Thing 12

ah, Thing 12 was missing.....I must have not saved the blog correctly. It has actually been useful reading the information on delicious and re-thinking abut it. I went through this Thing fairly quickly and dismissed it as one of the 'nice idea, but no time to implement' Things. I liked the examples and noted that one of the first things to think about with tags is what case you put them in - I quite like the Philosophy library's lower case tags. Delicious seems more useful to a departmental library rather than a college one - the departments can inform their students about subject specific articles wheras a college library would find it hard to get down to such fine detail for every subject. I like the effect of Delicious, and can see that it will be of interest to students, but, in a busy library, I still don't think that I can afford the extra time to set up something that I can see only a few students taking up. I think that my limited time might be better spent on other tasks. It has still been useful to find out what Web 2.0 facilities other Cambridge libraries are making use of.
So a last photo - to signify my first steps into Web 2.0 for my library; and looking forwad to further explorations.

Tagxedo

I can't get Wordle up on my computer yet so I made a cloud in Tagxedo.

Thing 23

The last post....the finish date is tomorrow and next week I am off to Vienna for a dancing 'celebration'.
I have started to use some of the Things....iGoogle - I find it hard to imagine life before iGoogle. We have set up a library blog and twitter account; are using LibraryThing and I have used some photos from Flickr for my first marketing display. I used Doodle once and found it useful - I will use it again when necessary. I haven;t gone back to Linkedin, Zotero, Googledocs, podcasts and wikis. I may go back to them later as and when I need them but at the very least I feel that I am familiar enough with them to know if they will be useful. I also feel that the 23 Things has enabled me to feel more comfortable with the technology and the jargon that is used in Web 2.0. Before 23 Things I was aware that there were a lot of Web 2.0 things that I should be looking at but apart from personal recommendations, I didn;t know really where to start. 23 Things has enabled me to 'dip my toe in the water'. I have also been able to commence some things for the library this summer - all of which helps with marketing my library to both users and the college as a whole. Thank you for running this for us - it has been very helpful.

Thing 22

I have to admit that I do use Wikipedia - I didn't at first as the accuarcy seemed poor, but it has got better and now it is often a first port of call. See salsa dance.

I have looked at various wikis and I like the fact that you can all get together and edit a page - I can see it being useful in peer-to-peer work. There seems to be a blurred line between blogs & wikis and I am not so sure that it will be as useful for librarian-to-public material; blogs or webpages seem more of use here. I looked at many library wikis (both from the samples and a quick search on google) and although they seemed to all have options for comments, most of them seemed to be used as web pages and there were no comments that I could see on the pages. These were of course, public wikis and so maybe not as representative as private ones where a small group of people are all contributing to one piece of material.

I like Wikipedia (although I would check important information before I used it) and I like the peer-to-peer uses wikis have. I am happy presenting information to my readers by web, blog or twitter, and I do not plan to start any ikis for my own library - at the moment.

Thing 21

I looked through a variety of the podcasts suggested in Thing 21. I chose the University of leeds Critical Skills podcast - useful, but no pictures. It was 11 minutes long and seemed to present information for undergraduates quite well, but it also spent time saying who they were, what a padcast was etc. I can imagine some students switching off, or qust 'tuning out' and not listening to a stream of information - especially one wihthout pictures. I also looked at most of the Youtube videos. Again, some of these were far too long for the casual user. Some were funny, some were not, some tried to be funny but I was disappointed. Some of them seemed to spend time making the videos fun - lots of special effects and not much content.
I did join YouTube - sigh - another username to remember and signed up for a dancing site ...I had bee nthinking of doing this for a while, to receive new posting s of their videos, but had been put off by the thought of another usemane & password. Thing 21 gave me the impetus to register. It is a useful site showing all the 'standard moves' in rueda.
http://www.youtube.com/user/ruedastandard
I follow this dancing standard and it has been very useful - YouTube is a much better medium (and cheaper) to show dancing moves than the 'old' dvds that were produced and sold. So, my views on podcasting and youtube - can be useful, but I do think that the library/librarian has to be careful as some of the exanples looked unprofessional. I think that if something like this is to be done then it has to be done professionally - is this the correct medium to use? who is it for? Is it going to reflect well on the library? Is it funny or just 'naff'? It will be very interesting to see the university production next month. I did love the Ninja Librarian Youtube video though!

Thing 20

I have had a quick look at Googledocs and I can see it will be very useful for collaborative papers. I haven't got any on the go at the moment so my test was quite short - I tried some text and also a photo. My Cam23 colleague also showed me how to get individual comments through highlighting & inserts. A few people are begining to follow our library blog....thanks folks!

Library Blog

Thing 19

I looked at Thing 19 along with my colleage (see my blog for Thing 7). I have started to put our Light Reading collection in the library online using LibraryThing (we will go live later on). This week I have helped to co-write a blog for my library. Homerton has a good website and I talked to the librarians there. They used WordPress so we looked at that. WordPress seems to be a little more easy to use than Eblogger - Eblogger was great for starting out, but it seems that you can do more with WordPress, and it also seems simple to do (so far...). I have spoken to a few people at college and we will go live soon. We have also just started a Twitter account to work in conjunction with the blog. At the moment I have set up the blog so that I can moderate all comments. I am looking forward to the launch to start promoting my library and also to promote the facilities we offer.

Thing 18

I loaded Zotero and started to investigate it. It seems useful but not too user friendly. I have srarted to sue it for my dancing emails/video clips/YouTube/ etc. I managed to load them and then started to fit them into different files - it might have been easier if I set the files up first. I can see that this will be of use in creating a 'catalogue' of items, but I can also see that when these things were in folders in my email I dealt with them.....I will have to be careful to deal with the items in Zotero and not leave them to linger. I have not written a guide to using Zotero: there is a good one already written by the university computing service that I can use. I am not sure if I will continue to use Zotero myself in the long run - or whether it will become just one of the useful things that I can tell my students about.

Thing 17

I have quickly looked at Linkedin before - I was looking for someone a while ago. It was recommended as somewhere I might find many of the scientific community. I had success, but I was not interested in joining myself. I have had a further look and whilst it was interesting to see other Cambridge colleagues details up on the web, I decided not to add myself. I can see that it might be useful if I was thinking of looking for another job, or needed to meet up with other librarians who are interested in the same things that I am but Cambridge colleagues have a close-knit community anyway and so I decided that there was no point in joining Linkedin and then not using it again. I have already got quite a few other 23Things to commence before the start of term and I am going to concentrate on those. 1 more photo to keep me going - dancing dolphons

Thing 16

At last, something I use regulalry. I have a personal facebook already and I am also an admin for my dancing group page. I looked at a few other library facebook pages with an eye out to creating something for my library. I am still not convinced that a blog & twitter account for the library won;t be better than a facebook page. I did look up my college and found several pages set up already, but with very little content on them. Some seem to have been set up a few years ago. Hmm, people don;t seem to be using Facebook for information about the college. Off to Thing 17....

Thing 15

Just when I had decided to leave LibraryThing until January; the next thing asked me to set up an account and add some books. it seemed sensible to start and to plunge in with the library's Light Reading collection. Just the fiction authors beginning with A. I will get around to adding the other later..after the start of term maybe, or January. So, I set up an account read the isbns of the books in with my work scanner (much easier than typing isbns in by hand) and also added them to a 'fiction' category. Our collection is not classified or catalogued, but sits in a cupboard with 4 categories, fiction, bio, travel & misc. The only thing that ook time was reshelving all the books afterwards! I also added a widget to my blog page.....

Thing 14

A nice, compact thing. I have heard about LibraryThing but never explored it before. We are a Heritage Library and they have a 'most popular' and 'what's new' sections. Again, this is a good application but I can't see that the effort spent would be worth the payoff in our library. I do have a mild interest in putting my own personal collection of books on, but at about 6,000 and rising rapidly; I can't quite see myself putting them on qin the near future. BUT at work we have a 'light reading' section; books not on the catalogue, they don;t need to be borrowed via the computer - they just have to be taken from the shelves & returned. I have had various thoughts about publicity, recommendations, etc. LibraryThing will be perfect for this. Not this summer though. We have made a note to perhaps look at this again in January when our workload should tail off a little bit.

Reflections week

So Reflections week.....I have been working through the 23Things too quickly. I started late & then had a 2 week holiday....It has been very useful to complete 12 things. These have given me an introduction to new techniques that I had heard about, but not actually used. Some I have taken on board; some I have looked at but won;t use now. It isvery useful to have looked at them so that I know in the future if I need to use them I can. I still feel that I have just been skimming the surface of some of these applications ....maybe instead of doing this over one summer I should have taken a year - but then I don;t know if I would have kept up the enthusiasm for so long. My head is buzzing with ideas for next term to start using some of the 23 things....the only problem is that term is runnign towards me too fast and I don;t know if I am going to manage everything. Twitter...a blog.....once started, then these have to be kept up-tp-date and refreshed periodically; if we start something then we will have to carry on.... Oh well, 10 more Things to go...I wonder what they will be.

Thing 11

Sideshare....interesting and useful to keep in mind for the future but I don;t have a need for it this minute. I was surprised to find out how much information was on the site; especially foreign language information - e.g. I found lots of items in Spanish. To carry on a theme; I looked for salsa oin the search field. There wasn't much there; mainly adverts for dvds to buy, or web pages. The main use seems ot be 'work' rather than 'play' related information. I might use slideshow in the future, but not now. Jing does look fun though.

Thing 10....more Flickr. I found this old picture of college from Cornell that looked interesting. 'No known copyright restrictions' as opposed to 'Some rights reserved' which most of the other photos seemed to state. I also had fun with Tagxedo (once I worked out how to save). my computer didn;t allow me to use Wordle without adding an app. so I tried Tagxedo.....image created within 1 min - I just typed the words 'Cuban Salsa' in and theis picture appeared. I then spent a bit longer choosing a template (I rejected the footprint and the cloud etc) and spent even more time choosing the colours....so many options.

Thing 9

I have looked at Flickr before although not signed up. There are some beautiful photos there - including some from my library. I had fun doing further searches but found the coverage quite blotchy although there is a lot of Cambridge stuff on. I did think about doing the 'optional extra' but I didn't want to sign up to something that I don't think that I will use much. It is good to have the information in case I want to use Flickr in the future.

Thing 8

Blog 8 - Tagging. An easy one this week. I had been adding tags anyway to my blogs but I added a few more. I was interested in the information on Yahoo v. Google and the way they organize data.
1 more dancing wave, this time from Clashnessie beach. Yes, I know, it is a bit of a stretch from dancing to waves, but pretty pictures of waves are a lot better 9and a lot more numerous) than those of me dancing.

Dancing

ps Just been asked to teach Dancing in Vienna and Cambridge in the next couple of months. Also, my holiday in Scotland produced a few more photos of 'dancing waves'.

Back to 23 Things (Thing 7 & 19).

So, a 2 weeks holiday and then a week & a half of catching up......I am still on Thing 7. Gulp. Time is running out & I must spend more time on 23 Things. Twitter stymied me for a while...when to Twitter...when to Blog. I think that I am begining to see my way clear to setting up a blog for my library as I am coming up with ideas for content. I also had a look forward at the Marketing 23 Things.....discussions with someone at work who is way ahead of me in 23 things. Maybe a blog and Twitter for the new term.....We are going to mull over this for a while & make a decision on whether the marketing/advertising is worth it for the extra time it will take to set them/one up and keep them/it running.