Oscar is pleased to discover that the International Children’s Digital Library has the option of searching the collection by cover colour, in Oscar's case, green. But the New Zealanders have certainly beat us here - the only Australian books I can see are Blinky Bill and Dot and the Kangaroo.
WorldCat's also a bit 'beta' at the moment. Why don't they have a list of member libraries? At least Zotero recognises books on this site as books. Maybe it's just an OCLC thing?
NLA's Library Labs in another beta concept that could be useful but seems to have died in the last year. Some of the links from current news items to collection items are truly bizarre - eg "New PM to sign Kyoto" was linked to a picture of the 1975 dismissal(let's hope Kevin Rudd doesn't share Gough's fate), and another item about the former PM of Pakistan was linked to a biography of John Howard. The add-on for Firefox search was nifty (if currently out of date), as was the RSS feed, but Oscar found this link quite touching for personal reasons.
#18
Oscar was surprised that he did discover some new and potentially useful tools in this program, such as wikis, LibraryThing and Zotero. Oscar learnt to take careful note of passwords and logins. Libraries need to be aware of how users and potential users find information, so we can help them locate what they need in our collections. However, Oscar's a bit concerned that the online world is replacing the real world, and technological obsolescence will make historical research almost impossible (such as the approaching demise of the hardback book, or attempting to load and search CDATA 91).
Not everything can be found using Google!
Oscar will now go and play with Rollyo
Oscar
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A modest workplace
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3 comments:
Congratulations on completing the program. It certainly will be interesting in years to come to try to research history. I wonder if John Howard's YouTube will still be there??
Lynette
Congrats too Oscar in completing Learning 2.0 and for your thoughtful observations along the way.
A program such as this can broaden our horizons as to what information is available through the internet and technology, but also appreciate the limitations.
A touch of cynicism never goes astray. I'm not one of those people who thinks the virtual world will replace the real world, and for research purposes I reckon the genuine uses of the web are yet to be discovered.
Sure, right now we have a few cool tools, but to be honest they aren't a great leap from what was supposedly Web 1.0 (with the exception of some smart search algorithms). Fun? Yep. More widespread in application? Absolutely. Handy? Sure - for citations, for example.
Amazingly mind-bogglingly different to the way we used to do our thesis research in the days of pencils and cards? No.
I find those little sticky page marking tab things more useful than a whole lot of web tools in my historical research.
Lots of Web 2.0 publishing tools aren't much different in USEFULNESS as the good old ninemsn or Yahoo communities of eight or ten years ago. Search engines work better, but on the other hand there's more crap to search through.
We don't yet have the kind of earth-shattering web leap of the magnitude of the introduction of word processing or email, for example. But it will come.
And when it does, we'll need to be ready and willing to engage.
As indeed we are.
Congratulations on reaching the end of the Things.
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