, I was excited at the prospect of creating a Google Map for where we spent Easter Sunday: the Hunter Valley. Creating the initial map was very easy. I already have a Google account and was logged in to that, so as soon as I opened Google Maps it knew who I was. I did a quick search for The Vintage golf course, where we stayed in the Hunter Valley, added it to a new map called ‘The Vintage, Hunter Valley’, and voila, my map was created. Where it got tricky, however, was when I decided to play with the added features of Google Maps. I wanted to draw a line. Unsure of how exactly the line was being drawn, I moved my cursor all around and ended up with a squiggly line on my map. Removing the line  proved challenging as I could not find ‘Delete line’ options or anything similar, and Help wasn’t particularly helpful. A Google search resulted in discovering suggestions on how to remove lines from Google Maps, alas when I followed the instructions (including right clicking on the line), I still could not remove the squiggly lines. As such, I decided to start over and create a map to the winery, Ernest Hill Wines. So I deleted The Vintage map and created an Ernest Hill one. For some reason my squiggly line still remained, even though I’d created a new map of a different place in the Hunter Valley. After spending way too much time agonising over how to remove the line, I have left it there temporarily, and would welcome any suggestions on how I can remove the squiggly line from my map!

Adding a Flickr image and description to the tag for the winery was straight forward, and I figured out how to reduce the size of the image fairly quickly. What I struggled with was amending the map to open at the zoom that I wanted it to open at. I tried using the Link button and ‘Customise and preview embedded map’ but the changes I made did not seem to be sticking when I’d later go back to open the map. I will have another play with it on a less technologically challenging day. Here is my Google Map for Ernest Hill Wines:

And for anyone who’s interested, here are some photos that I took while at Ernest Hill Winery in the the beautiful Hunter Valley:

Wine tasting and cellar door building at Ernest Hill Wines

Vineyard at Ernest Hill Wines

Once my postcode was recognised by Yahoo, it was very easy to join Flickr. There were prompts from the moment I joined to help me to upload my first batch of photographs. I chose 4 photographs to post on Flickr, and they took a surprisingly long time to upload (but that is most likely due to my slow-ish internet speed!). Once loaded, the layout was very simple for adding titles to photographs, typing descriptions and assigning tags. It was also very straight forward to change the copyright of the images to a Creative Commons license.

I played around with the features, including the Slideshow option, and the Share This option which allows either for the sending the stream to an email address or copying the link. I searched for and joined the group ‘Lorne, Victoria, Australia‘ and added my photographs to the Group Pool, all of which was incredibly easy to do. I also had a quick look at the Explore/Interestingness/Last 7 Days to see some interesting images from the last 7 days, and then stumbled across this great group ‘Library Cards‘.

Here’s one of the pics that I added:

One instance of Flickr from a somewhat industry related point of view was an experience I had when I left London. I’d been working at the King’s Fund Library in London, helping in the preparation for the relocation of the library to another part of the building.  Unfortunately I had to return to Australia earlier than anticipated, and thus leave my position just weeks before the library was relocated to the new space. Knowing that it would be a long time before I’d be able to see the brand new library, my ex-colleagues took photographs of the new library and added them to Flickr so that I could see the new ‘information centre’ from Australia!

As I work with an institutional repository as part of my job, my colleagues and I try to keep abreast of the latest innovations in repositories around the world through a variety of means, including subscribing to listservs. One listserv that I receive regular mails through is JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee). Last week the hot topic was whether university respositories are using Twitter to increase the visibility of their repositories. And some are! Minho University is using Twitter to let people know about new deposits into the repository as the Twitterer repositorium and EPrints have set up an automatic tweet every time a new record is added to alert people of new articles. In addition, the SWORD project has a twitter which is more humanised and chatty, and EPrints have created wiki instructions on how to add a Twitter to eprints.

These are great examples of how Twitter is being used in a professional context and I think we will be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing in the very near future.

In the meantime, I had a look at some photographs of interest on Flickr, including the image below of the Kings Library, which is located in the centre of the British Library. King George III’s collection is housed over 4 storeys with a glass wall surrounding it, so that it appears as four huge walls of books!

Flickr photograph by sashfatcat of the King's Library, located in the British Library.

I ideally wanted to include a photo of the gorgeous London Library, an old and unique lending library situated in St. James’ Square, London, but finding a decent photograph of this on Flickr that also had a Creative Commons license was challenging.

As soon as Yahoo will let me have an account, I’ll rejoin Flickr and get some of my photographs on it.

Joining CiteULike was easy, with prompts to assist me in getting my CiteULike account up and running. It included instructions for installing the CiteULike button into the toolbar of the browsers Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.

On its home page, CiteULike says that it is a free service with features that include being able to store your references, share references with others, and even store your PDFs. It has additional functionality to search all of the public entries posted on the site and to browse journals (for example, while doing a simple search I came across an entry for ‘The role of reference librarians in institutional repositories‘ by W. Charles Jr, published in the Reference Services Review in 2005, that I have now added to my CiteULike page with an ‘I will read it’ priority).

Features that I like about CiteULike include the presentation of the ‘My library’ page. I like that the title are in blue, with the rest of the citation details clearly beneath. It makes it much easier to view all of my records than in the main page of an EndNote library, where there is often brief information, cut short due to the narrow size of of the data columns. The priority option of CiteULike is also very handy for keeping track of articles I will read, articles I might want to read, etc. I also like that when I click on one of my records in CiteULike, the next screen gives me the option to change the Citation Format (e.g. to Harvard), as well as links to the article or abstract, options to change my tags, and the ability to export my references into a reference manager such as EndNote.

Once exported using the RIS button, the data seems to import into EndNote really well.

Some areas of CiteULike which I don’t really like include the fact that when I type my tags, if I put a space between the words they show up as 2 separate tags. For instance, in order for institutional repositories to show as one tag, I had to type it as instutitionalrepositories (with no space). It is also frustrating when I click on my toolbar option ‘Post to CiteULike’ and the data doesn’t transfer across: I have to copy and paste it in. I had to do this with some articles from Academic One, whereas the Springer and IEEE records imported automatically. It’s a pity that they don’t all import directly, but hopefully down the track that might happen.

In terms of the documents it is designed for, it seems to handle journal articles and conference papers no problem, however I have yet to play around with book chapters and websites. In the FAQ is does mention that although you can include websites in your library, it is actually designed specifically for academic papers and suggests using Delicious to keep track of websites.

I think that in terms of  research, that I will use CiteULike for the research collection process, and then export the references to EndNote when writing up my research. I think CiteULike is a very useful social bookmarking tool.

Joining Diigo was very straight forward. It was also very easy to add Diigo to the browser toolbar, and supports the application of the broswer toolbar to Firefox, Internet Explorer and others. Adding the Diigo toolbar was also very easy, and the help section was actually helpful, so I was easily able to figure out how to highlight text and add comments to webpages. I was also able to import my Delicious bookmarks straight in to Diigo.

I’m not sure I’m much of a fan of the layout of Diigo though. The idea of the side toolbar is helpful, however I think I prefer the layout of the tag list in Delicious. Being able to search on the tags is handy, and it also appears to search on the bookmark title… however I think I would be more enclined to use this feature if it would also search for text in the bookmarked website… or is that asking too much?

Being able to search for communities based on a tag is quite fun and a great way of learning about new websites that might be of interest. The ‘related tags’ suggestions are also very helpful.

Unfortunately I don’t have any friends using Diigo, however according to Diigo, if I did have friends using it we would be able to exchange bookmarks, view what our friends are bookmarking, and even send messages to each other.

Diigo is definitely better than browser bookmarks/favourites, in that you can annotate your bookmarks, classify them, search them , view them from any computer and share them. I think that I will explore Diigo more over time as I do really like the highlighting and sticky notes functions, but for now will continue using Delicious.