Evaluating websites

Book Clique Cafe has a 'contact us' web address. There is a copyright declaration with date, also the date each page was revised. Linked with Amazon. Aimed at online reading groups who create book discussions on the web. No junky advertising.
Book seer is a very basic site of just two pages - a bit of a gimmick. Several titles I entered generated no recommendations, so somewhat limited. Have to delve further than first page to find information about the site. A literary web project by Apt.Labs, which has contact details of the authors. List of clients are all reputable publishers.
Librarything is a very good site, aimed at booklovers of all persuasions. You sign in and become a member.When you create a list of the books you've read, other members recommend similar titles you might like. Every book listed has reviews written by Librarything members. Also talk forums, blogs, local events and featured authors. There is a copyright declaration and no advertising. 'See what bloggers and the media say about Librarything' is very positive and encouraging. Librarything is available in many languages.
Personally, when helping patrons, I have used Fantastic Fiction, Literature Map, and Librarything, which is especially useful for its reviews.

An author's perspective

Authors on tour live has an archive of previous podcasts listed alphabetically by author. Searching the list I came across Lynne Truss, who wrote the very popular 'Eats, shoots and leaves' about punctuation. In this podcast she talks about her new book, 'Talk to the hand', which I have read. It's great to hear the voice that goes with the name and face. It gives a fuller understanding of the book and empathy with the author. However, she sounded slightly nervous and a bit forced. It must be hard for authors who are quite comfortable writing unseen but not so at ease in front of a live audience, but to increase sales they have to be visible.
I think this would be a useful tool to recommend to patrons who want to know about their favourite authors.

Readers and booklovers

Book groups don't appeal to me but after looking at some of the online book groups, I rather liked the Book Clique Cafe, which is a collection of online reading groups, based on genre, e.g. Roman history group, Mystery addicts, Diaries and journals.
There are so many groups and sites for booklovers, I could never have the time to keep up with them all.
I have liked Librarything ever since we did 23 things last year.The suggestions for further reading based on titles I've already read have been great.
Cleopatra's daughter by Michelle Moran was my latest enjoyable read. The orphaned children of Queen Cleopatra and Marc Anthony are taken to Rome to be brought up by their father's rival, Octavian and his sister, Octavia. Moran tells their story, through the eyes of Princess Selene, with all the politics and splendour of Ancient Rome.
From ten suggestions on Librarything for similar books I've already read only one, so plenty to be going on with there.
Bookseer provided a similar list with some titles from Librarything and a few different ones from Amazon, so even more to be going on with.
I liked the footnote, 'Of course, you could go ask your local bookshop or your local library'.

RSS revisited

At last I can do it! A very kind work colleague showed me how to edit the URL of the feed to subscribe to Bloglines and it worked. Now I should be able to help other people who are having trouble. I learned a valuable lesson with this - always read the instructions carefully, right to the end.

File converters

This was very easy to do! Google docs has a narrower page setup so the text was three lines instead of two. Was the font slightly smaller? Bold and italics the same. The table lines were lighter. The bullets changed from fancy to plain points.
Also uploaded the document from Google docs to Zoho docs. This time the page setup was the same, the bullets were plain and the lines of the table had disappeared.
So a few minor format changes when converting a file.
This will be very useful for helping our patrons.

Google specialist search engines

1.I searched Blinx and Youtube for 'Only fools and horses'. Youtube had 1,790 results including multiple entries of the same videos; random layout of entries was rather confusing. Blinx, however, had a very clear page showing a list of all the episodes within each series, more like an organised catalogue, which I found easier to use.

2.Under magazines in Google book search, I chose 'Organic gardening' and entered 'zucchini' ( no entries under courgettes ). The result was page after page of the magazine with the word 'zucchini' highlighted where it appeared. This was very clunky having to scroll down looking for a word, instead of being led straight to relevant articles.
I then chose 'Yoga journal' and searched for 'sun salutation'. Initial results were more appealing - a large thumbnail of the page with the search term highlighted and the page number to click on taking you straight to the article.

The magazine searh could be useful for patrons wanting to recall a certain article from a magazine, so long as it was one of the titles listed and there aren't very many at this stage.

I've had a look at Google, Yahoo, Bing and Exalead, also Dogpile and Metasearch - information overload! I didn't realise how huge and extensive Google is with so many options for extending a search. Wonder wheel is great, offering related ideas and topics for information.
I searched all the search engines for the meaning of the phrase 'Gone for a Burton'. They all came up with plenty of hits, also unrelated stuff including someone's blog with that title. Google had a satisfying explanation from Wikianswers, which said -
Gone for a Burton comes from "Going for a Beer". During the Second World War it was used in black humour when someone died in battle. Usually the RAF.
They had not died or had gone missing, they had only slipped out for a Beer. Burton's being one of the biggest Breweries and Brands of Beer at that time.
My next search was 'Growing courgettes in NZ'- a vast difference between the search engines in the number of results: Exalead 197, Bing 545, Yahoo 5020 and Google a whopping 32,400!
At present Google would have to be my first port of call for information because of familiarity and the wealth of information. It was interesting to try out the others though and to know there are other options available.
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Other ways of keeping up-to-date

I set up several Google Alerts: Colosseum, Lake Rotoehu, and Growing vegetables in NZ. My inbox wasn't too overloaded, so I didn't need to filter them. Personally, I wouldn't use alerts and will delete these ones later, but for those people who must have the latest up-to-the-minute information, alerts would be great. While searching for New Book Releases for another alert, I found Kawerau Public Library's website and was quite impressed with it. Every 10-14 days they publish a list of New Book Releases covering not only fiction, but also non-fiction, CDs and DVDs, and children's. Conveniently this is a word document which can be printed off for patrons to take home. A useful suggestion for our website perhaps?

Gentle water, Lake Rotoehu

Labour Weekend 182, originally uploaded by Karen Orr Photographer.

RSS feeds

Exercise 1: I searched for archaeology in Access Science, and successfully bookmarked my chosen article. Scrolling down I chose and saved an image. When I went back into MyAccessScience both my search and image were saved. Knowing how to do this will be very useful.
Exercise 2: I did the same search in Proquest and set up the alert linked to my gmail account. However I was again stumped by the RSS feed process. All went well until trying to add the URL of the feed to my Bloglines account, where the message popped up saying ' no feeds were found, please verify that the website publishes an RSS feed.' Well I know it does because I just copied it! This keeps happening every time so no luck and very frustrating.

library tweet

Baffled by 'No item requestable, request denied' when requesting books online? Please contact us - we can reserve it for you :)

twitter and libraries

Firstly I looked at Upper Hutt Libraries' website, which has a link to its twitter page.They are mainly promoting upcoming library events such as the summer reading programme, public information evening, 'Tea and tales' etc. Also info about latest novels by various authors, storytime and a link to the new titles list on the website. Interesting page but a bit flat compared to Vancouver Public Library, which has a more informal, friendly twitter page. They have more interaction with library patrons as well, answering questions about the catalogue, about renewing overdue books online and even giving a patron directions to the local community centre.
Libraries using twitter can get information out to their patrons and receive feedback very quickly. To quote from Vancouver Public Library " The best thing about being a twittering library? Seeing our followers share their day-to-day experiences of/at the library."

searching twitter

On Twitter Search I looked up Glenfield and found several personal entries along with quite a few real estate ads for the area - also mentions from other Glenfields in the world. The most recent entry was posted 14 hours ago so if that's real time , our Glenfield people have better things to do than tweet!
For the third party search I looked up Glenfield in Chirp City. This site is nicely set out - on the left-hand side tweets from Glenfield and on the right-hand side, tweets about Glenfield, which were the same as results as for Twitter Search.
I also tried looking up library on Twitter Search and Tweep Search, which also searches the bio information of Twitter profiles. Great for finding people of similar interests.

twitter: an introduction

I went to Nicky Pellegrino's twitter page which reads like a diary of her thoughts for the day, is quite humorous and not at all self-serving.
The other page I looked at was cookbook via twitter which I thought was great. Very clever how they have abbreviated their recipes to fit into the 140 characters limit. I enjoyed trying to translate them back into normal language.
Grabaseat and Fitness motivation are purely for promotion of their product, no opinions.
The whole twitter concept is like glorified texting. I'm personally not interested in reading tweets of people I don't know and there is a lot of inane stuff out there. The kids aren't into it, saying it's just like your status on Facebook, which is their preferred networking site.

Colosseum, Ancient Rome

Colosseum, Ancient Rome, originally uploaded by **Anik Messier - trying to catch up!**.

A wonderful photo - one day I hope to see it for myself.

creative commons

The image I chose may be shared under the condition of attribution; it may not be used for commercial purposes and may not be altered, transformed or built upon.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/spiri/2461818066/
The condition of the license for this Web programme are the same with the added permission to adapt the work.

open id

Yes, I would use my Google account for other sites, but not sensitive ones such as online banking. It makes sense to try and simplify login details, but it does mean that your open id provider has access to all the sites you visit, which could be misused by marketers. It's all a bit confusing...

online privacy and security

This information is useful to pass on to patrons concerned about their own and their children's safety on the internet. I must admit to being lazy and apathetic about regularly changing my own logins and passwords. The McAfee site has very good advice about online security for families which is handy to know about. It's all common sense but how often do we read the website private policies and statements before submitting personal information? I know I feel uneasy about Facebook where the kids share both useful and trivial information with their friends. Having read about the dangers of Facebook quizzes, I'm even more put off - your personal information is not as private as you think.

new adventure

It's going to be interesting learning more about this Web 2.0. I hope we're not too pushed for time to complete the exercises this time round.