Wordle - that's all folks.

I'm glad to get the opportunity to create a Wordle since getting a mug with one on at the libraries@cambridge conference and quite pleased to see that the most frequently used words in my blog have been library and users - closely followed by one and may. I feel this is how it should be after all we exist for our users and aim to be an enabling force in helping them achieve their aims. Even if sometimes - after a particularly trying enquiry / task - we need to remind ourselves of this fact!

From among the 23 Things I think I would select blogging itself, the iGoogle page, FlickrCC, Slideshare, LinkedIn, Zotero and Googledocs as the most useful to me though I can see benefits to many of the others particularly LibraryThing, Delicious and Slideshare. Some obviously require further research and the usefulness of others will no doubt become apparent at various times in my career if not immediately obvious. Marketing, for example, is not something I am involved in at all at the moment.

In terms of what I found most thought-provoking, as a cataloguer, I would probably choose tagging. I am interested to see how successful this will be in the long-term compared to a controlled vocabulary as labels/tags come in and out of fashion.


I very much doubt, however, that I will ever revisit Twitter and become one of the "tweeple". This particular thing drove me mad - the restrictions on length of posts and the hash tagging system frustrated me.

Quite the opposite must be said of blogging, however, and since starting 23Things I now find myself one of the administrators of a professional blog - got to keep those skills fresh in one's mind! On a more personal level I think I will try and persevere with Zotero and I am likely to find uses for free images from FlickrCC in the future.

Web 2.0 media certainly cannot be ignored by libraries and with the opening up of so many things in society in general there is a demand for us to interact with our users in ways that we never have before. I don't think this is something that we should feel we are being forced into either. Libraries and library staff contain a wealth of resources many of which are untapped. Web 2.0 technologies are a way of making users more aware of what we have to offer but more importantly help us in ascertaining user needs so that we can meet them more effectively. Interaction is the watchword in librarian-user exchanges in the same way collaboration is amongst library, archive and information professionals / staff.

Twitter bird image courtesy of Matt Hamm via FlickrCC.

Wikis

Seemingly like many other Cam23 participants my use of wikis has been limited to wikipedia which, like others, I make fairly extensive use of whilst recognising it has limitations. Indeed I have been quite surprised that it seems to be creeping in as a quoted source for NACO authority proposals recently. I've never contributed information to the site though. I don't really regard myself as a big enough authority on anything to do so.

With a few colleagues I recently considered creating a wiki for our departmental intranet pages but ultimately we preferred use of a blog. This decision came about after careful consideration of exactly what we wanted to use the new technology for - in this case sharing and archiving policy and practice issues relating to cataloguing and classification. These are generally issued by heads of departments or at least a small number of individuals and for this reason - we didn't really see the need for editing (though comments could still be made on a blog).

However, I can see the use for wikis - and think the key word associated with them has to be COLLABORATION. They are currently no doubt best used where input from as many people as possible is welcome. If editing could be restricted more easily the use of wikis may even widen.

Image for this thing courtesy of cogdogblog.

Podcasting and YouTube

Well, youTube is one of those things that, even as someone a little behind the times technologically, I could hardly have missed and I was aware of podcasting as an audio-visual medium for conveying information. I hadn't really grasped the connection with subscriptions and RSS feeds though so am glad to have learned about that. I have a programme in mind I'd like to subscribe to - just wish I could remember the name of it, then I might be able to see if that service is offered by said programme makers!

Some of the youTube videos suggested by the Cam23 team were very entertaining. Romance of the Living Book was great and you could see that sort of thing achieving a cult following amongst students. I am hugely in favour of using the audio-visual medium to reach library users. Podcasts / audio-visuals can be entertaining, often humorous and can convey valuable messages at a time that suits library users, at the point at which they need it and can overcome some of the anxiety associated with using the library or not wanting to admit to lack of knowledge. Though this is of obvious benefit to distance users its value to local users should not be underestimated. Students have a lot to take in when they arrive at university. Particularly, in Cambridge where firstly they call on college and faculty libraries. They, therefore, may not visit the UL until some time into their studies and then be embarrassed at not knowing things and may have missed earlier induction programmes. The UL is not an easy place to use - largely because of its size.

Podcasting / audio-visuals nowadays entail little expense and I can also see a value not only in providing short introductions to resources available but also in providing information on new services / resources offered by the library or changes to usual procedure which it would help users to know about in advance. I'm not sure we can rely on users subscribing to an RSS style feed for podcasts though and feel that links on library web-pages and e-mail links would also be necessary.

Image courtesy of derrickkwa via Flickr CC

Google docs

Ah, now this one I really can see the benefit of - but only amongst librarians rather than between users and librarians. How refreshingly easy it is to use too. My immediate concern though, and something I have not been able to find out about quickly and easily, is whether when a person edits the document the previous version is saved. It may be, for example, that one of the people you share the document with and invite to edit it changes something to something you are not happy with - can you then easily cancel the change or revert to the original? Similarly if one person edits something and then another later edits the same thing does the second edit overwrite the first one - is the first editor wasting their time - or are the 'participants' of the sharing process aware of all changes? I suspect this is something I will only become aware of after having shared a document and found out. So, now I'm more or less up-to-date, I'm off to do just that ...
Image courtesy of helenmoverland via FlickrCC

Can Web 2.0 save us? - only if we use it effectively.

Mmm, the big one - library marketing in the age of Web 2.0. Well, firstly I was very interested not only to discover that LC had much more out there than I had realised but that Orkney libraries had discovered that there was little duplication between their fans on Twitter and their fans on facebook. This already goes some way to highlighting the difficulties posed by Web 2.0 marketing, namely that there are just so many options available. Ensuring your users know what is available or can stumble across it in places where they already are is a must. Thus one of the more interesting points of one of the slideshare presentations was the need not only to keep content up-to-date but to duplicate that content in multiple places.

This leads to another important point. Though duplicating content in several places can be seen as a way of time-saving one of the other points of importance in the slideshare presentations was the necessity of not underestimating the amount of staff time involved in marketing your library. Being aware of 2.0 technologies and developing awareness of new ones is only part of the issue. Much time needs to be spent carefully considering what the library is trying to achieve, which particular users it is trying to serve and how best this can be done. Then, having decided this appointing someone who will be responsible for implementing that strategy / strategies. Furthermore, the process does not stop at implementation, staff time is needed not only to ensure that information put out there is kept up-to-date but that interaction with users - PARTICIPATION - keeps it relevant and that new opportunities are not missed. It would seem to me there has been a lot of experimental exploration of these technologies, sometimes by libraries, but more notably amongst individual librarians in recent times. Whilst this is important I think ultimately the library has to have an institutional presence. In the days of subject librarians pages of individual librarians may have been more effective, but in reaching out to users I question if this is the way forward. Surely an individual web 2.o presence is more important for interaction amongst other professionals, some of whom may be geographically very far apart but who have common career concerns, interests etc.

Working in a library as big as the UL I am thus finding it difficult to blog about one tool / strategy that my library should adopt to promote its services. In order to have an effective marketing strategy and exploit web 2.0 opportunities I believe this has to be done very much with the authorisation of the librarian and in a concerted and organised fashion. Perhaps, in this respect, the strategy I would suggest is having a publicised strategy that all staff are aware of. As someone who works behind the scenes I am looking forward to exploring wikis later in the programme as this may be a technology I can exploit on the departmental intranet pages.

Image courtesy of bensheldon via Flickr CC

From zero to zotero

Thing 18 and now 23 Things fatigue is starting to set in - already drinking Coke at 10am and doing this on my day off. Still, zotero is a welcome addition to my knowledge of new tools and one that may be particularly useful to research students. Perhaps one of the reasons I'm finding it hard to get excited about this one is I don't have an immediate use for it and don't see that I can really merit the time to explore it to the extent that would do it justice. Perhaps if I was currently doing research myself, rather than trying to learn Polish, I would be getting more excited. Similarly at work, I am usually behind the scenes providing the catalogue records that others may want to add to their Zotero library rather than in a position where I would be helping library users get the best from it. It does concern me slightly that if librarians are not using this themselves are they really the best people to be training others to use it - would this not perhaps best be done in the faculty by other students/researchers? I get the distinct impression that entirely successful use of this tool would require investing quite a lot of time and effort and unless you are continuously researching / publishing think you will only be using a small percentage of its capability. Still I will endeavour to keep using it for things of interest I come across, hopefully in this way becoming more familiar with it and recognising it's potential. I hope, as the computing service and others have suggested, that it won't slow my Firefox down too much and think it will be some time before I need to worry about the effect of a very large database of references.
Image courtesy of jazzmodeus via FlickrCC

LinkedIn - should we be in the loop?

Loved this image but then was quite a smurf fan when little! Thanks to 99zeros via FlickrCC. Anyway to LinkedIn which I knew little about though had come across when working on NACO authority proposals for my Legal Deposit Libraries Shared Cataloguing. Can be quite useful for this! LinkedIn seems to me to some extent the other extreme from facebook. It has a much more professional/business feel and outlook. Profiles can look quite like CVs and I believe the site has been used for looking for jobs, conference speakers, etc. Libraries, however, need to question at least 2 things 1) Are their users here - for somewhere like CUL which operates as a Research Library for academics and not primarily as a lending library for undergraduates they may well be. 2) Do our users who are here expect to find us here? - do they associate libraries with business? If a library is participating in LinkedIn this would probably need to be advertised via other means -RSS feed on web page for example. Haven't spent as much time looking at this as I would like but think there might be potential for making contact with publishers, electronic journal providers etc. - finding out about what they offer, which new ones exist, keeping up to date with new technological innovations through a professional network and indeed expressing our own needs.

Facebook and libraries

For me another one of the more thought-provoking 23 Things. It's easy to see the attraction for libraries of having a facebook presence when facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites in the UK. Undoubtedly we want to be where our users are. I don't, however, think it is something that libraries should dive into lightly. Although presence on facebook can be seen as a platform for providing up-to-the minute information it seems to me information posted is rather difficult to organise. For this reason very careful consideration of the purpose of the presence needs to take palce. It was very interesting to see the various ways different libraries in Cambridge are currently using it - posting acquisitions, events, topical news items etc. - and the images of events certainly made a difference. Too much varied information, however, could be daunting for a 'fan' or 'group member' though. If a reader only irregularly finds something that interests them the chances are they won's stay a member of the group long or check pages regularly. Libraries also need to think about with whom they are trying to interact - other librarians, students, both? It's interesting to note the number of librarians that have an individual presence too - I'm not sure I'd want to merge the professional and social uses. However, if a library has a common page for the institution staff members on public access points need to be aware of the information being posted on it at the very least. If a reader comes in and says - oh I saw from your facebook posting that blah, blah, blah, then all library staff they are likely to approach need to know what they are talking about. For me, the Courses and Virtual Bookshelf features may be worth further investigation too as they are not things that I was previously aware of. It still hasn't really been demonstrated though how effective a tool facebook is for libraries and if it is something that is going to stay with us for some time to come needs to be investigated further. Libraries certainly can't ignore it's potential that is certain.
Image courtesy of Benstein from FlickrCC

LibraryThing - is it really for libraries?

Ok, so perhaps not the most interesting or inspiring image but you get the idea. I've discovered LibraryThing and added a few titles in order to play about with it. Couldn't agree more with the posting of Moonhare on the blog entitled On silent white wings - I could spend way too much time on this adding my own personal library. I think the main benefit of doing this would be getting recommendations and reviews of titles I don't own or haven't heard of yet. The recommendation section certainly seems more beneficial than amazon. I always find part of the problem with amazon is I buy things for other people and then get recommendations based on those purchases. LibraryThing is user-friendly but one of the most disappointing aspects for me was the lack of UK libraries which subscribe and it is interesting to note the lack of reviews on the CSL LibraryThing account. Having said this I don't doubt the importance of the addition of Web 2.0 technologies to OPACS. The addition of bookcovers, contents pages, reviews etc. or at least links to these is becoming something that is increasinlgy expected by our users and though I am a cataloguer I have nothing against tags appearing alongside traditional subject headings. Whether LibraryThing is the way to achieve this, however, I wouldn't like to say. I am not an expert on the alternatives and the pros and cons of these.

Reflections ...

At the beginning of 23 Things I felt like I was standing on the shore of the lake in this picture, courtesy of "Stuck in Customs" staring out into the wilderness, not even seeing the beauty of the reflection. I was embarrassed at not having kept up with recent technological developments and emerging tools. That has changed and I am glad of this opportunity to reflect.

Thanks to the clear instructions of the Cam23 team I now feel more confident about trying out new things and don't panic quite so much about what might go wrong! The programme moves quite quickly though and to a certain extent I feel like I am still dipping my toe in the water on a lot of the things. Still I've learned to see the programme very much as a brief introduction to the 23 Things which, now I am aware of, I can go back and look at in more detail when the programme has ended. Some things, for example, are also not that relevant to my current job but I can see the value of them and may well utilise them in the future.

I like the fact I can do the course in my own time, when it suits me yet have the backup of other bloggers or failing that the Cam23 team if I have further questions or indeed problems trying to achieve something. It would be nice if this support continued, perhaps in the form of a list, after the course finished. I also like the fact it is so hands-on and not in a pressurised environment. Self-discipline may become a bit of an issue as the programme continues though knowing I am learning new things and that others are doing the course alongside me is motivation enough and keeps me going.

So far I've loved Flickr - it opened up a whole new world of images which can add aesthetic vlaue to future creations, including my blog. I'd recommend this and iGoogle. Since creating my iGoogle page it's the one thing I've gone back to several times. This is perhaps more for personal than library use though. I'd recommend Slideshare for research in preparing presentations though fail to be won over by Twitter which I didn't find that easy to use.

Del.icio.us

Firstly, thanks to Aaron Landry for the picture of Strawberry Macaroon Cupcakes, acquired via FlickrCC.


To be honest I'm in two minds about this "thing" called del.icio.us which to begin with makes me think of all things tasty - those who know me well will know I have an exceedingly sweet tooth! Sometimes even chocolate doesn't cut it. Anyway, that's rather beside the point. Aside from it's strange name, I can understand why this resource has, according to some of the literature, taken off rather less among libraries. The big undoubted bonus is portability and the strength of this bonus grows the more you need to move from machine to machine - working on an enquiry desk, giving presentations, job-sharing, working from home etc. It strikes me, however, that to be successful this tool would demand much greater administration to make it work well for libraries if used in a public setting. It doesn't, for example, create a good impression to readers if the library is providing out-of-date bookmarks, broken links or links which for one reason or another simply don't work anymore. Similarly Rethlefsen's article interested me by describing the way the Bibliotheques de l'Universite Paris-Sorbonne was using delicious. Isn't the "extensivley organised" way in which it "divvies up" by tags/time/period/discipline/format etc. becoming more like a classification scheme for online resources? If so this demonstrates well the skills of the librarian but again would need constant attention. Arguably, I think this "thing" would work better for more subject specialist libraries or be best found on the web pages of individual departments where subject specific bookmarks could be provided. The fact patrons can contribute suggestions is also useful as a form of peer support. I don't think I'll be subscribing too soon. I spend a limited amount of time away from the same computer at work and would just use Google or email myself a link in advance if using another machine.

Slideshare

Another invaluable tool on the 23 things programme. I can see this being greatly beneficial for preparing presentations - seeing what is out there, what issues others have covered, how they have branded their presentations, used images and humour to get their points across etc. Though a bit dated now, having been created for a plenary talk at the "Library of the Future" forum, Learning Resources Services Network, Western Australia in 29 November 2007, I particularly liked this one:

Five Social Software Sites that libraries shouldn't ignore

View more presentations from sirexkat.

I'm not convinced mining SlideShare for actual presentations, in their entirety, would be terribly useful to libraries but for mining ideas and to save reinventing the wheel this tool has to be an absolute plus. The importance of marketing / selling your library does, however, surely need to be borne out by the branding given by the institution / individual within the institution creating the presentation. In this respect the main benefit of posting your slideshow / presentation on Slideshare after it has been given is to try and encourage some of your end users to embed it in their websites. For example, a library as large as the UL could perhaps encourage faculties, departments, the university admissions office etc. to embed introductions to the library, presentations on research skills etc. into their own pages. This would make the presentation available to the reader in new social spaces and hopefully capitalise on sites they are already visiting. The potential for receiving user feedback on SlideShare must also be a bonus for making improvements to further presentations and in finding out what users actually want and how this can be catered for. The facility for the creator being able to delete comments deemed inappropriate should also hopefully ensure commenting remains relevant.

I suspect I will be using SlideShare in the future if not to create a presentation, to keep up-to-date with new technologies and to enhance my professional development. I love slideshows like this that give you a quick brief overview to something new leaving the potential to research further when time permits.

Flickr

Thanks to LHZ for the artistic image of the UL's ex libris public artwork for this weeks blog on things 9 and 10 (Flickr). Getting towards half way there and I feel I am learning quite a lot. I particularly enjoyed this week. I love looking at images and whether we think visually or not believe they have a massive impact in making things look more interesting and drawing our attention to them. Something I believe exhibtions in particular can suffer quite severely from. I can't believe I didn't realise that so many of these images were freely available to use, or available to use with so few limitations. A definite plus. I've already bookmarked FlickrCC for future use. One thing that does concern me though is whether the people sharing their photos on Flickr in the first place have considered their right to do so. Still, I suppose this shouldn't really worry me as having checked the rights provided when using the image I would be acting in good faith. One related question about images to other Cam23 participants: What's the best way to give an image in a blog, such as the one I have used above, a caption?

Tagging

The debate between folksonomies and more formal classifciation is an interesting one and one that will no doubt continue for a few years yet. I recall writing an essay on the topic at library school several years ago.
As a cataloguer and classifier I have to admit I am a bit traditionalist about the whole thing and having just tried to tag my earlier posts have to say I probably remain so. How frustrating was it that if you had tagged something with a similar tag before blogger tried to change it to that tag even if this would result in some nuances of meaning being lost? Rather than free-styling I was having to think about using different vocabulary to try and express such differences.
I also think that advocates of folksonomies are a bit harsh on more traditional hierarchical systems of arrangement. Although admittedly in terms of classifcation with a shelfmark / number something for reasons of physicality has to be more one thing than another no matter how cross-disciplinary, this needn't necessarily apply to the subject headings given to that same item. The use of more than one subject heading can express such 'otherness'. Subject headings are by nature a more evolutionary form of classification and new ones can be proposed expressing new concepts (I think of the LCSH "dog scootering" here - yes it exists!) more easily than new classification numbers.
I also don't agree with the idea that someone searching for information on 'films' doesn't want to know about 'movies' just because they have chosen not to use that term. Surely it is because they do that some Web 2.o technologies display / suggest related terms to the user.
I think ulitmately it depends on the reason behind the tagging. If we are to consider serious research / archiving then the likelihood is that a common controlled term is going to be more useful no matter how that term was suggested in the first place. If terminology is related to the age in which it is used terms will become obsolete and valuable information lost if it is not indexed / recorded in some way. However, if we are just tagging photos of our friends with their names, for example, then we are not likely to care about what term we have used.
I await the barrage of comments from those less traditional among you!

Twitter, tweets and tweeple - Aah! Not twits.

Have to admit if it had not been for 23 Things in all likelihood I wouldn't have signed up for Twitter. I knew little about it but had heard all the celebrity talk of people posting what they ate for lunch etc. and thought what a waste of time, I'm not getting into that! However, I am now beginning to see it has value. In particular I can see the benefit of libraries being able to share links and provide very brief updates without expending large amounts of time and energy. I also saw the fact it can be used via SMS as an advantage though am now wondering how significant a benefit this actually is when I consider how many people now carry pocket size devices of various types which allow them to access the internet? Being able to search tweets by subject is arguably a useful facility though sometimes the results may be so large in number that information is found more easily through a careful selection of people / places / lists "followed".

I read with interest the further reading which stated that currently libraries tend to use Twitter as a broadcast mechanism rather than interactively. Though I can see the benefit of library-user interaction I would be slightly concerned about the lack of filtering. There is surely a risk of receiving unhelpful responses as a result of the low character limit and tendency when using such tools to shoot off an immediate response on a matter which one might normally give much more consideration. Also, of interest was the issue of future potential charging for the service which once established would in all likelihood have to be continued, even at an unknown cost. How easy would it be to find a similar service at no / less cost that was compatible with what the library had already established?

On a more personal level I found some of the terms rather off-putting. I loathe the term 'tweeple' and found the idea of stalking (oops, no sorry following) a bit odd. Unlike on facebook where friend requests can be rejected I initially thought anyone could follow the tweets of a person / institution and was concerned about the potential of ending up being associated with the views of followers, who would be listed as such, who held views that you / your institution wouldn't want to be associated with. Through the further reading, however, I realised, with some relief, that you can pick and choose who you want to follow you.

Google calendar

The potential for the use of this tool in the library world is by far the most obvious to me so far. It opens up a whole plethora of opportunities for communicating with users. I feel by following the simple instructions provided by the Cam23 team (thank goodness for them) that I have just dipped my toe in the ocean and the potential for drowning in the technical side of things scares me. Connecting calendars with other calendars etc. all sounds a bit complicated to a novice like me. Still the instructions were easy to follow and I created a few events, two of which I've asked to be sent a reminder about so I wait with interest to see whether I have been successful in doing this and it actually happens - spot the slightly technophobic sceptic. How did I manage to get so far behind with all this technology? Still, hopefully redressing the problem by doing 23 things. The calendar was easy to set up and offered lots of sensible options for recurring events, events lasting a specified amount of time, all day or with no previously known fixed end and having it on my iGoogle page rather than having to bookmark it separately is a bonus. Reading the further reading also showed me how compatible and adaptable this tool really seems to be and for something that is free and easy to use that is saying a lot. Will have to try connecting with another calendar soon ...

Doodle - not only a random sketch

Doodle! Mmm, interesting name and formerly known to me as a random scribble - something reportedly drawn in boring meetings from what I have heard - not guilty of this myself of course! Turns out it is actually quite a useful Web 2.0 tool though. Have now tried it out and was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was both to send out meeting invitations and to view results. Didn't have to register, provide more information than was required or any of that nonsense. Don't have a need to set up meetings in my current job though so my use is probably going to be limited in the foreseeable future - I think my friends may think me a bit strange if I tried to use Doodle to set up a social gathering! It may take off in this respect though! Still in terms of library work I can see the advantages particularly for trying to organise meetings between people in disparate locations. Am wondering what the optimum number of invites is though - not too many I suspect. Aside from needing to know too many email addresses one wouldn't want to have to scroll down pages of results to find the most convenient time. Is it possible to send a Doodle request to a list (like users@lib.ac.uk)? Is there a case for this for setting up user education etc.? As one blogger pointed out several sessions could be set up at once in this way after all only those with the intention of attending would respond. Presumably all sessions stemming from one Doodle request would have to be on the same topic though?

Thing 4

Have had a look at the blogs of other Cam23 participants and was interested to see the variation not only in iGoogle and blog page design but more significantly in levels of experience of Web 2.0 technology from the beginner like myself to those already talking about things I have no concept of - Netvibe, Zotero and Mendeley - and those racing ahead to things much further on in the programme.

The questions I am thinking about at the moment are 1) How to find blogs worth following without spending an age? - in terms of personal / leisure interest blogs this could well be a matter of personal opinion whereas in terms of blogs on professional issues this should hopefully be a bit clearer - there are just so many out there ; 2) What are the copyright issues for blogs? - particularly with regard to using images - I assume these are the same as using them on any other web page ...

... and of course the value of commenting. This is an interesting topic and I think really boils down to what is actually said. If a genuine debate is opened up then great but posts of the type "Oh yeah, I agree" seem generally to be of little value though admittedly there may be some circumstances in which this is of use - getting a straw poll on an issue for example. In-depth posts, however, have to be inspired by the content of the blog and a desire to learn more or open up a debate. In order to do some of the Further Reading suggested by the 23 Things programme I, in true traditionalist style, printed some of it off. In these circumstances the comments (some of which were of little added value) were quite annoying as far more pages than I needed were printed. Is there a way of filtering the comments to only retain what you want when printing? Perhaps lacking in the spirit of the programme I haven't commented on anyone else's blog yet though can see this is easily done. I have become a follower of one blogger and may well be inspired to write a comment a blog writer will value at a later date.

Success! First image loaded into a blog. How rewarding. Definitely makes the blog less text heavy and consequently less boring. I enjoyed creating the iGoogle page. It was quite user-friendly and the instructions from the Cam23 team fool-proof. Thanks guys. May have taken me a bit longer to get to grips with otherwise - time playing around trying to work out what I was doing. Adding stuff was a joy but more important for me was deleting some of the stuff the page seemed to come with. I can understand having a few things on there so that you can see what type of thing is available but the screen just seemed a bit crowded until you get in there and have a good sort and clear out. Some of the things you can add are invaluable and if you use them regularly enough I can see the advantage of having them there rather than searching using the traditional Google search engine each time. For example, I have kept the weather report and added a Dictionary, wikipedia search engine, currency converter and arabic-roman numeral converter. Some of the boxes seem to take up too much unnecessary space though and I found this particularly true of the YouTube one. This has now been duly filed in a folder on the left menu bar. Organising things around the screen was really straightforward and allowed me to customise my page with heavily used things at the very top so that I don't have to scroll which I found to be a good thing. There seem to be no restrictions on this. There is nothing that has to stay which allows more freedom than I might have expected.

With regard to RSS feeds. Well I'd seen them and used them but never for one moment expected to add one to my own page. This was easily done and the fact RSS feeds are updated without me actually having to do anything to them or having to revisit the page is fantastic. I can certainly see the attraction of these and how they might be a valuable tool for libraries, or indeed, any other institution wanting to keep its customers / clients / members up-to-date - the possibilities do seem quite endless. The advantages of spam protection and easy cancellation for the user are also attractive ones. It may be, for example, that you are only attached to an institution for a fixed period of time. Adding an RSS feed doesn't have the same feel as saying you are happy to receive endless emails from some marketing monster just because you once expressed an interest in something. Its up-to-date information of interest to you where you want it and when you want it. Having said that, I'm not sure I fancy creating an RSS feed. That part of the article by Zeki Celikbas scared me off a bit! In that respect I'd hope it was easy to maintain one once it had been established.

Starting 23 Things

Have now created my first ever blog! I'm hoping that undertaking the 23 Things programme will help me find out more about many things I have heard of but never actually used. I'd like to know more about the new technologies that the Google generation are growing up with. I'm a bit worried I'm becoming technologically old already in my 30s! and know that if I'm not careful it will be all too easy to get so far behind I will become scared of such 'new-fangled things'. I also want to know more about how these technologies can be used by librarians and information service professionals for reasons of continuing professional development. I have a feeling I am used to using more Web 2.0 technologies than I am aware of without either a) being aware of them (or recognising them by that name ; b) understanding how they work and c) giving too much thought about their potential in my profession. I'm sure all this and much more will be revealed to me over the duration of the course.