Library 2.0

After reading the articles on Web and Library 2.0, I can see that the field of librarianship will change even more rapidly than in my previous years' experiences. What it means to me is to keep up with this technology and I think that we've got a long way to go from our current position. Advances are great, but where's the money coming from to make these changes? Also, with more availablity of technology to patrons comes more responsibility on their part as the recipients. I'm entranced by the possibilities of better serving the public and more than willing to learn, but we have to remove the obstacles we've put in place to protect ourselves, so we can meet their needs.
I like the idea of allowing patrons some freedom to tag cataloged items, so they can find them easier and help each other at the same time. But people more knowledgable than me will have to set up that criteria.

Technorati

I've just begun to play with Technorati. I opened an account and went through the steps to claim my blog. Now it appears that I can post on Technorati or Blogger. I added one of the YPL blogs to my favorites and that worked great. I needed to add tags to it too and that was easy. I plan to add more and explore the other possibilities. Cool!

An evening with Del.icio.us

Finally spent some time at home with tagging in Del.icio.us. I opened my account and first added my own tags to one of my all-time favorite t.v. shows, Xena. It worked great, but like my son said when he happened to call, that won't be popular sharing today cause it's an old show. So I proceeded to look at other's topics and saved the Etsy site using other's tags. If you haven't tried Etsy,you should take a look. There's lots of original art work and creative one of a kind stuff for sale by regular people like us. There were tons of people bookmarking Etsy. Then I tried making up my own tags and borrowing some for bookmarking Avatar, the cartoon. That also proved to be a very popular bookmark. I was looking at exporting some of my own stuff from my favorites on my computer, but that's for another time.
I can see how Del.icio.us can be useful and fun having all your favorites in one place with the help of thousands of other users.