Sunday, October 19, 2008

catch-up time

Hi there,
well, you'll all have to forgive me for being late on some of the "Things". I'm up to my eyeballs in reviews and haven't had 2 minutes to myself, it seems. I'm really interested in exploring the photo sharing sites. There are a ton of photos I want to share with family and friends, such as wedding photos of my friends' wedding -- from OVER A YEAR AGO! Picasa seems to be a really great site, user-friendly and fun to search. I found some good photos of Iceland (yeah, I know their economy just tanked right after we planned a trip there... oh, well.) It really seems that Google has everything all bundled up through their site, which is nice to have a one-stop shopping experience. Here's a couple shots of two places I hope we can catch on our trip. Hopefully I'll have my own photos up soon after: http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/71uFYYNJhI7OwfOFirdJRA and http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/abGHX9oBuBdMO4926kueYg

A lot of these discovery activities make me think of ways they would be useful in our academic library. For example, our Student Coordinator and I have been trying to figure out a better way for all the students to be able to sign out for work shifts, while allowing other students to sign up to cover the vacancies. I'm interested in exploring how Google Calendar might help us there. Also, I think it would be nice to have a way to post all the new books as they arrive each week. That way patrons could "pre-browse" for something. A lot of times, people see from the catalog that a new acquisition is "available", but it was just cataloged at the main library and hasn't arrived at our branch, yet.

1 comment:

Jennifer Koerber said...

A lot of these discovery activities make me think of ways they would be useful in our academic library.

Excellent! Congrats on achieving one of the secondary goals of this course. Google Calendar will certainly make it easier for student workers to see what shift vacancies are available, and you can also give them access to change events and sign themselves up for shifts, under the Settings tab. There are also other people management systems out there, but they might be more than you need.

As for newly arrived items, there is a way to have your ILS send an RSS feed of recently-checked in items to your home page. If you want something a little more focused, you might consider a Twitter feed, with a display on your site. I think there's a way to automate that as well, and it's worth poking around online to see if anyone's doing it.

Excellent thoughts, all.