Online Communities

During my undergraduate years, I was introduced to online communities for the first time.  This was odd to many of my friends in college, but I did not find the need to join MySpace or Facebook even as a high school student.  When I arrived to college, I found that Facebook would help me stay in contact with my high school friends.  Once I joined Facebook, I joined several different groups to help me stay in contact with certain groups of people.  This included the education honor society, music honor society, drama club, and a high school group.  Later as I began working, it was required that I also join the group for our educational program and the Library of Congress.  Facebook has served me well over the years with keeping in contact with people and groups.  One of the sites mentioned above were not that great because they were not kept up to date causing it to be not useful for the members.  While in college, I was also asked to join a Yahoo Group for the music society which also did not work for the group because it was not kept up to date.  After trying the Yahoo Group, we decided to try a Wiki instead because we could share more items and we could keep it up to date more.  I was the one that created the group but it has been monitored by the current members who still use if to share specific items.  Lastly, I joined Second Life and Twitter when I came to San Jose State University as part of my classroom assignments.  I have not used these much, but have found that I do like Twitter because I can follow several of my friends, educational items, and celebrities.  Twitter has allowed me to stay more informed of what is going on in the same way that Facebook has.  The one other online community that I have knowledge about but have not created an account for is Flickr.  I have accessed Flickr for my work with the Library of Congress.  I may one day set up an account, but have not found the need.  Overall, I find that online communities are very important because they allow people the opportunity to stay connected and collaborate on certain things.  

Week 13: Training video

           For my training video, I looked at the Pekin Public Library’s page on YouTube.  On this page, I was able to find many videos which included story time, guest speakers, and instructional videos.  I decided to view a video called “Ebooks on the iPad app” located at http://youtu.be/CTvVfjhGpc8.  This video discussed the use of Overdrive Media Console app to access and read library books.  The librarian started the instruction on how to download the Overdrive Media Console app and ended with how read the book on the iPad.  She was very detailed in her instruction so that all patrons would understand how to use the iPad for ebooks.  The librarian also included the library’s phone number so that if any patron or viewer had any questions about the how to access ebooks on the iPad then they could call for further assistance.   

            Even though the librarian was very detailed in her instruction, the video in itself was not of great quality.  I could not actually read the iPad screen that she was sharing which made it difficult to see all of her step by step instructions.  This could have been easily fixed with some focusing of the camera or some editing software.  Another issue that I had with the video was the glare and random red dot.  Both of these can distract the viewer from the instructions. 

            Overall, I found that the library instructional video served its purpose of informing patrons of how to access ebooks with the use of an app.  I would suggest that in the future they took some time to edit the videos or had an assist video tapping so that the librarian can focus on teaching patrons the task only.  

Tagging

4.  What are some of the weaknesses of tagging for making content more findable? 

            I believe that the biggest weakness of tagging is the lack of structure or consistence especially with folksonomy tagging.  This type of tagging is based on what a specific person finds to be the most relevant term or terms to describe an item.  Since tagging through folksonomy is based on what a person thinks and not on a standardized system like taxonomies it can be harder to find an item of interest.  This means that to find specific content or an item a person searching would need to know the exact term(s) that one used while tagging their items.  Overall, tagging is not as reliable of a way to finding content as some people would think.

            Even though tagging is not as reliable as one may want, it is still a great tool to have because it does allow people to find some of the relevant information that they are looking to access.  One may not find every relevant item that they are looking for but they will have located some items that may help them learn more about a subject.  Thus, I believe that tagging is useful, but could be improved to help one find more of the content that they are looking for.