I think this self-publishing revolution is quite a significant change and that it may change the nature of publishing – where once people had to be approved by a publisher before anything could go ahead and be published, these days they can do it themselves. It levels out the playing field, making it more bottom-up rather than the traditional publishing model which is more top-down.

In this class we learnt how to use Flash. The worksheet was good for working through it step-by-step. I don’t think I quite understand it yet – my frog’s sound didn’t match when it jumped – but I had never been exposed to Flash or creating animations before, so I think it went ok. I liked the experience of experimenting with a tool I’ve never used before, and would like to give in another couple of tries to get a better understanding of how it works.

1. Young, Sherman 2008, Beyond the flickering screen: re-situating e-books, MC Journal, vol. 11, no. 4,  viewed 15 October 2008.

Reason for contribution: It’s an interesting article that talks about how book readers haven’t made the ‘cultural change’ to e-books as yet, even though online digital delivery is common in other formats such as music (iPods). And even though the technology is now good enough to compete with print books, the idea still hasn’t caught on in the mainstream. Young argues technological change is easy, but cultural change is harder.

2. Berube, Linda 2005, E-books in public libraries, Interlending and document supply, vol. 33, iss. 1, p. 14-18, viewed 15 October 2008, Emerald Full Text.

Reason for contribution: This article talks about how e-books can threaten print reading culture, how UK libraries are considering e-books, and discusses the experience of having some e-books for loan at a public library.

3. Waller, Vivienne 2008, Legitimacy for large public libraries in the digital age, Library Review, vol. 57, iss. 5, viewed 15 October 2008, Emerald Full Text.

Reason for contribution: As my major project looked at how libraries used Web 2.0 electronic publishing devices such as blogs and wikis, I am interested in how these tools can be used as a way of keeping libraries relevant in the digital information age. I was quite positive about libraries using Web 2.0 devices in my essay, but Waller thinks focusing on technology to legitimate libraries is doomed to fail.

4. Bohner, Dorte 2008, Digital Rights Description as part of Digital Rights Management: a challenge for libraries, Library Hi Tech, vol. 26, iss. 4, viewed 15 October 2008, Emerald Full Text.

Reason for contribution: I chose this article because I think it is relevant to electronic publishing, which I study, and libraries, where I work. Digital rights management is still a fairly new field and one I wanted to know more about. Interestingly, the article states that publishers are beginning to think of libraries as competition because libraries are reaching content users directly.

5. Joint, Nicholas 2008, Is digitisation the new circulation? Borrowing trends, digitisation, and the nature of reading in US and UK libraries, Library Review, vol. 57, no. 2, viewed 15 October 2008, Emerald Full Text.

Reason for contribution: This is another article that relates both to electronic publishing and libraries. It asks if things are fundamentally changed for libraries with the digitisation of content, etc. The author concludes that while the appetite for electronic information is increasing, this is not at the expense of printed library collections.  

My results included that the original image of 1,857 KB was reduced to 964 KB on correcting the image, and 853 KB on resizing the image.

Saving the image as a JPEG image, suitable for web publishing, made the file size smaller still, at 41 KB. Saved as a GIF, the image was 139 KB. The JPG image showed visual pixels earliest upon zooming in, which makes sense with the small file size.  

When compressing JPEG files, the sleep3.jpg file was best, showing a clear image, file size 96 KB:

Sleep31.jpg, at 20 KB was not quite as clear and defined as Sleep3.jpg:

Sleep49.jpg, at 12 KB was markedly less clear, looks like an image on a dodgy website:

Sleep62.jpg, at 10 KB you can only roughly tell what image is of. It is quite unclear:

Sleep81.jog was only 8 KB, but the Image was very pixelated and unclear what the picture is of:

Of the five, I would probably use sleep31.jpg as the image is reasonably clear and the file size is fairly small.

While I was already familiar with a lot of what was covered, and am a blogger from way back, I loved being able to explore new technologies as part of work. Watching YouTube videos, writing a blog, posting photos to Flickr and listing the books I’ve read on LibraryThing felt like leisure rather than something I was getting paid for! While working through the activities, I often felt like I should be getting back to my ‘real’ work.

So while it was fun and a great break from cataloguing, I can also see the benefit of the program. I am now more comfortable using RSS feeds and podcasts, and I think it would be a good entryway into Web 2.0 applications for those who hadn’t come across them before. 

Considering that as a profession librarians may seem a bit behind when it comes to technology, preferring to stick to the safe world of books, programs such as this are important for getting us up to speed. I’m glad I was given the chance to participate.

Don’t go anywhere near the computer-generated audio books; they’re too freaky and weird to listen to. Stick with the human-read audio books instead.

I think the site needs to be upgraded and have better functionality.

The site is hard to navigate. For instance, in Browse by category: Audio book, human read, if you click on one of the letters to browse by say, authors beginning with H, this takes you to a list of all the authors Project Gutenberg has that start with H,  rather than only the ones which have audiobooks available. So you get links to authors’ Wikipedia entries or text versions of their books rather than audio books. If you only want audiobooks, you are better off scrolling through their long list of available audiobooks, listed alphabetically by author.

It also took me a while to figure out how to actually play the audiobook. With Frankenstein, for instance, it is not immediately clear which link to click to download the book. I was able to listen to the first section of the audiobook when I opened up Windows Media Player and then clicked the ‘main site’ link on the first MP3 Audio one. This file than started playing on the Windows Media Player.

Why not have it so it says, ‘Chapter 1: listen here’ or something? The site needs a pretty radical overhaul if they want the layperson to be able to navigate it.

Whereas once people would stay home to watch a favourite show on a particular night, these days users can choose when and where they want to view or listen to a favourite show. I like how these technologies give media consumers more freedom to consume media as they choose.