Ever wonder what a proto-librarian looks like?

reading
Originally uploaded by eilir

This is me at age 13 or 14. I was always an avid reader (especially of fantasy), but I never really considered being a librarian until I'd graduated from college, gone through a divorce, and realised I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. Back when this picture was taken, I wanted to be an optometrist. I'd probably make a lot more money, but I love what I do now, too.

This week we're working on photo sharing, using services like flickr.com.

There are some great things about using a photo sharing site. One, you don't have to have your own server or pay someone to host. A lot of free websites won't let you host pictures in your space due to bandwidth issues, for example. This way, you get to populate your blogs, websites, and other pages with pictures easily.

You can also share a picture easily among friends, family, co-workers, etc. So, you can post that picture you took at the conference, put it on your website, and tell people all about it. You can tag (creating a folksonomy) and organise photos as well to find them easier. And you can comment on other people's pictures. :)

I can see flickr as especially great for small libraries that may not have banks of servers at their disposal. It's also good for networking with colleagues and putting a face onto the library for patrons, humanising it if you will.

That's all I can think of right now, but I'm sure there are lots of other uses out there. I need to read some of my colleagues' blogs and get their ideas.

Look-y what I can do! (with Google Docs)

I also have my resume and a spreadsheet for tracking my weight and blood glucose up and working.

One nice thing, too, is that Google Docs isn't blocked by my organisation (actually so far I've only found that YouTube, MySpace, and presumably Facebook are). I'm not allowed to blog at work (long story), hence why I am behind on blogging, but Blogger itself isn't blocked.

As to our assignment, the question is whether or not this is the future of all software products? I'm not sure about that, but it sure may be for products that would benefit from collaboration, because basically there's no need for multiple copies of the software if it's hosted online, it's portable, and presumably not too difficult to use.

It took me a little while to get to where I could insert rows into my spreadsheet and get some of the formatting, etc., but it didn't take more than a few minutes to get the gist of it. There was a little lag when I uploaded my spreadsheet, but it had several worksheets. The graphics didn't translate up from Excel, but it was easy to create new ones in Google Docs (I actually prefer theirs).

For any sort of shared project, I think this is an excellent way to go.

PS Since I use Gmail, Google Reader, and now Google Docs, I threw in the Calendar as well. It's fun. I've already printed out sheets for the roleplaying game I play in and have added dates for moon phases and pagan holidays. Yay!

And now I'm caught up! Double yay!

I am behind in class

Not so much in doing the actual homework, but in blogging about it. So you'll see a flurry of posts as I catch up.

Topic for this post? Social bookmarking...

So I signed up for del.icio.us. I really like making portable bookmarks. The only drawback I see is that you can't always use the downloaded browser buttongs in a workplace, networked system where nothing can be downloaded without administrator privileges, but at least you can still type in the address as you find things.

I'm curious about folksonomies and how people tag--and how it can interact with actual library catalogues. I like the feature too that shows how many people bookmarked a site. I'm surprised only 12 have marked our class wiki, for example. :)

I can definitely see it as useful as a custom bibliography/research suggestion sheet that libraries can put up on various topics, too.