Week 11: Which of the tools covered so far seems the most useful to libraries?

My top 3 votes go to:

• blogs (users can contribute and comment);
• RSS feeds - show our users how to set up feeds for the resources they use for their study and research, and implement RSS feeds for library resources and services; and
• social bookmarking and tagging.

I like the concept of making it easy to share and use images. Not everyone learns easily from text, some people are visual learners. But does it have to be Flickr or a similar site? Could we design our own?

Facebook - not sure - I could see a Facebook-type application being used for online reference services, but do we need yet another such service at this stage? I do feel Facebook is more personal than Psi, but then we're using Psi and associated authentication for valid reasons.

Second Life - yes, I think there is scope to use Second Life for services and teaching - as I've described in this post.

But we have to consider also how many different services we can support. I feel very strongly that there'll always be a lot of users who want old-fashioned face-to-face services, and we need to maintain these. There's no point in offering a vast array of services if we can't support them all and do them well - there's no point in promising what we can't deliver.