23 things gained

The final one is here and my head is now full of precious things. Some of them I have a continuing love affair with, others are on-off and some I am definitely on my final fl(th)ing with.

I am going to say goodbye to igoogle but I am very happy with my google calendar and the fact (after a few mishaps) that I have managed to merge my home and work calendars - at least I hope the rest of my colleagues can't see that I have my crime book club tonight!

I was surprised at how many of the things I had actually used before in some capacity.  But then I found that with nearly all of them I had not explored much or abandoned them quite quickly.  I think that is one of the major benefits I have got from this programme.  The excellent blogs by the organising team had informative links to further reading, explanations and uses for the things that gave you great ideas and an easy way to explore further.  That was also my downfall at the start - I wanted to read it all, spend time investigating, applying it in the library and then realised that the things were building up and my blog posts weren't.  I needed to be more selective and bookmarked some things for later.

Image by vainsang, flickr

As for twitter, I am still not sure - past the first few dates but am I in it for the long haul?  It won't be my final fling but I am not yet fully in love with it.  Our faculty does have a twitter feed  picking up from our news items and I probably should try to push out a few library updates that way.  As a start anyway. 

In library terms we already had facebook but I would like to try and develop some delicious lists and also investigate new books on Librarything.  Most of the other things I will probably use more for my own use, for example sharing information on projects via Google docs and following discussions on LinkedIn.  Interesting one at the moment on the fragmentation of the profession which has similarities to the talks on communication on the cam23 blogs about how you can get all parties involved in something and the triggers needed. 

I would say that Web 2.0 and social media are changing libraries as they are offering new forms of communication and the delivery of services.  In many ways they make it simpler to transmit the information and keep it up-to-date although there are barriers from organisations who don't allow the use of certain sites.  But I would also argue that libraries are changing, adapting to and directing their users all the time.  Social media is one change, the personal computer and internet were others.  It is important for librarians to keep developing themselves and their services. As Arthur C. Clarke said:

"The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers" [and you could add in Social Media!]

Finally I would like to thank the organising team and all the bloggers. I have really enjoyed the whole programme and exploring and using the things and reading other people's views. I hope to use the things much more for the library, even now we are using google doc forms as we have had problems with our book suggestion form on our webpage and while we wait for the coding to be sorted we put in a google doc one.

About to sign off and then remembered the Wordle.