Summing Up!

I looked into the Web 2.0 awards in several topics.
Under Health - the runner up site Medstory I though was really impressive. A topic search would give you leads under headings like Drugs and Substances, Conditions, Procedures, Complementary Medicine. Then links to sources in the Web, Research Articles ( Pub Med), Current clinical trials, News Media reports and Audio links...! Not sure if we have this site in our faculty links?

Under books, the Lulu site appeared to be a neat resourceful spot for people wanting to publish, sell and distribute, as well as link to others similarly engaged.

Under blogs I explored the Technocrati site a bit more. Interstingly I found an advanced search option, and this way I found more blogs on my previous Libary Orientation search than in the other sites. Technocrati allows you to link to videos and this way I found more titles than I had when searching directly in You Tube (because of their limited search option perhaps?)

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Well, I had meant the pictures above to come in at this point, so as to be a nice lead-in to any summing- up comments , but I guess I still have a lot more to learn about successfully placing images and loading videos etc...

The programme has been very worth while, despite not having enough time to get on with it at the beginning, and not trying to complete in the final week of the year! ( it would have been useful to advance together with other colleagues at the same time and have more interaction). Whilst I had already dipped into a few blogs, and had some vague notions about wikis and podcasts and RSS feeds, by needing to set up my own blog and work through a programme of exercises, the possibilities of Web 2.0 have been clarified a great deal more for me. Probably one of the more surprising discoveries was YouTube - how very easy it was to access and the extent of material there.

I do feel the Library should be utilising this new technology to make its services and resources more meaningful and relevant. Yet I feel we probabaly need a conservative approach at first to target just those mediums that we can resource and back up best (IT support) and that perhaps are not seen as competing with the more favoured means of student social interaction. This might mean a series of blogs and feeds to advertise and update library services, podcasts and video clips to augment faculty Information literacy programmes and provide self -guided modules (orientation and general IL) .