Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Off to a start!!

I've spent my first night trying out LibraryH3lp, and I'm very excited! I was able to create 2 users, a queue, an AIM gateway (although I'm not sure how to make that work yet) AND use the LibraryH3lp webchat feature to have a practice chat with myself:



My main problem is that my "30 minutes" easily turned into 45-50. I'm glad I waited until I finished other work, and I think that will have to be my M.O. until this becomes an "official" project.

Monday, March 30, 2009

New attempt...learning 2.0 technologies!

Well, I am going to try blogging once more, as I've come up with a way that it might possibly be useful in my work life. I'm currently working as an evening librarian at a medium-sized state university, and like everyone else, we are facing budget cuts. Our website and electronic access in general could use some updating, and the only way I think that can realistically happen is using open source/2.0 technologies.

I am NOT a techie, and I am not good at learning new technologies on my own. However, I think I need to get a basic working knowledge with many of these technologies before I present them to the rest of the library staff as ideas for our use. I'm therefore going to try to spend a short amount of time each evening trying to learn some of the 2.0 tools that I think we can use and both chronicle my attempts and ask for help here. I've already gotten some ideas from friends using Facebook and Twitter on how to better use Twitter, so we'll see where I can go from there.

My first two priorities will be Twitter, which seems to be in use all over library circles and non-library circles, and LibraryH3lp, a virtual reference open source software for libraries.

I'll try to update every few days on how my experimentation with these tools is going.