Friday 25 June 2010

The camera never lies


Turkey: Ephesus Library image by ultimatejourneys on Flickr

Thing 10 (and thing 9, at last I can combine) flickr and pictures.  I had browsed flickr before although never uploaded and still haven't.  I found the photostreams interesting although wasn't sure on the rules on taking pictures of places that are not public.  I suppose taking a picture from the outside is okay but do you need permission for inside?  Especially as the piccy goes up on flickr and under creative commons people can use it anywhere as long as they say who took the picture.  Not sure.  But at least it means we get to see some lovely places like the Ephesus library - an early centre of learning.  I could have put my own photograph if I had uploaded it to flickr - so perhaps I should start!

I was glad for the link to creative commons - now understand that alot better although it says things like cite the author in the way they request.  I looked around flickr and find nothing about who the author was most of the time apart from their flickr "username" but assume that is enough not to be banned by Google for copyright infringement!

We were told search for libraries (check) or hobbies - not so sure.  Anyway I found this that combined two of my interests (is an interest a hobby?)

Three wise monkeys & stormtroopers by Gianz on flickr

Three wise monkeys (I have a collection, not an obsession, honestly) and scifi/fantasy films. I have a collection of "three wise" anythings, atlhough I now realise I am missing a gap with stormtroopers. It started with my chimpanzee ornament from Bristol Zoo when I was 7.  Now I have over 50.  Mainly because I love chimpanzees (even adopt one from Monkey World) but the collection now has a variety of animals including lots of animals such as elephants, hippos, frogs, dragons, and Winnie the pooh.

Not so convinced on the usefulness of flickr in libraries - some are obviously adopting it and I think it is a good way to put up events.  A way, in particular, for public libraries to get more people in if they see what is happening. 

For those of you like me having an 80s flashback here are Bucks Fizz singing - My camera never lies on some show.  (Not just being frivolous as I have now learnt how to embed a video in my blog thanks to the blogger help.)







  

I had been a twit, now I'm not

Thanks to a comment from Girl in the moon on my blog about a blog made by Npage in response to a blog by Miss Crail on her hatred of twitter, I am not starting to feel better about it (even if I seem to be approaching a six degrees of Kevin Bacon moment with all these links!)  I have given JournoTwit a go and I like it.  I created a column for #cam23 and you can do as many as you want with different tags or keyword searches.  It also gives you some to start with as seen below:
Slightly worrying moment when I thought I had sent all cam23ers to the rubbish bin of twitter.  I marked my column of #cam23 tweets as read and the whole lot vanished.  Not to worry I found a tab lurking at the top and got it back again.

In a very shallow moment I prefer the look of it to twitter - suits my tidy mind with neat columns,  and finally I could see at a glance the responses to tweets I had sent.  I am not sure I am ready for a complete love affair with twitter but I am going to try some relate counselling via JournoTwit and see how I get on.

Thanks to the other bloggers for the information.

Thursday 24 June 2010

Tag - you're it

Tagging, labelling, classifying surely something librarians should be good at although as Shirky's article Ontology is overated makes clear, we are used to structured categories and classmark arrangements and web 2.0 is based on people just making their own choices.  One of the reasons this works with online material is the keyword searching.   You type in anything and up pop your results.  If you had to plough manually through indexes filled with all the words that people had used to describe the same thing it would be as big as a dictionary - bigger even with different spellings.

Of course with free text tagging it does mean that you may miss alot of stuff that you would be interested in but probably balanced out by what you find extra.  Of course adding user tags to our catalogues would be useful - not many of my users would put "theater - Rome" when searching for Roman theatres (good excuse to add holiday photo of theatre/theater in Orange!).

Although I tried an advance search of Google blogs to see if I could just search for labels but I didn't see an option.  That would have been interesting - anyone know if there is a way?  Also went on a few blogs and found that many people don't label at all.

Just realised another problem with labelling - I went to add "Orange" as a tag for my picture of the theatre and realise how disappointed fruit lovers would be!

I thawt I taw a putty tat - then it was gone

Thing 7, time for tweeting.  I felt I needed to try it out for awhile before I could really blog about it.  Still not convinced on its usefulness.  I think it is probably great if you are connected almost constantly to your twitter page and can see all the updates for the people you follow.  But if you only drop in now and again (or even just daily) it is pot-luck as to what you happen to see.

I am following various people but when I login I just get the last 10 or so tweets, sometimes all from the same people if they have been tweeting alot.  I probably need to investigate further and try other options for viewing tweets.  I have the #cam23 search so I can check out what is going on in there - although again only the latest ones unless I plough back through pages of old tweets.  If you reply to someone or ask a question how do you see if you get a reply?  Maybe I am missing something but unless I happen to be logged in when it pops up on my home page or if I replied to someone and go and check out their page I can't see responses.

I tried out "seesmic web" suggested in the 23 things blog to see if that helped but still couldn't see a way to sort my tweets.  Realise again this is the organisational side of my nature and sometimes I like the serendipitious (is that a word?) nature of logging in and seeing something that catches myr eye of interest or fun, but for more serious benefits I would like to be able to divide up my tweets, e.g. library related, friends, entertainment etc.

Anyway here is my twitter page and I did manage to change the background for no particular reason!

Should also add the one thing I do like about twitter (which I didn't think I would say) is having updates for conferences/meetings of interest that I couldn't get to.  When I am at them it has always annoyed me that people look like they are on their phone texting and not paying attention but now I will think they are twittering and passing on the useful information to people who can't be there. 

So I will take the one positive and try to develop from that and maybe if I didn't have such an antiquated phone and could check twitter on it I might become addicted.

Tuesday 8 June 2010

Let's get organised

I created a google calendar and added it to my igoogle page (also took the chance to create my own igoogle theme header while I was there)
We started using the google calendar in the library last year.  It has made life alot easier.  We have a library email so we use that to login and we can now access the diary from any PC and if we are on the phone or email it is easy to check availability - no more rushing off to pick up the printed diary. 

I hadn't tried using it for myself before but have always meant to or something equivalent.  Although as we login at work with the library account it does mean logging out to login with my own account which can be a bit annoying.

Monday 7 June 2010

The bird has escaped from its cage

Doodle - a thing I know.  I am a big fan of doodle and although I haven't yet scheduled an event with my buddies, I use it alot at work.  Previously when organising meetings I always used to have to birdcage people and then if there were alot of dates or people then I had to calculate which was the best date and check back who could do what.  Doodle makes it simple to check the best availability.  No more birdcages!


It is not flawless though and could do with more options  (or diversity - been watching too much Britain's got talent!). It would be great to be able to say "I can make all the dates" with one click - if you can do this, someone let me know how.  Also it would be good if more dates were displayed without scrolling.  Also I have had a couple of emails from people saying perhaps they shouldn't be at the meeting as their name is not listed on doodle - they don't realise that they are supposed to add their own name. 

Some more options may be available if you register but the reason why Doodle is one of my favourite web2.0 tools is people do not have to create accounts, register, sign up with google or anything to use it.  It means you can email anyone attending your meeting without worrying about whether they have an account with the provider, whether they want an account (many people don't want to sign up for google, yahoo etc) and know they just follow the link and enter their details.  A definite plus point from me.  


Interaction



Wow, I didn't expect so many blogs.  Great to see the enthusiasm for cam23.  I have explored around and made a few comments although one was about Asterix, but all part of networking!

I have decided, like some others, to follow a few blogs that caught my eye from quirky titles or entries.  I will keep a look at the rest via the netvibes page as I couldn't cope with so many in my google reader! I was suffering from information overload - not good for a librarian. I have updated the netvibes pages with the rest of the blogs from over the weekend but I expect out of date already at the rate they are being created!

Thursday 3 June 2010

Read all about it

Thing 2 - RSS feeds.  I am subscribed to a number of RSS feeds but in Internet Explorer you have to remember to check them so I thought this could be a good use for igoogle.  Adding individual feeds worked well but adding the google reader was not so helpful.  It mixed all the feeds up and as most of the current ones were new books added to our library catalogue it wasn't that interesting.  Also not many could be displayed in the small box.

It did seem useful having all the feeds together so I am now going to explore google reader separately rather than within igoogle.  When I have checked out some other blogs I may find some other useful rss feed readers to try.

After not being won over by igoogle I thought I would try netvibes.  My first experience of that was recently when CILIP created a page for their "big conversation".  I thought I would set one up with rss feeds and web searches that might be useful for my library.   This is the video section of the page:



Now this is where the librarian in me was shouting out for controlled language and had to be held in check by the web2.0 explorer telling me to "go with the flow".  First to choose an image on the top I tried "classics" and waded through a number of images of some beautiful and not so beautiful cars.  A change of search term to classical studies delivered up alot of images of Egypt and finally a classical temple which I chose.  Then netvibes kindly defaulted me various gadgets straight away.  Some useful some not.  It populated them with my search term and allowed me to edit this.  On reaching videos I was faced with a horror film but apparently a "classic" one so that was alright.

I need to explore netvibes more but think it could be useful if I search for good sites and then add the rss feeds directly rather than relying on automatic searching.  The tab system it uses I find more intuitive than google as it follows the layout of browsers.

i spy ...

The first task for cam23things was to create an igoogle page.  It was easy enough to set up up a default page but then I needed to add the stuff I wanted which was okay until I got to tabs.  Eventually worked that out but decided to add only those things I wanted or needed to use regularly.  This is when I decided igoogle was not for me.  All the things I wanted to add I have bookmarked in my favourites and find it quicker to go there than login into my igoogle page.  The only things I use every day were electronic databases that I couldn't add and Newton catalogue which didn't work when I tried to add it.    So I filled up with the news, weather, word of the day etc which are not essential (that is, of course, after spending most of my time  trying to find a header I liked!)


Interestingly the reason I find that I don't want to use igoogle is google itself.  I have just been going through my internet bookmarks, that have built up over the past 8 years, as they have just been expanding.  I realised that I had bookmarked alot of stuff that I don't use that often and in fact normally now just google to retrieve.  This is as quick as going to my favourites or scrolling round an igoogle page.  I just kept those items that are hard to find via a search engine or which I use very regularly.  I prefer that to the igoogle page.

I know people will say that igoogle can be accessed anywhere and doesn't tie you down to one computer but then there are online bookmarking sites (a thing for later) and I can get on a search engine just as easily.

Next thing RSS feeds and I decided to give netvibes a go,  more to follow.

Wednesday 2 June 2010

Where to start



My first blog for the cam23 things. Thing 3 instructs us to write about what we hope to get out of the programme. I am hoping that the programme will make me find the time to try out some of the web2.0 tools out there.

Most I have dabbled with in the past but usually another priority gets in the way. But now I can make the cam23 programme a priority and spend some time trying to develop some tools that will be of use in the library or if that fails at least enjoyable for me to use.

Blogging is one of the things I haven't done before but maybe by the end I will be addicted even if only talking to myself!