Delicious

I was extremely sceptical about Delicious, when I started exploring it.  How different was it to bookmarks and links that you put on your library page?  Initially I thought it wasn't that user friendly in its searching ability and wasn't keen on the layout.  However I did like being able to access websites easily.

After viewing the Green Library Delicious page at Stanford University, I also had different views to LibrarianGoddess and couldn't understand her excitement about it; this was initially due to the security warning message, because clicking on yes brought up the page to the right. Here you were unable to click on the tags or search bookmarks, so I was completely confused....

....that is until manic clicking produced a tag cloud (pictured left), which I couldn't return to, after choosing one of the options! From then on my views changed.  The Green Library Delicious tag cloud, is user friendly, if a little overwhelming, with all the words.  I liked the visual searching aspect, which allowed for easy access to information.

As LibrarianGoddess says, the main advantage of Delicious, is being able to access bookmarks anywhere, which is especially useful if you need to login to the library or university website first to see the library links and have forgotten your password or the web site is down! So I love this remote access aspect of retrieving useful websites, which a lot of students may struggle with, for many reasons.

In conclusion, I liked being able to search for bookmarks via keywords, sorry tags! and thought that once you had got used to how it worked, it was definitely better than searching google, as you could add new tags into your search to narrow down results.  If used through the library, it does allow you to have a certain control aspect over choosing suitable sites to bookmark, as well as providing a tag list to bundle similar sites together.

Calendar girl

I'm a Calendar Girl! No not one of the WI variety who pose naked for charity, although I do love sunflowers. More along the lines of the Neil Sedaka song, as to quote his lyrics "I love my calendar ..., each and every day of the year".

 

I'm a big fan of electronic calendars and find them extremely useful for organising my meetings and also for reminding me where I need to be at a particular time.  However why calendaring is seen as a Web 2.0 technology and included in 23 things I don't know.  I would have thought it was an essential piece of technology for one and all.

I have set up a Google Calendar for the purposes of Cam23 and thing 6, although I have to say will probably never use it.

This is because we use the Calendar provided with Mozilla Thunderbird in the library.  This allows us to all have our own personal calendars but also to have shared library and study room calendars. The advantage of this is we can see all appointments at one time, which is great for organising staff time and meetings.  The main disadvantage was not being able to view that from home or outside the library via a PWF machine.  Our "knight in shining armour" (aka our IT Manager) then entered stage left, giving us a useful answer.  Why not create a Library Wiki page which would allow access to both our own personal calendar and the library's calendar at once, along with providing a useful vehicle for other technological developments along the way.

Mozilla Thunderbird colour

coded calendar showing 

personal and library meetings

                        Wiki calendar can be accessed                          from home



I agree that a calendar on some websites can be extremely useful, providing information to students on opening times, events, training sessions, etc.  However this is something I may explorer in the Library Wiki, as we could also use that for storing library documents, guides and training handouts - a one stop shop for library information online.