Critical Evalutations of Library Related Online Resources

Just some quick assessments and critiques of a few handy Library resources of various types to round out my assessment:

Brown, Lindy. (2010), Circulation, America, viewed 31st of August 2010, http://lindybrown.com/blog/

This is a great blog written and regularly updated by a woman named Lindy Brown, who according to her online resume has a B.S. in Sociology, an M.Ed. in Student Affairs in Higher Education and is now studying for a Masters in Library/Information Systems while interning several hours a week at the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library and volunteering with the Internet Public Library. Between these qualifications (which can be verified by other means) and the quality of the blog I consider this to be a fairly authoritative resource. The individual posts are one person's subjective opinion, but they contain a lot of interesting information the way different libraries are using web 2.0 applications - and a lot of useful links as well.


Monash Public Library Service, (2010), Monash Public Library Service Podcasts, Australia, viewed 1st September 2010, http://www.monlib.vic.gov.au/pods.html

As the name indicates, these are the podcasts of Monash Public Library Service in Victoria. That guarantees their authority, but judging by the limited number of podcasts available and their dates the MPLS hasn't been offering this service for very long. The podcasts that are available aren't about libraries, but rather act as a way for the library to provide material (talks by various authors) that clients could normally only experience in person.


Library of Congress, (2010), The Library of Congress' Photostream - Map, America, viewed 1st September 2010, http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/map/

The Library of Congress (surely an authoritative source if there ever was one, although their flickr account doesn't specify which members of staff maintain it) uses flickr's mashup with google maps to let users geographically search for archival images it has posted online. Clever or what? In addition, clicking on a picture will take you to its flickr entry, which for the LoC's pictures will contain exhaustive bibliographical information on the picture.

I found a few other mashups that were library-specific. Interestingly, all of them used maps in some way.

As a bonus, here are links to a couple of blog posts that contain links to flickr collections for a lot of different libraries:

http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2007/07/08/libraries-using-flickr/

http://www.flickr.com/groups/librariesandlibrarians/discuss/169806/



Greenhill, Kathryn. (2007), youtubeandlibraries, Australia, viewed 27th August 2010, http://youtubeandlibraries.pbworks.com/

This is a pretty basic wiki that's never been updated. It's mostly interesting because it has several library themed youtube videos embedded in it - which makes it an example of another kind of mashup as well. It was produced by Kathryn Greenhill, an Associate Lecturer in Information Studies at Curtin University in Perth, who frequently speaks, writes and facilitates workshops about the impact of emerging technologies on libraries and our users. I would say she is a fairly authoritative source. Her blog, http://librariansmatter.com/blog/, is a great resource for any Librarian who wants to know more about how libraries can use web 2.0 technologies.