Week Five: Final Post

Wow! I can't believe I finished the discovery exercises in week 2 already. It was fun... I wish there were more... I particularly enjoyed "go animates", "bookjetty" and "geni". Some exercises like "animoto" and "go animates" took a bit of time to figure out. But after a bit of trial and error, I finally did it!!! "Animoto" took a long time to load which was a little bit annoying. One thing I didn't really like was "Authors on the web" and "Litlovers". Because I couldn't find any one of my favourite authors like "Sue Grafton". "Litlovers" was more for people who wanted to start a bookclub. I loved "bookjetty". It was pretty fun finding books and adding them onto the shelf. I think "bookjetty" would be something useful for customers because they always say that they can't remember whether they have read a book or not. This would help them keep track of what books they have read.

I like to thank the team who created these wonderful discovery exercises (and they are very quick at replying on your blog!). It has been enjoyable completing the exercises and reading the encouraging comments!!

Week Five: Social networks (part 1)

I visited two interesting websites. One was "Digg" and the other was "Reddit". On Digg, I registered first and then in the search engine, I typed in the words "library" to see if there were any interesting stories about libaries. I found this interesting article and lots of beautiful photos of old libaries all over the world. I particular liked the Strahov Theological Hall and the Strahov Philosophical Hall. I love the artwork on the ceilings and the wooden books look so grand with ladders attached to it. I think it would be pretty fun to have high bookshelves with ladders in Auckland City Libraries. The second story I find in "Reddit". It's about a library hotel situated in Madison Avenue, New York. There's about 6000 volumes in the hotel and the floors are organized by dewey decimal system. Each room is themed accordingly. For example, there is a philsophy room where you can read up on philsophy books, or political science room and there's even a "erotic literature" room.

Here are the links to the stories:

http://curiousexpeditions.org/2007/09/a_librophiliacs_love_letter_1.html

http://www.martiniboys.com/262-Library-Hotel-NYC-hotel.html

Week Four: Go Animate (part 2)

Even though I am not a creative person, this exercise is fun!!! Animoto seems a little bit boring compared to Go Animate. First, I registered on "Go Animate", then I started to create an animation. It took time to work out how to animate the characters and also making them smaller or bigger. It was pretty difficult to make the characters run away. Sometimes, I accidentally deleted a scene. When I pressed undo, it took a long time to load. The only annoying thing was that I couldn't make the characters do two actions at once and some characters had only a limited number of actions to choose from. I would recommend this website to kids during school holidays when they are bored and want to do some cartoon animation.

GoAnimate.com: The nightmare before Christmas


Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Week Four: Animoto (Part 1)

I visited the Animoto site and tried making a 30 second clip. It took a long time for the pages to load probably because the internet connection in the library was slow. It is very similar to using powerpoint. The difference is that you can play music throughout the slideshow. It would be much easier if I had more than 30 seconds to do the clip because a lot of my pictures got cut off.
I think it would be nice if we could put similar slideshows on how to renew books online, reserve books online, advertise what events we have going on in Auckland City Libraries, as well as Click and Learn classes.

Week Three: Bookjetty (Part 3)

Cataloguing books is fun! Even though I was only supposed to do 5 books, I ended up doing 22! It's a great way to keep track of books you want to read, books you have already read and books you have lost interest in. Here's the link:

http://www.bookjetty.com/people/casie25/books

Overall, I really like Litlovers and Bookjetty. In future, I would recommend Litlovers to people who want to look up information on novels or start a bookclub. I would also recommend Bookjetty if they want to keep track of what they have read. Although Authors on the Web didn't have the authors I wanted to look up, there were websites and blogs where you could find popular authors.

Week Three: Authors on the Web (Part 2)

I visited Authors on the Web and Author Yellow Pages. Just a little bit disappointed though. I could not find any of my favourite authors in both websites. Maybe because most of them are deceased. I was expecting to find a website on Sue Grafton but didn't find any. However in Authors on the Web, under "featured websites", I find a link to "Writers House" and they had a list of award winning authors and their books which was quite interesting so here's the link:

http://writershouse.com/content/winners.asp

Because these authors have won awards, I guess they are bound to be good-reads so I will reserve these books later in the day.

Week Three: Litlovers (part 1)

Litlovers had a big list of books including classics and modern day novels. I chose "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen. There was a brief summary of the novel as well as a detailed biography of the author. There was also commentary on the book and I gained some new insight of the book and learnt some facts from reading it. For example, throughout the story, the point of view was not in Elizabeth but someone close to her who can take us into Lizzie's inner thoughts.
Besides these resources, Litlovers also had many questions that could be used for discussion at a book club such as "Was Charlotte Lucas right to marry Reverend Collins?" The answer is a yes or no because Charlotte was 27 years old which many people would consider as an "old maid" back in those days. If she did not marry him, then there might not be another chance. Even though she was marrying the "stupidest man in England", in return she got a comfortable home and steady income (Just ignore this if you have not read Pride and Prejudice). Overall, I find the site very useful as giving tips on how to hold a book club, recipes for food and drinks and lots of useful ideas.

Week Two: Genealogy

Creating a family tree was fun!!! First, I registered at my heritage which was quite easy. It was quite easy to follow the instructions to making a family tree. After I created the family tree, I thought I would save the image and paste it onto my blog but it didn't work. I spent a lot of time trying to find where I could embed my image. I gave up and decided to try another website. I registered at geni. At first I thought I was already registered but I didn't know that I had to log in to gmail to activate my registration so that took a bit of figuring out. I created a family tree. I clicked on the "tree" tab and then I clicked on embed my family tree. Geni was much more easier to use than my heritage.

Test post

Hi there,

This is the first time I am writing in a blog so I am pretty excited!!!

Licence to Play 2.0 Week One

Hi, there

Actually it was pretty straight forward creating a blogger account. I find no problems registering because I already got a gmail account. The only difficult part was finding a username for my blog. I learned how to save the draft and go to "edit post" to go back to it later.
Now that I know how to use a blog, I can write in the blogs in the Auckland City Libraries website and interact with customers.