Facebook

Facebook, I have never signed up and I can’t imagine that I ever will but from a work point of view I can see the potential.  I looked at the ACU library page and the National Library page and I can its potential for the promotion of collections, I particularly liked the picture of the Queensland fire fighters from 1972 who saved their pub.

I think that it would be a great tool for special events and if your library had any special collections.  A nice example of this was the pictures on the State Library page from the John Oxley Library collection of the 120 anniversary of the destruction of the Victoria Bridge in the 1893 flood.  Overall I feel that Facebook is a tool worthwhile embracing for any library.

Tablets and mobile apps

For me personally tablets are not going to affect my work too much.  I have never had a smartphone so I cannot comment on them.  As a library assistant my use of mobile devices is limited to handing out IPads at the loans desk, I do realise however that the Librarians use them a lot I know that for example they use their IPads to access tools like Prezi.

 

 I did pick 2 comments from the report that I thought were good indicators of the effect of Tablets in relation to education.  That was The University of Adelaide replacing textbooks with Apple IPads for first year students in its Science program and Penn State Universities developing a mobile video app for video ethnographers to record and annotate video in the field.  This is a long way from how things were done when I was in school and reflects the flexibility of today’s technology and the expanding access to resources.

Productivity Tool

The first tool that I looked at is Dropbox, reading through the getting started pdf and the help pages I can see how this would be useful.  However I cannot figure out how to sync my Ipad and my work computer, I am obviously missing something but I just don’t have the time to figure it out right now, maybe later.

The second tool I looked at was Doodle, it is interesting the things that are available now.  Although I probably might not use Doodle it is a great idea especially if you are in a large organisation.