Thursday 12 July 2012

In the Cloud

For Week Four I chose to look at the "In the cloud amongst the crowd" module.  I must say I was nodding my head in agreement when one of the people in the video explaining The Cloud said, "I don't care what's up there, as long as it works", but it was interesting to learn the basics of how it works.  And also to realise that I'd actually been participating without really knowing it, through applications like Gmail and Picasa Web Albums.
After reading about Google Calendars I got excited about trying to sync Outlook, but unfortunately the work computers are not compatible.  So I will have to hold off experiencing this until we get an upgrade.  When I worked through the cpd23Things course we also had a look at Google Calendars, and at that stage I entered in birthdays.  It is really helpful receiving the email reminder that a birthday is coming up. 
Putting in the weather forecast was another setting I activated, just because I could. 
Here at Dunedin Public we will be moving from Symphony E-library to Enterprise 4.2 at some stage, and I am looking forward to working with this discovery tool.  Being able to search across our catalogue and electronic resources will make our resources much more accessible to our customers.
I enjoyed having a look at the various formats discovery software takes.  The ones that excited me the most were those, like Nelson's, that show that the community has taken ownership, by adding reviews and ratings.  User tagging is an interesting concept, offering as it does an added dimension over and above the cataloguer's work with subject headings.
As far as Library Thing is concerned, I am not keen on signing up for the sake of signing up, and listing the books I own on-line is just not me, so I just had a look around the site.  I particularly liked the way it provides recommendations.  Library Thing is certainly a powerful reader's advisory tool, and I will be promoting it to staff and customers alike as such.

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