The End

Its not really the end. I still use most of the Web 2.0 features every day in my personal life and I constantly come up with ways we can use them at work too. Marketing the library thru the internet seems to me like the way of the future as kids get more and more technologically savvy and their parents try to keep up.

My favourite part of the Amazing Challenge was winning a wonderful prize for my witty blogs. But I also actually like writing the blogs. I think blogging is the one thing i have learnt on the Amazing Challenge that i didn't already do before on a regular basis, which i may just keep up. I don't think anyone by Elle has read them so far, but you never know. its also a good way of recalling what was happening at a certain time. i was so proud of my Social networking blog that i sent it to my friend to read. She was suitably impressed!

I think that twitter and social networking in general could be useful to the TCL - us library geeks must find a use for these increasingly popular websites - whether it is for marketing or just for keeping up with the next generation in a way that they connect with.

When starting the Amazing challenge I wondered how much of a challenge it would be for me - already being a keen technophile. Initially the challenge was finding the time to do it - with study and working part time - however once i got some time I flew thru the challenges. While it wasn't much OF a challenge for me to read about and do the simple tasks, i would still say that I learnt at least a little bit from each thing. Eg i learnt what embedding meant in the you tube challenge, I learnt a little more about RSS feeds and started my own google reader account. So it was very useful in terms of my continued learning. Since we have had the internet on the bus, I have had a lot more time to work thru the tasks and have a play with some of the wonderful technology available. I really like keeping up with what is going on in other departments by reading the Libshare blog, I am thinking it would be great to have a section on there where branches could upload the minutes of their meetings to make the minutes even more accessible to other branches?

On this, my final amazing challenge post, I finally used the spell checker feature on the blog site too, so I HAVE leant something!

Thinking about my goals, I dont remember what they were, but i know one was to finish, so i have accomplished one thing! I have also learnt something, so I am sure that was one of my goals!.

One thing i would say about the format of the Amazing Challenge was the lack of sharing with fellow colleagues. I think it would be great to get together with others of different abilities and to have talked about or done together some of the tasks. I think showing others or talking about technology with others helps consolidate the learning for both parties. That's just me personally tho i guess.

Thanks to Elle for all your useful comments and for reading my blogs!

Claire

Google Reader

Its really weird that this was the next task in the Amazing Challenge because i just saw the 'reader' link on Google the other day and had a quick look at it because it was a topic discussed in my current Library paper.

I guess I need to have a better look at how to read it, and if i looked at it every day i suppose there wouldnt be so much stuff to read, but just having 5 or 6 subscriptions meant a lot of scrolling, or to click on the "mark all as read" buttong.
Its good that its just like Gmail which is the email that i use the most, so i know the basics of how to use it. Is it not just like going to those websites yourself tho, I need to find out how to manage the subscription so it only returns those items that actually interest me, cos at the moment it is returning for example from the NZ Herald website all the top stories. I could just go to that website to view those.
If i figured out how to manage these subscriptions it would be good to subscribe to library blogs, websites etc so i can keep up with the latest, it may take a while to trawl thru the internet and find RSS feeds to subscribe to!

I'm really not sure how libraries can use this. can the library subscribe to certain feeds and show that information on their website without having to actually be logged on to the net? Maybe Ellie can enlighten me on that one!

out

Addendum: Just noticed that Library Elf provides RSS feeds too, but they do warn that some readers show these to the general public even if you have set your profile to private. There is a use for RSS feeds for librarians and libraries!!