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!

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