Research of a Medical Librarian

What an interesting set of tools are available to us through Social Networking. This was an introductory class yet I felt I learned a lot. There is certainly more available than I’ll use either professionally or personally. At the same time, I’ve already starting adding some of the skills I hadn’t used before

I’ve been happy with del.isci.ous. I like the online bookmarking more than I would have guessed and have set up quite a few new tags with more to come. My biggest problem is that I accidentally imported all my bookmarks from my work computer so now I have hundreds of imported, not tagged entries. I’m slowly going through and cleaning those up.

I now have accounts in Facebook and LinkedIn. I don’t use the professional one much, yet, but am connecting with friends and family through Facebook. I don’t know if I’ll ever make a pod cast or web cast - those are potentials that will suddenly fit a bill in the future. I finally had to try to import a YouTube video, though, and was glad. Now I have the Interval Library at a place I can easily tell other people about.

Probably my major problem with any of the classes with the the online documents. I really like what I’ve been able to do in Google Docs. Yet I can’t seem to share any of my work. I see a good possibility with those here at work for someone else, but only if I can figure out the sharing problems I’ve had.

Now I can let all these tools settle in my head for a while. I know that the best thing I can do is not concentrate on them for a while. That’s when my brain will start working in the background and I’ll have more “aha” moments. I may find these tools invaluable then.

Thank you to the Medical Library Association (MLA) for sponsoring this online class. Thank you, too, to all the different people who took time to put together the sessions and make them interesting. This was a group effort that worked well.

Our final Social Networking Web 2.0 class is about mashups. This is one of those terms I’ve heard and vaguely understood, just hadn’t investigated.

Mashups are another tool that I don’t think I’ll be using any time soon, especially for work. What I may do is explore them further for my personal web site. One of the mashups mentioned was to match books to locations using Google Maps and ISBNs. That would be a fun addition to a book review web site. It’s not something I would consider attempting for a couple months. Then if that works, it may suggest possible applications for work. For now, I don’t see any.

In the meantime, I checked out some different mashups for our classwork. I had a lot of fun at Star Viewer. My love of science fiction and outer space shows up in that choice. I was finding the maps and movies fascinating and had to remind myself that I’m at work so couldn’t spend a couple hours checking out the different stars, galaxies, nebulae, etc. That is a good combination of maps, tags, and movies.

While searching librarians’ blogs on privacy issues, I came across this blog that’s about a year old at the Shifted Librarian’s site. The more I look at the Web 2.0 social networking tools, the more I think about privacy issues.

She talks about the different perceptions between the generations for privacy on the net and in life in general. I’m part of that older generation that still wants privacy. More than once I’ve been upset when I found personal information at unexpected places. I like to think my personal blog is anonymous enough to keep from being directly connected to me unless I tell someone who I am. Imagine how unhappy I was to discover how easy it is to discover who owns domains.

Privacy on the Web is pretty much an illusion, at least at my level of expertise. I’m not the paranoid person who either doesn’t use the net or electronic signature at all (my fiction kicks in - see The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks) or who encrypts everything I do about 20 different ways.

Instead I maintain the (illusory?) hope that I’m not interesting enough for people to investigate.