Week 9

#22 NetLibrary

I was under the impression that the books in the Netlibrary are mostly technical. I created a Netlibrary account and searched for eboooks on knitting. I was very surprised to find the ebook- Teach yourself visually knitting by Sharon Turner. This books starts with a very basic introduction to knitting, about different yarns, symbols, needles, accessories and basic techniques. The pictures in the book are clear and I guess it would be a very useful resource for a beginner. I then looked for books on crocheting and found one in the same series - Teach yourself visually crocheting. I added these 2 books into the favourites. I also found books on photoshop, Excel and other computer programs.

I think ebooks will be a good option for someone who wouldn't mind reading from a computer screen. The font of the books that I looked at were big and in Adobe we have the choice to zoom the page for easy reading.But cannot read it in bed!!!

It was interesting to read the BBC news item on Kindle. It says that with Kindle we can read books without a pc. The content arrives wireless (no idea how that works!) According to Amazon it takes less than minute to download a book to the Kindle. There will be lots of technologies and inventions that will come up in the near future to make it easier for people to access and read ebooks. It will be fascinating to see how things shape up in the future.


#21Podcasts

Podcasts are non musical audios or videos distributed over the Internet taking advantage of RSS technology. I had heard about podcasts, but had never tried to find out what they were. I used podcast.net and yahoo podcasts to find podcasts on book reviews and author talks. My search brought up different sorts of podcasts, and both directories were easy to use. I added the RSS feed to Diana Gabaldon author talk to my Bloglines account.
www.randomhouse.com/audio/podcasts/diana_gabaldon_rss.xml

It would be interesting to listen to old news broadcasts and author talks from the library websites.

#20 YouTube

The video that I added - Superlibrarian njlibraries is a great example of how libraries can promote themselves through Youtube. In this age of technology printed materials are not enough to get people, especially the youngsters into the public libraries.

I typed in the search word 'librarian' without expecting to find much.But I found lots of librarian related videos like the ninja librarian, librarian as a vampire, librarian who lays down the rules, angry librarian etc. which was a surprise. Librarians are everywhere!