Communication, but not as we know it?

Google intends to launch a new groundbreaking communication application that is a mashup combining email, instant messaging and document maps plus image and video sharing all neatly integrated into the one interface. Google wave will offer conference style calls between multiple people. Furthermore the application requires no special software download or plug-in to operate and can be easily used from any computer or 3g phone.

I can see a number of exciting applications for this technology from the perspective of facilitating collaborative initiatives such as the NSW Reference Information Services Group. It may also prove to be a powerful tool for providing reference services. Who knows virtual book groups may be just around the corner.

Google Wave was developed by the Google team in Australia, good old Aussie ingenuity. For further details please refer to the Sydney Morning Herald article.

Government 2.0

Twenty Theses for Government 2.0, Cluetrain Style highlights some useful points to think about when considering web 2.0 applications. The risks of not acting can be higher than taking action.

Making the World's Knowledge Computable

Has anyone had a go at the latest search engine - WolframAlpha?

They have an ambitious goal - to make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. (more about WolframAlpha). It is no Google killer yet but it seems to do a pretty good job of questions that have an exact answer. Try a search for city sydney for instance and you get a map, coordinates, population, current time and temperature amongst other things.

Is this bringing us closer to the possibility of having a completely free, all digital reference collection?

Reference Excellence 2009 - welcome to the Ref-Ex wiki

The slides from my recent presentation at the Reference Seminar are also available on Slideshare (helpful, 'cause the accompanying notes are listed there as well).

Reference Excellence 2009

View more presentations from CatyJ.

Reference Excellence is an online training tool using a wiki as the delivery tool. The Ref-Ex project has been a long time coming (since 2004) but it's now finally up and running. Covering modules from introductory reference through to reference interview skills and legislation and policy the aim of Ref-Ex is to expand across all areas of reference and information services (readers advisory, local studies, and so on) providing core training for public library staff across NSW.
Take a look and start your own professional development today!

Reference Excellence

RSS 4 Libraries

Here is the presentation I recently gave at the Reference @ the Metcalfe Seminar about using RSS feeds in Libraries. It covered three areas - professional development, connecting with your community and syndicating content on your web site.

I tried to demystify RSS and show people that it's very easy to get started using this technology. It's a relatively simple, time saving tool non-techies.

RSS At Your Library

View more presentations from Martin.

RSS is only a starting point. As libraries start employing staff with a few more technical skills (programmers, developers, etc.) we can start taking advantage of all the data that's available and growing in the cloud. If you want to see a glimpse of this type of what this might look like have a look at Paul Hagon's slides from his talk at the seminar. He gave a fascinating talk about how he's combining the data from the National Library with the services and APIs available from online services like del.icio.us and Flickr to create exciting new ways for users to discover the NLA collections.