Monday 31 May 2010

Web 2.0 - 1, Librarian - 0

The previous post took 2 hours to do. Writing it was fine, but the addition of an image presented a challenge. Firstly, finding an image was difficult. I don't have banks of images available to me at the touch of a button, all copyright-free. I started with Flickr, but their images - even those freely available - for some reason just wouldn't load successfully. I thought "no problem, I'll save the image to my computer and upload it from there," but found that when I did this, I was unable to actually save the image at all. (When you right-click on the image you want, and select "view image", it shows you what you end up saving - a tiny blank box.)

In the end I went with one from last year's holiday in Washington, of the outside of the Library of Congress. The one I wanted was of the library of the Monastery of San Francisco in Lima, Peru, which was meant to represent where I feel I am currently in relation to web 2.0. Now I feel a photo of the Great Library of Alexandria would be a better choice!

EDIT: After some more exploring, I was able to discover a way to put an image in the background of the blog. The image has to be available online, so you either need to upload one elsewhere or use a freely available one. I got this one from Wikimedia Commons, and I think I'm okay to use it as long as I cite the author (Jpoeta) and say that they do not endorse me or my use of this work.

EDIT 07/06/10: Even more exploring, and I found a way to customise the little image that sits in the top left hand corner of the tab when I visit my blog. It's called a Favicon, and the post I used to help me customise it was here.

Librarian vs web 2.0 : who will win?


This is me working on thing 3, part of the 23 Things.

I am what was for a while labelled "Generation X"; I began using the internet at school, and I'm often looked upon as the go-to person when something technological goes wrong in the library where I work. Despite that, I'm not all that comfortable with many of the web 2.0 tools and features. I also find it extremely hard to visualise how they can work in a professional setting (that's having seen them at work in a professional setting too!).

So for me, 23 Things is a chance to make the jump from web 2.0 for fun to web 2.0 for work. I'm hoping that some of the things will be something I can use to improve my workplace's presence on the web and increase accessibility of the library for its users.

Final Thoughts

Made it! So, in the end, what do I think? Image by Ralf Kunze from Pixabay I did this as a way of trying to stay connected with my l...