Week 4 Photo Sharing

Flickr is a very good online photo management and sharing application. Although I do not feel comfortable to put my photos on Internet for everybody to see, I opened a Flickr account to share photos with my close friends and family members.

We may upload, title, describe, tag, and organize library photos on Flickr to advertise our services, such as a virtual tour of library facility, a collection of photos showing the history of the Library, a gallery of our special collection items, etc.

Week 3: RSS

I have heard about RSS for quite a while, but did not know how it works. Thanks to Pollak-Library-10-Thing training program, I have a better understanding now. RSS is cool. This web feature allows you to get current updates from your favorite sites without having to click through each site.

I only briefly dipped my toes into RSS, but I have a feeling that RSS feeds can be integrated into the library’s web content to provide value added library services. Patrons can view new content from multiple web sites in a single interface. For example, we might be able to offer RSS feeds of new articles on a specific topic from many journals, or new search result in many library databases.

Web/Library 2.0

I believe Web/Library 2.0 applications will facilitate communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. But the dark-side of this revolution is the reduced barriers for people to access high-risk, potentially dangerous material. And I don’t think two-way online communication can completely replace human and social interaction. That’s why online education is not as successful as expected – although it is definitely the wave of the future.