Zoho Blog

The tools here are easy to use - easier than Word, since you don't have the menu structure to wade through - and if you are comfortable with Word you won't have any problem using Zoho. It does seem a bit prone to crashing though - this is my third attempt to write and save something without getting the 'we are about to kick you off the internet' error message. Not sure why - it may be something to do with the way it interacts with our local network.

Comments are easy to insert, making this a useful tool for documents being developed collaboratively. (Though I noticed that when I published my Zoho document here in Blogger it didn't bring the comment itself across - it only remains visibile in Zoho.) And publishing the text directly to the blog was no problem. I also like being able to save the doc as a pdf (or as a web page), since I don't have Adobe installed on my work pc - that gives it quite a bit of flexibility for online use. It's also useful to have the option of writing and storing documents online - I will be interested to see though whether there is a file size limit, and whether you can create a web link within a wiki direct to a document here without having to upload the document to wiki. If you can, it would solve one of my current wiki problems (see earlier blog for the boring details). Haven't experimented with that yet, but will try it out and report back.

Tried adding a picture which I browsed to in my C drive - added it OK in the Zoho doc, though using drag to re-size it doesn't work as well as it does in Word, Picture Manager etc. You only seem to be able to resize in one direction (horizontally or vertically) at a time - you can't drag a corner in and resize both dimensions at once, which means that the proportions of the image get out of whack if you aren't careful, and the image distorts. Will experiment with that further.

[Next paragraph added while editing the above text in Blogger].

I have also discovered since publishing the text I wrote on Zoho here on my blog that while the image I inserted while in Zoho did originally appear here on my blog, it disappears again if you then go into your published blog and edit it. Had to browse back to it from within Blogger and then insert it again.

- here -

which actually worked better anyway, as Blogger handles images better than Zoho and resizes them without the distortion. (BTW, The Victorian gent in this image is David Barr, a great uncle from Wanganui. He was about 21 when this was taken, and this is his visiting card).

Anna L.

Rollyo

Had a look at this. It's a nice idea, a site that lets you create a search tool that works across your favourite sites, but in practice the results it brings back aren't that great, and on the whole seem to be a pretty good demonstration of why librarians are actually still needed when it comes to searching out targetted info using sites specifically developed for that purpose.

A metasearch tool like this is always going to struggle when it is being asked to operate across a disparate range of sites with little behind-the-scenes consistency. I probably won't use it - actually, I found it pretty irritating - as I wasn't that impressed with the search results it brought back from the Rollyo of local history sites I created. Why?
1. The only successful searches were with very generic searches that were too unfocussed to be useful - anything more specific and you got nothing.
2. It only searches text on the site itself, and if you work primarily with sites that are interfaces to behind-the-scenes databases, it isn't able to pick up info at the individual record level.


Can I see a role for it? No, not if you are wanting to search online databases, like our Local History Online, or Matapihi, or Auckland Museum's "Street Search" - but if all you want to do is pull together info actually written on the site itself in xml or whatever, then yes, it could be useful.

Not sure whether this link will work for other people, but anyway, here it is:
http://rollyo.com/explore.html?rollterm=north+shore+history&x=14&y=7

LIbraryThing

Nice site, and very easy to add titles - no cataloguing required, which is pretty good. I can see the value of being able to link to other booklists belonging to people who have read the same book - what you like tends to be such a personal choice, and being asked by library borrowers if I can recommend good books is always difficult if you don't read the same kind of thing they do.

Link to my catalogue (so far)
http://www.librarything.com/home/AnnaLawry77

Image Generators

Used Generator Blog to check out some of these and found one called Old Photos which turns recently taken digital photos into ones that look like old heritage images. Here's the before and after shots.

Before:

and after:

It's pretty effective, even down to adding a 'silvering' halo effect in the center of the image, which you get with old photos. Here's the url: http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/old-style-photo.html

Wetpaint

I liked this - it's a bit more intuitive than the Wikipedia style wikis, and adding the blog link wasn't hard. Will explore this further as I can see some useful applications for it. It's quite similar to Fitch in terms of the way you use it.

Wikis

I have used wikis before as a shared workspace for a group project involving staff from Rodney and Waitakere Libraries and from Datacom - it was a good solution for a working group that was geographically spread not only across Auckland, but across NZ (one member was based in Christchurch).

The pros - it was a good one stop shop for providing overall management of the project, and also as a home for recording decisions once they had been made. It's also a good place for setting up frequently asked questions.

The cons? For some members who didn't use it much, having to log in each time (and remember their log-in) and then remember how to edit was too much of a barrier to its regular use, and most tended to revert to email for the day to day correspondence. The other negative - becasue it's web-based, it's fine if you want to link to other web pages, but not ideal as a repository for large project-related documents stored on local drives.

Library 2.0

The video clip The Web is Us/ing Us ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE) was great - the description of the difference between html and xml markup language and the way xml allows you to separate out a site's content without also having to define the way that content displays was probably the most valuable part of it - that, and the very cool way it used the very same technology it was describing to describe that technology.

It's that ability to strip out the display formatting tha makes the content, or metadata, so easily exportable, mash-upable and re-combinable - and it's from that that ability to recombine that Web 2.0 emerges in all its diversity and creativity.

What it will mean for us? The digital library as a virtual branch of the NSL system is already part of the overall vision, but we can't affoard to get lazy and leave this stuff to the web team to implement on our behalf, or put them in a position where they become the technology gatekeepers - not if we want jobs ourselves in the future. Young people coming into the profession are already comfortable with this kind of technology, and what's needed now is an environment that gives those staff and patrons who want to use this technology the tools and support to make it happen in a collaborative way. That's where the true value of Web 2.0 technology in libraries comes in.

And yes, you can include the patrons in this - for a great local example of a library that does exactly that, check out Kete Horowehnua (http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/) , a community site hosted and (very lightly) mediated by staff at Horowhenua Library.