This next session of Blue 2.0 involves three activities. There are only two I will address in this particular post. The third is something I'm not really looking forward to doing and really have no idea if I can do it. But I'll save that for another time.
Today, I'm addressing Activity 1 and 3 of the Week 7 & 8 activites. Activity 1 is to create a photo page. Chris and I already have one of these. We use Picassa, mostly because I already have a google account and it's just easier to keep everything under one account rather than creating more accounts on more websites. I've used flickr to look at other people's photos and I personally find it very unfriendly, from at least the standpoint of looking at photos, not necessarily downloading, etc. When we started with Picassa we just had to download something to our computer, which we did at home. Chris actually handled it and he said it was very cool. Once the program was loaded it found all the pictures already on the computer and moved them into files. From there we just had to arrange everything how we wanted it and choose what to actually show to the public and what to keep private. Currently we have pictures from the wedding, our honeymoon, Halloween, my niece's 2nd birthday, and our first Chirstmas together. I also like that I can link to other people's Picassa accounts, have a map indicating locations of my pictures, and I can get alerts when someone I know adds or changes pictures on their Picassa account. It's also very easy to navigate using the links at the top. You can get in and out of albums easily and back to your own album quickly from anyone else's album. This is the complaints I have about Flickr, no easy navigation functions that I can tell.
Check out our Picassa site here. As for uses in the library, I guess I can see this as a way to display pictures of the various libraries or areas of the libraries. I'm not sure I see too many uses for it that would help patrons, except maybe as a visual aid. I can see someone checking out what the library looks like when they aren't here. But if they are in the library and looking for a particular area, aren't most people going to be looking at signage, not sitting down at a computer to find pictures? It may be a way to store pictures for use in tutorials. Otherwise it seems like more of a fun thing rather than a practical application.
The third activity is to look at YouTube and search the terms "libraries." Once we do this and find a video we like we are to comment about it. So I did the search and ran into some music library videos. I found one really cute one called DePauw Music Library: Move in a Minute. They apparently had to move their library collection (looks like within the same building) and they filmed the process. The cute part is that they did it with cute music in the style of the silent movie days with everything kind of fast-forwarded and the black screens occasionally with text to let you know what's happening. Also, the black screens even have the wavy, old look to them. Even though the film itself is in color, it still has that "older," less-refined, early movie days look. It's very cute! Check out the link to view the short film.
You Tube is great for a lot of things. I was pointed to a series of You Tube videos yesterday created by some seminarians for use in marriage-prep courses in Catholic Churches. They were all very cute and humorous, 6 short spots in all. They are done in the style of the PC vs. Mac commercials that I'm sure we've all seen on TV. Only the topic this time was Contraception vs. NFP. Chris and I watched them last night and had a great laugh.
I can see a lot of good uses for You Tube or other video sites (another one I know of is www.lovetobecatholic.com). I can see using video to record BI sessions and have them available for students who are working independently. You could have a whole series on searching various databases, basic and advanced videos, what librarians do (ALL librarians), and more. This would be a great medium for promoting librarianship!
Next is podcasting, which I have absolutely no desire to do! I'll see about posting something about this later, if at all.
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