#Optional final

Oscar thinks he's successfully added a Rollyo search. This could be useful to eliminate search results containing rubbish.
So, that's it, folks. Oscar thinks he's completed the program, and learnt a surprising amount about the online world.

#17 web 2.0

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 The add-on for Firefox search was nifty (if currently out of date), as was the RSS feed, but Oscar found this link quite touching for personal reasons.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

#13 take 2

Oscar thought he wouldn't find anything exciting and useful in the webiverse, but struck it lucky today.
Oscar needed to recommend a citation/referencing tool and discovered that there's an add-on to Mozilla firefox called ZOTERO that has the potential to be very smart indeed. Although it can't do all the things it claims (like recognise SLV or LibrariesAustralia catalogues), it is a nifty way of saving sites while browsing and then downloading the info in citation or bibliography format in a Word document.
Oscar's current grouch ( re #15) is that YouTube clips loaded from igoogle take so long to load. Oscar is a bit concerned that his PC may be self-destructing. Even Hotmail takes a while to load.
#16 as Oscar doesn't have an iPod (yet, but there's hope!), podcasts aren't a lot of use, but he's downloaded a few in the past. His Lemon-shaped podcatcher seems to have disappeared - must get it back sometime.

#13 General Rant about Techie Stuff

As instructed, Oscar will now devote 150 words to this topic.
With regard to changing technology, the most useful techie thing that Oscar uses in his daily work is the scan/email facility. First, we had snail mail, so Oscar would post photocopies to customers (Oscar remembers first using a photocopier at High School. The copier had 2 sheets of paper and was a 3 step process. But I digress). Then we had the fax machine, so responses were much quicker, but still in print form. Now scanned pages from newspapers, etc can be emailed across the world in a few minutes. There's still a problem in producing a reasonably legible scan from microfilm, but at least the technology is a lot faster.
Oscar also likes igoogle, even though it can sometimes take a while to load, and crashes. It makes keeping up with Library websites a lot easier. Oscar's added a rain radar map and current temperature widget as well. And the way the colours change during the day is really pretty!
Oscar would LIKE to use Facebook, but his Nearest and Dearest have banned him from opening an account, on the grounds that there's stuff on THEIR Facebook accounts that could incriminate them. They know that Oscar isn't as cool as he pretends he is.
Have I got to 150 words yet?

#12 Online word processors, etc

Oscar has known about these lovely applications for a while now, since the Writely days. Patrons of the Modest Workplace are referred to these an an alternative to proprietary software from the Seattle-based company. The latest upgrade of Zoho wiki seems to have eliminated the need to compose documents in Zoho writer first, and even the latest version of Hotmail has some editing options.
Oscar particularly likes uploading in Google docs. It'[s not really complicated, but some of our customers find it so.
Can't please everyone in this grouchy world.

#11 Flickr

Oscar has managed to caption his picture using the Flickr toy Captioner. Very smart! Oscar is also tidying up some of his previous posts after inspecting the incredibly talented blogs from some of his colleagues.
Once again, Oscar is humbled

#5 LibraryThing and Technorati

While Oscar found Technorati to be difficult to load on his version of Firefox, LibraryThing may prove to be a very good friend indeed!
There's a couple of novels Oscar read in the past (borrowed from a good library, naturally), and the titles completely escaped Oscar's tiny brain (a senior moment?). However, by trawling through tags Oscar had a 100% success rate - very impressive! In case anyone's interested, the titles were "Body and soul" by Frank Conroy, and "A soldier of the Great war", by Mark Helprin. Maybe Oscar's brain can be outsourced, like today's Library Link
Oscar's also added a libraryThing comment for the book featured in episode 1 of "The Librarians" - "What colour are your knickers?" by Sam Lloyd. Children's story time should always be fun!