Problems librarians may face with blogs and Web 2.0

Web 2.0 holds many possibilities for libraries to put information and publicity online.
This possibility relies on their manager/employer to put in place the ability to do so.
Some employers may think maintaining a blog or webpresence is too time consuming and not worth the trouble. They may think core business is all they have time for, given the few already busy staff they have.
This is not true.

Many libraries already produce library newsletters, fliers and media releases in order to promote their monthly activities. Cutting and pasting that already written content into a blog will really take very little extra time and yet have the potential to reach a much wider client audience, even reaching people who have not come into the library recently. These customers can subscribe to the blog and get regular updates on free workshops, reviews of new books, author visits,  booktalks and children's activities that they can attend, boosting numbers and so making them more successful. This is turn justifies the funds spent in organising these events in the hope someone will attend.

Short speeches, films and photos can be posted that promote collections and local history information that the library holds. A local cemetry tour could become a slideshow that can be downloaded to an Iphone and used as a virtual guided tour by someone walking through the cemetry. Someone overseas researching family history can find a keyword indicating that there is a photo of their ancestor's grave included in that tour, and be able to make a virtual visit to the grave.

Libraries are all about reaching a wider audience with knowledge.
Trove has made a start with putting old newspapers online, and the response has been very enthusiastic.
The ability for readers to correct the text they see on screen or put a comment with more information under a photo is very interactive and builds on the knowledge presented without costing the site extra money.

What is the use of having valuable old records and photos locked away where few can access them?
Digitisation projects get these same items out on the web and being accessed, as well as providing a copy that cannot be ruined by fingers. A poster for a display takes time to produce and is taken down after a short time, but a poster and photos scanned and uploaded to the internet makes a display available worldwide for a long long time.

Other blocks to using Web 2.0 functions include library web filters that stop even the librarian accessing them; the inability to place widgets eg. for delicious on the top browser bar; and not having backroom or offdesk time to perform these tasks. Managers may see publicity as the job of a personal assistant and not see the need to produce a more attractive professional-looking product that librarians with layout or Indesign skills could supply. If other Council departments produce branded well-marketed fliers, then simple old style library fliers may start to look second rate. Public library computers need to have access to programs such as Adobe and Flash for customers to access interactive functions such as movies or online forms on sites. These require an IT department that is able to keep these updated and working. The library may need to buy a digital camera or scanner or send staff to training, but in the long run there is not a lot of extra money or time involved in getting an exciting web presence. The greatest obstacle is the permission to do so.

Trove and family history searching

Losing a loved one is an impetus to go poring over and sorting through old family photos. 

Researching family history can be done in a number of online sites these days, such as ancestry.com and cyndislist.com.

I am no expert on this sort of research, and so was pleasantly surprised to find the National Library Trove search page http://trove.nla.gov.au

which allowed me to access photos that have been stored by the John Oxley library and newspaper accounts of family members going back to the 1870s from the Sydney Morning Herald and the Brisbane Courier Mail.

The ability to edit and correct the newspaper transcript as we read the scanned pages is a great interactive tool to allow users to help with the digitisation project, as is the ability to leave comments and information about the photos I had ties to. This is a great way to add to the store of knowledge being presented. I sincerely hope that regional papers such as the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin, a full archive already held on microfilm, may come to be added in to this resource. What a boon for researchers to have it all online!

So if you have done any family research and have old photos of pioneering days, consider sending copies to the John Oxley Library in Brisbane to have them added to this resource. Booklets, diaries, letters, photos and the like are encouraged for their insight into our history.

The State Library of Queensland's John Oxley Library, opened in 1934 and now in its 75th year, is responsible for collecting, managing and providing access to material which documents Queensland's history, development and cultural life.

The John Oxley Library collects widely, assisted by the State Library’s legal deposit role whereby publishers and others are required to deposit a copy of their works with the library. It also acquires the works of Queensland authors.

The collection falls into the following broad categories and access points:

• Manuscripts Queensland, providing online access to the library’s extensive collection of manuscript and archival material as well as works of art relating to Queensland.
• Picture Queensland, providing access to those images from the pictorial collection that have been digitised for on line access. In addition to these online pictorial resources the remainder of the library’s pictorial resources are available on site at the John Oxley Library.
• Published materials, accessible through the State Library’s One Search. This collection includes books, serials and newspapers. Significant printed collections include Rare Books and Ephemera.
• Maps collection, with particular strengths in historic, land exploration, pastoral and commercial or real estate maps.

Back to the National Library and Trove.

Trove describes itself as "a new discovery experience focused on Australia and Australians. It supplements what search engines provide with reliable information from Australia's memory institutions.

If you are researching in the fields of the social sciences, literature, local or family history, or need inspiration for your school assignment, then this is the tool for you.

Trove was designed to:

• provide a single point of access to the resources of the deep web
• facilitate access to a significantly greater range of resources from major sources, including selected digitised material freely available online
• support searching of, and access to, full-text content
• enhance ease of discovery by providing improved relevance ranking, refinement by facets, FRBR-like grouping of related items (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) and exploitation of thesauri
• engage with communities and individuals through annotation services
• ensure that relevant information is not missed in a search by reducing the need to search material-specific discovery services separately
• provide a platform for niche services to query a vast resource of Australian metadata and adapt if for their own needs.

For example if researching images relating to Edmund Barton, our first Prime Minister, results will include descriptions such as people, book, manuscript, map and newspaper articles. A researcher searching for information on Nellie Melba will be presented with a range of results including biographies, pictures, music, newspapers, books etc."

Well worth a look.

Peter Stephenson newspaper illustrator and artist

This is my Father's obituary in the Courier Mail. Sadly, he died on the 14th January 2010.

Artists view life with careful eyes and imagination. They frame life and present it to our eyes. My father loved the Australian landscape, horses and birds, and these are well reflected in his art. Some artists never become famous in the eyes of the world, and few readers would have noticed the signature under his many illustrations in the Courier Mail, but they were the work of a talented artist. His work in the Art Room of the Courier Mail enabled him to support us as a family.
Given time, I may be able to assemble some of them from newspaper microfilm archives. The scanned images I assembled as a Powerpoint for his 80th birthday party can be found at slideshare and below.
As a family we hope to compile a booklet of his life and art.

He left his family paintings, poetry, jazz cds and an illustrated story of his childhood. Most of all he left us an inherited creative streak, a love of playfulness and nonsense, many rambling conversations on all sorts of topics, and a lot of quiet love.
Googling his name I find there are two Australian artists named Peter Stephenson, but to my mind Dad is the original and the best.

Sliding in just in time with last testdrive

Videos online: well I knew about youtube pretty quickly from having teenagers, and my favourite video from youtube is a morphing video which features the faces of lovely women in art.
And of course a lot of the short training videos for this course came from youtube. The commoncraft videos were very simple but effective.

Given a video camera, library staff could also record simple instructional videos or tours of our libraries and services. Longer multimedia presentations could be uploaded to slideshow. Now to wish for a camera and time to do these things.
Our local history cemetry tour which was so popular could become in time a webbased tour that anyone could do from their internet or use Iphone for commentary while actually walking the cemetry.

google there's more

So now I've covered google applications which help with language translation, perhaps this will come in handy with clients at the library or to add greetings in other languages in my online store.
Then I created a personal i-google homepage with daily updates of my favourite topics and a themed leunig banner.

I added a staff meeting to my google calendar and sent a reminder email to myself at work. We could remind clients with their permission of course by sending them emails about events they have booked into, so that they don't forget to come along.
So far we use software to send a reminder email when their books are nearly due back, but as this is part of the Sirsi software, it is easier to administer.

I've located an online copy of Dante's Inferno for my son through google books. And reminded him where his nearest library is to borrow a copy.

I've made a tourists and residents places to see and go google map of Rockhampton. I think the map is already here embedded in an earlier post, but on revisiting the map I found some details needed updating so I've added and deleted some details.

zazzle shirts cards aprons and other fun gifts

make custom gifts at Zazzle

Kavanagh's Queensland

I'm just home from a literary lunch featuring Courier Mail journalist Lawrie Kavanagh.As my dad Peter Stephenson also worked for the Courier Mail in the art room starting in the 50s,they would have crossed paths there for some years. Interesting too that they both were born in Rockhampton. So I bought dad "Outback", Lawrie's Book which has illustrations by Hugh Sawrey in the same quick messy illustrator style that my dad used to do to go with articles in the Courier Mail all those years ago before computers and photographs came to dominate newspapers.

In those days being a press artist involved illustrations, some in color but most in ink line drawing, touch up work for photos and maps, and page layout - gluing the articles in place on a paper page not on a computer - before it was sent to the setup room for the presses.
Dad has fond memories of the Courier Mail, and it was nice to meet one of the men he talked a lot about.

For anyone else who remembers' "Kavanagh's Queensland" columns, he also has been persuaded to start up a blog for his memories and musings