#23 In Conclusion

The L 2.0 program was an interesting and worthwhile experience. Extra comments are contained in exercise 15. I hadn't blogged before and I must say that this is an easy way of keeping a public diary. However, I didn't like the way that posts are listed from bottom to top, rather than vice versa. It's hard to develop a story that way, since we are used to reading from top to bottom. I don't think most people could be bothered going back to the start, then working forwards.

If the exercises were done at work, a lot more time than expected was required. I think that most library staff members don't have a great deal of time to "play", so it would have saved a fair amount of time if all of the instructions were clear, accurate and concise.

As for the technologies, Flickr was a good way to share photos and search for photos through tags. Mashups can be a very useful combination of elements such as photos, maps and text. Trading cards are a fun type of on-line business card and could be used to liven up e-mails.

RSS feeds are very worthwhile and could be added to our library web site. There were many tools to find such feeds. As for Image Generators, the range was bewildering.

Library Thing was a favourite of mine and could be used for booklists, and book discussions on our web site. Rollyo is good for one-stop searches of favourite web sites. Delicious web site tags are very handy for organising and adding to favourites.

Technorati allows you to explore most aspects of blogs. Special purpose Wikis would be good for library project teams, book clubs and other discussion groups. However, it's a concern that non-experts can delete or alter Wikipedia entries, even in a non-matching style.

Zoho Writer didn't work for me. I'd rather use Word. However, there were some very professional Web 2.0 based tools. With YouTube, the reliabilty, quality and speed of the videos was very variable, but some were excellent. Similar clips would make interesting attachments to our website. However, these videos seem to attract many trivial or offensive comments.

I think Podcasts were a waste of time and had more problems than YouTube videos. On the other hand, on-line Audiobooks worked quickly and reliably and could be a worthwhile web-based addition to our collection.

Overall, I learnt a lot and will continue to use some of the above technologies. The program showed that the possibilites are almost endless, but you need particular purposes and enough time, to make the most of them.

#22 Audiobooks

Netlibrary and Overdrive appear to offer excellent subscription services to eAudioBooks. Access can be gained through a library web site, via a patron barcode and PIN. As well as playing the recordings, I think some patrons would be interested in downloading them to their own portable devices.

While World E Book Fair required username and password access (probably based on subscription)to most titles, it had some classic eAudioBooks free to air, from authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. Unlike podcasts, they played almost immediately, were very clear, and didn't break down every few seconds.

In addition, whilst listening to the stories, you could watch some very clever and almost hypnotic, on-screen graphics. If the cost was reasonable, and the demand was there (particularly from older patrons), compared to our hard copy talking books on cassette, CD and MP3, I think our library service would do well to subscribe to these products.