Tuesday, 9 March 2010
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.
Monday, 8 March 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
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!
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 :(
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 :(
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Snowman in Wellington Square
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.
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....
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