Click if you love animals

One of my favourite animal rescue groups that I support (and have persoally visited) is Full Moon Farm. This sanctuary offers shelter and care to wolf-dog crosses. These beautiful animals have been abused or abandoned and would have been put down if not for the hard work and dedication of Nancy Brown who owns and runs this rescue shelter.

The Animal Rescue website at http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=3 is currently running a contest to benefit animal shelters. Click on "Click here to give" (each link provides a bowl of food for an animal in a shelter) then go down to the bottom of the "Thank you" screen to the Animal Rescue Site Shelter Challenge. Click in that box then please cast your vote for Full Moon Farm, Black Mountain NC, USA.

To find out more about Full Moon Farm, go to the link on my blog under Favourite Web Sites.

The woofers and I thank you!

Run over on the Information Highway

So here I am, better late than never, blogging away on a beautiful Sunday.

Talk about information overload! First, I created a bloglines account. Very easy. Next, I needed to decide what blogs to add. Okay, let's begin with adding blogs from various people in our web course. Great! That saves me the time of clicking on each blog to see what people are doing. Or, have I simply shifted WHERE I click? A least I can see at a glance if there have been any current updates so that saves me the time spent in needless clicking only to find that there has been no change since the last time I looked at someone's blog. Like all of you who have subscribed to my blog and are wondering where the heck I've been and why haven't I completed this week's assignment. Ah well, life intervenes; it's been an incredibly busy week.

Next step...check out all of those tools. Yvonne was right - topixnet is too much info with too little Canadian content. Feedster seemed to have a download problem on my home computer vis a vis taking too much time so like a child with a short attention span I gave up and clicked elsewhere. With regards to Syndic8 I hated the interface - very poorly designed in terms of graphics, organization, and use of space. The bloglines search tool was great and opened up a whole new realm of information tracking. So much information and so little time to digest it all...

Feeling overwhelmed with the Information Highway, I am now going to clear my head by travelling down a different kind of highway; this time on my Harley.

Putting RSS feeds on online catalogues would be great for library patrons to track new additions to our collections.

And for anyone who is concerned with copyright laws in Canada, please check out Michael Geist's blog. Great insight as well as a great activist, especially in the area of DRM (Digital Rights Management).

It still feels like I'm being overloaded with information. At least now, its nicely organized...

Copyright, Comments and Links Questions

Hey fellow bloggers, here are some questions that I am pondering:

• Copyright - What must we consider with regards to copyright law now that so much is so easily accessible to so many? In my previous blog entry, I had fun adding a caption to a picture featuring Captain Jack Sparrow. What are the copyright issues around using a picture like this either on a library web site or as part of a library blog?

• Comments - Our blog sites allow us to post comments to each others' blogs. Is there a way to invite and moderate comments posted to library blogs? Hoping there is a way to invite public participation without creating a venue for the general public to post questionable content on library blogs through the use of comment field.

• Permissions - What is the etiquette regarding including links on your blog? In my earlier blog entry, I included a link to the Region of Waterloo Library web site as an example of how libraries use geotagging with photos. Should links to other sites be included only after obtaining permission to link?

Please feel free to comment!

Geotagging with Flickr

Check out the ability to combine Flickr with geotagging! You can combine your photos on Flickr with a map. This allows you to pinpoint to others exactly where the photo was taken.

Try the following link: http://www.flickr.com/groups/virtualmountainrange/pool/map?mode=group

If you enlarge the pink dots located on the map of North Carolina, you should be able to see three photos I snapped on my summer vacation in June. This map is currently being used by an environmental protection group that is concerned about the destruction of mountain ranges for coal mining. By asking advocates to post their mountain photos and pinpoint where those photos were taken, EarthJustice is hoping to raise awareness in their campaign against removal of entire mountain tops during mining in the United States.

Libraries use this to pinpoint the locations of their branches with maps and photos (see http://www.rwl.library.on.ca/). Add Letters was fun to use (check out Capt Jack Sparrow at the bottom of my blog).

Wow! My first Blog!

This is very cool! Everyone is doing it; friends are doing it with other friends, family members, even complete strangers...so here goes my first foray into the exciting social world of blogging.

Rather like keeping a diary for the whole world to see, blogs are a great way to share comments, thoughts, adventures, or whatever with people you don't even know. Can I be political? Can I be subversive (librarians are known for being subversive according to recent comments made at Kempenfelt), can I be challenging, controversial, funny, thought-provoking? All of the above!

The really exciting aspect is that just by including a topic (such as Save the Wolves), people that I don't even know can tag that word and find my blog. Being an environmental activist, I can see the potential for sharing ideas at the grassroots level - sort of a cyberspace-public forum.

As a librarian, I am curious to know how popular blogs are on library websites. Does anyone have any stats on this?

While not yet on Facebook or MySpace, I have used Flickr. It's a great way to share family photos and comments.

Let the fun begin!
Sheryl