Week 6, Thing 15, Perspectives on Web 2.0

I read through the first two perspectives "Away from Icebergs" by Rick Anderson and "Into a new world of librarianship" by Michael Stephens. I found the first article very intriguing. I really like how Anderson related the libraries to boats, and discussed the various obstacles that libraries are currently facing. The world is rapidly changing because of technology and more and more people are turning to the internet rather than a book for reading material, whether it be for research or pleasure in our fast past world it's easier for the majority of people to get online than it is to get to the local library.

What he said about there no longer being a need for "the 'just in case' collection" really struck me. My last year of college I worked as a helper in the library and I spent the majority of my time clearing out the "just in case" material that had been stored for years. Unfortunately, not all material made it to the recycle bin and much of it landed in a closet "just in case" someone needed that outdated article on hearing devices from 50 years ago.

I must agree that if libraries are going to make it in this new technology driven world, they need to change "one little boat-at a time". They need to find a way to keep up with the needs of their patrons. One thing that many of my local libraries are doing is making many of their resources available to patrons via the internet.

Week 6, Thing 14, Technorati

I thought this site was very similar to de.lic.ious, and thought that there was similar information on the site. While searching "school library learning 2.0" it was interesting to see the different results based on where I was searching. I also was surprised by the "popular" blogs, searches, and posts. Many of the searches were things I haven't even heard of or at least had never heard that abbreviation before. I didn't realize how out of touch I was with what is "popular". It was also interesting to notice the similarities and differences between the popular blogs, searches, and tags -only a few things in were more than one of the popular categories. I would have thought that if a lot of pople were searching for it more people would be at least blogging about it.

I like the idea of tagging and think that it could come in very handy when trying to mark material/resources for future use, but the same time I also feel like I could easily get lost in the overwhelming amount of material. I do like that with tagging you can quickly get an idea of what the resource is like.

Week 6, Thing 13, Del.icio.us

I really liked the delicious site. I thought it was very easy to navigate and could easily find information about the resources thanks to the posts of previous veiwers. I really like that it tallies the number of people who have saved the site, because typically if a site has been saved by numerous people it is more likely to be a good site. I liked the short blurbs about the sites, because they made it easy to get a quick idea of what that resource contains. While searching the site I found a really neat web page called the Logo Creator http://creatr.cc/creatr/.

I think this would be a great tool for a research assistant, because like I said the blurbs about the resources make it easy to quickly find out if the site has what you are looking for. I also think it is a wonderful resource for anyone who uses multiple computers, because it is a fast easy way to access bookmarks from anywhere. Being a teacher of the deaf I am constantly changing rooms, and have different sites on every computer and the site I am looking for is hardly ever on the computer that I am using at that moment in time.