Teaching 2.0

One of the tasks for the CJRLC Tech Challenge is to teach some 2.0-ish stuff to someone else.  In 2 weeks I’ll be teaching several staff members at MPOW about blogging, but in the meantime I thought I’d write about some more impromptu teaching I did not long ago.  I was happily minding my own [...]

Putting the Books in Library 2.0 (Part II)

In the last post, I talked about how LibraryThing works; today, I’d like to talk about how LibraryThing can work for libraries in the following ways:

Reader’s advisory
Networking with other libraries
Introducing tagging and 2.0 to patrons

1.  Readers’s Advisory
I think the most obvious application of LibraryThing for librarians is during reader’s advisory sessions.   I thought reader’s advisory was going [...]

Putting the Books in Library 2.0 with Library Thing (Part I)

Although I’ve been an avid reader all my life, I didn’t become a librarian out of a love of books; this a good thing because I find my job as a public librarian really doesn’t seem to involve books that much.  I spend most of my time with computers, which is what makes 2.0 so much [...]

Mmmmm…. Tagging and Social Bookmarking (Part II)

Tagging and social bookmarking are taking libraryland by storm because there are so many ways these tools can be used by librarians to offer better service to their patrons.
Although there is a bit of controversy about using tagging in library catalogs — authority files exist for a reason, you know — the potential exists for using tagging to [...]

Mmmmm…. Tagging and Social Bookmarking (Part I)

Part of the CJRLC Tech Challenge is to explore the site del.icio.us, which is a tool that essentially allows users to bookmark and catalog sites on a web-based platform.  Sounds pretty dull, huh?  Well, there are two 2.0 elements that make del.icio.us a sneaky cool service.
 The first is tagging.  When someone decides to bookmark a site [...]