LibraryThing

I'm not entirely sure what the value of LibraryThing is for libraries although it's obviously something that individuals can get a lot of pleasure and use from. It seems to duplicate some of the information that's available elsewhere, e.g. Amazon already provides reviews of books from individual readers and there is probably only a limited number of such reviews anyone would want to read. Likewise the information about authors and the books themselves is readily available elsewhere. I can't quite see what exactly LibraryThing has to offer libraries, although enthusiasts will no doubt disagree.

Delicious

Having looked at the Judge Institute and Philosophy libraries' Delicious pages, I can see the potential Delicious has. A number of our students are part-time and attend short courses which do not entitle them to a Raven password. We maintain something called '24hr Library' on our webpage, which gives such students access to freely available resources, and using Delicious would extend the range of resources we can direct students towards. In our regular newsletters we flag up useful websites but do not at the moment maintain a list of these - Delicious would allow us to do this in a more systematic and accessible way. And of course it wouldn't just benefit the part-time students without Raven passwords, other students and academic staff would find it useful too.

Slideshare

Not a lot to say about Slideshare. I've had a look at the links on the Heriot-Watt webpage and some of the presentations they have posted look quite useful. At this Faculty we already post the specially tailored presentations for different groups of students on, for example, online research skills, on their individual CamTools sites, although I suppose something more general could be made available via the main Library website. In terms of PowerPoint presentations, it's good to be able to revisit them ,but if you didn't attend the original presentation, some of the information on the slides can seem very cryptic. As with all things, it's important to be selective.

Flickr

Flickr is the first of the 23 Things that I have positively enjoyed. It's easy to browse and as my special interest is children's literature, I decided to look at children's book illustration. There are some beautiful images here - the one above is from a collection of images called Golden Legacy: Original Art From 65 Years of Golden Books and posted by spike55151. This was an exhibition mounted by the National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature presenting a public showing of original illustrations from the American picturebook series, Little Golden Books, which was launched in 1942. Master's students in the Faculty of Education studying children's literature might well find it useful and interesting to be able to access a wide range of illustrations, although the bibliographic details of the books from which the illustrations come are often incomplete, if they are suppied at all, which would limit the usefulness of the images.

I can see that more generally that images from Flickr could be used in all sorts of ways to make library guides, handouts, posters etc. more appealing and attractive. People might even read them then...