Technology: not so bad after all

As we come to the end of the semester I would like to in an un-organized quasi-list fashion go through what I have learned about emerging computer web technologies and I do think that this class was a real help to me. I now feel MUCH more comfortable in this ever changing environment and more than that, I am interested to continue to improve my knowledge in these areas and stay up with new advancements. Its kind of like now that I am aware all this is going on, I have to keep up. So lets see what I can list that have learned about or used this semester that I either had not attempted before or did not realize the value and possible library related applications of:

Of course Wikis, Blogging, Technocrati, Del.icio.us, widgets, flash, rss aggregators, Process maps, page organization, bubbleshare, tutorials, pod casting, photo share, music share, webcasts, page design, usability testing, PMBOK, API (still a little confused here), and how could I leave out bligits.

When I signed up for this class I did not know what to expect, but I was frustrated that there was all this buzz about web 2.0 applications and the term was just as elusive as it was frustrating. Now I still feel it is a bit elusive, but that does not frustrate me any more and I readily accept the fact that new technology will always be emerging and there will always be something new and exciting to learn. I think this will make me a better librarian and I can tell it already has.
Thanks to my classmates for all the neat things you shared in class and thanks to Dr. Ball for taking the plunge with all this technology and helping us all along.

Web Reserach: a collaborative solution

As team members located in separate offices, we had a challenge of conducting a large amount of research on the web and did not have the luxury of time to be duplicating each other's work. At first we tried to set up work stations in the central office and designate time in the afternoons to come over and work on the project; but this proved infeasible because of the workloads of team members. Secondly, we tried having the project manager send out a document with designated areas for team members to work on, and team members would send the updates to the project manager at the end of the day. Although this solution seemed fine at the outset, it proved to be terribly inefficient. Why? Even with predesignated areas of the document to work on, team members were duplicating each other's work left and right. The problem was that the web pages being researched had bits and pieces of information that pertained to several different sections of the document. As a result, the same link was being saved multiple times in the master document and this was creating an organizational problem. After experiencing these issues for several days, one of the team members suggested looking into trying out collaborative link sharing on the web to update the links. The project manager was open to trying this out and the team got together and mapped out the tagging conventions and organizational structure of how the links would be listed and the site was subscribed to. As team members began adding tagged links in and got used to working with the software, the benefits of using this program for our particular tasks was immediately evident. As long as team members were on the same page with tagging conventions and categorization, it worked great. If a team member came across a link that was relevant to the project, they would proceed by initiating the tagging process. If the page had already been tagged, the team member could see this immediately. The team member would then review the tags and place a tag for the particular information piece that was important to their section on the master document and update the page. This helped move the project on more quickly and efficiently and the project manager liked the fact that she could update from anywhere, including while travelling or sitting at home on the couch!

Web research: a collaborative dilemma

The past few weeks we have been working on a particular project which has required myself and a few other team members from separate offices working on separate servers to conduct research on the web. For the purpose of the job we have also been asked to save the the links to relevant pages that we find and place those links in a categorized document. Well, we began to talk about how we were going to update this document with each team member working from different offices and off of different servers. Some of the questions being asked by team members were: How would we divide up the work? How would we keep from duplicating looking for information that had already been linked in. How could we keep up with the progress of the different team members with out asking for regular e-mail updates. We threw around the idea of having IT set up a few extra work stations at the central office so team members could come over in the afternoons to work on the project. We actually tried this for a few days, but it just proved to be to difficult. The schedules and workloads of team members did not make it easy to just pick up in the afternoons and leave your work environment for a different office where you could not monitor e-mail or be available for the countless last minute tasks that arise in the profession. We then looked at having the project manager e-mail out the research document and each person would work on their designated part of the document from their office and e-mail their updates to the project manager at the end of the day. At the onset of this strategy, it looked like e-mailing updated documents to the project manager would work okay, but as it turned out the nature of the research made this method terribly inefficient and although we were assigned different sections of the document to work on we were still duplicating each others work left and right.... To find out why we were duplicating each others work what we decided to do, tune in to the next post.