You Tube in the Library

Like a lot of folks in this online CE, I'm a little behind with assignments. I won't bore anyone of the maybe 2 people actually reading my posts with the reasons why, but I think it's safe to say I'll never make it as a blogger in real life. Anyway, I've gone through the reading and listening/watching exercises on podcasts and YouTube. I had trouble with slow service on Odeo, so I'm not sure if I ever actually signed on to that account. I did poke around on some of the other suggested sites, PodcastAlley and the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library podcasts of medical history - really interesting. However, of the YouTube videos I saw, it was naturally the silly ones that I liked best - like this one:



I find I like the playful nature of YouTube. Even the YouTube videos describing Web 2.0 in this class are concerned about "keeping it light" which is an appropriate concern for library instruction as well. After all, the subject matter of most bibliographic instruction sessions can be downright deadly for most people. I do think that there is a place for serious instruction about the library using YouTube - as long as we don't get too serious! Maybe a short video on evaluating consumer health information online with Jon Stewart - it could happen!

Web Office Tools

It's funny - in this assignment for the MLA Web 2.0 CE, I've discovered, as I have in several other assignments, that I've been using 2.0 tools for a while now in my work and I just didn't realize it! I've been using Google Docs - at the initial prompting of my techie boss, Gabe Rios - to create collaborative documents for my consumer health information service advisory board as well as distance collaboration among colleagues on an article. What I was totally unaware of, however, was Zoho - that looks like an extremely cool resource!

Is this The Future of All Software Products? Danged if I'm willing to forecast about anything in the area of technology, although it does seem more efficient to use Google Docs and Calendars and what not than sending a gazillion emails back and forth. There are drawbacks I've run across, however, including the resistance of some collaborators to creating a Google account in order to access the documents or calendar or whatever. After all, we all have to register for so many online accounts these days, it's hard to even remember what we have out there. Maybe Zoho could make it so you don't have to register to use it...

BTW, if you're interested in seeing a Powerpoint presentation I made available on Google Docs to promote my consumer health service (which is an NLM MedlinePlus/Go Local partnership) you can view it here .

Social bookmarking

While I've had a del.icio.us account for a while now - well, okay at least a couple weeks - I hadn't really given much thought to the social aspects of it, or the fact that I could use it for "research" purposes beyond basic reference. I knew it could solve the problem of being able to access my carefully gathered bookmarks from places other than my work desktop, but I hadn't really taken a look at others' tagged links much or thought about my links being useful to others. Could it be useful for research? The CiteULike is interesting, although I didn't see many citations that were reviewed, and it didn't seem much worth it to bother with CiteULike, when other databases covered much more than what seemed available there. Still, I just finished writing an article with colleagues both local and across country. We set up a Google Docs page to draft the piece, and I can think of a couple instances in that experience where posting links to highly relevant journal articles and websites might have been very useful to each other in the process. And of course, del.icio.us can come in very handy in the day-to-day reference interaction. One of the sites I tagged in del.icio.us a while back was OR-Live: Online Surgical and Healthcare Video and Webcasts which was also tagged by over 260 others. I could definitely see creating a del.icio.us account for particular user communities, such as consumer health, public health, medical education, etc.

I'll have to revisit CiteULike again before I make up my mind about it.