Thing 9 addition

23Things at VCCS
Originally uploaded by stevesgal91

Here is the photo I was trying to add into my Thing 9 posting but I could not figure out my password to Flickr.

Thing 21: Mashups.

Looking through the various mashups were interesting, esp. the ones related to books. I like one that gave you a list of book sales going on in libraries close to you. But the one I really liked, since I am a huge history buff, was conflicthistory.com. It starts with a google map of the globe and a timeline. You can pick a geographic area and a span of years, and it will give you all the various conflicts in that area arranged chronologically. If you want to know more about a specific conflict, you can click on the letter 'i' in the corner which brings you to the beginning of a Wikipedian article. You can read just what is given and that usually is enough but if you want to know more, there is a link to the original wiki article you can follow. Naturally, as with all Wikipedia articles, you would not want to suggest this for use in a research paper but it would be useful to get an overview of what was going on in a certain time period in the various countries across the globe.

Thing 19: Multimedia

Even though I do admit to watching YouTube videos when people send me certain links, by and large, I usually think of it as a vast wasteland. But like anything else, I can see it does have its uses. A video promoting the services our library can provide might get the message across to students who ignore our pamphlet - plus it can show administrators what we actually do here.

I did look through a few YouTube videos that were done through academic libraries - I looked at one from the Berkely Campus of the University of California titled Building Academic Library 2.0 which addresses many of the topics we have learned about through this project.


I picked the YouTube video (from the Central Rappahannock Regional Library) that I included here because it shows the effects of budget cuts on libraries in a humorous but effective manner. It is a tad long, but if you watch it all the way through, I think you will definitely empathize with a library staff that is still trying to meet its demands by the patrons while going through budget cuts ( I esp. liked it when the front desk computer used to check out patrons was suddenly replaced by an abacus).

Thing 20: Tagging and Social Bookmarking

I can definitely see the advantages of tagging and social bookmarking for both students and library staff. It would be handy to have a social bookmarking site compiled by our library that we could suggest to students as an easy way to have all the databases and other websites handy for them to access. Our library webpage has too many layers to navigate through so students often do not realize what they have available. I liked the other bookmarks compiled by the VCCS library because it had other types of materials students often need but do not know where to look, such as the City and Building Index and the Photo Archive. The bookmarks for copyright and fair use would also be useful to instructors. I also like the idea of being able to comment on the bookmarks chosen. Sometimes other people will know of other websites that offer the same information and they could comment directly on that bookmark so others can see it.