Thing 11 - podcasting

I'm going to skip this thing for now, as most of the time I spend on a computer is sitting at the Issue Desk and I don't think I look very approachable with headphones on! If I get time to do some work in the office I might return to this later.

Thing 10 - Delicious Networks

Delicious is such an odd name for this tool - my title for this post kind of makes me want to mime eating a network, except I'm not sure what that would look like.

I've added a few other users to my network. It turns out that I can only do this from within my own page - even though if I visit someone else's page, there is a link saying "Add to my network", the link doesn't seem to work.

I'm not hugely taken by the layout of delicious - it just presents an unstructured list. I realise it's possible to structure the list with tags, but the tags themselves just show as a long apparently random list, and I would prefer to be able to organise by subheadings, or something that shows more clearly how the items in the list relate to one another. There's something about the list layout that doesn't tempt me to follow any of the links - I need some kind of context. Obviously it's different for my own links because I know what they are, but looking at other people's I feel a bit lost.

Online reading lists

At Continuing Education we provide online reading lists on our website for Weekly Class students. We use the Mark and Email records functions in Web OLIS to create an HTML reading list that we can paste onto our website, and it allows readers to click through to a screenshot of OLIS to check if their books are available:
http://library.conted.ox.ac.uk/weeklyclasses/readinglists/Archaeology/GoodburnBritannia.php

We did this mainly because many of our weekly class students struggle with using the catalogue so we wanted to make it easier for them to find books on their reading lists. However, there are a number of problems.

It's not possible to mark and email records from SOLO or telnet, so we have to use Web OLIS. As it's not possible to limit the search by library in Web OLIS, searching for the Cont Ed copies of books which may have many different records on OLIS can be time-consuming. Furthermore, Web OLIS times out and loses all the marked records if, for example, you have to stop and help a reader. From the reader's perspective, they only get a screenshot of the catalogue, which doesn't allow them to place reservations. They also have to navigate through quite a lot of screens of our website, and I think many of them find this just as difficult as using the catalogue - especially if they then want to search for books which are not on their list, and they have to use the catalogue anyway.

So......I have been experimenting with using tagging in SOLO as an alternative. By tagging the books on a list with a tag that indicates the course title and tutor, and another tag indicating the department (conted) and the start date of the course (eg april 2010), it's possible to create an online reading list that readers can access directly from SOLO. They just need to select "in user tags" on the drop down menu and search for their course.

This is massively easier to set up than the previous system, which involved searching, marking the record, emailing marked records, copying and pasting the HTML from the email onto .php documents, and updating the library website. It will make it a lot easier to simply update reading lists which are substantially the same as last year's, without having to look up every record from scratch. It also allows readers to start from SOLO - which is the first screen they see on library computers - and click straight through to a live OLIS screen from which they can place reservations and access patron functions.

There are limitations to this approach. We can only link items catalogued on SOLO, whereas on our own website we could link individual journal articles and useful websites, as well as including explanatory text. There is also a danger that other SOLO users will use similar tags, which would add unwanted items to the lists. Tags can only be 35 characters long, which means it won't be possible to use the full course title, so readers will need to know the abbreviated course title that we have used. And readers who feel lost in SOLO will probably still feel lost.

So, I'm still playing around with the possibilities and discussing it with colleagues and nothing is decided yet. But I thought I'd share this with other web 2.0 fans!

Delicious, Thing 9

I have signed up to Delicious and added the various websites I use for 23 Things, as well as book supplier websites that I use for work. I've also added a Delicious gadget to my iGoogle page and will experiment with using this instead of the Bookmarking gadget I was using.
My delicious page is at:
http://delicious.com/ann.domoney

I've been trying to push SOLO records to delicious as I thought that might be a good way to create online reading lists, but every time I do it I just get an error message from delicious :(

Snowman in Wellington Square

Snowman in Wellington Square
Originally uploaded by Ann23Things

This time I have clicked "Blog this" within Flickr and connected my Blogger account with my Flickr account. Let's see if it works!

Thing 8 - Picnik

I have played around a bit with editing my photo on Picnik. Possibly I should have uploaded some more colourful pictures to give me more editing options! I have cropped, sharpened, de-red-eyed and sepia-fied my snowman!

To include the image in this post, I had to click on "Share" in Flickr, then "Grab the link", then copy the URL for the photo. I then clicked on "Add image" in this post and pasted the URL into the box under "Add an image from the web" Hopefully this will have worked - I can't actually see the image in the post as I'm typing this!

Hmm, the image is also not in the preview of this post.. . I will publish and see what happens.

@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

I have changed my google login to reflect the new email address! Now I just need to make sure I can remember how to spell Bodlein - Bodlaien - Bodleain....

Flickr

I have signed up for a flickr account. Although I use Yahoo for my emails, I've never used flickr before. I've only uploaded one photo so far - one that happened to be stored on the computer at work! I might have to bring some more in another day.

I notice quite a lot of people have had the same idea as me and have put their snowy Oxford pictures up!

Using iGoogle

I have found some useful gadgets for my iGoogle start page! I am writing this post from the Blogger gadget on my iGoogle page - I also have a Google reader gadget. I'm going to try to get as much of the 23 things related stuff on this page as I can.

...and following some more blogs!

Jane has helpfully pointed out a very easy way to subscribe to feeds - I can just use the URL of the site I want to subscribe to. I was looking for the RSS feeds, but not all sites have them. So, I am following a couple of blogs that I like in my Google Reader: Shapely Prose and The F-Word. This does raise some of the issues I mentioned in my last post about blurring the personal and the professional - these are blogs I normally read in my spare time so I shall have to be disciplined about not reading them at work!

Following blogs

I've just realised that clicking "Follow" on other people's blogs adds them to my Google Reader subscriptions - for some reason I thought that would be something different.

I think I was a bit confused about what "following" meant in the Google world because I read an article recently complaining that Google have set up something called Buzz - which automatically creates a public profile including information about who you "follow" - which is determined by who you most often exchange emails with. The main issue is that it makes private information public without requiring the person to actually do anything - you can opt-out if you choose, but if you do nothing the default is that the information about who you email is made public in the form of a list of people you are "following". They have since changed this: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/189329/google_apologizes_for_buzz_privacy_issues.html

This does raise interesting issues about social networking generally, and the relationships between the different kinds of tools we use. There's been a blurring of personal and professional, public and private information, and a lot of it seems to happen because the software is available rather than because people actually want it. In particular having all of these tools owned by one company - so that Google has access to a whole range of information and can choose to combine different data sets - blurs everything even more, so that people have much less control over their information. Google's main intention seems to be to make everything as automated as possible - they are very good at predicting what you are looking for and finding it for you, so that you don't have to do much work. But removing the work also often involves removing the control and the choices, as with this "Buzz" feature which saves people the effort of choosing which information they want to be made publically available.

Google Reader

I have set up Google Reader and subscribed to the Oxford 23 Things Blog RSS feed. I'm not quite sure what to do with Google reader now I've got it - use it as a website in it's own right? Direct the feed onto a different site, eg my iGoogle start page?

I'm struggling to figure out how to set up a feed from other participants' blogs - perhaps I'm missing something?

More blogs....

I forgot to mention that in fact my own library has a blog! It's at http://contedlibrary.blogspot.com/
It's used to update readers on any important information, like changes to opening hours. We have an RSS feed so that news items appear on the library web-page at http://library.conted.ox.ac.uk/ - clicking on a "headline" takes you through to the full post on the blog.

I've been having a look at a few other library's blogs. There is a mixture of time-limited information (like upcoming WISER courses), information which is new but will stay relevant (like availability of new resources) and reminders of information which isn't time specific at all (like resources we've had for years but which readers may be unaware of). I think given the chronological organisation of blogs, it does make more sense to use them for the time-specific information. They're not a great way to store information in the long term, unless you have a very sophisticated tagging system, but they are useful for updating people about information as it comes up.

Blogs

I use blogs quite a lot in my spare time. I have my own personal blog that I use mostly for rants that I'm not sure anyone would want to listen to in person! I also read a number of feminist/anti-oppression themed blogs, which I find is a really useful way of learning about different people's perspectives and experiences. In particular, the immediacy of comments threads makes reading a blog a very different experience from reading a book or journal. But it's also very different from an informal conversation face-to-face: people from all over the world who share similar interests can easily find each other on the internet and discuss issues they are interested in, and the topic - and style - of the discussion can be quite tightly defined by moderators, so that it doesn't get derailed in the way "real world" conversations might.

But in terms of libraries.... I know the SSL has an issue desk blog for day-to-day information that needs to be quickly accessible to all staff on the desk - mostly lost property, but it can be used for other things too. That's a really effective use of a blog for information sharing.

I think it's also a really good idea to use blogs for this project - as people are working on similar things at similar times they can share their experiences, and for people like me who are way behind - the information is all still there!

iGoogle start page

Setting up a google account was very straightforward.

I struggled more with the igoogle start page, as it was difficult to find gadgets that actually looked useful. There are lots of fun colourful gadgets, but too many of them just make the page look very cluttered.

There are little things about the iGoogle page that I find a bit annoying - there isn't any obvious way to change the size and shape of different boxes, so for example my Bookmarks box only shows two bookmarks unless I maximise it. The screen looks cluttered by default because the boxes are all very close together. Possibly there is a way to change this - but it's not the kind of thing I'd want to spend a lot of time fiddling with, because it is just a way into doing other things rather than an especially useful tool in its own right.

I don't think I would use a start page. It seems easier to have the home page set up as whatever website I use most frequently - eg SOLO at work, my personal email at home - and use the Favourites menu for everything else. I'm not sure what the start page adds to that.

Belated beginnings

I'm starting the 23 Things programme rather late - hopefully I will be able to catch up! I'm hoping to gain some familiarity with some of the tools that are available. Perhaps during the course of the programme I'll think of some tasks that would be helped by the use of these tools, or perhaps just having that awareness will mean that when a situation comes up later I'll be able to think of an appropriate tool.

I use social networking sites like Facebook, Livejournal and various discussion forums, but beyond that I haven't yet made much use of Web 2.0 so I'm keen to learn more. As well as working in a library I am also a part time student so I'll be interested to see if I can make use of any of these tools in my research.