Activity Three

Activity Three

Set up an account a social bookmarking service such as Diigo -https://www.diigo.com/ - or Delicious - http://delicious.com/

Explore the functionality for storing, tagging and sharing your bookmarked resources.

Get started - go out and tag a few resources!

If you wish to use this task as one of your three OLJ tasks.  You could write a short evaluation (no more than 350 words) of your use of social bookmarking - include a critical evaluation of the effectiveness of different features and/or functions, as well as a brief statement on the different ways an information organisation may be able to utilise such a tool to support information services, learning and/or collaboration of users and/or employees.

I've found social bookmarking to be a very useful tool for me, especially as I'm not always on the same computer, and also to engage collaboratively with others online. I use two social bookmarking tools: Delicious and Pinterest. I was first shown Delicious in a web 2.0 training course '23 Things' which was adapted from the first 23 Things http://plcmcl2-about.blogspot.com.au/ by Helene Blowers. The course was designed to introduce library staff to new technologies that were useful to themselves as information professionals, as well as tools that could or were going to be used in the library. 

The best thing about Delicious nowadays is that it bookmarks all your Twitter links, so it's curating and collection all the links you post to Twitter without you having to worry about it. It's much easier to go back through Delicious to find links to articles you've posted that having to scroll through your Twitter feed without any search functionality. Also, the social aspects of Delicious are very useful. Not that many people I know have Delicious accounts, but I can still share any of my links with friends and colleagues through the ‘share’ tool to Twitter, Facebook, email or Instapaper. 

Pinterest has a much larger audience, so find this site to be far more interactive and social. I have an interest in art cinema, and I’ve created a large collection of film still with quotes by directors and actors. Pinterest, being a visual bookmarking tool, is more effective for bookmarking things that can be represented by a photograph. Like Delicious, I can access my bookmarks and share then from any computer or device connected to the internet. 

In the library setting, many libraries have a Pinterest account like Cockburn Library, and use this to showcase new library books, as well as their collections and articles of interest for mothers and young adults. They also have general links to recipes, art and literary quotes. The collaborative aspect to this that users can ‘re-pin’ the pins of Cockburn Library and comment on their links. Other  library accounts can also share links with each other. I think in an information professional context, Delicious is more useful for staff as a place where links about library topics can be curated in a shared location. Staff could visit the site and look at the links saved, and also save new links for everyone else to share. This encourages discussion and reflection about new library technologies and initiatives. 

Activity One and Two

Activity One:
Read the 'Introduction' section, followed by 'Our Digital Lives' (Section 1) and 'Our Social Spaces' (Section 2).

How do the concepts and findings in these sections of the OCLC report reflect your view of the socially networked world in 2014?

In terms of libraries and the idea that they were thought of being only an physical social space, and couldn't become an online social space, obviously this has changed dramatically. My library has created an online book club, we have our interactive Twitter and Facebook pages which include competitions like 'Get Caught Reading' where people take photos of themselves reading somewhere interesting. I feel that the library has to have both a physical social space, as well as an online one. Some of our customers never visit the library, using only our e-books, e-audio, e-magazines and our online databases. For other patrons their trip to the library is a big part of their week, and they enjoy the interaction with others in the community, either coming in for their book-club or other group activity, or just running into friends while browsing the shelves or reading the newspaper. Anyway, I feel like I'm writing a lot here. I'd be interested to know what others thought of the articles in terms of their own experience.

Activity Two:

Explore some of these definitions of Web 2.0:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BAXvFdMBWw&feature=relate

Based on your reading and viewing of these definitions, try to summarise in your own words what you think Web 2.0 is.

To me Web 2.0 is the move from the static pages of web 1.0 to the social, interactive, convergence of ideas and the creating of social spaces online. What web 2.0 is now, was five years ago, and will be five years in the future is definitely of interest to researchers. To me, one thing is certain, it's continually evolving, and no one really knows the extent this is changing our everyday lives. Or, even if it's changing us at all. As Carole quotes the OCLC 2007 report in her introduction to this unit:

"The practice of using social communities to establish and enhance relationships based on some common ground—shared interests, related skills or a common geographic location—is as old as human culture. As early as the time of Plato in 400 B.C., scholars and philosophers studied and analyzed the formation and interaction of groups of people…

Today, the term social networking is being used in new ways, but the concepts behind it—sharing content, collaborating with others and creating community—are not new. What is different is simply the availability of the digital medium, which makes contributing materials and connecting with other people faster, easier and more accessible to a wider population than ever before." (p.2-1)

I think this is good food for thought. We've always been social, but now the extent we are social and the amount of people from different places we can be social with has greatly increased. To talk about Web 2.0 is to talk about social media, as it's a key component of Web 2.0. This sort of thinking also needs to be incorporated into Library 2.0.