Reflections

Time for a pause for reflection and for a look back over the last few weeks. Some things I've loved and some I'm not so sure I'll use again. Blogging is top of my list of favourites (I've even persuaded my uncle to set up his own blog!), Doodle is pretty good too. I'm not so sure about iGoogle and Google calendar, just because they seem to duplicate things I am using already (bookmarks on the web and the Outlook calendar). But this could be because I don't have a computer at home and so I don't need to carry my bookmarks or calendar with me.

For the library: Slideshare, Flickr and Twitter all have great potential. Slideshare for sharing information and providing induction for students; Flickr for all kinds of publicity and Twitter for getting information out to our users. Currently, I am least at home with Twitter - but I will definitely be using it for the next academic year. I'm also planning a blog for the Old Library and our on-going cataloguing project there.

I'm feeling much more confident about web 2.0 and much more willing to "have a go". The instructions from the Cam23 blog have been brilliant and will be a great resource for continuing to explore in the future. I HAVE found it hard-going at times. But I've found it more and more easy as I've been going along - so the learning process is definitely gathering pace!

I did the VARK test and my style of learning is multi-modal (not a great deal of help!). However, I don't need VARK to tell me what I already know: I tend to ask people to show me how to do things! However the Cam23 programme has shown me that having the patience to follow written instructions can be VERY productive. It's a great way to learn - so a big THANK YOU to the Cam23 team!

So much for good resolutions!

Somehow doing one "Thing" a day to catch up didn't quite work... but I'm almost there and I'm so grateful for this week of reflection.

I enjoyed a browse around Delicious and thought that Stanford's Green Library page was excellent. This is a great way to provide links to specialist resources and to share them with others.

I can see that Delicious would be particularly useful for Faculty Libraries because they have a specific subject focus and the librarians have specialist knowledge (so it's great to see the libraries of the Judge and Philosophy using Delicious). For a College (generalist) library it is possibly less useful, given the number of subjects we cover. Also, it is not so useful to duplicate effort put in by more specialist libraries! However, I can see the benefit of using Delicious for supporting scholars using our Old Library and special collections.

I particularly enjoyed Emma's links to knitting patterns and this has prompted me to join Ravelry - a knitting site I heard about a while ago! OK, it's not work - but don't they say "All work and no play..."?

Favourite Flowers

A trip to Norfolk in glorious sunny weather was an opportunity to take some floral photos! Here are some pics of roses from Peter Beales (Attleborough) and blooms from Blickling Hall.

 

Roses and day lilies at Peter Beales

Glorious roses at Peter Beales

Dovecote and roses at Peter Beales

Black iris at Blickling Hall

Rhododendron at Blickling Hall







Wild orchid at Blickling Hall

Skye blue delphiniums at Blickling Hall

Treasure trove and medieval madness

Into the third day of week six and I've almost caught up! Today it is Slideshare. I had a good look at the four suggested Slideshare sites and here are my thoughts: slides are great for reminding you of a talk (including Andy Preistner's excellent 'Marketing your library') - however, in general they are not so good if you haven't been there (they lack the detail).

That said, I found Phil Bradley's slides really good. I was hooked in by his slides on Facebook privacy and found the instructions on the slide easy to follow - so easy that I have used the application and tightened up my Facebook settings. Thanks Phil!

Facebook Privacy options

View more presentations from Phil Bradley.

Because this is a small library, we don't do formal presentations using slides. However, inspired by Phil Bradley, I can see that Slideshare could be used to give step-by-step instructions on how to find e-journals (for example), or how to use other resources provided by our library.

Anyway, I searched for Cambridge libraries and found Tony Hirst's link to a great UTube video called Medival Help Desk - it had me laughing out loud!

Time For A Library Shift

View more presentations from Tony Hirst.

Slideshare can be a lot of fun and informative too! I hope I will find the time to use it for our library in the future.

Creative Commons

With my new resolution of "One thing a day keeps the doctor away", I am launching into Thing 10 and Creative Commons licensing. Interesting that doing yesterday's search but limiting it to "Creative Commons licensed content" cut the number of images down to a third. However, there are still wonderful images of the library available and here is my favourite taken by 'erase':

It is so atmospheric of the library at night! I'll be looking at other photos in his Networkshop 37 Cambridge folder on Flickr... and I've made a decision that any photos I load onto Flickr will be under Creative Commons so that anyone can use them!

Flood of images

The Voyager upgrade has given me time to catch up on the 23 Things. Hooray! So here I am on Thing 9 and exploring Flickr... I've found some wonderful pictures of the library - they will be really useful for library guides, the website and publicity. Here's a screenshot:

I love the Library of Congress page of Mystery Pictures - what a great idea to get the public to help identify images in your archive. As for the photos of inside the UL - they are absolutely wonderful. If I saw such beautiful images of my library I'd be really pleased!

Brave New World (of Tagging)

Well, Clay Shirky's article proved to be really interesting. If you went to Dan Cohen's Arcadia Seminar then you will have encountered all these views before, but it was really useful to take some time out to read and ponder about classification on the web. Google's flexible searching has made Yahoo largely redundant as a search engine. I have to confess that I have hardly ever used Yahoo - I went straight to Google when I started using the web for work. Now it seems that we are at the beginning of a new revolution with Web2.0 tags providing flexibility for retrieval that the Library of Congress subject headings can't.

I think the Ann Arbor library catalogue is great. I'd love to see Newton look like that too. It's an exciting way to rejuvenate your library's online catalogue. The list of most popular tags is interesting - but perhaps not as helpful as it might be! You get the dross at the top: i.e. "Picture book" and "Picturebook" which account for thousands of tags and is not a very helpful search term. I went down the list until I found something more specific and clicked on "Anime" (281 tags). I then narrowed it down to "Books" instead of DVDs. Here's a screenshot:

It's great to introduce some interactivity into subject retrieval! Even for a trained librarian the Library of Congress headings present problems: you have to be familiar with the way the headings are constructed and also the headings change over time. Recently, we have been updating our history of art records and the bib check programme has been rejecting a lot of records with the (obsolete) heading "Art and power". With Web2.0 tags the user could add "art and power" as a tag for retrieval - the flexibility is there!