# 6 (Week 3) Authors on the Web

I don’t think that the site Authors on the Web would be a very good tool at all for readers advisory, as it appears to me to be a private business site, promoting its own work.

Yes it provides links to a lot of Authors websites, but they all appear to be clients of this company, therefore it is biased and likely to only be certain types of authors. There is no search function or classification, so I think it would be really unlikely I’ll ever use this site for Readers Advisory purposes.

I didn’t really like any of the sites, but if I had to chose one it would be Author Yellow Pages. I liked the fact you could search for authors and particularly that you could search for genre. Genre is my favourite way to find new books to read as I'm a bit of a crime buff.

# 5 (Week 3) Lit Lovers

I've always been interested in book clubs. I think they sound really interactive and enjoyable, but I've never even considered joining one. Lit Lovers really reinforced never joining one for me.
I thought Lit Lovers was okay as a base point, but didn’t have most of the books I’ve ever loved enough to wanted to talk about. It seems aimed at middle aged women, and fair enough, as I’m guessing they are the main book club members of the world.

I eventually chose ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ by Jonathan Safran Foer
I thought the collected information was very interesting, and I really enjoyed seeing the user attributed questions to stimulate book club discussion. They actually reminded my why I liked the book in the first place, so I think I’ll check it out again! This would be a great tool for people keen to start a book club, and if I ever find myself in a position where I'm asked to run one, I'm glad I found out about this site!

#4 (week 2) Genealogy

This week was quite interesting. I've always been vaguely interested in my family tree. My grandfather is adopted and took both his birth parents and adoptive parents names, which is where my surname comes from. It's nice being one of less than 10 in the whole world.

I think of the sites I looked at, I prefered My Heritage because I found it easier to use on the whole However Geni didn't try and help you every second of the way. I thought it was pretty easy to use as well.

I found it really interesting that my heritage asked for women's maiden names and Geni didn't. i think maiden names make more sense. However, My heritage assumed that if we have kids, they will have the surname Rivera (my partners last name) which is a bit much. (For the record, I will call them "Name Town-Treweek-Rivera").

I can't see myself recommending things like this to customers in my current job, but nonetheless, it's really good to know they are out there. A lot of geneologists come into this library, and it would be good for them to know they can keep track of all their research online with these tools.

Ooops. What I would like to learn

I didn't even do last week's exercise. I am teh sux.

I'm doing this course for a couple of reasons:

Firstly, I want to support my staff who are doing it.

Secondly, I'm hoping this will reignite some of the excitement I felt last time I did the Web 2.0 stuff. It really made me think about ways I could use the things I'd learnt in our working enviroment. We even started up a couple of things, like a Wiki and a Circ blog, but they fell by the wayside, mostly because the internet connection in the library is really slow.

Also, there are new things in this course, and I like learning new things. Keeps me up with the kids. Hey, maybe I can even journal this for my professional registration diary. I'll have to check.

Looking forward to doing next weeks stuff. I'll start doing it on Wednesday when I am back at work.

License to play - more on web 2.0 technologies

I am resurrecting my old blog in order to do the 5 week License to play - more on web 2.0 technologies course.

About 5 of us in Circ are doing it, so it should be rad.

:)

hello again

I totally forgot I had this blog, and then I found another one called the chair and it looked exactly like mine (well kinda) and I was all worried it was gone, but I found it again. phew.
all that web 2.0 training from work didn't go astray and that is great news.

I like this blog it's pretty. Got nothing much to say at this stage though. xxx