Tag team

I can lots of potential with using social bookmarking. The obvious one is as a collaborative online reference tool. I can see each our branch libraries contributing to a reference group social bookmarking website. I like the way Sutherland Library e.g. highlight the fact that professional librarians are choosing the websites and that they have found them to be useful reference tools. It seems a nice blend between the folksonomy angle and the professional cataloguing skills of librarians.

I can also see it being used by specialists e.g. young people's as a way of sharing good websites, especially if you have an rss feed set up in a network so that people are alerted when new ones are added. I would be far more likely to check them out if I was prompted rather than having the self-discpline to check regularly (let's be honest here).

I can also see it as being useful for projects e.g. we've got an indigenous library liaison committee brainstorming and discussing possibilities at the moment. This could be a great way to share info as each of us come across useful websites.

I've always been pretty organised with my favourites (with subfolders etc), but this seems to be much more efficient and effective. Feeling pretty excited about this!

I also like Library Thing. We could use it with our library book clubs, like Noosa has done. I also like the idea of it being part of our online catalogue. I prefer the idea of a one-stop service, rather than people having to go to several places. It will be more likely to be successful.

RSS Feeds My Imagination

It was easy to subscribe to Bloglines and set up a free account. I can see that RSS feeds would be useful personally to aggregate new items appearing on blogs that interest me. The tricky bit is narrowing that list of blogs down, so I'm not being overwhelmed with new stuff. I can see more benefit for RSS feeds for our customers - keeping them informed of new events and programs, as an example. We currently have a monthly e-newsletter, and this seems the logical next step so that customers aren't having to wait until the next month to find out what's happening or having to constantly go to our website and look for updates.

I found searching for the particular blogs I wanted to subscribe to a bit overwhelming. So I didn't search widely to be honest. The sites I ended up selecting were OPAL training, Between the Shelves (our library blog for young people), ABC top stories, Librarians Internet Index New This Week and Bloglines News.