Oh what joy!

As I was listening  to "Beauty and the Beast" on LibriVox, I was thinking about how useful it would be if I could play this in the car for my daughter...we have some old cassettes with stories on that she loves. Then, the realisaiton that if we had an  iPhone or iPod, we could. And of course ... we could access all types of music for her to listen to..  Wow.. And of course .. how wonderful to have this capability for people and library clients who are hearing impaired. And they wouldn't be limited to home computers or library computers if they had a roaming device.

Though I found the quality of the recordings and the skills of the person reading the book varied, it was still a great resource.

Using Google Books

Have always meant to explore this site. It is not immediatly apparent how to search for fully digitised books. Found the option in Advanced Search by ticking the "Full View Only". A search for the subject dentistry showed only 8 books. Could not see any information on how they decide on their subjects. Of course the results only show full text of non copyright books. It will be interesting to see, if Google win the right to sell copyright books, how the service will change . It will become far more valuable if this happens.

I found it useful  to be able to preview books that are under copyright, and which gives you an idea if you want to actually buy the book.  You can do this in Amazon but not sure if you can do this to the same extent. Another useful feature is being able to export bibliographic details into EndNote.

LibraryThing and things

It was fun entering details of books I have read into this. Must tell my husband about this site as he used to keep a note (a long time ago when he had more time and before children), of all the books he read and classify them into different categories. A librarian in the making!! Not sure why he did this at the time.

Anyway this site is potentially very useful if you are interested in a certain genre and would like an idea of what to read next. Can be interesting reading other peoples take on a book you have read, and I think that i would use this site for that purpose.  I don't think I will use it to record details of my collection (such as it is!).

Locating News Feeds

Dipped into a few of the sites suggested in Task 9 such as Technorati and Topix and found them a little confusing. The advertising was confusing and I found it hard to navigate around the sites. Unless I am missing something they seem to contain mainly social and news sites. I searched Topix for blogs under the Education category and could only find two subcategories.

Lots of interesting items in Digg.com. Very addictive and could spend alot of time (wasted or not, whatever your point of view!), reading them.

RSS Feeds etc

This is a great tool. I can see the value for home and work use. I currently subscribe to a number of groups through Google and the emails currently get sent to my home email address. It can be time consuming to go through them all. This is a far better way of viewing websites and the information that you are interested in.

I have subscribed to a number of Library related sites and it is a very useful tool to keep up to date with developements.  I can also see how it could be applied to a Library work setting, to update staff on changes in procedure and general info etc After I subscibed to my first RSS Feed I found it easy to do subsequent ones. It would be easy to get carried away, which I think I have done. I can see how I can delete RSS feeds that I am no longer interested in, that I have subscribed to, but I can't work out how to delete old posts that I have read, and that I no longer want displayed.
Can anyone help?