Jury's out

Well, my google Calendar is up and running.

Having somehow circumvented all Google's nosy questions about myself until now, it turned out that the calendar wouldn't work without a first name and surname (Duh! OBVIOUSLY when you are sharing your calendar with others, they need to know who you are). Still, feeling rather taken over by Google recently, I dug my heals in and set myself up incognitio as 'News Nowhere'.

I can see that this is another application that has lots of potential: it was easy to set up and use; and I'm impressed that the UL and some other libraries are already using it.

Personally, I'm not so keen because I already have an online calendar / shared calendar, using Outlook, and it works very well. I can see that Google Calendar would be useful to link colleagues or friends together who do not use Outlook. The disadvantage is that they would all need to have an iGoogle account. But, when all is said and done, I will certainly keep an open mind about using Google Calendar in the future and I'm thinking of using it to record bookings for Old Library visits which can be shared between the group of people who act as guides.

Here's a screenshot of my Google Calendar in operation:

Spagetti junction (my brain...)

Having an instructive and crazy time doing things 1, 2 , 3 and now 4! Starting off is easy - it's when you decide to customize that things go pear shaped... So many choices, so many clicks that do something you haven't expected, so many clicks that don't do ANYTHING at all. Thank heavens for the cancel button!!

Well iGoogle was fun (in the end) after the shock of finding out that I already had an account (well I must have created it for a Google application at some point) plus the dreaded password (which I couldn't remember). Half an hour later, I hit on the right password and was on my way. I spent happy hours (is this the best use of my time I ask myself?) customizing my site and choosing toolbar images for different pages. Then I added links to some blogs and to Copac and did some searches. I have never used Copac (Worldcat, RLUK and the ESTC are my choice) so it was good to explore it.

What can iGoogle offer libraries? It is a great aggregator of information for an individual user - through the choices you make information comes to you rather than you having to go looking for it. However, there are disadvantages: the iGoogle account is password protected and so is not a suitable platform for disseminating information. By setting preferences it could make you lazy and narrow your options by taking away some of the serendipity of web-searching. The main advantages: 1. It helps individual librarians to organise their professional lives, through gathering links and blogs in one place; 2. It helps librarians to understand the different formats we need to use to get our information out to our users.

We already use an RSS feed for new acquisitions - but I have now added some more RSS feeds to my browser toolbar: arcadia@cambridge ; 23 Things Cambridge ; Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Blog. I'll keep adding feeds when I find useful ones in the future.

These 23 things are taxing at first but once you get the hang of them they are fun!