Library Transformers!
I had a wonderful time yesterday at the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Library System’s Staff Day, where I gave a little talk about some emerging technologies for librarians, largely based on the class I teach here at OU. They were a great audience (with lots of SLIS alums, as I was happy to find out!) but as usual I had far more material to share than was reasonable, and much was missed! I promised to provide a list of the “ten tools” with their URLs from my slides, so here they are:
Amaya (open-source web authoring program)
Audacity (open-source sound editor)
Diigo (social bookmarking tool used by class)
DocStoc (wannabe YouTube for professional documents)
GIMP (open-source photo editing)
Lite-C (simple language for 3D game design)
Portable Apps (free software carrier)
WikiScanner (identification of organizational sources for Wikipedia edits)
And here are the two blog posts that pretty much sum up why “this stuff” is so important:
“20 Reasons Learning Emerging Technologies is Part of Every Librarian’s Job” (from the Librarians Matter blog)
“Under the Hood of Web 2.0″ (from The Other Librarian blog)
Special thanks to my 5433 class for providing almost all of these goodies, to Kellie of last year’s class for inviting me, and to Josh of this year’s class for being such a good sport in the session!
I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your presentation at our staff day. It was the highlight of my day–I’m amazed to see all the interesting new things I’ve been missing, and your sense of humor cracked me up. Thank you also for posting these resources you mentioned on your blog. I’m planning on trying some that I was unfamiliar with.
All in all, the experience made we want to enroll in SOME kind of class. I never thought I would miss being in school, but after 11 years of post-MLIS work, your talk made me miss it! Thanks for stimulating some dormant brain cells.
Appreciatively,
Karen Bays
Edmond Library, Metropolitan Library System, OK
My pleasure entirely!