I came,I saw, I uploaded

Week 6: Videos online
We are being propelled inexorably into a visual information age.We are already there ,I hear you say.
We are at the end of the beginning!In spite of the great advances in the latter half of the 20th century from UNIVAC to Ipod ,I believe computer technology is still an infant or maybe just into kindergarten.The advances in the last twenty years have been startling,to the extent that older folk feel like they have been left behind forever. But as technology has grown in storage capacity and functional power the execution of this power has become much more user friendly.Not so long ago, if you didn't know BASIC or some similar language, then you were greatly limited in what you could do. Now, a press of a key can set off a myriad of digital functions with others waiting by just itching to be given the go ahead--press Enter.
The marriage of digital power to the visual media has been a revelation. A generation ago a Lord of the Rings; a Matrix, could not have been made or not to any level which may reflect our imaginations.Similarly, information is now more commonly being conveyed in a visual medium. This is not to say this peg fits all holes. A student reviewing a video of WWII for example,still has the time consuming task of making notes from a visual information source to put into an essay.A picture may be worth a thousand words but they often still have to be written down.
If one's only exposure to the images available on such sites as YouTube and GoogleVideo were the sort of thing that appears on "Australia's funniest near fatal accidents",one would be excused for thinking that they are mostly for entertainment. A bit of deeper searching turns up such sites as Mosman Library which feature many videos of expert talking heads . I love nothing more than listening(and watching) to informed,impassioned speakers on any given subject. Further searching turns up videos which explore subjects such as commercial issues,news,music,training,oral histories, cultural records and so on.Furthermore, such images can now be so easily captured on the digital camera or ubiqituous mobile phone.

Libraries could do very well with following the activities of libraries like Mosman. Oral histories where we see the person telling their own story rather than just reading a transcript would benefit from the human touch.(Fifty, one hundred,two hundred years from now this would be priceless to social historians-look at the clothes they are wearing,hear the accent,does anyone use that word anymore?) Opportunities also exist in library training for library users, recording of community events, a collection of historical events on video,or even the latest council meeting to provide a wider access for the local area residents to the decisions being made on their behalf.

On a personal note I have inserted a video of a favourite performer of mine,Tom Waits.

Week5: Wikis, not so wacky

Wikis show themselves to be a fine example of the democracy of ideas that live on the internet.
The’Net exists in a ruggedly democratic space. This openness flourishes because of the wide range of ideas, interests and agendas held by the netizens of the world. Sure, it is open to abuse. People are self obsessed; people are cowardly; people are prejudiced; people are misguided. No surprise there. It exists in every other area of human behaviour.

What is also true, is that, in areas of human endeavour, quality very rarely appears without quantity. For every 10 second 100m runner, we start with a thousand athletes. For every singing star, we listen to a thousand Idol moppets whose only crime is feeling the joy of singing and having friends and relatives who are tone deaf. Similarly, quality of web sites is in some ways related to the sheer volume available. The good ones (or the ones that give their punters what they want, no matter how low brow) survive and grow.

Wikis are the same. Wikis have very much the flavour of talkback radio. The host or callers set a subject agenda; be it education crisis, taxes or teenagers, and listeners ring in or SMS or email and give their 2c worth. Some are informed on the subject, others not, but through steady contributions, disagreements and corrections and a guiding hand from the host and a ready finger paused over the “kill” button, a picture emerges of the tone or direction of the views on the topic.

Wikis show themselves to be greatly representative of the democracy of ideas;
everyone is invited to contribute to update this ’Wiki, with each input, presumably, of equal value, and with people expected to be on their honour.

The examples provided in the exercise were very interesting. They show that there are a variety of applications for wikis. In a public library such activities as annotating references to books in the catalogues, reviews, local history, kid’s wikis, special interest forums, Friends of the library type groups, suggestions for purchase, are all very feasible.

The increasing level of computer ownership and internet subscription suggest that in the very near future such activities will be as commonly expected of a public library as books and magazines

Week 4:RSS-A new twist on an old tale

RSS strikes me as an old idea reworked for a new technology and a new market(or is it the same old market?)

The first entrepreneur who thought of daily home deliveries of the newspaper, was perhaps the first to get a glimpse of push /pull technology, while soaking in the tub one night. Why not deliver the paper to someone's home instead of making them come to the paper shop,or the pizzeria or the Chinese takeaway.

Now, whether this takes account of human foibles like laziness,time restriction or more positively, curiosity, it is an idea that is here to stay. Its value is found in many areas. It saves time(searching and key strokes,download time) . Having subscribed ,do we feel an obligation to read what we may have otherwise passed on every other day. Have we saved time?

People feel a need to keep up to date- especially today. Today, in some crowds, it is the ultimate in embarrassment to be in last week's fad or, recycling last weeks news. When it means money,when the back pocket nerve has been stung, it is doubly important to be up to date on the latest technology, the canniest improvement or the most economical tweaking of an idea or product.

My interest is much less about being hip to the new thing or fad. My needs are simple . I want to know the news,what happened and why. That's why my RSS feeds are predominantly news and current affairs orientated with the odd bit of popular science thrown in.

• ABC News : Just In (0)
• The Economist: News analysis (0)
• Powerhouse Museum - Photo of the Day (0)
• Scientific American (0)
• Sydney Morning Herald

In the library ,things are always changing. Writers keep writing, technology feeds on itself and morphs into something else, storage grows or decreases, funding waxes and wanes ( sometimes it wanes so much as to almost disappear),fads come and go- you know the drill. No matter what goes up or down, the need to be up to date just seems to be ever constant. This is where RSS is relevant to libraries.Quite simple applications may be new book releases, State Library updates,technological updates,coming events and even discussions on line-blogs of new thinking about library "philosophy".

My Friend Flickr?

Wk:3 My friend Flickr?
What a very necessary and voluminous resource is Flickr and other photosharing websites. The sheer quantity of images produced today across the globe; some “once in a lifetime” images, ephemeral and eternal, beautiful and banal, in our visually obsessed world , demands that websites such as these should exist. Truly, necessity was the mother of invention. If only to save the lives of millions of trees sacrificed in honour of the humble family snap.

Such websites make photos findable, shareable and safely stored. The hundreds of photos previously printed out at the chemist, that we are told we will risk our lives to save, in the case of fire or flood, will presumably need to be scanned to create a digital image.At our library we do have a great store of local history images accessible on our website, a lot in glorious sepia or black and white. Strangely, I always find colour photos of the local area have a sort of throw away, plastic ,showy feeling about them. Black and white connects more strongly to that atavistic gene within us.

According to Wikipedia, Flickr free accounts which are inactive for 90 consecutive days may be deleted. If this happened in practice the site would probably not suit me, as an occasional photographer at best, or, require me to be a member. Wikipedia also refers to the the Flickr system of setting safety levels to that of a minor. This is understandable for freely viewed images, sort of a G rating, but there are reports of German users staging a revolt over being assigned the user rights of a minor- those sexy Germans! Flickr later amended the German access to “moderate” and the future possibility of age verification procedures in the future. Flickr is still unavailable in some countries like China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran.

The value of digital cameras, I am told is the functionality, the quality of image, the capacity. One can simply delete the poor photo or the regretted image, multi-duplicated shot of the Taj Mahal …and do we need a thousand photos of your new baby, or worse, new puppy? The expectation would be that only the cream of the photographic images would be saved and uploaded to Flickr.

Recently I had cause to collect images of birds for a mural and sought out images of rainbow lorikeets, frequent visitors to my garden, on Flickr. The first image makes a bare tree into a fruit tree of colour. The second image is a lovely shot of rainbow lorikeets which would be more than useful for my purpose...a keeper. Having also looked at Google image, searching for similar pictures,I found that the best pictures were on Flickr. I imagine this is because those on Flickr are shots by enthusiasts.Rainbow lorikeets are such colourful and photogenic birds and easily habituated to come to us with just a bit of regular feeding (leaving aside the value of this). So, it is surprising to see some pictures on Flickr that would not usually be kept by the keen photographer--the birds are blurry spots of colour on top of a distant tree or undistinguisable silhouettes caused by lack of attention to backlighting of the subject,something that would have been attended to when using the older fashioned SLR camera. Surely, these shots required the heavy thumb on the delete button. The seductive capacity of digital cameras can have its drawbacks. I was going to show these shots as a cautionary example but strangely they could not be captured from Flickr.

I suspect that libraries will, if not already, find that Flickr type sites will be indispensable in the future. Your museums ,state libraries,Smithsonians et al(not forgetting your local library local histories) will need the extra storage and back up. Subscribed group photosharing used in conjunction with various interest clubs could also make great use of these sites through their libraries.

blogschmog

I am an older style librarian with a slight greying at the temples. I am able to remember a room full of librarians oohing and aahing at the 60 second response to a command put into a new computer being spruiked to our library by an enthusiastic salesman. Everyone agreed that this was a wonderful thing. Only 60 seconds and it flashed onto the screen in living colour. Albeit, that the graphics were not unlike early Russian animation and the amount of information available to be searched was not much more than would be found in your average calorie counter guide…yes, we all agreed it was a wonderful thing.
No need for card catalogues you say, go on,…gone are each book’s card where previously the patron’s membership number was recorded…unheard of! Later this thing called the Internet, but it wouldn’t catch on, who would use such a thing, who has got a computer at home anyway? Well, things, as they say, change. And, quickly!
So, the Learning 2.0 program is a godsend. I may not have a need for an ipod. I still have little need for a mobile phone. But this does not mean that I do not wish to know what they do or how they fit into the great pantheon of communication technology.
I would not have thought of myself as a blogger but, once started, like most people, I kinda like the sound of my own typing. The idea of putting it out there; what was two minutes ago was only in my head and in two minutes can be seen by millions, is startling, frightening, humbling , omnipotent. So, beam me up Scotty!
Lifelong learning is, one would hope, what everyone does. Librarians tend to have it as a common practice because of our jobs or because of why we got into that job in the first place. In this particular context it is about keeping up to date with new technologies for communicating information, gathering and structuring information, meeting, greeting and bleating, sharing and caring, seeing the future and recording what’s past.
Lifelong learners are commonly the most interesting and vibrant people to meet. Their desire to keep moving forward and not be content with enough is enough is invigorating to themselves and others. Everyone has their story. Everyone’s story has room for more chapters and is refreshed every day (like clicking the green icon on the top of our screens) by the infusion of new ideas, good and bad ,new strategies, crazy and inspired and old truths that we have rediscovered.
Blogs can tell these stories. Some, I have read are very personal. They seem slight. But the best songs are written for the writer, not for a large audience, with the certainty that if it means something to the writer then it will also speak to others.
Blogs that push a political or cultural philosophy can be interesting, inspiring or just plain infuriating. Perhaps most fulfilling are those that share a common interest in things like hobbies,music, art, literature, model collecting or hundreds of other pursuits. I love enthusiasts. Bill Collins tended to gush and cluck about movies a bit too much for my liking but I loved his enthusiasm for his subject.
Blogs could have a relevant and important use in libraries. They could report on new ideas, research, discoveries for those with an interest in subjects like local history, new publications, technological updates or “what’s happening” type of activities like author talks, storytimes and various cultural activities. They would gather in strength as home computer use became more pervasive and an interested client audience was established through word of mouth, emails, interactive discussions and formation of groups with similar interests.