Twinset & Purls

Friday - Libday 8

2012-02-03T09:09:00.000-08:00

I did this myself with a highlighter and Skitch, can you tell?

I started with a rush today: I'd inexplicably forgotten to a) book a room and b) circulate an agenda for our Subject Librarians' team meeting at 09:30. Luckily we have our own teaching room which was free, so I was able to book us all in there, then put the agenda together - both the papers had been circulated previously so cheerfully my organisational fail was not as bad as it could have been.

Sorry about that, colleagues.¹

The meeting itself was useful - we discussed a couple of papers (to do with enquiry work competencies and resource discovery) and I'll give our feedback about them to their originators later today. We also caught each other up on a couple of projects, the website, and had a small moan about the speed of the internet,² but we managed to finish early - go us!

Rather shockingly my calendar is free for the rest of the day, except for an appointment I'd offered to a student who didn't get back to me. Cheerfully I have a large pile of stuff to do so I'll manage to cope!

Stuff what I did with my acres of free time:

Worded an email with manager to Very Senior Manager about an issue that needs resolving for students (and us!)
Et some chocolates from the staff room whilst saying hello to a librarian from another campus
Finished and sent January's budget report, complete with suggestions on how to spend it, to department - lots of messing about with formatting to make it look pretty, and I had to crack the calculator out!²
Read, wrote and replied to emails
Had a bit of lunch and managed a whole row of my huge shawl - one more right-side row and I'm ready for adding the beaded edging and bind off rows. Very exciting stuff. You know, for knitters.
Responded to further emails about the issue in the first bullet point!
Looked at feedback on an essay I wrote for my PG Cert
Emailed out responses to people about the things we discussed in the team meeting for them
Used my CPD hour to do some of my PG Cert - the online module requires participation in the discussion forums. Surprisingly hard, considering how much time I spend on forums in the wider internet - but Ravelry doesn't (usually!) require referencing!
Answered meeting requests after The Issue mentioned earlier spiralled.
Had a bit of a think and a chat with colleagues about collection development matters.
Had an email chat with a couple of colleagues about resource discovery, how it relates to information literacy, and the future of online publishing, you know, nothing complicated.
Tweeted a bit - I love twitter, and it's great for current awareness, but I *try* not to let it take up too much time during the day⁴ - this week I've been very absent from it.
Volunteered to do an urgent report next week once other people have sent me the information. One day I will learn.
Emailed colleague about the desk set up in our new graduate help centre.

Then, I hurriedly finished up this blog post, and legged it to the SU for a staff Pub Quiz. I shall exhibit the prize when we have won it :D

ETA: we did not win it. We were extremely mediocre. However, I maintain that in an 'open book' pub quiz where the questions were harder but we were allowed Google, no one would beat librarians.

¹I did print all their documents for them in contrition, but I even managed to mess that up by forgetting to turn off the colour when I sent it to the Office printer - ours is still broken.
²Which is EXTREMELY NOT FAST.
³And then felt a bit stupid because a) the ipad makes a very expensive calculator and b) Excel is also quite good at adding stuff up and would have been a lot less hassle.
⁴Stop laughing. I did say I *try* not to have it take up too much time! Also, it is a good source of information and peer support and stuff.

Thursday - Libday 8

2012-02-02T09:08:00.000-08:00

It's Thursday Island. Geddit??

Today I felt like I'd aged a 100 years by lunchtime. First thing was the usual emails, though thankfully nothing urgent, because we had to rush straight into prepraring for teaching at 10:00, which usually takes 15-30 minutes, depending.

This was not helped by my computer taking a truly spectacular 20 minutes before I could actually do anything other than stare helplessly at yesterday's emails. I also managed to compile half of my budget report for January - I've got the figures off the system, they just need formatting properly now and sending out to Interested Parties.

This morning my colleague and I delivered the teaching session to school students that we'd planned earlier in the week - they looked even younger than I was expecting and it was kinda strange, because I'm used the over 18s! They were a great bunch to teach, though; I was expecting to have trouble getting them to pay attention in such a long session, but we'd chosen quite a lot of hands on activities and discussions and that sort of thing, and it seemed to work pretty well. We even got a round of applause at the end, and their teacher really liked it - hopefully we've persuaded some of 'em that university is a good choice for bright pupils. And I have to say I've taught undergraduates that didn't pick up stuff as quickly as they did - AND the cool girls at the back already knew what Boolean searching was.¹

I was exhausted after all that - not least because my normal steady drip-feed of cups of tea had been interrupted by the teaching - so after we'd tidied up and put the materials away and generally got out of the teaching room, I went straight for lunch. I paused for long enough to pick up the results of the first essay from my PG Cert course, then read something online that made me SPIT FEATHERS², before I ushered myself into the staff room. I tend to bring my own lunch so a quick turn in the microwave later, and I was having a nice chat and catch up with some friends from down my end of the office.

I was interrupted once by a senior manager needing to know something about a report I'd submitted to them earlier, and as it was for the head of the service fairly urgently, I sorted it out and sat back down - except I devoted some of my lunch to writing this stream-of-consciousness diary just for you #libday8-ers, of course!

NLD 2012

Once I started working again it was more emails, most of which just needed reading so I know what's going on, then I received a phone call from another manager on another site about our National Libraries Day events. This subbing-for-your-boss thing is a lot more work than you'd think!³

I also replied to some queries I received from colleagues in CPD25 about an event we're organising, and read a few emails from the new SCONUL Focus board that I started yesterday - I'm very new to that so I'll save a proper read of them for tomorrow when I have time to work out what's going on!

At 14:00 a PG student will be coming to see me to talk about referencing and research for their project over the summer, then at 15:00 our repository manager and I will be doing a bit of induction for a new member of staff involved in learning technologies from my department. This sounds much posher than it is; in fact he's an old colleage from the place we both used to work, so we'll have a catch up, show him some stuff, and perhaps plot some sort of far-reaching learning project that will Change Everything For Everyone.

Then at 16:00 I'm the last person on the Help Desk, so I'll answer some student queries and generally try and make sure things on the 5th Floor are okay, then shut the desk at 17:00. The desk on the 2nd Floor stays open until 21:00, though, and the building until midnight, so our hardworking students will have someone to help them from the evening team when the day folk are all at home.

The desk...

Q: Various people asked "Why won't the self-service machine let me have this book?"
A: Usually one or more of...

The machine hates the book's barcode.
We put the barcode on the book before we bought the machine, and the book is too wide for the scanner.⁴
You already have All The Books.
It's a reference book.
You have an eye-wateringly large fine.
I have absolutely no idea, but it worked on my machine, so here you are. Sorry about that.

Q: "Could you help me find a book please?"
A: "Yes!" *helps*

Q: "Where do I get my reservation from?"
A: "The desk downstairs! [+ actual explanation and soothing noises if they've just walked past the desk with all the books behind it and then up 4 flights of stairs to find me]".

Q: "Whaargaabllle what is wrong with this self issue machine!"
A: *flails, works it out eventually, refrains from kicking the machine*

Q: "Could you help me with the self-issue machine please?"
A: *helps, helpfully*

Q: "What does edition mean? Why is this book all ... old?"
A: *explains, also helpfully* [Also, that book was supposed to be old. It was like, Freud, or something]

* Brief argument about the meaning of 'Silent', as in 'Silent Study Area' *

Q: See number one, re: misbehaviour of barcodes.

And that, ladies and gentlemen and those who identify with both or neither, was Thursday. Also, I have been promised chips for tea.

EDIT: Of course it wasn't... when I got back to my desk I suddenly remembered I hadn't sorted out a winner for a quick survey we'd done, so I printed 'em off, folded them up, and got one of our IAs to pick it out of a hat (for hat, read pile). Done!

¹Although we didn't call it that, obvs, we didn't want to have them running off terrified!
²I'm easily outraged, and my Twitter buddies talked me off the ceiling with internet chocolate and Game of Thrones trailers ;D
³Don't worry, Dear Manager: this is just a very busy week - I'm feeling rather glad Libday was this week rather than next week, cause I've got a very free calendar then!
⁴We do try and change these, but there's quite a lot of books in here. Also, we are not RFID'd.

Wednesday - Libday 8

2012-02-01T09:16:00.000-08:00

Knitted Wednesday!

At this point I think you can take the rainstorm of emails as read - other things what I have done/will do today include...

Dealing with a flurry of last minute one-to-ones where students must see me immediately.¹ I always try to squeeze them in as soon as possible but our tutorial room and my calendar are rammed this week so I fear some might have to be delayed. I respond with as much online/email guidance as I can so hopefully they can at least get started without me.
Argued with various printers for some time in an attempt to print out the agenda and some documents for a SCONUL meeting. I'll be swish and have some on my ipad that don't really need printing, but some of them I know I'll want in hard copy. This took a ridiculously long time.
Preparation for teaching the college students tomorrow that I hadn't done after work yesterday because I am a disorganised and generally morally flawed person and I wanted to finish knitting a mitten. I was adapting a previous exercise so it took about 45 minutes to put together a new set of resources, a worksheet, and powerpoints to explain it. I also fiddled with the introductory Prezi to check it was all ready for the morning.
Poked at hair, retrieved Desk Shoes² and et an apple in preparation for going to external meeting.
Used a scant few minutes' gap in play to read some of the online readings for the online PG Cert module - I've got to write a discussion post about this stuff sharpish so I'd better squeeze it in! I've clipped most of it to Evernote so I can read it on the bus as I am currently too cheap to PAYG some 3G credit.
Go to Somewhere In Euston³ for my first SCONUL Focus editorial board meeting, to find out if I can actually do the things that they asked me to do, which I'm fairly sure I can but it would be rather embarrassing if I can't...
Go to our Learning Development Centre's Showcase this afternoon - lots of useful ideas, I hope, for teaching improvements, online learning, fantastic techy stuff that helps students stay engaged like PRS systems and magic pens you can draw on slides with... all good information literacy stuff, and great for the PG Cert course I'm doing this year. I strongly suspect there will also be wine and food.
Finally... I'm going to go to my yoga class at the end of the day. Not really work, but in the same building, so practically the same thing.

Things I did not do today:

have much in the way of a lunch break
eat properly (which is SO unlike me it's a miracle I didn't keel over)

¹I'm not the only one - we think this might have been Dissertation Supervision Week!
²What? Everyone has desk shoes, don't they? The ones that live under your desk so if you need to look slightly more put together than usual, you can put them on and trot off to your meeting.
³I should totally work out where it is, really.

Tuesday - Libday 8

2012-01-31T09:07:00.000-08:00

Tuesday! A day of shiny possibilities! Not Monday, so therefore not automatically stressfull, but also not the end of the week, so it feels like you can actually achieve All The Things before Friday.

So far this has not really been the case, but anyway...

Things I Have Done:

Emails. More of those. See Monday for details of the sort of thing they tend to contain. Today's popular topics have been:

Follow ups from conversations about collection management and/or reading lists I had yesterday
Search alerts telling me that new City stuff has come up in Scopus
More emails about reading lists
Some emails alerting me to new comments on the online module of my PG Cert course and on the Super Sekrit Blog we've got for reflection on the course.
Organising meetings

I have also booked conference places for me and someone else in the team. It's not My Team, but the Team What I Am In, and we are currently rudderless as our Lovely Manager¹ isn't here at the moment, so I'm acting as a sort of Team Liaison - I'm not managing anyone, but I'm fielding the sorts of queries and work and teaching sessions and all that stuff that comes to us from other parts of the University and our senior managers, sitting on some working and project groups, and generally keeping her chair warm until she gets back. Unsurprisingly this has lead to a marked increase in the number of emails in my life.

The New Staff Welcome Lunch - a colleague and I decorated a stall and sat on it for the Welcome to The University event that is held for new staff across all sections every few months. It was great - you get to see colleagues from all over the place, there's a free lunch, you get the chance to liaise at people about your service. Lots of very enthusiastic people today, including a few from the School I support that I got to say hello to again, a few new and not-so-new library people, and a colleague from two jobs ago reappearing in a different department here.

Lunch: mainly in the Welcome event, but I also found some time to do some panicked oh-pants-I'm-running-out-of-yarn maths on my Line Break wrap. I think I can make it, man.

More teaching planning: colleague is now way ahead of me on this so I need to get my bit done. I might have to finish after work though, because of...

Quick Meeting One: about an issue to do with timing some stuff to do with reading lists. It's all about the reading lists all the time this week.

Shiny New Graduate Centre

Quick Meeting Two: about staffing our shiny new graduate centre - this is one of the 'me failing to pretend to be my manager' things. It's great to have it, and the PGs are already fond of it - but having a staffed desk in there will mean a bit of working out over how we'll be able to make sure there's librarians there when students need us.

Allowed myself to become completely distracted by another subject librarian's really interesting reference question about bartering. In my defence it was fascinating.

Arranged to meet a student to help them get to grips with their dissertation research; it's getting to that time of year again!

Wrote and sent a mini-report on a decision affecting the way we describe stuff - I'd spent the last two days gathering up my fellow Subject Librarian's opinions on it and then got a round-up to our Head of Service so a final decision could be made.

(In the interests of full disclosure, I was also writing this post throughout the day as well!)

Glossary:

Quick Meeting: Part of speech: Oxymoron. Use: 'They said we'd have a quick meeting about it, but three hours later we'd only just got onto Whether Or Not It Really Is Snowing.'²

¹ Brownie points acquisition: ENGAGE!! Unlike my mother, my manager might occasionally actually read my blog ;-)
² This is gross slandering of my colleagues, both of whom were, in fact, perfectly quick and lovely.

Monday - Libday 8

2012-01-31T03:16:00.000-08:00

Aargh! Libday has rolled around again! And despire it now being Tuesday and me having not realised it until this morning, by the Power of Outlook¹ I am able to recreate What It Was What I Did yesterday.²


Does anyone else remember Teachers?

So.... MONDAY.

I got to work at 9, and waited for exactly 14 minutes for my computer to let me actually do something. Normally I'm at work earlier to combat this but TFL's Evil Overlords prevented me that morning. Once it was working, it was time to deal with the emails, which is I SWEAR what I spend a good 1/3 of my LIFE doing:

replying to queries³, helping people, making arragements for teaching sessions or other bits and pieces with academics, colleagues, people at CPD25, that sort of thing.
deleting JISCMAIL (apart from when they're useful ~~or people are having an amusing squabbles~~).
reading Very Important Missives from various people.
wondering why I've been sent this and if I was supposed to do something about it that I've forgotten
sending Very Important Missives to various people who will then wonder why I've sent them this and if it was something they've forgotten.
moving stuff into folders so I can find it later.
swearing at the automated 'Your mailbox is FULL which will cause the internet to FAIL in three minutes and it will be ALL YOUR FAULT' email, and half-heartedly deleting a few Sent messages with PDFs in them.

Then I spent a few hours (three? Four? It was a while, anyway) planning a teaching session with a colleage - on Thursday we've got some Gifted Youth coming to see us as part of a partnership programme with their college, so we're going to do a workshop to introduce them to what academic libraries are about and how they can use them to research - they're all doing extended essays for their A Levels - and a bit about citing and referencing and how to actually evaluate results.

Colleague and I have never actually taught anyone under 18 before so we're erring on the side of Over Prepared. We teach LOTS of information skills workshops throughout the year, so we've lots of materials to draw on, but getting the tone and level right is hard - we don't want to patronize or bemuse. Teaching sessions take a huge amount of planning, because you always want to change them and make them better - for every hour in the classroom I do at least 90 minutes of prep, even when I've taught the session before - for this one, it's even longer.

Look! Ikea! I've still not worked out where the actual drawers are.

After that I had some lunch, when I came to the disturbing conclusion that I might be stuck with my horrible sofabed because the ones that fit two people are too wide for my space, but the ones that fit are too narrow for two people.⁴ On the up side, I did see some nice bedside tables.

Then it was back to the emails - my 'sent items' folder reveals I was mainly concerned with organising an induction for a member of staff outside the library, a focus group⁵ that colleagues were doing at a different site about a web development, organising an induction for some other partnership students, planning a meeting about and some actual teaching for some staff training I'll be delivering for evening and weekend counter staff, liaising with some academic staff about a series of workshops I'm deliving for some PhD students in my department, checking something about our Subject Guide system with a colleague from my last job, and talking some stuff over with colleagues from my CPD25 task group.

Then at 14:30 I was on the Help Desk on our book floor, answering all sorts of questions, from the perrenial 'where is the loo please?' right up to 'Aaargh I am a new PhD student and it's all confusing and here is my topic and here are my fifteen questions' - which is sadly just my idea of fun. I also got visted by two academics from my department with various problems and questions and book orders.

By 16:15 I was off the desk and chatting with some colleagues about reading list management, looking at the training materials again, looking at emails again, and also worrying about this blasted sofabed. You know it's time to leave when you're daydreaming about those mittens you're knitting, so I wrapped it up just in time to recieve a phone call:

Customer Services: "You know how you're back up for the late night? Well, I've not seen Late Night Lady yet...".
Me: *heart sinks to boots* "Oh, really?"
Them: "I'm sure she'll be in soon cause she's not phoned but could you hang on until she gets here?"
Me: *rails internally and considers possible escape routes, all thwarted by being on 6th floor* "Sure, I can do that."
Them: "Great, I'll let you know when - oh, she's here! Never mind!"
Me: *leaves trails of flames as she flees the building*

And that, my dear readers, if any of you are actually left now, was Monday.

¹Much like the Power of Grayskull, but with no actual He-Man. We're a bit short of those in our office. *writes off to CILIP*
²I've heard people use memory for this, but I've never had much luck with that.
³The answer to a minority of these would usually have been more easily found by a ritual Reading Of The Instructions or The Searching Of The Google, but as I am frequently very guilty of both of these Crimes Against Subject Librarians when I'm in an unfamiliar situation, I forgive and forbear.
⁴Of course, the real solution here is for all visitors to stay in hotels in the future, but I suspect all my family and friends would develop fairly serious hate for me if I decreed that. Apparently the state of my back is less important in my mind than the ability to have people over in Tiny!Flat.
⁵CARD SORTING EXERCISE!!! (there is some debate over this :D)

Metareflection is both meta AND reflective.

2012-01-26T07:21:00.000-08:00

I'm doing a PG Cert in Academic Practice with work, and as part of it we're doing this module called Technology-Enabled Academic Practice. And as part of that module, we're doing a reflective blog hosted by the University to help us through it as it's mainly online and also some of the final assessment is based on reflection.

SO below is the reflection what I reflected on earlier - but I wanted to add a bit more here. Basically, it felt a bit odd reflecting over there - even though this is MUCH more public, because the other blog is private and only the assessors can see it, I just felt a bit exposed. That's really weird, right? I felt weird, anyway. Perhaps it's because there was much more of an element of judging in it, even though the actual blog itself wasn't being marked? I dunno. Maybe I'm just weird :D.

AND AND AND that was the other thing. I don't feel like I can write in my usual style over there - I felt all formal and stilted. Like I couldn't shove in lots of emoticons and RANDOM CAPITALISATION and totes made up words and random l33t speak that I can't even speak properly.

Which is fair enough, because my tone over here is not always the most professional - although I am, honest, potential future employers and colleagues! - and I realised that I'm actually really uncomfortable with the idea of honest public reflection in a space that has the university name and connection on it. Reflection is personal, and that's a work space. Does that make sense? Maybe not - it's not like I'd badmouth anyone in either space - but it just seemed Not Quite Right somehow. So here I am.

Maybe I'll just link to posts here over there...

--------

So it’s the second of the induction days for the TEAP module (part of the MA Academic Practice offered by my employer) and we’re learning how to blog. I already have a personal blog (*waves*), using Blogger, and I have to say I’m already really impressed with WordPress and am considering converting it over; I’m not very fond of the slightly amateurish look of the Blogger blog I have so I think I’d like to change it over. I hope there’s a way to take the post with me!
It’ll take me a while to get used to the way this works, of course, but that’s the way of technology, I suppose: you just have to practice and play and bork stuff up a bit sometimes.
Anyway, how am I feeling about the module so far?
I’m okay, I think: definitely coping. I was slightly afraid that there would be Serious and Alarming Tech involved that would be all difficult and I wouldn’t be able to do it, but the reality is much more like I hoped it would be: it’s about applying different tools and merging stuff that I often know about already into teaching and general academia, rather than learning really hard stuff.
(Not that I mind that, either – I’m doing CodeYear with some people at work, for instance – I’m just not sure I want to be assessed on it!)
I’ve just been reviewing my notes and although it seems like it’s going to be an Awful Lot Of Work, I think it will be enjoyable – and the final assessment is to do a project that uses technology to produce an actual artefact to be marked, and the other librarians on the course and I have got some great ideas that fit in nicely with our actual jobs so that will help.
I confess, though, my big problem so far was already knowing how to do some of the stuff which seriously dented my ability to concentrate and be a good student: it’s really, really hard sit back and follow instructions designed for beginners when you’ve actually taught the topic yourself! I think the next time that happens I might have to design a strategy to stop myself being distracted: perhaps the best thing to do will be to do whatever it is quickly, then concentrate on the reflective blog instead, so that I’m still working on TEAP stuff and not allowing myself to be distracted.

I did it! NaNoWriMo

2011-12-05T05:00:00.000-08:00

Well... sort of. I'm really, really, really pleased with my NaNoWriMo performance this year: I broke 100,000 words on Day 29, which, even when you're a fast typer and a wordy writer, is something to be proud of. So yay me! I've also tentatively decided after two whole days of not writing (I did a bit on Dec 1st) that I should really try to finish this baby before the end of the year, at least, because it's so close.

Only... well... I still didn't actually finish the actual story. And we're not talking complicated subplots here, either. In a competant writer's fingers, this would have been a YA adventure from start to end. But apparently even 100,000 words isn't enough for me to actually get to the point! I've tentatively decided after two whole days of not writing (I did a bit on Dec 1st) that I should really try to finish this baby before the end of the year, at least, because it's so close.

One of the things I've found with NaNo is that you learn something about your writing every time you do it...

Year One: I learnt that I could, actually, write stuff again. That I did have imagination, and all that jazz, and that this whole JUST WRITE IT STOP EDITING WHY ARE YOU THINKING WRITE WRITE WRITE thing actually works really well for me in terms of stopping me from worrying, and just doing it.

Year Two: It's better for me if I don't write with too much background work already done (at least at this stage of my fiction writing). Last year, I just had a vague idea and I didn't develop it at all, just sat down and started writing. I got much further into a plot than I had with the first one, which I'd been planning in fits and starts since the previous January.

Year Three: This year, I've learnt that I need a lot of space to write myself into the story. Forcing myself into that 100,000 words gave me the space I needed to get almost all the way through to the actual end. I also learnt that there's a happy medium between preparing EVERYTHING and doing nothing: in late October, I wrote a 6 page rough summary, with plot points to check off, and thought about my characters a lot, and that seemed to help.

What I think I should do differently next year:

Write my way into my characters BEFORE the start of the novel. Not actually write the book, cause that's cheating, but write about the people who're in my head, rather than wait until NaNo starts to write at all. That might save me some messing about!

Remember that 100,000 words was supposed to help me to get to the end of the plot, not give me twice as much piddling about with lengthy descriptions of snow or whatever to do. There's no point writing so much if I'm STILL not pushing the action forwards.

Actual plot is clearly my current weakest point. I should probably work on this.

Deadlines are useful. But I enjoy writing way too much just to leave it to the end of every year... perhaps I should set a few self-imposed deadlines as New Year's Resolutions? Especially on the 'actually editing what you've got' front.

And no, you can't read it. It's frakking terrible. If you want to read a frakking terrible novel, then wait till November and write your own, and then you'll understand why I won't let you!

Applying to Library School, Networking, Blogs and Other Bits and Pieces for Aspirant Librarians

2011-11-11T08:03:00.000-08:00

Regular readers, of which I'm sure I have at least 6 (hi Mum!¹), may be aware that I'm on the CPD25 Career Development Task Group. One of the events our group organises every year, usually at the end of October, is a great one-day conference for people interested in taking an MA or MSc in a LIS subject and becoming a librarian. We call it....

Applying to Library School... And Beyond!²

There were quite a lot of links and bits and pieces mentioned this year that the attendees wanted to see in one place, so I suggested I could host a round up with some links, etc. on it on here.³ So, here's what I've got!

The Presentations: here's the links to the presentations:

So you want to be a librarian

View more presentations from CityUniLibrary

Máire's presentation acts as an overview of how academic libraries work, what sort of librarian roles you find in them, and some personal thoughts on what sort of personal attributes managers would be looking for.

Sarah Ison cpd25 presentation nov 2011

View more presentations from CityUniLibrary.

Sarah Ison's presentation concentrated on the benefits of getting involved in CILIP and other organisations and networking to build knowledge and experience.

Jo Harcus based her talk on a post she wrote for the popular CPD23 programme⁴- Volunteering to Get Experience.

Twitter and Blogs

Sarah Ison: @sarahjison. Blog: Librarians On The Loose (with colleague Emma).
Jo Harcus: @joharcus
Penelope Swan: @pennyswan
Ka-Ming Pang: @AgentK23 Blog: Ink Dipped.
Helen Murphy: @lemurph. Blog: Library Wanderer.
Samantha Tator: @citysamantha Blog: City Samantha
Linsey Chrisman: @spoontragedy

There are a few tweets about the conference under the hashtag #AppLIS11. If you're not on Twitter but would like to be, I suggest...

Read and follow this sage advice from librarian Ned Potte r.
Just tweet any old nonsense about stuff you're interested in. If you read this post, you'll see I pretty much live by this rule.
Read this old post with some tips in it on how to find people to follow.

(and, in case you didn't work it out from the big Twitter sidebar, I'm @samanthahalf. And this is my blog. :D)

Other bits:

LISNPN, the LIS New Professionals Network: also sorts of useful bits and pieces in there, including forums and a whole section reviewing various different Library School courses (in the Downloads section).

Jo mentioned a useful paper about the pros and cons of LIS volunteering: Bronagh McCrudden, Would you work for free? Unpaid work in the Information Profession (and how to make it count).

Anything else? I'm sure there's all sorts of information that could be useful for this topic: please stick useful links into the comments and I'll add them in as I see them!

¹Yeah. My mother totally does not read this blog.
²I'm not sure who came up with the title, but I presume they had been watching a lot of Toy Story at the time and therefore I approve.
³Thus handily driving traffic to ze blog and making me look dead popular and stuff.
⁴The programme is finished now, but the blog stands as a great crash-course in driving your own personal career development and playing around with some online tools.

That Thing Where I Write 50,000 Words In a Month

2011-11-10T14:07:00.000-08:00

This read '38638' when I posted it.

I'm really, really, really enjoying NaNoWriMo this year. I've competed twice in the past, and won¹ twice: but I've never actually finished the actual novel. In fact, despite sporadically going through writing periods since, well, since I could write, I've only actually finished one actual novel that I can recall, and it was about the riding stable bed and breakfast I would own when I was grown up², and I believe I was ten.³

But this year. THIS YEAR, MAN. This year I'm going to make it. This year, my horrible, misshapen, lumpy, randomly-worded, badly-plotted, thinly-charactered novel is GOING TO MAKE IT. We are going to get to an actual ending. A happy ending. A HAPPY ENDING I TELL YOU. With room for a sequel, obviously, no one can sell fantasy these days⁴ without plots for at least seventeen further books lined up.⁵

But to do it, I've realised that I need to throw caution to the wind and abandon the word count in order to finish the actual plot.

No, not like that. I'm still going to win. It's just that, well, this year, I think I might win on the 13th... with more than 3/4 of my actual carefully-plotted out plot left to go. It is a good job that my telly doesn't work, I tell you.

100k, anyone?⁶ Bring caffeine.

¹Alright, alright, it's not that exciting. You win when you hit 50,000 words. There's no checking up, it's all done on the honour system. But I still did.
²Remarkably, I am now a librarian, and I do not own a riding stable or a bed and breakfast, and whilst ponies=yay, I can't think of anything more hard work or worse without actually joining the SAS. Which, obviously.
³I also believe I still have it somewhere. I shall not reveal where.
⁴Look, it's Week Two. No one can get through Week Two without pretending to themselves that they are Definitely Going To Edit This and sell it to a publisher and make a fortune by next year's NaNo. If you don't lie to yourself, you'd just give up.
⁵Yes, George R. R. Martin, that is everyone Looking At You.
⁶The really alarming thing is that I haven't written a single one of those words when I was supposed to be working. ALSO, children: when your Dad says 'Learn to touch type': DO IT. Not only will the temping income keep you in cocktails all the way through uni and those horrible first years afterwards where rent still needs paying but you have, like absolutely no idea what you, like, want to do, but you will ALSO be able to write as fast as you can think. And that's really, really bloody useful.

LibCampUK11: What Can Libraries Learn from Retail?

2011-10-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

This was another session run by Jo Alcock, @Joeyanne, this time with Anna Martin, @AnnaLMartin.¹ I don't know a lot about this topic, which is why I picked it. I'm generally pro-innovation in libraries, but like a lot of librarians I can be a bit cynical about introducing retail-style changes into our spaces because retail and libraries have kind of different aims: we're not exactly for-profit organisations.²

The idea came from a blog post that Jo wrote after reading Paco Underhill's Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping; it turned out that Anna had previously written about the same subject, so they joined forces to facilitate this session. Anna's post about the session is available on her blog.

The session was looking at tips and hints for libraries gleaned from retail experiences and from what might be termed a sort of 'behavioural psychology' or 'anthropology' observations in retail (this was my impression, by the way, not actually what it's called!) - basically, information gleaned from careful observation of how customers actually behave in and use retail space.³

There's a range of these kinds of books available now - Paco Underhill's other one, for instance, is called The Call of the Mall, and is about the geography of shopping malls as 'intersections of American consumer marketing, the media, and street culture'.

Some of the ideas mentioned:

Browser's Neck: a particular problem for bookstores, and by extension, libraries. Customers get a crick in their necks from turning their head to read spines⁴ and therefore don't buy, it's an uncomfortable experience. Solution: turn books face on on the shelves.
Use your queue: put books there (more important for public libraries where getting turnover stats up is a key metric?), put informational signs there - people aren't doing anything and will actually see them.
Improve your conversion rates: if you keep queues down, people will actually buy stuff (or borrow, you get the idea). If the queues are visible and long, people will just walk out.
Also improving conversion rates: lots of chairs. This is something I think we're doing okay on at the moment.
Give the customers/students/users/whatever somewhere to store their books when they're browsing: baskets, for instance. I think this is a completely genius idea - we should totally get baskets.
Floorwalking (this is becoming increasingly popular in libraries already) - use self-service to free people up to help at the point of need. People like human contact, they want to see staff walking about. Utilise your shelvers to answer questions.

Then we all started to chip in with ideas... a couple of people mentioned the need to properly train floorwalkers to spot people who needed help and were open to being helped. They suggested retail training companies rather than doing it in house.

The idea of doing swaps with actual retailers was mooted, and it seemed popular: actually getting library staff to appreciate what sort of training and expectations retailers had when there was a profit-motive involved. Sian Blake, @funktious, talked about her experiences at Kingston of doing a retail training day where they explored local businessses to see what sort of customer service they offered.

We then discussed the idea of zoning libraries both to increase usage and to improve behaviour so users didn't annoy each other. This is something that's worked pretty well at my employer because we've enough space to dedicated whole floors to a particular zone, and the soundproofing is pretty good, but what about when you've only got one floor, or an open space, or small spaces? A couple of the companies represented said that they had ideas - they're on the sponsors list on the blog if you're interested. One suggestion was that instead of zoning by space, you try to zone by time: like a swimming pool, where you have schoolkids at 4pm and old ladies first thing in the morning (what, I haven't been to a swimming pool for about twelve years). They also raised the idea of furniture on wheels to facilitate these time-zone changes.

Glasgow's Saltire Centre was brought up as an example of great practice in zoning, which was amusing, as it turned out the designer was actually in the room with us!

The conversation briefly forayed into a discussion about coffee in libraries and mostly the librarians there didn't care. I'm a bit of a biaised reporter here because I don't, either! I always enforce the rule of wherever I work, but I do feel very harsh stopping some poor student from getting into the library carrying a coffee when they're trying to revise.

We moved on to talk about transition zones, a concept where basically you want to keep the entrance to a retail/library space empty so that people have time to acclimatise to where they are. After that, you get a bit of a 'landing strip' where you can put signs, etc. and actually expect people to read them, although we should still avoid information overload with signs. This is a great place to store things like return trolleys - people like to read things other people have been reading, apparently.

At this point various people piped up with tales from their own services. One university has sofas and other friendly furniture in their landing strip zone, which is really popular - the only problem is that the noise makes working at the desk very stressful! Another talked about a Student Union building in Northumbria which has been redesigned to look more like a studying space, with all the bars, etc., pushed out of the way for during the day: should we be worried about other academic spaces competing with us?

Returning to the coffee issue, one delegate made a great point: don't present it as a coffee shop. Don't dilute your message: call it a learning cafe. Have it support what you're doing, not undermine it.

We then talked about how rubbish a lot of library shelving is for making attractive displays: various contributers said it was either flimsy, or ridiculously expensive, or too solid to be useful for displaying... sadly no one had a solution to this!

At this point, we ran out of time, but this was a brilliant session and I've got some great ideas for reading now if the chance to effect a building change comes up again.

¹This, incidentally, was the session from which I stole the Red Ball of Non-Successful-Throwing-And-Catching.

²I just had a really terrifying thought. What would a properly for-profit library service look like? Would it be more successful than normal library services at answering every sort of need? Do people value things they pay for more than things they get for free? Would this mean I get paid more? OR LESS? aaaargh. *ties self in crisis knots*

³Slightly random, but I wonder if this is why Waterstone's have got rid of their 3 for 2s? They've been watching people wandering around in actual physical and mental pain whilst looking for that bloody third blasted free sodding book that they never even wanted in the first place, oh god why did I even come in here *walks out in a huff with no books, a tarnished soul, and less love for Waterstone's*.

⁴I propose a new definition of 'professional' librarian: you no longer have to turn your head to read the spines. Sorry, eresource specialists!

LibCampUK11: Special Collections session

2011-10-11T08:56:00.000-07:00

Completely random shot from The Commons to illustrate online collections.

This was Katie Birkwood, @Girlinthe's session. I actually don't have anything to do with Special Collections: like a lot of people, I would have loved to have worked with rare books and materials after qualifying but it was not to be, and I'm quite happy where I am now - but I just fancied this session.

It's still really, really fascinating. And we do have exhibition space within most libraries, so I was hoping for some ideas about how to fill it. Lots of the people there had pretty much the same idea, I think: it seemed to be split pretty much half and half between Interested Parties and people who were just interested. I'm going to report based on my notes, so these are not my words, particularly, just what I jotted down based on what other people were saying. I'm totally not as clever as all this!

We kicked off with @Theatregrad telling us about her dissertation: it sounded absolutely fascinating because she'd done case studies and a survey about how libraries use their online and physical exhibition spaces (if they have one!) and how much support and training librarians thought they needed to display and advertise their materials. I loved the point someone (sorry, can't remember who!) made about displaying materials: it's important to tell the object's story, not just put it in a case and expect people to be interested.

This lead us to a conversation about space, security and staff time involved in putting on displays, and then into the unfortunate side effect of displaying stuff: people want to look at it!

It turns out that putting exhibitions online, for instance, or advertising them in the local area, is ace for outreach and getting the local community involved in your service, but can lead to an influx of visitors that you either can't cope with, or to non-researchers trying to get into closed or low-access collections to view precious materials.

Various suggestions were made for coping with this, such as clear guidelines on online exhibitions about people not being allowed in without an extremely legitimate research need. The general feeling was that we shouldn't worry about the percieved risks of attracting more attention than a service can cope with: just put the material out there, with appropriate access (or no-access!) information.

It was pointed out that mostly, unless a collection is really local, it's important to have it online so that access can be really global: otherwise, people will just never know it exists, and that's a cultural loss. Katie agreed, and pointed out that you never know what might be interesting to people until you've put it out there; ~~she used~~ someone else added the example of the collection of an aluminium scientist, James Webster, as to the randomness of what people can be completely captivated by.

At this point, a librarian from a firm told us about the special collection their employer has that isn't online, sounds really interesting, but is not easily accessible at all, and wondered what they could do about it.¹ We had a great conversation based around this collection of papers as to what constituted an Archive, and what was a Special Collection (hint: it depends on which body you're apply for funding to :D) and about ideas for how to take this collection forwards. It seemed like negotiating a loan with a library or archive that could manage preservation or access for the company would be a great step, both because it would put people in touch with the fascinating material, and because the company could probably get some good advertising out of it!

There was a brief detour into some horror stories about collections and archives being lost to skips and worse at this point *shudders*, then we were running out of time a bit - we rounded up with a few thoughts:

There's no point keeping it if no one knows it's there and no one can get to see it.
It's anti-elitist to share exciting stuff, even if it's only online, and that's a good thing.
Outreach using interesting objects/materials = good publicity for your service and institution.

¹I'm not putting loads of detail in in case it's a problem with their employer - if you don't mind me putting more up, Sekrit Librarian, pipe up and I'll add stuff!

LibCampUK11: Transitions from School to Higher Education Session

2011-10-11T08:21:00.000-07:00

This was my first session at Library Camp, and it was REALLY useful. It was lead by @Joeyanne and Jean Allen, and was about supporting students and each other in the transition from School to Higher Education. I got a huge amount out of this session and I'm really pleased I went to it: this sort of sharing practices, knowledge and experience across sectors was *exactly* what I wanted to get out of Library Camp.

Jean opened by talking about her background: a former HE librarian, she became a School Librarian later in her career, so she has a great perspective on what students need as they progress. She talked about how Information Literacy skills need to be inculcated from the very beginning of a school career, and how she tries to embed them into the curriculum. Jo has been working on research in this field and mentioned that there's already good resources available, tagged in on her blog, in Delicious and on Twitter using the tag sch2uni.

Then they opened the session up for discussion, and we had a great wide-ranging talk from School, FE, and HE librarians, as well as a couple of parents. The three key bits I learnt/relearned were...

Students at all levels often don't really understand the tools that they know about and think they can use: so sessions on how to use Google's advanced search features, how to put good search terms together, about the existence of Google Scholar, that sort of thing.
There's an assumption made in HE (and I'm COMPLETELY guilty of this) that all students come out of school having spent their whole lives playing with computers and therefore have a basic grasp of how to use them, at least to navigate the more entertaining bits of the internet. We do understand that the idea of digital natives is a myth, but what we don't realise is that often, school children only get a chance to use computers when they're being supervised at school or in a public library, on heavily censored networks. Lots of kids don't have computers at home to mess around with.
Students very often don't extrapolate information skills (or other skills!) across subjects. Unless you make it totally, perfectly and obviously clear, they don't realised that, for instance, the search skills you taught them for History will work for English or Geography or whatever as well. When I heard Jean say this, it was like a bit of jigsaw piece clicking my brain: this is definitely going to help me develop my HE students' skills properly when I teach.

I've just started a PG Cert in Academic Practice at work, which will (hopefully!) result in me getting not only the qualification but also becoming a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, so this sort of session was completely perfect for getting me to think a little more widely about my teaching practice.

One thing I realised during the session is that I might be pitching a little high for my UG students, perhaps spending a bit too long on resources we subscribe to and provide, and not concentrating enough on helping them with general internet/information skills. I also need to be really specific about make sure that students know that these skills will help them all over their academic and personal lives, not just in that module.

The session also gave me some good ideas for where to look for more information (e.g. @jsecker and @LibGoddess's Arcadia Project developing an Information Literacy programme for Cambridge), and a possible idea for working with our Widening Participation people to, um, widen participation.

Things I learned at Library Camp UK 2011

2011-10-11T08:12:00.000-07:00

Librarians (and various shambrarians and other interested parties) can't catch.
That's okay, because they can't throw, either.

This may, of course, have been because (as @antlerboy rightly pointed out) everyone either had a phone, a laptop, an iPad, or a coffee in one or both hands. OBVIOUSLY had we not been bristling with more technology and coffee than the CIA we'd have represented the profession far better in the realm of seminar-room athletics.¹

Secret Weasel films you secretly.

ANYWAY...

The best thing about Library Camp UK 2011 was definitely meeting all the people off the interwebs IRL. Lots of my lovely Twitter friends were there. Some I've met before, but there were a good chunk of people that I hadn't, and it turns out they're all equally ace in person as they are online.³ I even met the Infamous Randy Weasel and his co-conspirator Kooei the Goose. On top of that, I found a whole host of OTHER lovely people to follow, which was also brilliant.

THE SESSIONS...

Thank you, @pstainthorp, for the Creative Commons pic!

So how it worked was that after the opening welcomey bit, anyone who wanted to pitch a session queued up, told everyone about it, then if it was well-recieved (which virtually all of them were), wrote it on a post-it and stuck it on the then-blank timetable, which had space for lots of parallel sessions - 35 in total, seven room slots across 5 time slots.

Then whilst we all had a coffee (I drank A LOT of coffee. I don't really feel it helped me maintain my thin pretence at sanity), the organisers shuffled it so that everything fit. Then we all picked a session and whoever was facilitating it just got on with it at the appointed time, in the appointed room.

Full details of all the sessions have been/are being recorded on the LibcampUK11 wiki, including a bit of a record of who went to what. I'll link my own blog posts about some of the sessions I went to here, as I write them: it was either that or this post would be even more immense!

Session One: Transitions from School to Higher Education, Jo Alcock and Jean Allen.

Session Two: Special Collections, Katie Birkwood.

Lunch: sandwiches, cake and more cake, some fruit (I think I got a pear and I don't recall eating it, but I get funny about pears), some coffee, some more cake, and a biscuit. And some of @Jaffne's amazing tablet.

Session Three: What Can Libraries Learn from Retail.

Session Four was the one that Laura Woods (@WoodsieGirl) and I facilitated, Liasing with Internal Stakeholders and Embedded Librarianship. We got the lovely Sian Blake (@funktious) to take notes for us to share afterwards. Doing it as a joint session was totally unplanned: we were standing next to each other in the queue and realised that we both wanted to talk about basically the same thing (cross-sector best practices, experiences, etc. in liaising with internal stakeholders like academics, lawyers, etc.) from slightly different angles.

Luckily the ball was smaller than this.

I think it went pretty well: I could have explained myself a bit better in the pitch, I think, Laura was much clearer than me, but as a group we didn't lack for anything to say. I was really interested to hear about Laura's experiences of being completely embedded in her team, and it was interesting to hear from the sle and small team librarians how they cope with the pressure of being practically on their own.

I've never facilitated like that before, but in the previous session they were keeping the conversation flowing using a red ball as a sort of talking stick, so I borrowed it⁴ for our session. We also didn't do lots of introductions at the beginning like they did in the morning sessions: I think that worked, because we certainly kept it going without introducing ourselve and that saved time.

It was a bit scary to facilitate, but doing it with Laura and having Sian freeing me up from taking notes as well (thank you both!) certainly helped make it a bit less frightening. There are things I'd do next time: state my aims a bit more clearly, little things like, you know, start on time (sorry), perhaps have a bit more of a plan, but I think that wasn't so much to do with the format as my own inexperience.

Session Five: Unofficial Knit Camp. Part of the thing of an Unconference was that nothing was compulsory - you went where you felt you'd learn and/or contribute. There were one or two sessions I could have gone to, but none were strictly necessary for personal interest or for work, and by that point, but my heart wasn't in it (too much sugar and coffee) so instead a few of us who'd brought knitting had a little session of our own. Much skill was revealed by the other knitters and crocheters - but sadly my inability to count was revealed to a watching librarian world. We also chewed the fat about a lot of library-type stuff anyway, so it wasn't really a waste to not go to a final session!

THE FORMAT

I've read a few other people's blog posts already, and they were mostly pro the unconference format, but I'm going to be a bit heretical. I loved the anti-hierarchical, participants are key, knowledge sharing ethos of the format, but...

I think it could work well if it was slightly tweaked, so that the sessions were pitched and the timings planned using the wiki during the week beforehand. It would have saved a bit of time on the day so more actual conferencing was done, and meant people could plan beforehand which sessions they were going to go to so we didn't need as long to change over between sessions - we could have got, say, 55 minutes out of each block, rather than 45. And had I realised that the number of pitchers was almost exactly equal to the number of slots, and therefore I would almost certainly be speaking, it would have given me the opportunity to a) match up with Laura quicker and b) perhaps do a bit more with our alloted time.

The organisers did a wonderful job (it must have been a bit like herding highly-caffienated cats at times): this is just a gentle criticism of the actual format/concept of an Unconference itself. Thank you, everyone who was involved, it was a marvellous day and I'm very glad to have experienced an Unconference, even if I'm a bit too much of an ungrateful, Organise All The Things librarian to appreciate it!

CONCLUSIONS

Did we mention there was cake?

Meeting people that I wouldn't normally get to meet, as well as all my Twitter friends, and having conversations longer than 140 characters, was brilliant; partly, I confess, for the socialising, but mainly for the different perspectives I got to hear from all the people from different areas of the profession and the country. I bet that was particularly great for all the students and new professionals that came, but it gave me a great chance to learn about them as well. For instance, @SpoonTragedy and I had a great chat in the pub afterwards about our routes into librarianship and her experiences as a Children's Librarian, which is route I never even considered: but it segued into some useful insights for me about teaching practices and how stuff can just go wrong sometimes. Even with two year olds.

It wasn't all work, of course - there was a cocktail-fuelled incident in which Someone (who shall remain nameless just in case they care about their professional reputation) and I educated a somewhat-bemused Other Someone about exactly what all those slang words in fandom mean... But even that turned into a conversation about literary theory (cheerfully we agreed that textual evidence is paramount and are of one mind over Dumbledore⁵) (Oh, and also share Terry Pratchett-love and - oh- Esk! *dissolves sobbing*). Edit: apparently @Bethanar does not mind being identified as Someone who shares my fannish tendencies!

*pulls self together*

So... what am I going to do with all this lovely learning?

Find everyone who was there on Twitter and follow them. (working on it!)
Find out who it was that filmed me rambling and bribe them to burn the footage. Or, you know, delete it. (I was coffee-high and now can't remember who it was. He may have been Canadian.)
Do some reflective blog posts. (tick!)
Put a bit of those new insights into teaching wot I had into practice. (erm... trying. Half a tick?)
Book tickets for next year!

¹We were using a small red talking ball² instead of a talking stick in some of the sessions. And, athletic librarians, I know you're all very good at running about and catching and taking the skin off your knees and all of that, and I'm very pleased that you're not going to die of cake-induced diabetes at 37 like the rest of us, but seriously, the statistics are not in your favour here.

²That is, the ball was being used as a talking stick, not that the ball was talking, which is just silly, because everyone knows that balls don't talk. Although there was a lot of cake there, it's possible that the ball was talking for some of the more sugar-saturated attendees.

³The only worrying thing was that I could. not. stop. calling people by their interweb-names,but luckily they all responded anyway. Also, all those people with fun and amusing non-themselves avatars? They're using them to stop the rest of us getting jealous about how STUNNING they are. You know who you are. *glares*

⁴I totally have no idea what happened to it, sorry!

⁵I can expand AT LENGTH if necessary.

Stuff about which I am excited

2011-10-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

1) LIBRARY CAMP! Which is tomorrow. I have planned my outfit (lots of black, with glittery shoes (because obviously) and my Ook vest which says Ook and what I made myself), I have planned my train times, and I even know what knitting I am taking. I have not baked a cake but I shall be making a special excursion to M&S to purchase treats if I remember. I have to get up at 5:30 to get there, which I am NOT excited about, but there we are. For every good thing there is a BAD THING.

2) MAAP! Which is ongoing. I'm doing a teaching course, basically, at the end of which I shall have a PG Cert in Academic Practice. We've had two days of the first module, so far, and we've talked about all kinds of interesting stuff to do with teaching theory, methods and actual practice. There is homework, and at some point I'm going to have to write about a teaching session - I picked the 3 hour workshop I did with 40 students on computers this morning (which went well, is fun, but is also AAARGH SCARY) - in a 3,000 word essay. And then I have to mark the essay myself, which seems odd to me, but at least I'll get a good mark that way. :D

3) STUDENTS! Freshers' Week and the first couple of weeks of term have been very hectic, as usual, but we're all just about coping. We've just opened a Helpdesk on the newly-refurbished 5th Floor which has proved to be very popular, so there's clearly a need for it, and it's great to be able to fix problems and do a bit of one on one teaching at the point of need, rather than before or ages after the problem occurs. I also love the completely random questions you get asked on any Enquiry Desk: today's favourite was 'So, what's your favourite floor in the Library?' (I like the 5th best, cause all the books are there, and the books make me feel happy.)

4) TWITTER! To be exact, my new Twitter account. I'm having a good old play with using social media for work purposes, so I've set up a CityLibrarySEMS account for me to tweet interesting stuff from. So far I've not actually got any students following me - fail, I think! - but I've got a lot of City and library accounts, which is great, and finding information to tweet means that my subject knowledge is getting Right Up There. Slowly but surely. I'm certainly learning a lot more about maths, which is great.

5) SQUIRREL! Well, not that excited. It broke into the office and et my banana. :-( But we have photographic evidence now...

And the winner is...

2011-09-13T06:04:00.000-07:00

Me! Well, and some other people too.

We've just had the prize announcements for 23 Things City and I'm very pleased to have won the 23 Things City Evangelist Prize. I'm very glad to have been chosen for this prize, because I've really enjoyed doing the programme and encouraging EVERYONE ELSE to do it as well. It's been a really worthwhile experience and I can't wait till we run it again.¹

Thank you, 23 Things City Overlords, for an excellent programme and your kindness, and gigantic WELL DONE to For Your I.A.s Only, who won the People's Choice award for the best blog, and all the other prize winners as well.

My prize was a splendid £10 Amazon voucher: I have a fairly epic wishlist so this will come in very handy. In recent years, however, any bits of money like this that come my way have been going straight into my Kitchen Aid fund, so I'm compromising with myself and putting £10 in there and spending my £10 voucher as well.

I'm going to spend it on Snuff: I'm sure no one will be surprised to learn that I'm a huge Terry Pratchett fangirl so I'll be looking forward to getting this in the post. Not sure where I'm going to put it, though... bookcase space is at a bit of a premium round mine! *reads faster*

¹Perhaps with some different stuff this time so none of us get too complacent!

Thing 23: The End of 23 Things City

2011-08-31T03:06:00.000-07:00

It feels like a really long time ago that we started 23 Things City; this is the 12th week since we all dutifully completed Things 1-3 by setting up and registering a blog, posting some stuff to it, and adding some labels to the posts.

Since then I've managed to go from 0 blogging experience to 68 posts, which were mostly about library stuff and 23 Things, although there may also have been some knitting. I think I can safely say that the Thing I liked best about our 23 Things Programme is definitely Thing 2: posting.

Stuff about Blogging about Things

I'm not totally sure what the future of this blog will be, now; producing a lot of words on a topic is (clearly!) not a problem for me, but what do I write about when I don't have a nice list of Things That I Must Blog On every week? I suspect I'll come up with something, but how frequently I can't say (nor am I willing to bet that lots of it won't be about knitting...!).

Screenshot of my Most Popular Posts of All Time

That said, simply having the blog has already proved useful as somewhere to write up experiences of conferences; two of my most popular posts (with 125 views for the list of links and 87 for my own write-up) (yes, alright, popular is relative!) are the ones related to the New Professionals Conference from last June. I've also used it more recently as a way to advertise for volunteers to help with a conference I'm organising later in the year.

So, whilst I suspect the frequency of my posts will go down, there's definitely scope for me to carry on using the blog for my own CPD (especially as I'm intending to a PG Cert this year) and for other library-related wonderings as they pop into my head; sometimes I need more thand 140 characters to think something through! I'd also totally not realised that a Cool Extra Thing, about Facebook and Libraries, was frequently read - I suspect that's because the hits are coming from Google and it's not an uncommon thing to search for¹ (I know I've googled for the obvious search terms there a good few times whilst looking for ideas and information).

Of course, as you can see from the inset screenshot, my actual most popular post is the Great Toast Debate: there's definitely room for a bit of frivolity here as well! I'm also pleased to see that one of my very few knitting-related posts made it up there into the Top 5 as well; sadly I have many more tales of knitting disaster to recount so if there's interest I can always put some more of those up.

So what else did I get out of 23 Things City?

To be honest, I probably wasn't the person that this programme was aimed at. I'd already used 16 of the actual 23 Things and had heard of all of the others - and in some cases, I'm what you might call a Power User (Twitter, for instance. 7,384 tweets and counting). I'd also come across or used a lot of the Cool Extra Things before as well. I was expecting to learn a bit, but mainly thought it was going to be a fairly routine sort of process to remind myself of all the tools out there so I could teach them to students more effectively if I needed to.

So, I've been pleasantly surprised to find that I've learnt a huge amount about all of the Things and Cool Extra Things, even the ones I've used a lot. For instance, the two Things on the programme that I already used the most were Google Reader and Twitter. In both cases, I learnt at least one new trick; how to use Reader to archive conference tweets, how to see blog subscription details and other stats in reader, how to link to an individual tweet in New Twitter - I'm sure there's more.

I've also rediscovered some old things that I'd tried before and either not used or been unimpressed with, with mixed results: there's no way you'll ever get me to use iGoogle, but as you might just have noticed, Evernote is my new BFF and I am currently importing my entire life into there.

“I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.”²

Most important, though, has been the process of using the blog to reflect on all of the Things. I'm a bit of a worrier and I tend to think things through anyway, so I've always thought of myself as a pretty natural reflector and not really seen the point of doing it formally (I HATED those bits at Library School where you had to do coursework reflecting on the coursework you'd just done before it'd even been marked, for instance). However, writing up all these Things has forced me to remember that years of historical training means that the act of writing is part of thinking for me, and reminding myself of that has been pretty useful.

Cool Extra Thing 9

The final Cool Extra Thing, according to the original programme, is to receive certificates and prizes this Friday. I'm just about to register that I've finished, to truly finish up Thing 23, and I know we have to vote for our favourite blogger, so I'm just going to refresh my memory of my fellow participants' blogs⁴ before I do that final task.

Goodbye, 23 Things City!

I've really enjoyed the whole process of this programme, and I'm sad to see it done, but a new term - and an awful lot of associated work - beckons around the curve of summer again. I'd really like to do the programme again next summer, though, perhaps with some tweaks and changes in focus to keep it relevant and so previous alum aren't repeating the same things, and try to entice a few more people in? I've got some ideas, if any of the team are interested...³

¹Unless it's just Orkney Libraries hitting refresh over and over again... :D

²William Faulkner, I think, though those quote farms never have proper references so I'm afraid I can't tell you where it's from; I first saw it on someone else's blog.

³I am constitutionally incapable of not fiddling about with stuff. You should see me with a red pen and someone else's written work. All Must Be Tweaked And Improved!

⁴Note the apostrophe. That's been driving me mad all summer. Sorry, 23 Things City Overlords.

Help Wanted: Volunteer Library School Students

2011-08-26T03:39:00.000-07:00

Well, A Librarian Needs You, Anyway.

Are you a Library School student in the UK?

Are you more than half-way through your course?

Are you studying part-time or by distance learning?

Are you based somewhere nearish to (or in) London?

Are you interested in being part of a Question-and-Answer panel at a conference for potential library school students? (It's on the 28th October.)

If this is you, or you know someone who might be interested, please could you contact me? Phone or email, I don't mind.

I'm looking for a couple more students to help out at a CPD25 conference - it'll look good on your CV and there's a lunch in it! (Don't worry if you don't meet all the criteria, by the way - stick your name forward anyway.)

Cool Extra Thing 7: Music Playlists

2011-08-26T02:07:00.000-07:00

Be warned, all ye who enterest here: I have incredibly atrocious taste in music. I like vocals, I like cheese, I like warbling, I like to be able to sing along in the shower. I like musicals, I like tear-jerkers (though I also quite like shouty-with-drums). If it's being sung by a super-cute animated creature, all the better.

*********

This task is about sharing music online. I remember, once upon a time, back in the First Age of the Internet, when Certain Naughty People used to share music all the time, before the more recent conception of social media. Names like Grokster, KaZaA and Morpheus may be familiar to Certain Naughty People, although obviously not to me. But without those early and somewhat dubious sites, I don't think the internet would look or sound the way it does today, and it certainly wouldn't do the same sorts of things.

The differences that I've spotted between those Naughty Sites and the ones I've been introduced to through this Cool Extra Thing is thusly:

These new ones are not under constant threat of being shut down by incensed licence and copyright holders. Which is nice.
But the choice is slightly more limited because of all that lovely legality.
You're connecting to an identifiable person's playlist, the files for which are being held centrally, not to their actual files.
There is no dial-up involved. Fire, Hot Water, Running Water, Chocolate, Tea, Broadband. These are the hallmarks of civilisation.
You don't accidentally end up downloading something you'd really, really rather not have been exposed to because some clever wit changed the filename to 'Kylie Video' when it was really... something else.

So, I've created a playlist to share with you*.

BE SHARED WITH AND ENJOY IT.**

It started off cheesy and got better.*** I think I could really get into this Grooveshark thing; it's a great way to explore music without putting your money down first, and because you can save playlists you can go back to them and work out what you really actually want to put money down for. Which is likely to make me buy more music.

Just as it's been shown before: free music seems to make people buy more music. Filesharers spend more money on music and DVDs: BBC in 2003, Guardian in 2005, BoingBoing 2009 (from an IpsosMori poll): you get the idea.

I don't fileshare or pirate, because I think people should be paid for creative endeavours, but I do spend more money if I can try before I buy, and this is an ideal way of doing that. Sadly I doubt there's anyone from a record company reading this, though.

Plus, just think about all those 15 year old without enough pocket money to spend a lot on music. If they can spend their teenage years honing their musical tastes and lusting after album after album, but never being able to actually own content because they don't have much money, what do you think they're going to spend their money on as soon as they actually have some?

*I think it's only fair to point out that some of these songs have swear words in them. It's actually not all Disney.
**The random addition of the actually-not-bad Faithless song is cause it's one of my favourite songs. If it helps it to stick to the cheese theme, the backing vocals are Dido.****
***Well, okay, it's still pretty cheesy, but with more in the way of proper, non-Disney music. I've left it in discovery order so you can see the lack of thought processes behind it.
****No, really: she's Rollo's sister. Though if I know that, I suspect everyone else does as well.

Cool Extra Thing 8: Amusing Googly Bits

2011-08-25T03:29:00.000-07:00

I'm skipping ahead a bit here because the PC I'm using does not have headphones so I can't produce any 23 Things Playlists.

So instead, here's a quick rundown of the Cool Extra Things for Week 9, which were all quirky little things to do with Google:

A Google A Day

This is new to me, and it seems like a nice bit of frustrating fun. Alas, I was so busy trying to bang out this post that I totally cheated on my question after my first three tries failed, and just guessed the answer (they wanted a hair colour) - I got it right first time.

Still, it's nice to know about, and it might be a fun little site to use in an internet search skills training session, because the 'hint' and 'full answer' links tell you about what search terms to put in to get the answer.

Let Me Google That For You

I love this site, but I swear that its primary function is to start flame wars. On several occasions I've seen a poor, clueless newb on Ravelry ask an innocent question on the Techniques board such as 'Are there any videos about knitting on the internet then?', only to have some sarcastic old hand either shout JFGI or direct them to a suitably mean-spirited LMGTFY link.

Of course, what they meant was, 'Please, amateur-experts, could you help me find some good videos online that I can trust, because I am exercising critical thinking skills and not just trusting the top 3 results from Google.' But alas, effective communication on the internet is all about tone and clarity,¹ and new posters don't always know that... Cue upset all round. Apart from the Rubberneckers², who go and find some popcorn.

Anyway, the problem with this site is that whilst it is funny (and I do enjoy it), a lot of people find it a bit mean-spirited. If you don't know the person you're typing too well, particularly in an online community like Ravelry where there's a lot of first-time forum users, then they all too often take it the wrong way and get upset.

Which isn't very nice for someone who just wanted to chat to some new people about knitting. But then constant questions on familiar topics aren't very nice for regular users who hear them ad nauseum all the time because new users never use the search box.

Either way, I'm not really sure that this is the solution for a nice forum for grown-ups. (And to be fair to Rav, this sort of thing is getting rarer and rarer now that Remnants is gone.)

Search Stories

This YouTube/Google combo tool thing looks like seriously good timewasting fun - but I wonder if it's something that could be used to teach searching skills? Or point users to resources on our website?

OR OR OR OR OR: to take them through the steps of a research project? Hmm... but how to do it whilst pointing out that actually, Google is really not the best place to go for academic information...

Anyway, I loved Helen's Party Invitation Story - that's a really cute idea.

¹Which is yet another reason why declining literacy rates and mastery of advanced writing skills are such a huge problem: how can you get a job in an environment that uses email if your grammar, spelling, language use in general aren't up to subtle understandings of the written word? Except, of course, it turns out that a lot of people can, which is why so many corporate communications are so mind-numblingly badly written. Also, this is why smilies are actually quite a good idea. Although they, too, can be abused in the name of sarcasm and meaniness.

²Amusing group HATED by drama queens across Rav, because they like to poke gentle fun at people making fools of themselves on the internet. OR, depending on your PoV, they are hateful spiteful meanies who go around laughing at other people's VERY SRS BSNS because they are hateful and mean. I shall leave you to guess my opinion... think of it as a 'tone on the internet' test :-).

Cool Extra Thing 6: Evernote, Or, The Thing With Which I'm Cheating On Twitter, My One True Love.

2011-08-24T08:55:00.000-07:00

This is a snapshot of all the Very Important Bits of Paper on my desk that are my default organisational technique (as I've mentioned, a charitable person could call this a Hipster PDA, except I never have a bulldog clip¹):

Yes, that is a dead tree diary. I can have quirks.

That's not even all of it: that's just the stuff that's important right now. And those bits of paper, scattered and scribbled and above all, with Very Important Things on them? They're why I love Evernote.

So, come with me now, if you will, gentle viewers. Join me on a new voyage of the mind. A little tale I like to call... Evernote, Slayer of the Lost Bits of Really Important Paper.²

The Start of Ye Wonderful Love Affair With Evernote.

So, ages ago, I signed up to use Evernote, and thought it was a pretty cool idea, and made a few notes, and then didn't really use it and sort of lost the point of it a bit and stopped using it and that was, pretty much, that. One of those things that worked for some people, but not me. I just didn't really get it, and it seemed like a lot more effort than what I was already doing.

[Time passes. I continue to lose important bits of paper behind radiators, or leave them at work when they were a home thing, or vice versa. I continue to not be able to find the correct bit of paper in the Giant Piles. I continue to not be able to find that really cool website, you know, it has a kitten on the front page but it's really about QR codes. In short, I'm my usual, mostly-organised-but-could-do-better self.]

Then we started doing 23 Things City, and I was reminded about Evernote when it came up as a Cool Extra Thing. I stuck the app on my phone, and then didn't really do anything with it. Then I saw @Melon_H using it on her iPad, and I kinda hated her for about 40 seconds before I remembered that I'm a grown up and I can buy an iPad if I want to, so I should probably suck it up and save my pennies. Anyway, she's using for all kinds of magical note-taking things. I looked at my pile of papery goodness. I looked at my phone. I looked back at the paper-pile.³

Then I had a sudden blinding flash of realisation:

My phone has a camera on it. And the internet. And the Evernote app.

I don't have to learn anything magical and new here. I just have to take photos of important stuff I've scrawled on bits of paper and tag 'em in Evernote.⁴ And then they will be wherever I am. Providing I don't leave my phone at home.

Some Thoughts About Evernote.

Evernote + Phone + Camera was the key for me.

I vowed to try to use it, to see if it helped with my niggling organisation problems, and it pretty much has done. The great thing is, it's not completely transformed the way I work or anything life-changing like that - it's just making remembering and finding all these little bits of stuff much easier for me, so that I can be a touch more efficient.

The big difference for me in how much I use it now, and why I didn't before, is that I have access to the technology that makes it useful now that I have a smartphone. Before I had access to it through my phone, paper was more effective, because I could carry it with me. @girlinthe, Katie Birkwood, has made the same point in her CPD23 post about Evernote.

Finding things within the big virtual pile of notes is pretty easy. There are a few levels of organisation that you can make use of - individual documents are called notes, and they each go into a notebook to group them into a particular topic, then you can put the notebooks into a stack. So, for instance, I have three stacks: General Stuff, City stuff, and Personal, with various notebooks inside them, and then I have a default dumping-ground notebook and one called 'read/watch it later' at the top level to catch everything I want to keep, but don't have time to deal with.

I think part of the reason I didn't immediately take to Evernote the first time round was that I wanted more organisation that just these three levels, but I'd actually very much missed the point: it's not the organisation that makes it easy to use and to find stuff in, it's the search function. It's part of a wider move towards allowing programmes to take care of retrieval for you, rather than setting up your own system everytime. All you have to do is remember enough about what you needed to search for it.

It's this search function that makes it perfect for what I usually use my scraps of paper for: acting as an external brain dump. I don't need huge amounts of the stuff in there, personal or work related, all the time: I just need to know it's in there so I can find it later if I suddenly need it. It works really well, and because you can clip all the text from websites and it will search text within images, you don't even really need to tag or annotate notes if you don't have time.⁵ You can also search for different media types, like PDFs or Images, to help you get what you need.

One problem I've had with Evernote, though, is that I've not quite cracked how to make a To Do List that works for me. There is a checkbox function within each note that you can insert within different notes, but I don't know if there's a way to make that automatically produce one big To Do list for you. I suspect there's a way to do this using tags if I just think it through, and I've just found a blog post about clever search parameters that might help, though.

It's a freemium service, but I'm really pleased with Evernote's free functionality - I haven't had any real annoyances about the limitations of a free account yet, as the terms are okay. That said, if I did develop a real need - say I had to upload more than the reasonably generous 60MB a month upload limit - I think I would pay for it. And I never pay for premium versions.⁶

How I've Been Using Evernote.

2) To control all those recalcitrant bits of paper.

It's hard to change the habit of a lifetime, and in any case writing it on a bit of paper is often quicker when you're in a hurry. But now, I use the Evernote App on my phone to take a snapshot of the bit of paper. It gets uploaded to my 'general' default notebook, then when I have time later, I can retrieve the bit of paper and put it with notes on the same topic, or tag it, or add it to my To Do List, or whatever. The important thing is that I can't lose it mysteriously if I've got the photo, and I don't have to spend boring hours typing notes up into files that I still can't search effectively anyway.

1) For keeping bookmarks as I find stuff online.

Whilst my blinding flashes of realisation were going on, I also wrote a post about Delicious. The first draft of this post, the bit that never made it to the blog, had a list of 'what I want from a bookmarking site', and as I said in that post, I was fully expecting to go running back to Delicious with open arms. But it was not to be.

Here's the list. The original 'want' is in bold, with how Evernote answers the need in the normal font:

I want somewhere that will automatically harvest links I tweet, or are tweeted at me, so I can retrieve them when I half-remember them later. Easy to do in Evernote - I simply tweet them to @myen and the tweet gets put in my default Evernote Notebook with the link. Setting it up was easy.
I want to create a sort of personal internet search based on content I've seen before, so if I'm rooting around for ideas for, say, a teaching session, I can search stuff I know I liked enough when I saw it to save it in the first place. I use the Evernote Web Clipper installed in my browser toolbar to do this: you can either save the whole webpage, or highlight a portion of the text to be sucked into the note. It will add any pictures, too, and it's a very quick process - you can even add tags at this point, though I usually shove everything into one default notebook to review properly later.
But, I'm kinda too lazy to want to be bothered tagging it all myself. I'd like something that searched the actual websites I included, rather than just the tags I put on. If you clip all the text of the webpage, the normal Evernote search function will do this. You can also tag anyway, and add annotations if you want to, too. I tend to just put them in an appropriate notebook - I chose broad headings like 'Information Literacy' and 'Induction'.
Some kind of 'read it later' function would be really handy. There are a couple of good tools that do this already - Instapaper and ReadItLater particularly, but I decided to just go for it and use Evernote, so that I'd be keeping things in one tool - see below.

Using Evernote for bookmarking this way gives me a bit of organisation, because of the notebooks and any tags I can be bothered to add, but because I can simply save the text as well, I don't have to worry about adding perfect tags then and there. I can either just shove the whole thing into a subject-notebook, or I can put it in my default notebook and play about with it later.

3) Reading and Watching Stuff Later.

I come across a lot of stuff I don't have time to read - work stuff when I'm at home, home stuff at work, lengthy but interesting posts and videos when it's two minutes to the end of lunch, that sort of thing. I just set up a notebook and called it 'Read/Watch Later', suck the link in using the Evernote Web Clipper, and when I fancy a random read I dive around in there, then just delete them if I don't want to keep them, or move and tag them if I do. You could also use a 'read it later' tag for this.⁷

4) Recipes!

Ages ago I got a bee in my bonnet about indexing my cookery books and random-recipes-I-found-online-or-in-the-supermarkets. All the tools designed for that were either software & hard drive based, or expensive, or time consuming, or whatever. After using Evernote for a bit I hit on a genius plan:

Create 'Recipes' notebook.
Bookmark recipes from the internet there.
When I have time/can be bothered, stick titles, page numbers and ingredients of my print recipes in as well.
Tag with ingredients.
When I have a load of chicken or artichokes or whatever and I want a recipe, go to the tag or search within the notebook, and see what I've got at a glance.

I haven't had time to carry out all of this plan yet, but it's worked a bit so far, and I'm confident it's a pretty good one. I'm not the only one who does something like this, so I think it will be effective.

5) Planning Events and Organising Projects

Such at the CPD25 events I organise: I can copy bits and pieces from here and there into one note for each event and edit easily, so it's all at my fingertips instead of scribbled on 17 bits of paper that I stapled together. The same goes for work on particular projects and groups - at the moment, for example, I have notebooks for each group I sit on and each project I'm involved in, so I can keep the notes for each associated piece work together. I can even share these notes and notebooks with other people - so for example Verena has access to my Staff Development Notebook, and I can email copies of my CPD25 event planning notes to fellow team members as I update them. If someone emails me, I can either copy and paste the info into the note, or I can click the Evernote button on Outlook and it will create a new note out of the email for me to work with.

This works for personal stuff as well as work projects: we moved flats recently, and because I'm a bit obsessive I numbered all the boxes we moved with and put a description of the contents in an Evernote note. This turned out to be really useful when I needed a sewing needle in an emergency- I just searched for 'sewing' and found which number box they were in really quickly.⁸

6) Keeping meeting minutes together.

I take a pic of the notes I made (unless there's something sooper sekrit on there, obviously, as it is a freely-provided web tool), and annotate with any actions I had (using a checklist), as well as any relevant tags, then store them in a notebook marked with the name of the meeting. I can't lose the minutes, but now I don't have them lying around in a pile either, and I can refer back to them quickly if I suddenly need to in another meeting. I use this for things like One to Ones with my manager, for instance.

7) Links to amusing pictures what I have found on the internet.

Because images are really hard to search for even if you remember everything about them: this way I can store the link and tag them with things I'll remember so I can retrieve them, not rely on search engine's image searches to find them for me. Recent examples include this beautifully-done riot-related photoshop and a lovely representation of Fractal Wrongness:

And Finally, Two Other Great Things About Evernote

1) You can back it up.

...to your hard drive, or wherever, so even though it's a free/freemium/cloud service, you can have a degree of security over your contents. Here's a horror story about why to back up, plus instructions on how to do it. The only drawback is that I'm not sure you can do this automatically, you actually have to remember to do it, although there is some information on automatic backups using Windows on the Evernote site itself.

2) The Trunk.

Zillions of Apps, instructions, bits of hardware and software, all kinds of bits and bobs that interact with Evernote in useful ways.

If you're thinking, I wish I could just email stuff straight into Evernote, the instructions are there. If you need to scan a lot of stuff in and want to streamline the process, there's an app for that. You can even buy the t-shirt.

Having all this interactable stuff together in one place made it much easier for me to get back into using Evernote, because almost everytime I identified a need, I found the instructions on how to do it, or the app I needed, in the Trunk. They've actually just had a conference for their API developers and everything.

*************

So. In conclusion, I really quite like Evernote. It's pretty useful.

Also, did you see that I worked out how to do footnotes in HTML? Next time I might even try and make them hyperlink up and down. For a special treat. :D

¹And, lest anyone think I was flailing around in misery before Evernote, this technique does actually work pretty well for me, and I've been using it a long time. The big flies in the ointment are a) it's rubbish for links, because you can't click on bits of paper, and b) you have to not lose the bits of paper.

²With apologies to Joss Whedon. Original is the opening lines from the Season 7 Buffy Episode 'Storyteller', which is brilliant because Andrew.

³I'm on a horse.

⁴Evernote also makes these scrawled bits of notes, or printed paper, or whatever, searchable using OCR as well. This isn't instant for free users, but it gets done eventually, and it's pretty effective. Quite a lot of my scrawl is illegible even to me, though, so I also make use of tags and annotations.

⁵And of course, the other benefit of this is that if you're doing research, you now know exactly what was on that webpage when you came across it, and it downloads the URL and the exact time and date that you made the note as well.

⁶Flickr, I am totally looking at you here.

⁷ The current contents, for anyone interested, are as follows: links to several videos, inclulding A Very Potter Musical and John Barrowman singing to Doctor Who to the tune of 'The Wizard and I', two audio notes that I left myself from my phone concerning a blinding flash of inspiration about something I'm failing to write, two PDFs featuring long and complicated library-related fun, an ethnographic study about students' research techniques, and a list of 10 fictional places in which is it unlikely that anyone would really continue to live, were they real places.

⁸That rope thing that holds the slats together on IKEA beds. It had to be quick because my poor boyf was holding everything together whilst I was frantically looking for the needle!

Cool Extra Thing 5: Google Docs and Remember The Milk

2011-08-23T03:47:00.000-07:00

A quickish one, for I am determined to do All The Things, including all the Cool Extra Ones, before I Reflect Properly for Thing 23.

These Cool Extra Things are from back in Week 6, when we were looking at Office 2.0. I've actually used both before, and I think they're pretty good tools.

Remember the Milk

I used to use this (for about 3 months) to keep a track of my to do lists, but I've since abandoned it for Evernote (which I shall discuss, AT LENGTH, later, as it's another Cool Extra Thing). It's a good tool, nice and speedy to use, and it has a good set of prioritising and date-setting functions that make it easy to organise what you're supposed to be doing.

However, I started to dislike the lack of context around the notes; it's useful to be able to say 'Do this Then', but some of my tasks, particularly the self-set ones, are rather nebulous and need to have notes, or pictures, or all sorts to go with them to make them more useful. That's why I started to prefer Evernote when I became reacquainted with it. Also, I found that my priorities changed with circumstances quite a lot, so I was spending a lot of time fiddling about changing dates and orders and flags.

In conclusions, good tool, does what it says on the tin (and cute branding): it's just not quite right for me. The social functions do look interesting, though, and if there were more people using it I think I'd find them more useful.

Here's a list I've shared, just to prove I have done the Thing, honest!

Google Docs

I love Google Docs. I use my account a huge amount. I don't work exclusively in there, but there are some things for which it's PERFECT.

Sharing spreadsheets & other documents with my partner, e.g. when we were moving house.
Keeping track of my own spending. Obviously I don't put any deeply personal information in there - it's just lists of amounts, really - but it's a great, low-effort way to stay on top of things from wherever I am, using my computer, phone, internet cafe, library... you get the idea.
Backing up the interminable texts of my NaNoWriMo writings when that time of year rolls around.
Keeping backed up copies of PDFs, particularly knitting patterns that I've usually paid for, like this lovely cardigan I'm knitting from Twist Collective.
General dumping ground. As with most Google products, the search function is good, so I can easily throw things in there (yes, alright, recipes on the whole) and rely on the search to dig them out again if I need them (again, though, this is a use that's being overtaken by Evernote for me).
Scratchpad. I often use docs as a place to scribble ideas down for home if I'm at work, and for work if I'm at home, so I know I can get them later; I can brain-dump and move on.

I also like using it for some work functions. I don't think it will completely replace actual MS Office software anytime soon, not least because of security and similar concerns, but the principle of shareable cloud working like this is definitely the way forwards. It really is useful for sharing documents with your colleagues (again, particularly for jotting ideas down or creating lists and spreadsheets). The 'Forms' function also looks really interesting, and I'd like to learn more about that for using it to create surveys, for instance, as I've never done that myself.

We have our statistics spreadheet on the work Google Docs account - to make it easy to fill in, I share it with my own account (that way I don't have to keep logging in and out) and then I can just open it up and fill it out as I do something.

Or at least, that's the theory...

Thing 22: Meta Search Engines

2011-08-22T09:20:00.000-07:00

Meta. It's a funny old word. Quite overused. Mainly by me.*

It's an interesting concept, actually; something about the something that you're talking about. Wikipedia defines it like this:

"In epistemology , the prefix meta is used to mean about (its own category). For example, metadata is data about data (who has produced them, when, what format the data are in and so on). Also, metamemory in psychology means an individual's knowledge about whether or not they would remember something if they concentrated on recalling it. Furthermore, metaemotion in psychology means an individual's emotion about his/her own basic emotion, or somebody else's basic emotion."**

So I suppose technically meta searching ought to be searching for search engines, perhaps, but the general meaning of 'searching lots of search engines at once through the same search engine' is good enough for me.

Where was I?

Oh yes. I was going to write something librarianly about metasearching rather than meander down a entymology side street.

I quite like metasearch engines; they're a nice way of saving a bit of time if you need to cover all your bases when you're looking for stuff online. The usual caveats apply, of course; no substitute for a proper academic database, not everything is available online, not everything online is accessible through search engines, etc.

But still; they help you be a bit more thorough when you need to be, and they're a nice way of showing students that there's more to the internet than just Google.

Some Meta Thoughts on Meta Search Engines, Using the Keywords 'Chicken Recipes', Because I Have Some Chicken In the Fridge At Home And I'm Quite Hungry.

Metacrawler Screenshot

Metacrawler: a few too many ads for my taste, taking up too much of my screen. I don't mind ads on Google so much because they're at least useful and/or amusingly misplaced, although obviously I exercise my finely-honed librarianly critical thinking skills on them.

On the Metacrawler page, though, the adverts are taking up way too much of my results screen and they're a little bit too hard to distinguish from the results at first glance. They are actually Google Ads; I like the way that the ad source is clear from the greyed-out text.

I also like that in the main search results: it's nice and clear what came from where. Results are also pretty good for what I'm looking for: lots of links to lists of chicken recipes.

Dogpile Screenshot: Results

Dogpile: I have to report a bias here. I hate using Dogpile because the name makes me feel a bit queasy. Sorry. Hope no one reads this whilst eating. It's just too reminiscent of the sort of piles that dogs leave. (Of course, the case could be made that it's a pretty apposite name for a search engine, given the amount of crap on the internet...)

This one brought me a very similar set of results in terms of accuracy, and again uses the nice technique of greying out the source so it's clear and easy to spot which engine each result came from, but not too intrusive into the actual results themselves.

Dogpile: Search Ideas

However, in Dogpile, the sponsored results are completely mixed into the actual search results, which I dislike because it makes it very hard to discern which are the actually-popular/useful sites, and which ones have merely paid to be there - and for a search term like this, it's possible that the popular/useful sites have also paid for ads, so it's all just a bit confusing.

One thing I did really like in Dogpile, though, was the nice list of possible alternative searches on the right-hand side. I suspect they're also optimised for selling advertising space, but they gave a few good ideas for other searches, and demonstrated the sort of thing that I teach students about how to create lists of keywords - they'd certainly spark some new ideas for me.

Zuula Google Results Screenshot

Zuula is probably my favourite, actually. I like the layout of the page: you get 'related searches' at the top (in the Google view, anyway), and then your results follow, but they're separated by search engine - if you want to see the search in a different engine, then you click the appropriate tab. It's also searching more than just Google, Yahoo! and Bing, which is good to see.

When you switch between tabs, Zuula is also minimising the duplicated results from your first seach engine as well, so you can see the new and different results at a glance. You can still get the other results back with a click, though. I like this; it makes it much easier both to compare between engines and also get what you're actually looking for.

I also like the way that you can customize Zuula - Google is the default first tab, but you can simply drag them around to change that, and there's a whole section of Preferences that you can customize to your heart's content for all the different search types. The various search types, particularly 'tag' and 'blog', are a nice touch as well - rather than just searching general internet search engines, they're searching sites like Delicious and Diigo, and Technorati and BlogPulse respectively.

The one thing that's a little disconcerting is that I can't see how the site is being monetized, which makes me wonder if adverts are being hidden in the results somehow, but the site is in beta so perhaps it's just that there isn't monetization... yet. There's nothing in the About page, just a little bit about sponsored results in the FAQs - but I can't actually see them on the page. A bit of a mystery... That said, I can see myself actually using Zuula - I'll add it to my little box of search boxes in Firefox, once I've worked out how.

So, there you have it. My second-to-last actual Thing post. I just need to catch up on the Cool Extra Things and then I can tackle the final hurdle: The 23rd Thing.

Also, I think I shall use the mince for tea instead.

*I have a whole tag, metablogaboutblog, even, where I write blog posts about writing a blog.***
**Or at least that's what it said on August 22nd 2011 at a quarter past four, anyway. Goodness only knows what it says now.
***BLOGCEPTION!

Thing 21: Stuff That Isn't Google

2011-08-22T03:06:00.000-07:00

Aaargh. This week's Thing is supposed to be the final reflection and catch-up, but by my calculations I've got 3 actual Things left and a MILLION Cool Extra Things to go. I've been on holiday. Well, I moved house, it wasn't exactly a holiday. Pity me.

Searching book content would also be cool...

Anyway, enough excuses. On with the Thing!

I confess, I am a bit of a Google sort of girl. I use a lot of Google products, particularly my beloved Reader, and for my personal email. Google knows a lot about me, then, and that's sort of worrying, because it means that my search results will be getting very personalised to me - and that means I might miss things because I'm sitting in my own personal echo chamber, only having my own likes and wants reflected back at me.

*Pauses to look pointedly at Twitter*

But, on the other hand, it's also kinda good, because it means that Google knows what I mean when I type vague words in (yes, yes, bad librarian, I'm over it), which is handy because thinking is hard work sometimes.

I don't use other search engines all that often - in fact when I do it's often entirely by accident because I didn't realise what box I was typing in - but they are pretty handy to know about, because when you're having trouble tracking something down, a different set of algorithms can often drag it out of the depths of the interwebs for you. (Although, of course, that doesn't work for stuff that's NOT on the internet...)

Other Search Engines What I Use...

Twitter's own search engine: I do use this a lot; it's great for setting up RSS or saved search feeds on particular topics. For instance, the other evening as I was cowering in my flat listening to the riot police thunder past chasing miscreants with the contents of Argos under their arms, I set up several feeds for the local area and was able to work out - without opening my curtains - when it was a) safe again and b) the shop was open so we could buy some beer. I've noticed, however, that it's recently changed, so whether this kind of functionality will remain or not, I don't know.

Advanced Search on Flickr: for images, obviously!... and as discussed at length during 23 Things City already, advanced search is a great way to find Creative Commons-licenced work.

PDF Search Engines: There's a ton of these, and I have no particular favourite; they're just handy every so often when you're looking for a particular document you know you've seen, and can even remember a line from, but can't remember the title of. As Phil Bradley points out, though, you can also just use Google to do this by using the command filetype:pdf in your search string. The drawback with these searches, though, is that they'll bring back an astounding amount of copyrighted material - whole scanned books, all sort of things - so I tend to use with caution. (Well, I say drawback... naughty people might see this as a positive!)

Altavista: for no other reason than it was the first search engine I ever used, and used to be my way into the interwebs, back when it was an Information Super Highway. Though I think it's actually just Yahoo!'s search now. Yahoo! once had an attempt at a classification system for the internet, incidentally - Clay Shirky wrote about it in 2005 as part of a longer discussion on the nature of ontology when faced with the chaos of the internet.

TechExtra: I use this because it's good for the subject areas I support, so it's a great place to refer students to as well as to rootle around in myself. Because it's a subject portal rather than a straight search engine, it's drawing its results from a finite set of websites and other resources, including a job portal, and it's cutting out the 'noise' that you get from using a general engine or Google Scholar, which is useful for novice searchers like undergraduates.

Wolfram Alpha: again, its content often falls into my subject areas. Personally, I find it particularly useful when baking, because in the US food bloggers tend to use volume ('cups') rather than weight measurements when giving ingredients. If you search '1 cup of sugar' or whatever in Wolfram Alpha, it will give you the amount you need to actually weigh out. I also like the semantic-ness of the results - the results tell you what the engine has assumed, but you can click various options to change that. So for the sugar example, it tells me 'Assuming "sugar" is a food | Use as a chemical compound instead' and I can click to see a ton of detailed chemical information instead.

I am a bit dubious about Wolfram Alpha, though, because it's never clear exactly where all this information has come from. I'll trust it for baking, but I don't think I'd want to use it to give me information I was going to rely on in a paper or a dissertation: it's a bit like Wikipedia that way. A place to start, but never an end point for proper research. If you scroll to the very bottom of your results, it does give you a proper bibliography under the 'Source Information' link - but then spoils it with a disclaimer:

'This list is intended as a guide to sources of further information. The inclusion of an item in this list does not necessarily mean that its content was used as the basis for any specific Wolfram|Alpha result.'

In all fairness, you can request to know exactly where the information came from: 'Requests by researchers for detailed information on the sources for individual Wolfram|Alpha results can be directed here.' - but I don't know what sort of result that would garner and how long it would take; perhaps looking it up in an original source would turn out to be less time-consuming anyway? :-)

**************

So, there's some thoughts on search engines. Now, could someone invent one that would search the interior of my tiny noo flat to find out where the hell all my belongings are, please?

I think I might be in love

2011-08-09T14:17:00.000-07:00

So I may have mentioned my profound love of doodling. I have found a Grand High Vizier of doodling to worship. Epic.

Thing 20: Podcasts

2011-08-08T05:17:00.000-07:00

I don't have anything witty for a caption, I just
thought this was a cool photo.

Podcasts. Hmm.

I confess, I'm at a bit of a loss here. I'm extremely not an audio person. I'm the one who takes copious unreadable notes in meetings when I don't need to, the one everyone else gives the 'god she's such a superkeener' looks. I'll never look at the notes again: it's not cause I have magic colour-coded files of everything you've ever said, it's because I'm rubbish at sitting quietly and just listening, so if I don't have a pen in my hand writing things down, or at least doodling, it will go in one ear and out the other without making any impact on my consciousness.

You'd think, being an obsessive knitter, I'd get on really well with podcasts, as you don't need to use your hands for them. And true, there's tons of knitting podcasts for Interested Parties: see the article about 'em from 2006 in Knitty, that's a good starting point, plus also the Podcast Junkies group on Ravelry).

I just don't get on with them, though. The only time I'd rather listen than read is when I'm knitting, but I find the spoken word worryingly distressing then. I can't hack podcasts, audiobooks, Radio 4 - even The Archers - it distracts me and pulls me out of my rhythm much more, and much more jarringly, than a reading a screen or even actively listening to music does.*

I'm also not sure about using them in libraries. I can see them working as part of a wider subject blog, just like Emily has demonstrated on the 23 Things City blog with her Lawbore agony aunt podcast, but otherwise I dunno. There's been a dreadful tendency to call any audiofile a podcast, cause it's the in thing**, when it's actually a singleton library tour or similar. However, a podcast, to me, should be a series, something that's updated and that people queue up in iPlayer to listen to.

Are there really all that many topics that we could podcast about that would have students perched on the edge of their seat waiting for the next update? Perhaps I'm letting my own prejudice against podcasts shine through here, or perhaps I'm just very cynical, and other librarians will come back at me with figures proving me wrong, that 1000s of students are desperate to hear me read out my latest thoughts on Referencing & Citation, but I doubt it.

That said, having audiofiles on the website on the relevant point is a good idea, because unlike me a lot of people are very aural, so they'll prefer to download a spoken word file rather than read through text - also great for people with visual impairments or various disorders that can affect reading skills and preferences.

So, perhaps here's a path for libraries and librarians that want to create audio content and are enamoured with the idea of podcasting:

Make your useful audiofiles to complement what's on your website - for us, we could add 'em into Upgrade, our brilliant information literacy site.***
Then, edit the file to add a bit at the beginning and the end to say 'hello welcome to our podcast this is episode three hundred and eleven million of a neverending series...'.
Add it to iTunes or wherever.

Voila: instant podcast, plus useful additions to your website. Next, I shall achieve World Peace using only a pair of compasses and a small mouse.

*I tend to read lengthier blog posts, that sort of thing, online whilst I'm knitting. Spacebar FTW . I haven't yet managed the art of reading a print book whilst knitting, though I believe Kindles are good for that sort of thing.
**Yes, alright, the in thing about 8 years ago, and yes, I know I sound like my Grandmother, but hello, I am librarian who called her blog Twinset & Purls ON PURPOSE: I am okay with that. I am, as Pink so sagely pointed out, Too School For Cool, and I think that's a good thing.
***I can say that without seeming big-headed cause so far I've had naff all to do with it, except pointing people to it cause it's really useful.

Thing 19: YouTube & Information Literacy

2011-08-04T02:18:00.000-07:00

Probably not what YouTube's servers look like

Ever one to follow instructions carefully,* I've dutifully watched a lot of videos featuring lovely sleepy kittens. Now I'm to consider how libraries and librarians can use YouTube .

I confess, when I first heard someone say 'Oh yes, search youtube for some information literacy videos' a couple of years ago I was a scoffing unbeliever, because till then my main uses for YouTube were watching:

videos of Maru
music videos which I'm sure were completely legal
clips of people falling over
TV and film clips which I'm sure were completely legal
~~entire programmes and films~~ reporting copyright infringement to YouTube's overlords.

However! Now that I have all the epic skillz and l33t knowledge commensurate with being the baby subject librarian,** I know better. Here's some ways in which libraries and librarians can use video...

Advertising services to students and staff

For instance, talking heads of students passing advice onto new students (Helen and I are filming something similar at the moment for our induction) - Warwick did that and hosted it on their own website., and there's a great candid video of a Middlesex student talking about how much she uses the library (not on YouTube, but on MDXPlay, Middlesex's own institional equivalent). You could also do clips of staff introducing themselves, an overview of different parts of the building, that sort of thing.

Warwick have also produced videos by students about the library , Presumably, videos like these have a twofold effect: they help create library ambassadors out of students, and seem much more real and relevant than materials produced by librarians, no matter how down with the kids we are.***

Teaching Students: Information Literacy

Using videos as part of workshops or lectures brightens them up a bit, and you can link to the content from subject guides afterwards so students can watch again at their leisure. Hosting videos we've made on a service like YouTube is useful for this as it makes it easier to reuse our own content: we could all easily access and link to each others' content without reinventing the wheel.

But YouTube is also great for finding other places' videos to reuse, so you don't have to make your own! It feels cheeky at first, but that's what people expect when they make their videos public, and it's a really useful way of making a point a bit differently in a training session: for instance, you could show your students how you plan out your searches**** or come up with keywords, then show them a video of how another librarian does it. Or, you could tell them about the CRAAP Test without having to stop for a giggle, if you're a bit immature about swearwords. Obviously I'm not.

Often, other people's content is really engaging, and not too heavily branded to other institutions - that's why I love the dinosaur video and the 'don't just Google' cartoon one, I hadn't seen it before, shown in the 23 Things City multimedia pos t.

Helping Users: How to do stuff

Film someone doing something. Stick it on YouTube. Stick link on a 'how to' guide, use it on the reference desk, email it to people. It can be much, much quicker to email a video to a struggling student to show them what you mean than try to explain over email or the phone - free tools like Jing, which films your screen as you do a voice over, are really useful for this. Middlesex has used Jing to produce some 'how to' videos for particular databases, for instance.

This technique is particularly good for things like Self-Service Machines: I find that lots of students are convinced that they're evil because they've used those horrible supermarket ones, but as soon as you show them how efficiently they work, they're quite happy. Having a video (like London Met do) means you can show them in inductions rather than having to talk them through it individually.

Tarting up blog posts basically at random

Here, enjoy these Fainting Goats. 20 Internet Points if you can fit 'em (relevantly!) in an Information Literacy session:

*Shuddup. I do when it suits me. See also: Buffy.
**Yeah, we worked out some experience figures. I'm pulling the average way down, but I make up for it with relentless and mildly terrifying enthusiasm.
***I am not down with the kids, nor would I wish to be. But I do quite like students.*****
****I plan. Officially.
*****Couldn't eat a whole one, mind. Unless there's melted cheese or something.

Thing 18: Delicious

2011-08-03T04:29:00.000-07:00

So. This post was going to be a post all about my personal bookmarking needs, documenting my attempt to solve all my problems. I fully expected to be returning to Delicious for personal use, embracing it like a long-lost friend. But...

But... everytime I identified a need that I thought Delicious would help me with, I discovered a way to do it in Evernote. I'm going to write another blog post about it, as Evernote is in fact a Cool Extra Thing, but this is the gist of it:

Seriously. Someone find me an app for this.

Anyway, enough: this wasn't supposed to be about Evernote. It's about Delicious. And because I seem to have talked myself out of Delicious for personal use, it's about using Delicious at work.

Using social bookmarking tools for Work Stuff

Delicious, Diigo and similar alternatives are great for sharing free links with users: they’re easy tools to use, and anyone with the password to your account can add or change tags or descriptions for anything online. Both have easy ways to embed the information on a website, and they also work really well with subscription products like Libguides, which is a popular tool for producing library guides.

However, Delicious provides a rather tasty* lesson about using free online tools institutionally. And the lesson is this:

Free online tools might disappear.

(See Also: PageFlakes.) Delicious seems now to be as safe as any free tool can be, now that it's been sold, but after Yahoo! bought it in the first place there was a long period of little development followed by a leaked slide from a corporate presentation showing it as earmarked for closure. This really hammered home to me that libraries using online tools need to have a bit of a plan for what to do if it all goes wrong and the tool disappears.

For social bookmarking, I think the risk is fairly easily mitigated by using another bookmarking alternative at the same time. Diigo, for instance, can be set up so it updates Delicious automatically, so you’ve always got one backing the other up, and you can easily manually download the contents of one and upload it into the other. Doing this took me about 10 minutes the other day, including working out how to do it. I don't think that the risk of a free tool going under should be enough to stop libraries using them, though - it's just something to be aware of.

I think the important thing about bookmarking tools for me as a Subject Librarian is that I can provide mediated access to good free resources efficiently and quickly, without having to attempt to put half the internet into the LMS: using these tools returns us to a point where the catalogue is just for things we own or have paid for access to.

Social bookmarking means I can point users to free sites without messing about with long HTML lists, and it keeps access to free websites where they belong – on the internet! Plus, it provides access into Delicious itself – which means users have got a place to search that’s got content selected by real human beings with extra contextual clues for critical thinking like tags and descriptions provided by other users. It's not something I've really explored myself yet, but there are social functions like sending bookmarks to other Delicious accounts that could be a way to engage users.

*Pun totally and unapologetically intended.

Thing 17, Wikis, and Library Day In The Life Round 7

2011-07-29T05:25:00.000-07:00

For #libday7-ers: I'm a Subject Librarian at an academic library in London. This is a mixed 23 Things and Day in the Life Post - scroll down if you don't care about my opinions on Wikis!

I've had a bit of a mixed experience with Wikis. My sole contribution to Wikipedia to date has been a one-woman crusade to remove the 17th century anachronistic 'à' from the middle of mentions of cantankerous old Thomas Becket's* name.

Wikipedia gets a lot of flack from all kinds of quarters, and there's definitely some flaws with it, but it's much easier to correct than the Encylopaedia Britannica, and about as accurate.** My personal feeling on the matter is that I don't trust Wikipedia in the absolute sense, and I certainly wouldn't cite a Wikipedia article, but that it's a useful tool for getting a grip on background information on a topic, or understanding the meaning of words or phrases in context. Much like any other encyclopaedia, in fact.***

I have contributed to several smaller, work-based wikis before as well, for recording training events at a previous job, for Library Day in the Life Round 5, and of course I use our current work one for looking Stuff up when I'm on the desk, which for me is the chief most important use of a staff wiki. There was a bit of a fad for using wikis to Fix All The Things**** a while back, and whilst a lot of spurious and unsuccessful wikis were invented, I think they've settled into a useful tool, particularly for things like the Library Day in the Life.

Oh, yes, Library Day in the Life. That's what I was going to do before I started banging on about Wikipedia. Ahem.

Wow. Get a load of that card catalogue! *wolf whistles*

Monday:

Had a nice day off. Did not think about work. Mainly knitted and watched films on the telly, although via the DVD player because my telly has been basically broken for about three years but I am too cheap to purchase a new one and too lazy to try to fix it. Besides, that's what iPlayer and its weaker imitators are for. I did read some library blogs, though, because I am a glutton for punishment.

Tuesday:

Back to work after a long weekend. Spent a bit of time catching up with colleagues and avoiding my inbox. When I eventually faced it, there were 105 new messages, and sadly most of them needed something actually doing with them. I 'proposed new times' for all the meeting requests first, because obviously they all clashed with each other... that's why I'm normally completely meticulous about keeping my calendar up-to-date.*****

Then I did a bit of triage on the emails, responding to the important ones, putting some aside for later and generally firefighting 'em. It was at this point that I realised my whole inbox needed seriously organising and things needed putting neatly into folders, a project which I've been slowly working on all week.

What else? Hmm... a bit of CPD25 stuff, some 23 Things City blogging, sorting out some library inductions for my School for the coming year, a bit of collection management at some recalcitrant books, and generally getting on with catching up with stuff.

Wednesday:

This was a day of meetings. A meeting of the library Induction Group to sort out logistics and plans for the general library induction for 2011/12 was followed by a meeting to finalise plans for introducing new subject guides - it's a system I've used in a previous job so I get to be expert for about three days until everyone else works out that it's really easy to use and overtakes my knowledge. Then I was on the Service Desk reception for an hour and a half. It was pretty quiet, so I used the time to catch up reading fellow 23 Things City-ers' blogs, and helped the few students that came to us. It's mostly returning books and paying off fines at this time of the year.

Then I did a bit more thinking about some events I'm organising for CPD25 next academic year, and started on a few actions from the previous meetings, as well as attacking the inbox again, which by this point was starting to look a lot more librarianly. Quite a lot of the emails were the bottom of my triage pile and just needed reading and absorbing, rather than responding to, and those are the ones I find easiest to let slide when there's pressing things to do, but I was a Good Librarian and read them anyway.

Thursday:

Sadly people keep selfishly sending me emails which makes the whole inbox-tidying thing much more difficult, but I persevere. Thursday morning saw a sudden flurry of emails regarding induction, rather suggesting that there may have been a meeting about it elsewhere, so I've got a nice lot of times and dates to work with now. Induction Week, as usual, is going to be Fun.

We also had a site meeting, which was a chance to hear about some upcoming developments and a bit of strategy - it's always nice to know where you're supposed to be going! That was followed by a nice positive One-to-One with my manager where we caught each other up on Stuff, had a nice discussion about 23 Things City and generally went over things.

After lunch I wrote a review email to the head of our service about the LIS DREaM Conference; I'd totally forgotten that she'd asked to be briefed about it, but luckily I remembered not too long after the event. It always takes longer than you'd think to digest things like that down into a Short Version for Busy People, but it does help to clarify your own thinking.

In the afternoon, Helen and I had a great time playing Film Director in the library lobby area, persuading some lovely students to be videoed answering a few questions about how the library. We didn't prompt them for positive answers at all, but to a person they were incredibly complimentary to us and said all the right things - one even said how much like like the electronic resources - clearly we're doing something right!

After 5 I had a bit of time to spare, so I polished off another Thing blog post (I'm catching up!). Then a few current colleagues and I headed off pubwards for an pre-wedding party for a former colleague we'd all worked with. Libraries are pretty small worlds!

Friday:

Today I've finally won the Battle of the Inbox, and turned my attention to my atrocious-looking desk. I have a terrible habit of writing Important Things down on scraps of paper and leaving them in a pile on my desk (it's a bit like a Hipster PDA, but less organised). It's surprisingly effective, but it does mean that you actually have to have the bit of paper with you when you need it, so I'm trying to reorganise them into a more useful format... but more about that in another post, for it utilises some Cool Extra Things.

When I came in this morning, there was much talk about publicity materials, and I somehow found myself invited to attend a meeting about it this afternoon at another campus I've never been to before. I was supposed to be joining this group next academic year anyway - now I'm early and unprepared - fabulous!

A bit of shift-swapping ensued and I found myself on the desk again, this time balancing lots of queries about fines and book returning with doing a bit more filming for our video - it's going to be a masterpiece, I tell you. My favourite bit was a user who told that they'd never heard of libraries charging fines before...

This afternoon before the meeting I'm going to carry on organising myself a bit better - this time of year is really the time to do this sort of thing as it's (relatively) quiet for a subject librarian. Then I'll make a start on my new subject guides :D.

Back to wikis....

So, that was my week. Our Thing this week was to blog Library Day in the Life or add our blog to the UK Library Blogs/Bloggers list. I was a bit of an overachiever and tried to do both, I'm afraid - the blog list was fine, once I'd worked out how to log in, and I'm just waiting to hear if I have permission to add myself to the other one. I've done it before, but clearly I must've been using an old work email address.

I love the whole Day in the Life concept, but I'm never sure what happens afterwards - I like reading them just for a bit of fun and an insight into other peoples' days, but it'd be great to see a bit more than that - has anyone ever used the posts for research? A library school dissertation, perhaps?

*Interested parties should investigate the further reading section on the Wikipedia article - all great books. The easiest to read and most up to date****** is Duggan, Anne (2005), Thomas Becket, London: Hodder Arnold. Which I have a signed copy of, which you CANNOT borrow, because Anne Duggan was my dissertation supervisor, and I am That Cool. Those of a stronger constitution should also read both enormous volumes of her translation of his Correspondence, which is fascinating.
**At least, in 2005. Fine, you want a proper citation? Bloody librarians. Here: Nature 438, 900-901 (15 December 2005) | doi:10.1038/438900a; Published online 14 December 2005.
***Apart from this one. Don't use this one. Almost entirely NSFW but the front page *should* be okay.
****Read this blog post, immediately. Seriously.
*****Well, that and scarring from a previous job where I was an administrator for lawyers who either couldn't use Outlook, or just plain old refused to use it. It was hellish. Scheduling a meeting was a nightmare, and when it came around people just didn't turn up, or were hugely late, or demanded to know why they hadn't been formally invited when they had, or turned up three days early. AWFUL. Use your calendar, people.
******Yes, actually, it does matter in history, just as it does in every other subject. People discover new stuff about the past all the time and come to new conclusions even more frequently. Sometimes even two or three in the same sentence, if my UG essays were anything to go by...

Thing 16: Slideshare

2011-07-28T09:27:00.000-07:00

I think Slideshare is great. I've used it before both as a viewer and as an uploader, and it's really very, very useful. In fact, I've already embedded someone else's useful slides in a blog post here. The best bit for a subject librarian is that you can upload your slides before you deliver a teaching session, use them during the session*, then use the nice easy embedding code to embed the presentation into your subject guides or VLE afterwards, or simply email the link to people if they want it.

"And this poor chappess was a victim of the previous Bad Presentation!"

Of course, that's the same as Prezi - it too has good embedding features. I find it pretty hard to compare the two, actually, because I think they're both good for slightly different things. Prezi works particularly well when you want to present non-linear concepts to people - for instance it would be perfect for teaching students how to mind-map, or how you go about thinking up keywords for searches. But PPT is better for more structured concepts, like taking users through the steps they need to follow to log into Athens, or to find something on the library catalogue.

Of course, if you were doing a long teaching session covering a bit of a crash course in finding stuff, then you might want to embed a couple of PPTs from Slideshare into Prezi (or vice versa) to really make the most of both mediums...**

Prezi has the edge over PPTs for self-guided presentations, I think, where you put them on a website and users or other viewers follow them through themselves. But still, this would depend on the content - a quick trawl through Slideshare's best presentations will show that you can do this with PPTs as well, and because you can embed them through Slideshare rather than uploading a clunky old file, both as as easy to disseminate as each other.

Ultimately, I think, as with most presentation tools, from a blackboard & chalk to all the shiny kit Apple uses in a new product launch: it's more about what you do with them than with the tool itself - the idea is to get your point across, or to meet particular learning outcomes, or whatever, and part of the 'trick' of doing that is to pick the right tool for the job. To do that, I think you need to play around a bit with tools like these as they cross your path.

*I always have my memory stick in my handbag. I'm very careful like that. What I do not always have, however, is the correct presentation loaded onto the memory stick...***
**Presception! I put a presentation in your presentation so you could present while you're presenting, cause I know you like presentations.****
***Actually, the best cure for this is to always store them all in Dropbox,***** so that the docs are always there when you need them. Unless the internet goes down. In which case you've usually got bigger problems.
****Why yes, I do spend a lot of time on the internet, why do you ask?
*****That's a referral link so if you use it to sign up I'll get extra space. I'm greedy like that.

Ye Saga Of Ye Cardigan Blue

2011-07-28T05:09:00.000-07:00

It has been brought to my attention that there is not enough knitting content on this blog. Fair enough. I therefore present a heavily edited rehashing of the project notes for my poor maligned and mistreated Hey! Teach! cardigan. OBVIOUSLY I never swear, so I have edited all the Bad Words out.*

A few words in my defence before I begin: I had been knitting for about 5 months at this point and had never tried lace before. I also have no common sense or fear when it comes to knitting and will attempt anything, no matter how ludicrously complicated it looks, no matter the risk to my sanity, on the (extremely tenuous) grounds that it's only pretty string and I can always start again if I get stuck. More importantly, I also did not know about lifelines at this point.

Ha.

Bits of the blue cardigan, in the midst of the madness.

July, 2008.

This is fate! I saw this and loved it, but am not going to buy any more yarn as I have tons of knittable stuff to use really. Then I realised I'd got this yarn** that I'd failed to make something else with, so I frogged it, and here it is!

In the meantime, some kind soul had added the yarn measurements to this pattern on Ravelry, and I realised I had just enough of just the right sort of stuff! Fate, I tells ye. So I’ve been pretending to do lots of important stuff all evening whilst starting it.

Later the same day:

So, turns out lace is like, rilly rilly hard. Huh.

Even later the same day:

LACE IS REEEEAAAALLLLLLY BLEEPING HARD. I did like a whole repeat, and then it all went wrong and I dropped something somewhere and I’ve had to frog all the way back to the BLEEPing ribbing cause I couldn’t work out how to just unknit it a bit because of the yarn overs. I think this time I might try and weave in a safety cord or something at the end of a repeat. Is that even possible?? Arrrgh.

Much later, still the same day:

So. Turns out there’s a reason for why I’ve only been getting 5 repeats and not six, and guess what? It’s not a fault in the pattern. But it is connected to why mine doesn’t look like everyone else’s.

Turns out that this whole Yarn Over thing, right, means that you just do the wrapping the yarn over bit, and doesn’t automatically include knitting the next stitch. [this is basic knitting knowledge, apparently...] Which logically makes a whole world of sense, but hadn’t actually filtered through into my studip brain. So I’ve frogged*** it down to the ribbing again. THIS TIME IT WILL WORK… WILL WORK I TELL YOU.

30th July, 2008:

FOR BLEEP’S SAKE. Why can’t I decrease on this pigging thing???? I can’t work out why I’m so BLEEP at this: surely it’s just a question of starting at the point on the chart after the stitches you’ve bound off? Gnnnnnngggghhh. I’ve tried interrogating the interwebs for help - I might have to (deh deh deeeehhh) ask for help on the Techniques forum.

No. I can’t expose myself to that madness.****

1st of October, 2008, after shoving it in a cupboard for several months whilst knitting other things and pointedly ignoring it.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I ROCK! I ROCK MANY! Worked it all out with the help of some graph paper and a bit of thinking. I can’t actually work out what I was doing wrong before, but that's besides the point, because it works now, and that’s the important thing.

For future reference, self [big chunk of boring Note To Self technical knitting stuff removed].

YAY MEEEEE!

5th October, 2008:

I has finished teh back. I is genius of godlike proportions.

22nd October, 2008:

At risk of giant-wip-destroying hubris, I think I can say that I kinda get it now. I’ve got a back, I’ve got one front, I’ve charted out the other side and I’ve cast it on and started. It’s a bit of learning curve, this lady, but I think she’s been good for me so far!

1st February, 2009, after a long hiatus caused by Giant WIP-Destroying Hubris caused by an argument with the sleeves and a vast improvement in my knitting skills, knitting self-awareness, and stash enhancement***** skills.

Thoughts on finishing the first sleeve:

I really, really HATE cotton. Feels like knitting with tough string, doesn’t look pretty, not very warm, no memory or poofyness to it, has a funny sound. Totally totally over it. So much that if there’s any of this left I’ll probably be making very expensive Rowan dishcloths with it and then never buying any more of the BLEEPing stuff ever again.******
I have just realised that the reason mine doesn’t have those lovely straight lines going down from each point of the lace pattern is that I’ve been doing the middle decrease wrong. Instead of slipping two stitches knitwise AT THE SAME TIME I’ve been doing them purlwise, one at a time.
The above is not as much of a problem as the discover that ALL MY STOCKINETTE IS TWISTED because I've been purling the wrong way for, oooh, AN ENTIRE YEAR.
I’m not at all sure I’m going to like this when it’s finished. Perhaps I know someone who would like it? Cause I’ll HATE the thought of frogging it, because it was a lot of work and it’s taught me a huge amount.
Blue. I don’t wear blue, so perhaps buying all this because it was on sale was always going to doom the project to not-quite-but-almost-sorta fail anyway? I dunno. I actually also hate blue. I suspect I probably should not purchase blue yarn, as it tends to get made into blue clothes.

Hmm.

5th February, 2009.

Erm. So I think I kind of like it again now. We’ll see. It’s all sort of coming along, and the buttons are SUPER SUPER cute, which is very cool.

7th February, 2009.

I kinda don’t know if I like it or not. It’s surprisingly warm for horrible cotton string, and actually although it bears limited resemblance to the pattern and everyone else’s the lace is actually nice and not completely BLEEPed up. But, I forgot to factor in that my [unimportant anatomical information]: I should have tried to make it longer to counter 'em. Still, one lives and learns, I suppose. I shall block it and see if it makes a difference.

[Editor's note: the persistent belief that 'it will block out fine' is a common delusion amongst knitters: washing and stretching to shape does make it look nicer, but it won't magically make you a completely different size. For some reason I can only remember this when I'm not knitting.]

11th February, 2009.

I don’t really like it and I won’t ever wear it. It makes me look frumpy and mad. Also, it is blue. I do not wear blue.

So I’m going to give it to my mum if she likes it, or possibly my sister. Or someone. But I’m still glad I did it - I learnt stuff, I suppose.

Sweet, sweet revenge. Everytime I clean something up. :D

So, there you have it. Knitting, a gentle and amusing past-time for nice ladies. Who like blue. And following instructions rather than blindly ploughing ahead. And aren't completely foolhardy.

The cardigan's eventual fate was to go to a good friend who is considerably taller and nice-figured than myself, and she seemed pleased about it; on her it looked elegant, and she suits blue rather nicely.

*I've also taken out some of the very technical knitterly bits. Sorry, knitters, you'll have to use your l33t librarian skillz to track me down on Ravelry. 5 internet points if you do, and 30 more if you're geeky enough know where my username came from...
**What you probably think of as wool, except it makes more sense to call it yarn because yarn can be made of zillions of things, not just wool, which specifically comes from sheep. Also, it's usually yarn on the interwebs because that's what Americans say, and also pedants will pick you up on it. If you're interested, the yarn I am using here is 100% cotton, called Rowan Handknit.
***Because when you undo all your work by just grabbing it and pulling, you ripit, ripit... geddit? No? Fine.
****Ravelry has lots of forums for chatting in, full of wonderful and helpful and amazing people. And some people who like to BLEEP all over one's cornflakes when a newb asks an innocent question.
*****It's the polite term for going mental in a knitting shop or exhibition and coming home with £200 worth of yarn you didn't know you needed and have no plan for. You mock now, wait until you get hooked.
******And, indeed, I am now the proud owner of several very expensive dishcloths and every time I wipe up something horrible with them, I smile beatifically.

Thing 15: Survey Monkey and the Great Toast Debate.

2011-07-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

Ever feel like you've created a monster?

Last week, popping back to my desk after lunch to get on with some work, I made a throwaway comment on Twitter about the raging toast-based argument going on in the library kitchen. The next thing I know, my twitterstream is FULL of people having detailed debates with each other about toppings, order of toppings, and whether failing to have butter underneath yourr jam really is barbaric or not.*

"Lol," says @melon_h, "you should do a survey of that for Thing 15!"**

So I did. And here are my conclusions:

I love this profession.
You're all, and I mean this with great affection, kind of crazy.
People have Strong Opinions about toast.
No one knows how to spell That Thing Made With Chickpeas And Tahini.

Infographics were requested. I have many talents, but I'm not sure infographics are one of them, so I did the best I could with Excel and Paint...

Question One:

Infographics: probably not how to do it.

Clearly, the people who answered Butter, then jam, obviously, were correct, and this is proved by majority vote in the data. The 3% of you who don't eat toast but filled in the survey anyway... I'm really not sure what to say about you. Thanks?

The 15% of people who had another opinion were, indeed, opinionated, and my infographic of how they felt is inset. I feel that the production of infographics may be an area in which I could use more training. Or any training at all. At the very least, I could use more than 3 minutes and FotoFlexer.

The second question concerned what else one might wish to anoint one's Holy Toast with, and revealed that many of you are deeply, deeply Wrong. Here's a Google Docs spreadsheet giving totals for the suggestions I gave and the write-in votes. You could pick any number of options, so the total adds up to more than the number of participants. Here's a lovely graph demonstrating the Long Tail Of Toast Toppings - as you can see, the winners were Peanut Butter and Honey, although not together (well, apart from one person), followed closely by Marmalade, Marmite, and Various Types of Cheese:

This question also revealed that some of you have rather specialised taste in toast toppings. These included: devilled kidneys and cod's roe (separately, I presume and fervently hope), cucumber, cinnamon and sugar together (which I'm totally trying), and the delightful sounding Haselslag and Spoon Sweet, which I shall be investigating. More worrying were the following combinations:

marmalade and marmite
cream cheese and jam
normal cheese and jam
marmite and peanut butter
peanut butter and honey

The best combination suggestion was to put peanut butter on as usual, then add chocolate chips and put in a toaster oven (or I guess the grill would work) to melt.

The Final Question: Do you have anything further to add about this burning issue?

Another skilled infographic

(The pun, by the way, was completely unintentional but I did lol when I realised later what I'd done...)

See the results here: the most frequent final comment was along the lines of 'toast is great', but after that came criticisms of the survey, responses to my bad pun, arguments about the toastedness and temperature of the toast, the type of bread, and further exposition of the Jam Without Butter Heresy. Further praise for one's chosen topping and statements about being hungry were also popular. Cheerfully, only one person made a threat to report jam haters to CILIP for breaching the Code of Professional Ethics. I'm fairly sure that this is not in the code, but I'd keep jam hatred to myself, were I you.

Further Research is Needed Into...

What compelled so many people to fill in such a daft survey.
Bagels.
Why I spent such a long time - at least a whole hour or something - writing it up.
The type of bread used to create the toast.
My inability to produce sensible infographics.
Jam vs Cream on Scones (suggested by commenter. Clearly, however, all sensible people know that the answer is "both, and butter.").
Toastedness and Temperature of Toast.
This leftover chickpea curry business - that sounds seriously delish.
Haselslag and Spoon Sweet, see above. I shall investigate my local 24hr shop**** (usual source of things the supermarket doesn't have) asap.

Actual stuff about actual Survey Monkey, actually meeting the actual criteria for this Thing:

It looks like 1994. Particularly the retro colour themes, just like back from when you had to boot Windows from the DOS prompt and it took two days for the 486 to load.*****
It's pretty easy to use. Unlike DOS.
Getting your results, with a tiny bit of anaylsis done for you, is easy.
Ease of use does not mean that you don't have to know anything about questionnaire design or statistics. Hence why my hurriedly-produced questionnaire was methodologically crap.
The free version of Survey Monkey is very limited - the last 15 people to fill in the Great Toast Debate didn't get counted because the limit is 100 - but I didn't know that until *after* it was too late, because it's not very well advertised. And I didn't look in any meaningful way, cause I wasn't expecting more than about four people to be that invested in toast.

So, conclusions: Survey Monkey is a v useful tool (I've used it professionally before) for setting up and disseminating surveys if a) you actually know how to design surveys and carefully interpret the results, and b) you have a paid account with some of the bells and whistles added in. Users have almost always seen it before, so they know how to use it.

* Just in case anyone cares where I stand on this, failing to have butter under your jam is not barbaric, but it is a bit Wrong. Barbaric seems... harsh, however. Also, butter is actually a very barbarian thing, cause they didn't use olive oil like Proper People, i.e. the Romans. Random segue is more random than usual. Sorry about that.***
** I paraphrase, obviously, I've never actually heard her say 'lol'.
*** I am not really sorry for random segues.
****Famed because when my former housemate asked them if they'd be open over Christmas, they instructed her to look at the front of the shop. Closer inspection revealed that it does not, in fact, have a front, and can therefore Never Close. It is a Good Shop.
*****I'm not incredibly old, we just had a computer when I was very small and I used to write atrocious "novels" about ponies on it. That's why I can type so alarmingly fast. The Pullein-Thompson sisters and Patricia Leitch have a lot to answer for.

Thing 14: Doodle

2011-07-26T07:12:00.000-07:00

23 Things Tea will not be this posh. BYO tea.

I think, now that I see it, I may have been on the receiving end of a Doodle invite before, for large-scale meetings at a previous job where very few individuals were vitally necessary, but a certain number of us had to be there for the meeting to be quorate.

I've set up a poll for having a 23 Things City Tea: if any of you City-ers would like to join me, please click and pick a time!

It's certainly a good idea to give people choices in when they'd like to meet - I wish Outlook did this - but I can't see myself using it for the sorts of meetings I usually have, because I like to keep my calendar meticulously up-to-date with details of meetings and possible meetings and travel times and similar, just because that makes life so much easier for other people who might need to know where I am.

*flashback* Plus, in a previous life I used to arrange a lot of meetings for horrible lawyers that never filled in their calendars properly and made my work life very traumatic because of it, cancelling meetings at the last minute and not turning up to things, or turning up to things three days early, or *end flashback, with crying*

Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, I like to model good Outlook ettiquette due to scarring from a previous job. I like Doodle because you can poll people as to when would be good for them, but I'd have to use Outlook as usual as well, so it wouldn't be suitable for run-of-the-mill meetings, perhaps just for larger ones as I described above.

What I really adored about Doodle was that I didn't have to register for it. It just did its thing without needing to know the name of my first pet or my grandmother's favourite brand of jam. That was refreshing, and will probably be the thing that brings me back to it, if I need it again: if I'd had to register now, there's no way I'd have remembered the details by the next time I needed it, and I'd probably not have bothered fighting through to get the password reset.

Plus, it was pretty easy to use, and I can see already that people have answered me and that I can see very easily what the votes were. I can see me using this again if the right circumstances arose.

Thing 13: Prezi

2011-07-26T03:39:00.000-07:00

I've been aware of Prezi for a while now, and I've seen it used really, really well, and sort of badly (which is a win on PowerPoint already, where you generally see it used kinda well and incredibly badly). It's particularly great to use at the moment because a lot of people, library users and academics especially, are not that familiar with it, so using it at all means you have an automatic 'wow' factor for your presentation.

For instance, here's a not-very-good-at-all Prezi I put together for an ICS Customer Services course I did recently - it's a bit rubbish, but most of the delegates hadn't seen Prezi before and were really interested in how I'd put it together.

Improving Communication at the Service Desk on Prezi

However, one of our educational technologists pointed out to me a while ago that this impressive-cause-it's-newish thing will be short-lived - at some point soon, bad Prezis will be as common as awful PowerPoints. I suppose that means...

Make hay whilst the sun shines: use that Prezi now before the novelty wears off!
Use 'em mindfully now so that you're actually good at it when everyone else jumps on the bandwagon as well...

(Sorry, apparently I'm in a cynical mood this morning.)

The thing I think most people, me included, have already noticed about Bad Prezis is the zooming... too much zooming and you've a conference hall full of slightly seasick people who really just want a lie down and perhaps another one of those nice biscuits.

Get it right, though, and Prezi is a great way to present your work and ideas and actually have people listen, especially as it helps you break out of that linear thing that PowerPoint forces us into. I'm not sure I've achieved that yet, but I'm enjoying having a go.

Key Components in Designing Information Literacy Sessions for Students on Prezi

This simpler Prezi was used in a job interview: and I got the job, so I must've done something right! This one makes much more sense as a standalone - I think that's going to be important to bear in mind as I think about materials for induction this coming year.

One of the things I like best about Prezi as a tool for presenting information is that whilst it's great to use as a tool to speak to, it's even better when it's designed to be embedded on a webpage for self-guided learning - the ability to use non-linear layouts, easily embed videos, etc., means that it's just that bit more interesting than PowerPoint.

I still think there's a use for both, though - it's another tool to use where it's appropriate, same as any other teaching and presenting tool.

LIS DREaM Report, Part 2: The Afternoon (and Lunch!)

2011-07-24T11:14:00.000-07:00

This is Part 2 of my report - start at the beginning!

Lunch and Networking

I’ve been to a couple of events at the British Library Conference Centre before and as usual, the catering was wonderful - the Peyton & Byrne lemon curd tarts were my particular favourite, although the broccoli and Stilton tart was a close competitor.

I’ve already written a short post on how Twitter made networking with the other delegates much easier, but I just want to note again how very friendly everyone was. I don’t usually go to events that attract a lot of researchers so I hadn’t met many delegates before, but it was great to hear so much about the kind of research people were involved in and what they were hoping to achieve. As I said in my application, I’d like to get involved in research, but I’ve not done any yet, and I was still made to feel very welcome.

Breakout Sessions

It was almost impossible to choose a breakout session, as they all sounded useful and interesting, and indeed that proved to be the case when we heard the reports back. The choices were:

1. Raising your research dissemination ambitions (Philip Hills)
2. Extending your research methods repertoire (Julie McLeod, Elizabeth Lomas)
3. Stepping out of the comfort zone by collaborating across disciplines (Sara Rankin, Gina Czarnecki)
4. Cultivating networks: opportunities and challenges (Gunilla Widén)

I attended Session 3, simply because it sounded so very interesting: stem cell & leukocyte researcher Professor Rankin and frequently-collaborating artist Gina Czarnecki were to talk about merging Science and Art in their public engagement work.

And it really was fascinating. Of all the things I expected from this conference, it never once occurred to me that I might learn how to fill an enormous crystal resin fairytale castle with children’s milk teeth. Learning about the Palaces Project (and how it contributes to public understanding of science and to wider ethical discussions about consent and bodily autonomy) is exactly why I love being a librarian: the opportunities for learning about random and interesting things are unequalled. [1]

My potential-collaboration map

More importantly for LIS research, though, we also learnt about collaborations, and how it’s the personal relationship that guides the whole thing forwards. We heard about the importance of letting go of control to get the most out of a collaboration, and how to be open to the strange and unexpected directions that a great collaboration can lead you in. We drew our own maps of potential or actual collaborations (mine’s pictured), and I’m definitely going to be keeping one eye open for opportunities to engage in this kind of work.

Finally, we also learnt that a disturbing number of mothers are clinging onto really old milk teeth, but that it’s okay - Gina can rewhiten them with special powders. Knowing the vagaries of reference work, I’m sure this is knowledge that will become useful one day.

Closing Keynote: Dylan Evans, ‘The Promiscuous Researcher: Flirting Across Disciplines and Courting the Media.’

Dr Evans took us through the unusual path of his academic career so far - from Linguistics graduate through work in Psychoanalysis, to a Doctorate in Philosophy and a postdoc in Robotics (obviously!), as well as running his own businesses and working in departments with varied focuses: Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Medicine, for instance.

Of course, there was a logical developmental path to all this, and he stressed that the variety is what led to interesting research opportunities and intellectual developments. He talked about the various collaboration opportunities he’s had along the way, such as a fascinating project where an artist used mechanical engineering equipment (a 3d printer) to create a work based on the heart. This, in turn, lead to greater understanding of the potential medical uses of this kind of printing equipment. [2]

Finally, he talked about the need to promote libraries’ work and research by courting the media, and left us with an interesting insight into a side benefit of moving between fields and collaborating across disciplines: you come to realise that actually, every discipline has the same kind of problems that Professor Cronin outlined in the opening key note, and it’s only from the outside that they look more coherent!

My conclusions

As I’ve been writing this report on the conference, I’ve still not come up with an idea on exactly which area I’d like to start my forays into LIS research. However, my enthusiasm for joining in as a practitioner has definitely increased, and I’ve certainly learnt a lot about problem areas to look out for, particularly the need to focus on rigorous methodology, to root LIS work in wider areas of thought, and to firmly link any potential research I perform to the needs and experiences of practitioners.

I’m also going to be looking out for potential areas of collaboration that would serve to raise the profile of LIS research and libraries as well as produce useful and practical research outcomes. Biddy Fisher made the excellent point in Breakout Session 3 that librarians and LIS researchers are trained in thinking laterally, both across subject boundaries and in terms of understanding others, as well as in how knowledge fits together - inter-disciplinary collaboration should be something we can do well.

1. At this point, some of us privately made a mental note to reread Hogfather and look out for signs of spare belief sloshing around the vicinity of Imperial College.
2. A PDF of the project report details more information.

LIS DREaM Report, Part 1: The Morning

2011-07-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

I had a great day last week at the launch conference for the LIS DREaM Project. DREaM stands for ‘Developing Research Excellence and Methods’ within the field of Library and Information Studies, and the conference was subtitled ‘Out of the Comfort Zone’.

I was one of 5 lucky new professionals who won funded places (sponsored by TFPL, Sue Hill Recruitment and Glen Recruitment – thank you!), along with Paula Goodale, Ray Harper, Shreeti Rajyaguru and Charlotte Smith, as well as International Award winner Colm Talbot. The other delegates were a great mix of experienced and newer researchers, academics and practitioners.

My report has turned out quite long, so I’m going to split it into two posts: this one, dealing with events Before Lunch, and the next one, dealing with events During and After Lunch.

Welcome & Introduction from Hazel Hall

The day kicked off with Principle Investigator Hazel’s warm welcome. She gave us an overview of the aims of the DREaM project, which are, briefly...

to raise the quality of LIS research through improved research training and practice
build up the communities’ research capability and volume
to put a foundation in place to start long-term collaborations within LIS research and with other disciplines.[1]

Hazel also told us about the other DREaM events, comprising three workshops and a final conference. This event was really worthwhile, so I’d definitely recommend going to one of the others if you’re interested in research. These events will be part of developing a cadre of ‘professional revolutionaries’, which has already started online:

Hazel showed us screenshots of the various online communities developing, one of which turned out to be rather surprising. As usual, one of the ways people can connect is good old Twitter – and she’d decorated her slide with #lis_dream1 tweeters’ avatars, including mine![2] There was much giggling as people spotted themselves.

A £500 award for a practitioner (or group of practitioners) excelling in LIS research was also announced: the award will be for making a ‘substantial contribution’ to the field since 2009. If you know someone you’d like to nominate, then further details are available on the 19th July press release.

Opening Keynote: Blaise Cronin, ‘...And into the Zone of Quasi-Rationality’

Professor Cronin’s tour of past LIS research was a particular highlight for me as a non-researcher, because it helped me understand the background of his own review of current research, and how the rest of the conference sessions fitted into the wider body of the field.

In some ways, Professor Cronin’s overview of the current state of LIS Research was rather depressing; he identified some key problems -

‘Cookie cutter research’, in some part caused by the demands of US academic libraries’ tenure systems. The audience laughed and grimaced in equal parts in recognition of his fill-in-the-blanks research titles: “Information Needs Of...”, “Authorship Trends In...”.[3]
Not enough meta-analysis: researchers need to do more to widen and generalise research, both by performing topical meta-analysis and introducing relevant research from other fields (the example he used was the inclusion of French Theory [4]).
Weak methodology and a lack of ‘hard’ research skills in areas like statistics. (This is a particular personal worry for me: rigorous training in historical research might leave me capable of reading abbreviated medieval Latin [5] but it’s not much help when faced with a big pile of questionable questionnaire data and a copy of SPSS!)

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom: there are reasons to be cheerful, not least because of conscious improvement efforts like the DREaM conference. He pointed in particular to...

The recent reversal of trends in LIS citations [6] - over the last 10-15 years LIS papers and articles have been increasingly cited outside the LIS field, rather than just within it.
The introduction of non-LIS academics from allied areas into LIS departments, and their influence on new LIS researchers.
The growth of networking: social media both as a growth subject in LIS research and as a means of collaboration and dissemination for the community and across subject lines.

The conclusion I took from the keynote was positive as well: we can make the most of connections, both physical and virtual, and work out where best to concentrate our research, in order to benefit the LIS profession as a whole and improve the field.

One Minute Madness

This was the first time I’d seen a One Minute Madness session, and I was astounded by how well everyone kept to time - poor Stella Wisdom, officiating, hardly got to use her car horn to shush the participants at all.

The slides with details of the Madnessers’ projects are available on the LIS DREaM website; I particularly enjoyed hearing about Frank Huysmans’ look at Dutch public libraries, especially after Elaine Fulton had just spoken about Digital Reference Services in Scotland. Watching everyone do so well at explaining their complex research in just one very short minute was very inspiring: who knows, next time there’s a session like this, maybe I’ll have something to say?

Proceed to Part Two: The Afternoon, And Lunch.

1. See slide 8 of Hazel’s Welcome Slides.
2. Slide 18 of Hazel’s Welcome Slides. It made me very glad I’d changed from my previous avatar to a nice professional-looking one - despite hoping they well, it’s always a bit of a shock to me when I realise that people are actually looking at the information I put on the Internet! It’s a shame that this professional look did not follow through onto Slide 24, really – Hazel had managed to catch a screenshot the Twitter list of DREaM participants just when I was banging on about Harry Potter. Again.
3. See Slide 13 of the Opening Keynote.
4. See Slide 12.
5. Confession: I’m not actually sure I can still do this. I could do it once, promise! *Looks longingly at Pipe Rolls*
6. See Slides 22-24.

Conference Fear: A Bit Of Reflection

2011-07-21T05:42:00.000-07:00

So I'm just attempting to write up my post(s) about the the launch conference for the LIS DREaM Project, which I went to on Tuesday, and within two paragraphs I'd tangented (surprising, I know), and it turned into a whole new blog post about Fear and New Stuff and Scary People.

I’d been really very nervous, as I always am before conferences and training courses, about meeting and talking to all these New People who would, obviously, be much more knowledgeable, poised and fabulous than me. Indeed, I’d met hardly anyone there before, and most of them only once, briefly. But that was the point at which all that twittering away that I like to do justified itself...

Firstly, @bethanar invited any available London tweeple and #lis_dream1-ers out for a drink for when she arrived in town the night before. 'Aaargh, no, i-am-too-scared,' thought the inner voice of fear. I very quickly sat on her, and instead I carefully and consciously thought, 'Perfect, I can meet a small number of friendly delegates before I get there, so I won’t feel too scared.'. I very quickly tweeted back to say I'd be there, so I couldn't back out. It worked really well, because we had a fun evening, and it meant the next day I knew there’d be a couple of people there I recognised and had a bit of a relationship with already.

And secondly, the library twitterati* were out in force – of the 85 delegates on my list, just under half are tweeters, quite a few of whom I knew pretty well on the internet. It made me feel infinitely much more comfortable not just talking to the people I know online, but also (and more importantly?) talking to the people I’d never met before and didn’t know at all. That first plunge into actually talking to people on Twitter, which is a relatively safe environment that’s easy to back out of, made the subsequent much scarier Real Life experience much easier to cope with.

So, notes to self:

Taking advantage of the pre-meet up was a Great Idea, do that again.
Twitterers are, on the whole, similar in person as they are online.
Keep doing new and scary things – they get easier with practice.

*Much like the glitterati, except more cardigans (no, really) and knitting chatter (it’s not just me, loads of ‘em love it!).

Cool Extra Thing: Facebook & Libraries

2011-07-20T07:26:00.000-07:00

I've already been thinking about how libraries use Facebook - and whether libraries *should* use Facebook - for actual work. The work's not finished yet, but I've already come to a few conclusions...

Should university libraries be on Facebook?

My initial instinct has always been to say 'no, no, no, it's intruding into students' personal spaces. But that's because that's how I would have felt about it 4-5 years ago, when Facebook was still uni-only and didn't involve any fake farms and hardly any zombies and I was a student myself and, oh yes, I still actually used Facebook.

Now, though, I think there's been a bit of change. I do think we should have a Facebook presence, because our students are there, and I suspect that they expect us to be there, because their University is (City's page has over 7,000 likes, for example). People like to 'like' the things they're involved in, don't they - that's why the British Library has 33,000+ terribly intellectual likers.

Also, a Facebook page would be a good complement to all the other social media stuff we're doing - we cater to Twitterers, so why not Facebookers? There's a lot of overlap between the two groups, sure, but there's also a lot of users who will only use one or the other. And it's easy enough to link the two together to make updating quick and easy.

Finally, for the definitive answer, this is why our library should be using Facebook:

My case, let me rest it.*

Okay, so what should a library Facebook page be like?

This is a bit trickier, I'm afraid. The best answer I can come up with is an eath-shattering 'I don't really know'.

Why don't I know? Isn't it part of my job to know this sort of thing? ...Well, yes, it is, but here's the problem: everyone in the library, even within my team, is going to have a different answer, and they're not all going to agree with me, or with each other, on everything.**

Good practice from @CityUniLib

Which is a problem, because to use Facebook (or any other social media tool) effectively for good communications, marketing and user education, you need to have at least a couple of people involved, you need to all know what you're doing, and you all need to be behind the same message. You also all need to be writing with the same tone of voice - and that's really tricky to pull off. We'll come back to this...

If it was just up to me, though, I could tell you what I'd go for. Left to my own devices, my ideal library Facebook page would be moving away from a static, information-only portal in the style of many library blogs and trying to use it to really hook users into the library, engaging with them on a much more personal level, in a similar way to how our intrepid @CityUniLibrary Twitter admin is already doing.

Ebook query solved

In fact, I'd want to take it even further, and attempt to emulate the most engaging social media-ing library of them all: Orkney Library & Archives. They're active Twitter users and have a Facebook page where users are actually asking them for help and advice on all kinds of issues, and getting proper, helpful responses - I've inset a couple of examples. In the first, a user is having a technical problem with an ebook website, which is quickly solved

Researchier query

by the librarian, and reads just like the kind of conversation we have with users at the desk. The second is a more researchy query from much further afield - the user is from the US - and again, the query is resolved quickly, in a friendly, relaxed way.

Pat Butcher's Earrings

I strongly suspect, however, that this level of engagement from users in these social media spaces didn't just happen. The genius behind Orkney's social media use has made a habit of being funny, flippant, helpful and just plain old human on Facebook and on Twitter, and has hugely raised the profile of (his? her? their?) library and archives service whilst making the whole place seem completely approachable. Orkney is a person you want to have a conversation with, not a corporate drone that you suspect might be a machine. Recent Facebook and Twitter posts, for instance, include not just announcements of events, but commentary on the News of the World hacking scandal, Pat Butcher's retirement and earrings, visits from Russian sailors, opinions about coffee-flavoured Revels and Google+ (which they are also on).

Hang on, I've got a conclusion lurking about here somewhere...

So, what I'd like to see on a Facebook page is a human voice, warm and interesting, with a personality that students will want to engage with. What I don't want to see is a page that only ever updates when the opening hours have changed or if a database has gone down.

But the problem is that this personable, friendly and human approach appears to be risky, because it's a bit different compared to the traditional library website or blog. It's hard for more than one person to run an account in this kind of style. But here's the thing; if we work out where the line is in advance, there's less risk we'll cross it. If we work out a tone and some guidelines on how to achieve it in advance, we can all post to the same account without sounding disjointed.

It seems like there are pitfalls in humour and levity that could cause problems for the service, so it's better, easier, just to err on the side of caution and end up with a less engaging page. But the benefits in terms of engaging users are worth taking the risk.

And I think there's a way to pull it off. It requires care, confidence and planning. It needs open discussion and debate amongst ourselves before we start. It needs...

A social media strategy.

I know, I know, it sounds calculated, cyncial, or even oppressive. But if we had an agreed strategy, with supporting documents and guidelines and all that stuff, then it frees us to explore and experiment a bit with all kinds of social media, not just Facebook. It would mean that when a new thing happened, we could leap right in there (Google+, anyone?) straight away. It would mean that the nervous had something to fall back on, and the overenthusiastic wouldn't go off unrestrained and terrify the poor management.***

So, here's my conclusion and my three-step plan all rolled into one:

Develop social media strategy.
Apply social media strategy all over the shop.
~~Make $$$$~~ Engage users and improve the library's image, accessibility and service.

See? Easy.****

eta: recent and related Phil Bradley post about Google+.

*All screenshots captured on 20th July 2011.
**I know, I don't understand it either. Life would be much easier if people would just do what I say.
***Yes, yes, that would be me.
****Muhahahahahaahahah.

Thing 12: LinkedIn

2011-07-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

I've not exactly been putting this Thing off on purpose, but it's not exactly been at the forefront of my mind, either. My original whiny excuse was that I didn't think I really needed another social networking tool in my life, especially after getting into Google+ recently combined with not really using older ones like Facebook any more either. Twitter, my true love, is enough for me.

But I think really, deep down, I've got this sort of gene-level understanding-without-actually-knowing-anything thing where I'm under the impression that LinkedIn is only for sales people and schmoozers. I don't really know why I think that, considering that zillions of people who I like and respect clearly have profiles on there.

So, I was going to make up some fabulously worthy excuse about having looked into it and time management and personal effectiveness or some riff on those themes, but then I realised that it wouldn't have been in the spirit of the Thing at all, so I'm biting the bullet and giving it a go.

Mah Findings

Were variable. Firstly, the bad:

I really, really dislike that it wants my postcode to sign up with. Area - even the first half of the postcode - I have no problem with. Whole postcode is VERY intrusive.
I signed up with my personal address, because a) it's a personal thing about me and b) my work email address is so new there's not much point. The problem: there is no point in going through my personal contacts for people to connect with professionally. I hate automatic people-finders onsocial networks for this very reason. My email account has loads of addresses in that make NO sense in these contexts: I do not want to be friends with landlords from 8 years ago, nor, I'm sure, do
My LinkedIn homepage

they want to be friends with me. It came up with 3 people I actually know, none of whom are even remotely in the same industry as me.
I hate spamming invites at people when I join things. I put my manager's email in just to get started, because I know she's on there, and anyway this was all her idea. *smiles cheerfully at boss*
The basic homepage is crowded, full of adverts, and is asking me to look for contacts... which I've already just done as part of the sign-up process. Hmm.

And the good:

The groups it suggested I join were relevant - I saw useful groups in there to do with librarianship and academia.
When I signed in, it showed me having 3 items in my inbox. They were previous invites that had been sent to my email account. That's actually pretty useful, as it means there were contacts there for me already. Of course, again, none of them were in my actual industry...
I can see that the profile section would be great if I were actively looking for a job: putting a LinkedIn link on a CV or application form, for instance, so that recruiters could see much more information about me would be a nice way to round out an application, particularly if I had recommendations.
The site is pretty easy to use: adding education and previous jobs was easy enough, and I liked the way it suggested new contacts after each post.
I like the way the public profile looks, and I can see it must be pretty easy to change how the information displays if I decided I was being too open.

Will I use it?

I really don't know. It just seems like one more thing to keep on top of, and as the screens are quite busy it's rather hard to tell exactly what's going on, but that might just be cause it's new to me. I also, at this moment, have no contacts, which makes it hard to judge. But, I can see a point to it, even if I only have it as a static presence - presuming that it will email me if anyone does try to make contact!

I head at the New Professionals Conference that there's an awful lot of librarians and other information professionals on there, and I'm off to another conference tomorrow (the LIS DREaM launch) so we'll see if anyone adds me from that. In fact, I'm off to meet some people From The Internet in the pub in a minute so I might sound them out and see what they think of LinkedIn.

Final conclusion: I'm not going to delete the profile immediately, put it that way. But I'm not promising anything. My mental jury is still deliberating.

"Pithy, Vacuous, and Deeply Self-Serving"

2011-07-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

“Twitter suits me entirely, because it’s pithy, vacuous and deeply self-serving.”

I <3 this quote from fellow 23ThingsCity-er For Your IAs Only. I agree completely; it's like FYIAO is in my head.

Speaking of vacuous and self-serving, I mentioned I had some statistics about my own Twitter use, and here they are. I took 207 consecutive tweets* from my account, over 12 recent days. Ready for some thrilling numbers and analysis?

Of the 207 tweets...

157 (76%) were conversational, or in other words...

133 (64%) were @mentions.
24 (12%) were me retweeting someone else.

50 (24%) were me just saying something - and several of those copied another user in as well, to direct their attention to it.

By way of comparison, over the same period, I received 147 @mentions and was retweeted twice (I don't feel too bad about this, as it's more common to be retweeted if you're a news agency or famousish. *sob*). So I think it's pretty clear that for me, Twitter is a conversational, networky sort of medium, rather than just a static shouting box (though, I do do that too).

So what am I tweeting about?

Well, surprisingly, the most common topic was work! Well, if we count work as 'to do with librarianship and information and my actual job.' I was expecting it to be more heavily skewed towards non-work, because these 12 days covered 2 weekends and a day off for me, so only 7 days were at work, and I tend to tweet more in the evenings. Had I been to a conference or something it would be a very different picture, of course. But look:

And, of the 260 people I follow, most of them are librarians (like around 85%) - so I'm networking with people even as I'm tweeting about random stuff. It's a bit like being in the pub after a conference: you're talking about work a bit, but then things get all tangenty.

There's often more than one category per tweet, as well, so for instance a lot of the 'Books' tweets were also 'Work' tweets, as were a lot of the 'Feminism' and 'London Transport' ones. It's surprising what you can get into 140 characters.**

About lists...

I don't really use them much myself, though I've been interested to read about how other people use them, particularly E-literate's description. I am on 53 of other people's lists, though, so I did a little bit of looking to see what that says about how other people see my Twitter account:

32 are library or LIS related lists - not surprising!

6 are writing or NaNoWriMo related - these are really useful for moral support in November.

3 are knitting or crafty lists - despite my byline, I really don't tweet about knitting all *that* much.

3 are a variation on 'I have met these people IRL' - and indeed, I have.

2 are specifically to do with where I work.

1 is specifically to do with Londoners.

The remaining 4 lists are called ‘Random’, ‘Probably-likes-biscuits’, ‘Funny-non-horse-people’ and 'Shakers' (to do with a feminist blog).

I think these are not unreasonable categories, and I do indeed like biscuits. I am also not a horse, although I was a very horsey teenager, so I'm not quite sure how I feel about that description! Of course, the person who put me on the 'random' list is actually a librarian, so perhaps I should tweet about libraries a bit more, just to be more convincing?

*Cause that's how many I could persuade my PC to download using the method outlined here, that's why.

**For interest, here's a flavour of the sort of topics that were in each of the broader categories:

'Fangirling' mainly consisted of tweeting about Harry Potter (in case you hadn't noticed or it is now The Future, the final film is on general release RIGHT NOW) and Caitlin Moran, who has a new book out which EVERYONE SHOULD IMMEDIATELY READ. Clearly some of these crossed over with 'Feminism'.
Of the 'Music' category, 50% of the tweets involved mangled song lyrics, the most amusing of which was ‘I touched a book and I liked it, I peeled off its dusty jacket...’.
The high concentration of 'News of the World' tweets is entirely current-awareness related: I promise it's not something I would ordinarily be interested in - but, again, in case this is The Future, it started to implode SPECTACULARLY in an ongoing phone hacking scandal during the period I covered.
The entirely random topics including Manchester, cake, my first date, history, homophobia, me telling my boyf what time I'd get home, a photograph of a place sign with rude words in it, and a highly amusing but extremely obscure Terry Pratchett joke that no one got, because they are all clearly philistines.

Thing 11 - Find Some Library Related Accounts to Follow

2011-07-14T03:02:00.000-07:00

I just realised that I've completely failed to actually do or write about Thing 11 - because I was already following a lot of library accounts! But here's a few ways to find accounts to follow, to show willing :D

Hint, hint. @samanthahalf. Cough.
Search Twitter. Yes, obvious, I know. You've two choices: either use Twitter Search to find tweets about your topic (say 'libraries' or 'librarians'), or from your own account click on 'Who to Follow' at the top of the screen and search there.
Use other people's lists. Phil Bradley's a good person to start with because he's got lots of useful lists of people to follow. On his (or anyone's) profile, one of the tabs is called 'lists' - use it to see all the different lists he's put together, like a list of library Twitter accounts, or School Librarians.
Look through your blogs. Like a good 23ThingsCity-er, I'm sure you've all got your RSS readers crammed full of blogs now - actually go to the blog, and invariably you'll find there's a link to that person's Twitter feed.
Other people's 'following' and 'followers' lists. This one is dead easy. Find someone you like that uses Twitter, then from their profile, you can see who they follow, and who follows them. There's a nice '+follow' button next to all of them - click away on the ones you like the sound of.
Retweets. You can use the 'retweet' function to highlight a tweet from one of the people you are following to all the people that follow you. If someone you like to follow does this, chances are you might like to follow retweeted person too.

@mentions. You can go to someone's profile and look at their recent tweets, and see who they've been having conversations with. If it looks like it's interesting, follow the other person too, and join in.

I can sense, though the power of the Force, slight confusion over number 6 - surely you'd see that anyway, you might be thinking to yourself. All will be revealed...

When you're following someone, you see all the general statements that they make, and you see some of the @suchabody tweets that they make. However, you only see them IF you're also following @suchabody. BUT, if someone you're following tweets @someone and you're NOT following @someone, then you DON'T see the tweet, unless you go to the person's profile. With me so far?

Precis: you only see these conversational tweets in your own Twitter stream if you're following both people, but you can go to someone's profile to see all their recent Tweets.

For instance, if you're following me because of 23 Things City, and a handful of other people from work, and a load of rugby mates and some people from your orchestra, you might be wondering how the hell I've managed to clock up 5,887 tweets, because I don't seem to say very much. BUT, if you were following a lot of librarians, and knitters, and knitting librarians, suddenly it would seem like I tweet much more, because you'd probably be following a lot of the same people as me. That's because I tend to have conversations on Twitter - starting my tweets @someone - more than I just say things (I even have stats on this, but I'll save that for another post).

I'm not sure that makes total sense, but 1-5 are hopefully enough to get you people to follow. I found that Twitter only made sense onces I started following somethiing in the region of 100 regular & interesting 'real people' tweeters (I built up slowly). That was when it got useful and social.

Cool Extra Thing 3 - Playing with Photos

2011-07-13T08:01:00.000-07:00

Oh look, I'm all out of 23 Things City order. Never mind! On with the fun...

This Thing was playing with Fotoflexer and Photofunia. I had a bit of trouble the first time I tried this because one of the sites wouldn't work from the PCs on the Counter (what? It was very quiet and this *is* a work thing), and then the other couldn't see my face in the picture... #fail

Anyway, I've clearly got it now - enjoy a random lot of pics of me to laugh at.

Photofunia:

Captain Samantha Sparrow!

I think I look rather cute here. Obviously I am much prettier than Jonny Depp and should have been cast in his place.

I keep thinking that about all kinds of films. CLEARLY I should've played Hermione in the Harry Potter films, for example. Anyone who witnessed my costume AND fabulous hair at the Final Book Launch should realise this.

Or Bellatrix... Perhaps I'd be a better Bellatrix.

Look, I am mysterious time-traveller preserved in a book!

I'm also very fond of me-as-intaglio as well: I feel like I've been outed as a mysterious time-traveller. My secret has been discovered by a colleague in the Rare Books Department, and now I must struggle to hide my real identity AND find the missing... erm... secret instructions for... *consults Dan Brown* ...for breaking the Code of the Sword/Dagger/Jewel of [insert Crusader city here], whilst losing my heart to a Mysterious and Threatening Stranger.

(Ooh, excellent! I have a NaNoWriMo plot.)

Fotoflexer:

This one keeps crashing my browser... not so useful. But in the interests of Librarianship, I have persevered and can reveal unto you, my audience, the following glorious pictures, based on my old Twitter profile pic (which may come back as plenty of people seem to prefer MySpace!Me to Professional!Me) (I'm not sure that this is entirely a good thing).

VampireGoth!Samantha wishes to be invited in.

I've played around with layering effects on top of each other and come up with this spectacularly Goth look - I should definitely be in some kind of vampire movie, or possibly on the cover of an old fashioned wanted poster in a saloon.

I've now also worked out where people on Twitter, Ravelry, etc. are getting their very cool avatars from - they're all playing around with these sites.

I've seen people do avatars from Cartoonize and MadMenYourself, as well as using their own special Photoshop skillz. There's also ones for creating Simpsons avatars, and I'm sure there's millions more around the web. I might stop using a picture of a pair of socks for my Ravelry avatar (or ravatar, as they're known in site), and have a nice stylised one. Perhaps even this one!

Comicbook!Samantha hangs on her own wall.

I am also very pleased with the various frames you can get to put around pictures: this one is gigantic and gilt, as you can see, and I added a comicbook effect as well as layering a couple of others (which I've now forgotten, obviously) over it. Quite fetching, I think - certainly the sort of thing you could use to do quite a good avatar image with.

In fact, this is all making me think about the visual side of social media - the photos you put into your various accounts. Some people use the same one everywhere, and others randomize them a bit. Some people use objects rather than their own face, and others heavily disguise their image.

I've always been a fan of using my real face with my real name, rather than a picture, because on media like Twitter and Facebook I personally prefer to interact with a person rather than an object, so I return the favour - but on sites where I'm (reasonably) anonymous like Ravelry, I use either an image of me where my face isn't visible, or I use a photo of something else.

Stylised avatars like these provide a good happy medium for those who're shy about putting their real photo on the internet for some reaon (not me, clearly!) - if you do enough adjusting, they don't really look like you, but the image is your own, so there's limited danger of someone else nicking it.

I also think it's really important to have an image, even if it's a logo, or a picture of your dog, or anything, really, that isn't just the default. I rarely follow anyone who just has the Twitter egg for their avatar, for instance - I've got something like 250 people in my stream and I need to be able to tell you apart! It creates a visual hook for people to hang you on, someway to help them remember and separate you; having one is a hugely important part of your online identity.

The recent launch of Google+ has really hammered that home for me - for a day or so before I'd really got the hang of it, myself and about 10-15 people that I'd added mostly all had blank pictures, and it was NOT very social. It made the screen blank and featureless, and didn't look like a 'friendly' site at all. In fact, I got shouted at by one friend for not having a picture, and another person used a Google+ feature to suggest a picture for me to use (my Twitter avatar that I've mangled above).

Image, apparently, is something, if not everything.

Things 10 & 11 - Twitter

2011-07-07T09:57:00.000-07:00

Well, I think it's safe to say I've done Things 10 and 11. I've been on Twitter for... I dunno, ages... at least three years?* ...and as of this moment I've clocked up 5,782 tweets. Goodness me.

So, avid followers of my blog, of which I sure I have at least none, might remember this series of posts about my fear of writing stuff where people might see it. Once upon a time, this also applied to Twitter. I signed up a long time before I really used it - a year or so? And then, even after that, mainly actually used it because it was the best way of keeping in touch with one or two friends quickly. I was a light and scaredy-cat user for perhaps 500-1,000 tweets or so, until I really settled in and followed more people and made more friends on there.

And now, as you might imagine, I'm very comfortable there, and not scaredy at all. It was a fear of a New Thing, but I'm over it now. It helps that I'd say I actually know a good 1/3 of the people IRL - not through Twitter, but through various jobs and other friends.

I think I really got into it when I realised that it's an interactive thing; it's about talking to people. I'd write a great post expressing what I mean, but cheerfully I don't need to cause someone's already done a great Slideshare about it!

7 Reasons People Give For Not Using Twitter And Why They Can All Be Rebuffed With The Phrase: It's a Conversation

View more presentations from Ned Potter

If you're thinking about joining, you should definitely check out Ned's post on what you should do As Soon As you join Twitter, before you start following people.

I've got more to say about Twitter, including, if I can manage it, an analysis of the topics of my recent tweets. I mainly use it for keeping in touch with people and news gathering; it's a personal and a sort-of professional account. I do watch the content of my tweets to an extent, although twitter-me is definitely still me - I don't say anything I wouldn't say in IRL. Of course, I don't say some things I would say in reality, either, but I'll leave it to your imagination what those things are...

*I found a calculator thingy. Since 14th August 2008, so *does maths* yes, roughly 3 years.

Twitter - definitely a Thing

2011-07-07T06:09:00.000-07:00

Tweet like a nightingale!

Look at me with my fabulous library life, too busy to blog; I'm behind with my Things!

Well, sort of - I've not done the Cool Extra Thing from last week, and I've not even looked at this week's post yet (sorry, Grand Masters, I will, I promise!) - but I know that at least two of the Things are on Twitter so I figure I'm not too far behind.

In the interests of full disclosure you can see the links to my very-heavily used Twitter account in the column that's currently to this post's right (what, I might move things around!). I'm @samanthahalf, in case you don't recognise me - my hair looks much better on the Internet. Come on in, 23 Things City ers, the water is lovely!

Being Rubbish at Photography plus (Nearly!) Cool Extra Thing

2011-06-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve mentioned before that I follow tons of blogs on my reader, and a lot of them are food blogs. They tend to come replete with the most amazing, mouth-watering pictures of the recipe of the day, or what the author had for lunch, or what have you, and because they’re taking all of the photos, the whole blog tends to have a uniform look and feel that you just can’t achieve by using lots of different Creative Commons images.

Happy sheepie with Instagram filter

Boring sheepie

I’d love to have a blog like that – except that I’m basically crap at photography. This is an exciting case of bad workpersonship AND bad tools; I’ve no idea what I’m doing, and whilst I do have a proper digital camera, it’s old and unsteady and temperamental and heavy, and so is not really an option for me due to my inherent laziness. So, I’m forced by my own hand to rely on the not-so-fabulous camera on my phone. But I still want pretty pictures.

One way round this that I’ve found is to use post-processing apps to give photos more interest. The two I like best at the moment are Hipstamatic and Instagram (which has the added advantage of being nice and free). But there are tons more that you could choose from. See Sheepie, above, and the doodles below to see what I mean: you don't have to have much skill for the images to come out much nicer.

Boring doodle

For some reason my work computer refuses to accept that my phone exists, so getting photos off it can be a bit of a pain*. Emailing to my email account or to Flickr always seems to take ages for me. The quickest way was to upload them via Twitter with a note of apology (‘sorry, just ignore yet another boring photo of my knitting unless you like boring photos of my knitting’) and then suck them into my Ravelry account (which is what I normally wanted photos for, pre-blog) from there, but that results in less-good-quality images plus might be annoying for your poor followers.

Hipstamatic-ed doodle

However: yet another New Thing was learned this week, because when I was thinking about how best to move photos to computer I suddenly remembered about my Dropbox app (it’s great, btw, if you want a referral let me know, because then I’ll get more storage space!). I’ve never had much call to use it, for some reason, but then I went in and discovered that I can upload photos into the app REALLY quickly (in part thanks to wifi, of course) – and they appear on my work computer in seconds thanks to the magic Dropbox-synching magic.

So now, you can enjoy the delights of plenty of irrelevant but kinda cool-looking photos of random doodles** that I've been doing in meetings speckled throughout my posts!

* Of course, a few days later whilst whinging that it won’t charge either, a colleague pointed out that it was probably a dodgy USB slot and I should just swap it. And now both problems are solved.

** It's not because I'm not listening, incidentally, helps me to concentrate and I remember stuff better if I hear it when I've got a pen in my hand.*** Hence why I also take copious notes at meetings, too.

*** Seriously, I have a reference and everything: Andrade, Jackie (January 2010). "What does doodling do?". Applied Cognitive Psychology 24 (1): 100-106. doi:10.1002/acp.1561. PROOOOF.

Linkies: Book Recommendations & Amusing Copyright Song

2011-06-30T04:23:00.000-07:00

Subject and liaison and teaching type librarians, as well as those who read books and stuff, might be interested in the following linkies:

The Guardian's list of 100 greatest non-fiction books (published 14th June 2011). There's a sad and marked lack of Engineering and Mathematics books on there, but dear old Virginia takes her rightful place with A Room of One's Own, and amusingly there's a marked lack of a certain genre: "after some debate we decided that religious texts were a little too, well, fictional."

The Guardian has also produced 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read, which is helpfully split by genre.

And finally my amusing find of the day, via BoingBoing:

[Random introspection: I notice that I'm including these links because I'd like to return to them; whilst I'm keen to share them, I'm bookmarking them for myself, as well. Interesting use of a blog...]

Thing 9: Using pictures from Flickr

2011-06-28T09:09:00.000-07:00

I managed to do this without noticing: I didn’t read ahead properly so I could tick it off in my last post, but all the images are from Flickr!

Lovely British Library Interior Shot To Keep In With The Spirit Of The Thing

In order justify this post just so it can have Thing 9 in the title, here’s an example of how you can use Flickr and other Creative Commons images effectively:

Dave Puplett’s Fill The Vacuum Prezi

Who knew there were so many pictures of Henry Hoover in the world?