Clean-Up Post, Teachertube and RSS Feeds

I liked the Library of Congress youtube channel so much I wound up evaluating it instead of the teachertube video we were supposed to look at, but I didn't forget that assignment. I found a video on teachertube about Presidential Libraries, something I've always wondered about, and this video http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=97570&title=Presidential_Libraries, despite being aimed at school age children, contained a lot of interesting information (Reagan's Presidential Library in California contains a previous Air Force One - yes, the whole plane). It was uploaded by Teachertube user errce whose profile is unfortunately devoid of information that would allow me to check their authority, although the video didn't make any claims that couldn't be easily verified elsewhere.


This RSS feed http://www.libraryjournal.com/RSS is for Library Journal, a website about the Library industry that has a great many interesting articles - all of them avaliable on the RSS feed. Libaryjournal itself is a well established website with material provided by Librarians, Library Technicians and other Library workers, so it's reasonably authoritative, although each article has to be evaluated individually as they're written by different people. It's a very useful source of information for anyone who works in the Library field or aspires to.

Also, http://www.libworm.com/ is a site that collates a huge number of different Library themed Rss Feeds. Strongly recommended.

A Blog Post About a Blog about Illustrated Childen's Books

If Leonie should happen to read this post she may remember my showing her a Livejournal community blog called 'Storybookland' about illustrated children's books. That blog can be found here http://community.livejournal.com/storybookland and it's a wonderful resource for anyone who's interested in illustrated books. It's linked to an array of other useful blogs and websites and is full of beautiful illustrations, many of them linked to information on their creators. It doesn't really claim any particular kind of authority from an organisation or the qualifications of its contributors, but I'm not sure how much authority a blog on this subject really needs.

An excellent blog to look at if you have young children who love to read, or whose reading you want to encourage.

This is a Really Fun Wiki that Everyone Should See

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage

This is a wiki about - You guessed it! - television tropes. (this is actualy an example of 'Exactly What it Says On The Tin' which is one of the tropes listed). I would hesitate to call this site an authoritative source, especially as it proudly decries it's own authority. Despite that, it's various pages often feature interesting references, accurate quotes, links to related subjects and sometimes historical information (such as the source of a trope or it's first appearance). Although it might sound like a completely valueless source, it's actually a very useful and interesting guide to internet culture - if there's an expression you've seen online that mystifies you the explanation can probably be found here.

One warning - every page links to dozens of others on related subjects by way of text links and if you're not careful the site *will* suck you in and waste hours of your time.


If that's not sufficiently Library/education themed for this course I can also recommend http://librarywikis.pbworks.com/ a wiki by Library workers about wikis used in Libraries. It's full of useful information about how different elements of the Library community can collaborate, I found it easy to navigate, there are a great many links to other Library wikis and the qualifications of the main contributors suggest a certain level of authority. It was established by Matthew Bejune, who is an Assistant Professor of Library Science at Purdue University Libraries. The wiki is actually an adaptation of an article he published in a journal called Information Technology and Libraries in the September 2007 issue about how Libraries use wikis. It doesn't seem to have been updated much since he started it online two years ago, but it still makes interesting reading and the many links to other wikis are still functional - all the ones I tested worked.

Actually, this wiki is so good, did we look at it in class and I just forgot?

Podcasts on the ABC and Why I Like Them

This site http://www.abc.net.au/services/podcasting/ is the homepage of all the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's podcasts. As they now produce podcasts of all their radio shows (and have done for years) there's a lot of good stuff to listen to. I particularly like 'Dr Karl's Great Moments in Science' the podcast of which you can subscribe to as an RSS feed at this link: http://www.abc.net.au/science/podcast/gmis.xml which I found on this page: http://www.abc.net.au/science/drkarl/greatmomentsinscience/?WT.mc_id=science_podcast_gmis. The title is self explanatory as to the content, which covers everything from the solar system to human behaviour and it's fun, it's interesting and easy to understand. The backing of the ABC, a respected and long established news organisation, combined with the credentials of Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki - he has degrees in Physics, Maths, Biomedical Engineering, Medicine and Surgery - make this an authoritative source.

Incidentally, things I learnt while doing this evaluation include:

• Video downloads are known as 'vodcasts'. Why didn't I know that already and why haven't we heard the word in this unit?
• Dr Karl was a Distinguished Foreign Guest (capitals deliberate) of the USA's Information Agency in 1996.
• The spellcheck on blogger doesn't recognise 'podcast' as a word, but MS Word does.

Why This Blog Doesn't Have a Yotube Post and a Critical Assessment of the Library of Congress Youtube Channel

I made a dozen different atempt to upload my instructional video to youtube on several different days at different times. On every single occasion youtube would upload the video and then give me the same error message. Nothing made a difference. I am green with envy of the people who actually succeeded with their uploads, especially as I and Michael made a very nice video in which I followed him around the Learning Centre while he demonstrated the art of shelving books. My empty channel with no videos uploaded can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/beege222

Despite this, there are a lot of gems on youtube, such as the Library of Congress' youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress. This is a real find for library students, since it doesn't just contain loads of digital media from the LoC's archives but also plenty of instructional videos, including one about the preservation of digital media (http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress#p/a/u/0/qEmmeFFafUs) and video of speakers at the 2009 National Book Festival. Individual videos all come with useful notes explaining their source and context. There is, obviously, a bias towards American history in the material but that doesn't change the historical importance of events such as Roosevelt's inauguration and there's no denying the authority of the source. I recommend this youtube channel and its videos to any Library worker, student of history or lover of books.

Tools for Finding and reading E-books

I happened to stumble over this while I was trying to find a copy of a particular e-book. It's called http://www.findtoyou.com and it's a search engine that specialises in finding free downloads. It's divided up into different categories for different kinds of data, including software, music and . . . pdf e-books. Very handy and worth checking out. I also found http://www.processtext.com/index.html, a site where you can download a range of software for translating electronic texts from one format to another. If the only copy of a document you can find is in a format you can't read (which was the problem I had recently) this site is extremely useful.

So Rollyo Is Interesting

In light of my previous post, I entertained myself by creating a searchroll that searches Livejournal communities focused on books. It seems to work quite nicely. I think in future I might use Rollyo more for my own searches. Find my Rollyo page at http://www.rollyo.com/libraryguy22/

Why I Love Livejournal

I've been blogging on Livejournal for years and well before I started this class LJ taught me what a powerful tool blogs are not only for finding information but for getting the information/news/stories you're interested in to come to you. In the concise style we're trying to develop for this class, I love Livejournal because it:

• Allows you to 'Friend' other blogs (much the same as Following) and then creates a page where all the posts on all the blogs you're friended to are displayed in chronological order in blog format, from newest to oldest. Fantastic for keeping up with everything you're interested in, all organised on one page. Alternately, great for communicating with a group of people simultaneously.

• Allows you to create 'communities' which combine the best features of blogs and wikis in one unit. A Livejournal community is a multi-user blog in which multiple people have posting authority. A group of people with common interestes or related expertise can come together to create a community which then functions as a one-stop resource on a given subject.

• Communities can be friended too. By friending large communities for all your interests you can have a wealth of personally relevant information delivered to your online doorstep.

• Allows you to post with different levels of access so a given post will only be seen by the people you want to see it. One post might be for anyone who comes to your blog, another is only accessible by a select group of online friends and another is reserved for your work peers. You can comparmentalise your online life in one blog.

• Allows you to create tag clouds or lists according to your preference to organise all your posts and to put links to all your favourite websites and blogs in columns to either side of your posts. You can organise a large chunk of your online life from one page.

• Allows you to put any date you like on a post - many people use this feature to 'headline' an introductory or explanatory post at the top of their blog.

• Allows you to embed links, pictures and video into posts easily. Also lets you use html for effects.

• Has a search function that allows you to search by interest, so you can seek out exactly what you're interested in. The search engine isn't Libray-precise but it utilises a google-style ranking system.

• 27 million separate blogs and communities. One hundred to two hundred thousand posts in any given day. With that much information there's guaranteed to be something you're interested in.

If you want to see for yourself, go to http://www.livejournal.com/ and be impressed.