Week 24 - the dark side of the web

I have often been the target of a phishing scam. Generally it has taken the form of an email asking me to click a link and enter my bank details to help the bank and to make sure that my internet access did not get blocked. Some of these have been sent to me and are for a different bank to the bank I deal with so I realise that it was a scam straight away. I have read that banks will never send me an email to confirm my details so I am very suspicious when I see one of these types of email and I delete it straight away.

I think with a fair bit more thought there could be some great uses for Mashups in libraries. I would like to have more time to investigate this area.

This course has been interesting and helpful to allow me to keep up with new interactive technologies that are used on the web.

Week 23 Mashup revisited

Mashups are a novel way to display information, maps and photos. It is a great interactive way to work with data.
Interestingness flickr mashu seemed a novel way to show many interesting photos at once.

View this Mashup of a range of government data and google satellite map of Tamworth. When I entered Tamworth’s postcode I received many interesting statistics including the number of full time , part time employed and unemployed. Check out this link for yourself and if you want to try it for your area click here and enter your postcode.

Week 22 Instant communication

My family uses Skype from home to stay in contact with each other and friends especially our English friends. It is great to make video calls so that we could see each other and talk. It is a cheap way to stay in touch. My daughters don’t have landlines at their flats so Skype is a great & cheap option. Occasionally skype did freeze or cutout when talking to my daughter when she was visiting India. We were generally able to reconnect though. My daughters are often talking to school friends on Skype. We have also used the Chat features in Facebook to stay in contact with relatives who have moved permanently to Hong Kong. We found out about a very bad accident involving a friend at Walcha from our relatives in Hong Kong within an hour of it happening.

In our library we use Spydus which has an IM client inbuilt. This would allow HQ and branch staff to stay in contact at all times. It would be difficult to check for messages at busy times though. It would also be great to be able to take information request via Instant Messaging as many people are looking for information remotely and need answers fast.

Week 21 – Google Docs

One of the best ideas I saw came from 12 things you didn't know Google Docs could do - tip no. 5 Backups. My desktop computer at home crashed because the hard drive has died. I guess I could have uploaded my key files as an off site backup. This would have been very handy so long as my internet speed was quick enough so the task could be done quickly.

It was good to be able to create a form with google docs. I was able to create a helpdesk form for any computer problems. This could a form that any of our branches could submit a problem from. It is very nifty to see that once I submitted a completed from the results were logged into a spreadsheet. This could be a great way to track our local support calls. Not sure if you would give only Systems staff access to the spreadsheet or all clients. I think only systems staff but I am sure we could share the helpdesk spreadsheet out if we wanted.

I believe there would be many other ways that our library could use google docs. One example might be to setup a feedback form for our clients. This would allow us to fine tune the service to our clients needs.

Yes as many people say, "Google docs rocks".

Week 20 – Events Management

Doodle was a delight to use. Both a simple and efficient way to Poll people for all types of meetings, events or even just for making choices. As there was no need to login I was wondering for a while how to administer my poll but that quickly became clear. Brilliant and useful tool.
Google Calendar looks like a very clever tool. It could be used to host a calendar of events held by any of our libraries so that the public could link to it and see what’s on at a glance. It could even be updated by the branch librarians when they wanted to promote one of their events.
EventBrite looks like a useful tool as it will let an account be created and is free to manage an event where the tickets are free. It looks useful if you want to pay to have the extra abilities like accepting credit card payments & tracking statistics and being able to create list to contact those who have signed up for your event.

Week 19 RSS Feeds & Filtering

FilterMyRSS did not work with the link provided but did work with this address http://www.filtermyrss.com which then forwarded to another address. I was not sure what format to enter my filtering words and so hit the FAQ link which also gave me an error. When I entered some filtering terms with a , in between them and a – to exclude a term it only partly link worked ie it returned a page which was not showing correctly.

Feedsifter let me create a filter for one of my RSS feeds but did not let me subscribe to it. When I went to click on the subscribe link it gave me an error.

The feedmyinbox tool was a delight to use as it was simple and it worked wonderfully.

I feel the there would be use for filtering RSS feeds on occasions but not always.

Week 18 Slideshows, Screencasting & digital storytelling

Slideshare looks as if it could be a useful site to host a presentation which could be a great way to tell our clients about what they can access at our libraries. I like google docs because I think there could be stacks of applications for it's use. I am in a Systems team and we could use a Spreadsheet to log helpdesk requests and to update staff on the progress of their requests. I also think that we could create a template of a calendar so that regional staff could input any activities that they want to promote and have a like or have staff update the calendar as needed on our site.

The Slideshare show of the British Library's resouces available to researchers is a good example of a way to promote our library's services in a more interesting way. I really liked the way it highlighted the smorgasbord of tools that can be used.

The screencasting tools look very neat. I think that they are something we could use at our library. I will try to upload a powerpoint presentation promoting our library soon.

Cnrl website tips1

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