First post for LIS757

A little bit about myself:

My name is Simona Dinu and I am a part-time student in the MLIS program (my 4th semester now, planning to graduate in December 2007). In addition to taking 2 courses per semester I also work full-time as a supervisor at the Courtneypark Branch Library in Mississauga. I am very luck to have had the opportunity of working in libraries since I started doing the 40 hours of community service during highschool. I fell in love with the library (as I always like to say it) and ditched a promising accounting career (well, I'm not sure how promising it would have ended up). Right now, I work at the newest and largest library branch in Missisauga and I am basically responsible for a variety of duties, anywhere from supervising staff to preparing payroll, from being in charge of circulation to providing reference, from doing preschool programs to participating in organizing a systemwide staff conference. My days busy, rewarding,challenging, fun and I would never want to move out of the public library world....well, not for a while anyway....

My experience with social software started last October when as part of the committee responsible for organizing the annual staff conference in Mississauga, I was put in charge of the most innovative session ever, one about emerging technologies in libraries. All this, with the help of 5 very talented and knowledgeable part-time staff. That's how I learned about blogs, wikis, RSS, del.icio.us and even others such palm pilots and ipods. After this learning experience which took until May (conference time), I started exploring on my own: I created by own blog, but only finished it tonight. I set-up a del.icio.us account for myself (I have not really used it much, but will use it more now) and also one for our library in order to organize favourite sites (this project has been successful and we continue to build on it). I created a Library Thing account and added a few titles I read recently, just to try it out. I set-up a Pageflakes account (an RSS feed aggregator) which I have not used much, but at least I have it ready for this course. I also became more aware of wikis and of the different kinds of wikis (I always thought there's only wikipedia) and I think I have a better understanding of when it is appropriate to use them.
In addition to this I had the opportunity of listening to Stephen Abram talk about Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 at OLA this year and at our Mississauga Conference.

Overall, I hope this course will give me an opportunity not only to explore these technologies in more detail, but to also look carefully at the practical applications they may have to libraries. They all look great when you try them out, we just have to know when to make the best use of them and how to go about selling these mew ideas to others.

Looking forward to interesting virtual discussions....