Final reflections

Here we are at the final Thing! It's quite a relief to get to this point, so here are a few fireworks by way of celebration. I've enjoyed the programme very much, but began to run out of steam a bit towards the end.

  by  sean dreilinger

The thing I've ended up using most regularly, and will continue to use, is Twitter, probably because it offers most opportunities for distraction - it is very tempting to just spend hours clicking on links and searching out interesting people to follow. Despite these distractions however, it's also a good way to keep up to date with library issues and the world in general - most news seems to appear first on Twitter these days! Having a proper look at Flickr finally gave me the push I needed to update the pictures on our library's Global warming resources pages and to resolve to change them more frequently in future. I will certainly keep using LightShot as a wonderfully simple way to capture screenshots of images and text from the web, and will give serious consideration to creating some screencasts for our library webpages using Screencast-O-Matic.  I enjoyed exploring the world of podcasts, but the idea of creating one myself is a bit more daunting, and is probably unlikely to happen any time soon. Speaking of podcasts, the Cookie Monster one made me smile, and can probably never be shared around enough, so here it is again:


 

 I haven't managed to get into the habit of checking Google Reader regularly for blog updates; it always seems easier to get to blogs via bookmarks or links on the Cam23 2.0. page. Things that I explored and later rejected include Diigo which I considered as an alternative social bookmarking tool to Delicious, but ended up deciding to stick with the latter. I have also deleted the Read It Later account I created, as I just don't think it is something I will ever really make proper use of. The strongest negative reaction I had was to Pushnote, which I think is an annoying and pointless creation. There was no need to establish yet another forum for people to express banal opinions about websites!

Time for another picture I think, so here is the wordle I created from this blog:

I wish I had found time to do more of the extra things, but if the programme runs again next year, I'll probably have a go at doing them then.

I don't think libraries can afford to ignore social media and other web 2.0 applications; the communication and sharing of information is a huge part of our reason for being, and if we don't keep up with developments online then we risk becoming seen as irrelevant or antiquated. There are also so many free tools out there that can make our jobs easier, so it would be mad not to make full use of them. Doing this programme has made me aware of how many web developments I had let pass me by, and I am now determined not to return to my bubble of complacency. In case I don't get a chance at the party tomorrow, I would like to thank the Cam23 2.0. organisers for all their effort in running this programme. It's been a very positive experience!
  

Wikis

The penultimate Thing, and I seem to have a mental block! I'm not really sure what I can say about wikis that hasn't been covered in the Cam23 2.0 post for this Thing. My experience of them, aside from regular (probably too regular) use of  Wikipedia is very slight. I do remember using a wiki to edit the library webpages a while back, and having a bit of trouble navigating to the pages I wanted to change. You had to reach pages by inputting the correct pathway, and quite often I'd be told that a particular page didn't exist, when I knew it was there somewhere! Our web officer has since moved us to WCMS, and I find this much easier to use, since you move through the webpages exactly as you would on the live site, and then just choose the page you want to edit. Looking at Phil Bradley's weblog for inspiration as to what else I could possibly say, I found that he too seems to have talked very little about wikis in the past few years - perhaps they really are diminishing in importance. In 2006, however, he did provide a link to this interesting article: What is a Wiki ... which gives advice on using Wikis for projects and covers some of the advantages and disadvantages to using them.
A glance at a site like WikiIndex  seems to undermine the idea that wikis are on their way out. It has a long list of recently added wikis, from the serious to the slightly strange!  

Reference management

When I was studying for my library course I spent a lot of time and energy manually creating references, so I can see the attraction of using a programme to do it for me. Being a bit of a cheapskate, I immediately discounted Endnote and RefWorks because I would have to pay to use them. Zotero looked promising, but I eventually decided to go for Mendeley, which I became aware of after following the link to the CUL e-resources page. 
I chose Mendeley for a number of reasons, including the fact that, unlike Zotero, Mendeley offers an app that I can download to my iPod Touch. In addition, Mendeley offers 1GB free web storage space compared to Zotero's 100MB, and also allows annotation and highlighting of pdfs. This handy table gives a clear view of how Mendeley compares to other reference management systems.
Having signed up for Mendeley and downloaded both the web importer and the desktop version, I began to create a library of articles. The interface is attractive and user friendly, and the basic process of adding articles and documents seems to work very smoothly, although I must admit, I haven't had time to test the functionality in a systematic way. References can be organised into folders and tagged for easy retrieval. The desktop version interacts with Word to allow you to generate citations directly from your library. Below is a view of one of the folders in my fledgling library:

Lots of papers can be searched for from within Mendeley itself, and you can also add a button to your browser's toolbar which allows you to import documents and references into your library from many different databases. Mendeley also emphasises collaboration in research - researchers can set up public or private groups to share documents and ideas. If I decide to work towards further library qualifications in future, I'm sure this programme will be of great assistance. There are a number of ways it may be useful in our library too. For example, we could create a bibliography of the reference books we find useful when cataloguing rare books and music, to ensure that this information survives staff changes, and we could also create lists of the texts we draw upon when setting up exhibitions, so we can easily find them again in future.  I am sure there are many other potential applications.

Playing with Prezi

My first attempt at a Prezi, shown below, is pretty mundane, given all the options available, but it took me a while just to get the hang of the basics, so I didn't think I should try anything too complicated just yet. Having recently been on a very enjoyable walking holiday, I thought I'd bore you with some of my photos.

Walking the South Downs on Prezi

The potential for creating interesting and fun presentations using Prezi is clearly huge however, and it isn't surprising that it has become so popular. Having explored the site, it is clear that a lot of the presentations have been created by schoolchildren as homework projects, and many others are corporate creations, but there are still many useful ones, including the one I've included below, which tackles the same subject as one of the SlideShare presentations I featured in my last blog post.

QR Codes - What are they? on Prezi

One very small niggle I have is that after you have viewed someone's prezi, it doesn't automatically revert to the beginning to let you watch it over again. To do this you either need to refresh the screen, or click back through the prezi to the beginning. A "start over" button would be handy.
Creating presentations is not something I do very often, but if I ever need to do so in future, I think Prezi is what I'll turn to. Hopefully I can learn to produce something more polished than my first effort!

Slideshare

After casting about for something to post to Slideshare, I finally remembered a presentation that I created for the library course I did a few years ago. It isn't particularly good, or interesting, but since it was just sitting there on a memory stick, I thought I'd give it an airing. So, here you go:

Evaluating your reference service

View more presentations from AnnaTatherine

Uploading it was a very straightforward process, and I found it equally easy to then embed the presentation in this blog. I like the fact that the site provides statistics on the number of viewings that presentations receive. I imagine that a link to a nice portfolio of work related presentations would be a useful thing to add to one's entry on a site like LinkedIn, especially if they were getting lots of views! Having posted my presentation, I then spent some time browsing the site, and found a few interesting presentations by others. This one deals nicely with the extra thing for week 13:

Cracking the QR Code

View more presentations from Laura Botts

And then there's this one, which addresses a topic I've managed to mention quite a lot on this blog!

Global Warming and Climate Change

View more presentations from Philip Woodard
 

More reflections

Well, it's Week 10, and I'm still just about managing to keep up, so things can't be going too badly. I haven't been very good at replying to comments left on my blog though, so I need to resolve to be more responsive in future. Thanks to those who have made comments so far.

  by  Consciousness 

I think the Things I've most enjoyed exploring since the last reflection week are LibraryThing, Flickr and podcasts. It was very nice to have a good excuse to browse lots of interesting images and videos, and signing up to LibraryThing made me appreciate that there was a lot more to it than an opportunity to catalogue the books on my shelves. Looking forwards, the Things coming up are mostly unfamiliar to me, although I have used Wordle,  and did at one stage use a wiki to edit our library webpages. QR codes meant nothing to me at first, but when I googled the term, I realised that I was vaguely aware of them, but just hadn't registered what they were called. I'm now looking forward to finding out more about them in Week 13.
I can't deny that it is nice to have the end of the programme in sight, but I do recognise that things won't stop there - the world of social media is constantly changing and knowledge can quickly become outdated. Keeping track of this online world will have to be an ongoing commitment.

Podcasts

My experience of using podcasts isn't extensive. I have downloaded a few individual podcasts of Radio 4 plays to my ipod, but haven't yet subscribed to any ongoing series. The sheer variety of what's available out there is a bit overwhelming. Having browsed YouTube, I've discovered a few library related podcasts which I think work really well. My favorite is a series called "The Library Minute" created by Arizona State University Libraries. Each one deals with a different aspect of library services in a concise, informative, punchy and often humorous way. They are well produced, and the short length of these podcasts makes it more likely that students will watch them in their entirety, rather than clicking away to something else. The one featured below is all about communication and encouraging feedback from students:



Other effective podcasts I've encountered from closer to home include this one from London Metropolitan University's Library Services, which highlights the advantages of e-resources:




and this from Durham University Library, which is longer than the others I've featured, but serves as a great introduction to all that the Library has to offer. In addition to contributions from students and library staff, it also features tutors, who underline the importance of making the most of library services:



When done well, podcasts can clearly act as a very good advert for library services, and, as with the screencasts, they do communicate important information in a more attractive and entertaining way than dry words on a screen or in a printed library guide. However, I doubt we could produce anything for King's Library which would come anywhere close to the standard of the ones I've featured here, and something badly produced or poorly scripted could risk making the library look like more of a joke than an important resource. Still, it could be an aspiration for the future. It is certainly something worth bearing in mind.

Flickr: pictures galore

I love browsing Flickr and have already used images sourced from there to brighten up this blog. Now I've been introduced to ImageCodr, I'll probably use a lot more. It makes it so simple to attribute them properly! I quite often search Flickr via the Behold search engine, which only includes the higher quality images. It can also be set to return only those images that are free to use. Below is one of the results it threw up for the search term "fantasy". It is actually of an ice hotel, but looks very ethereal.

  by  Etolane

I then searched for "space" and got some menacing aliens:

  by  Merrick Brown 

On a more serious note, I have lately been sadly remiss in finding new pictures to promote our Global warming collection, so this is the perfect opportunity to renew the hunt. Here are a couple of good images I've found already:

  by  Cherrylynx

  by  AZRainman

I'm sure there are many more relevant images out there, so I'll have to make revamping the global warming web pages and posters my next project!

LinkedIn

I'm not very good at networking, promoting myself or "projecting an image" - one of the reasons I am following this 23 things programme in the first place - so if I were to join LinkedIn it would have to be after some serious consideration as to how best to present myself, and what I should or shouldn't include. I don't want to rush in and make a hash of it! At least I would be able to get some assistance with my profile though - the most recent entry on the LinkedIn blog announces that they are now offering an "Improve your profile" tool which offers customized guidance to every member. This could be very useful, as long as the end results are not too bland and homogenised.

Making links  - Chain by Pictr

 The CILIP Group looks interesting and I like the way that discussions are displayed on the group pages, with comments appearing in little speech bubbles. I also think that the personal profile pages have a very clear and attractive layout.  According to another of LinkedIn's blog posts, it will now be possible to apply for some jobs with LinkedIn, in cases where companies have signed up for an  “Apply with LinkedIn” button. I wonder how many libaries will adopt this when employing people? However, according to the infographic: How Are People Really Using LinkedIn? the numbers of people using LinkedIn for hiring staff are pretty low, at least for the moment. Maybe this new feature will change things.
LinkedIn seems more attractive to me as a networking tool than Facebook, maybe just because it comes across as more professional and grown-up. I may well join eventually, but not just yet.

Facing up to Facebook

I have always been a bit wary of Facebook, largely due to concerns over privacy settings, and articles such as "What Facebook fails to recognise" and "Facebook: the virtual Hotel California" which highlight its darker aspects, have hardly reassured me. Therefore, I've never really been tempted to create a personal account. However, as I have mentioned in previous posts, King's Library does now have a presence on Facebook, thanks to an account created and maintained by my colleague Gareth. I chip in now and again with a few suggestions of things to post. We try to keep the tone quite light-hearted, including quirky things such as a newspaper clipping from 1884 which reports on a seal being allowed to swim in King's fountain (my excuse for including the cute animal picture below), and the New spice, study like a scholar parody from YouTube.

Baby Seal by MyAngelG

 
We also use it for announcements, such as book return reminders, and as an arena for promoting things like our Amazon store and our subscription to the useful Library of America series. We have had positive comments and "likes" for many of our posts, so it seems to have been fairly well received so far, and, since 235 people "Like" us, we don't feel we are broadcasting into a void. However, we do find ourselves scrabbling round for ideas sometimes, so the 25 great Facebook page content ideas may well come in handy. I'd like our page to have some fixed links in the left hand menu - to things like our Library catalogue and our Delicious bookmarks, but we haven't worked out how to add those yet! Something like De Montfort University Library's page has would be good.

LibraryThing

I've browsed LibraryThing in the past in search of reviews for particular books and suggestions for new books to read, but until now, I've never actually got round to creating my own personal library. I have so many books that it would be a major task to add all of them (and involve paying for the account), so that put me off a bit. However, I've now taken the plunge and so far I've added about 30 books. I like the myriad additional features on offer, including the various groups that can be joined or just watched, the statistics available about every aspect of the use of the site, and the fact that it automatically picked up on my geographical location and provided information about book signings at the Cambridge branch of Waterstones! There are also some interesting projects underway, such as Legacy Libraries, which is an attempt to recreate the libraries of major historical figures.

Looking at some of the examples of libraries who have incorporated LibraryThing data into their OPACs, I can see that it does add a lot to the catalogue records. The addition of Library Thing tags allows a library's holdings to be linked up in new and varied ways, and I think this is particularly useful in relation to fiction titles, which aren't always served very well by Library of Congress Subject Headings. With LibraryThing data incorporated, library users are offered a lot more in the way of pointers to similar books and other titles they might want to read. However, since the tags are totally unregulated, you can get tag clouds with quite a lot of subject repetition in slightly different forms (eg Science Fiction, sci-fi, scifi, sf, sff etc), and this can look a bit scrappy. I think it is a shame that when you add tags to your books, LibraryThing doesn't indicate what other people have already used - in the way that Delicious does when you add tags to your bookmarks. This wouldn't stop anyone adding any sort of tag they liked, but might reduce some of the unnecessary variations on a theme. I know that each individual book page does show the tags assigned to that book, but a little gentle prompting at the point of editing your own collection wouldn't hurt.

 When it comes to King's Library, incorporating LibraryThing data would certainly make our catalogue more colourful, but I think there might be some practical difficulties, such as the fact that we have so many older books without ISBNs which might be more tricky to upload. I also think that unregulated tags may be less helpful when applied to academic works, as there is the risk that they could lead students off on a wild goose chase through irrelevant or only tangentially related titles. However, trying to be balanced about this, it is also true that some of these tangential links could turn out to be useful - serendipity can often play an important role in guiding the direction of someone's research in unanticipated but rewarding directions.

I will definitely be exploring LibraryThing further, and who knows, I may even review a few books, or contribute to the forums. It is definitely a fascinating and useful resource for anyone working with or interested in books.

Bookmarking tools

Finally! Something I've used before. I have used Delicious for my personal bookmarks for quite a while now, and get on really well with it. I find the layout very attractive, and tags make organising things really easy. My experience with it inspired me to create a set of King's Library bookmarks, which were initially just intended for staff use, as a way of sharing bookmarks without manually adding them to the browser of every staff machine. Having gradually developed a whole set of ebooks bookmarks, mostly linking to sites offering free full text access, we then realised that these might well be of interest to our students, so the link has now been promoted via our Facebook page and also appears on the electronic resources page of our website. This year, whilst checking booklists for the Pembroke-King's summer school programme, we discovered that quite a few of the works featured were freely available online, and so I set about creating a new set of PKP bookmarks (see image below) with links organised by course title.

King's Library's PKP bookmarks

We have advertised this set of bookmarks on posters in the library and on the user guides given to the summer school students, in the hope that it will lessen the demand for print copies of the titles featured. This is particularly important, as we have over 300 summer school students this year! 

Diigo is a tool I have no experience with. I have now created an account and imported all my Delicious bookmarks into it. This transaction happened smoothly, so now, if nothing else, I have a duplicate set of bookmarks which can act as a backup to my Delicious ones. The layout seems similarly clear and easy to navigate, and I like the ability to highlight bits of webpage text to include with the bookmarks. However, I'm not so keen on the adverts that pop up above and between sets of bookmarks. These adverts add unnecessary clutter and make the display less attractive, so I'd be less inclined to use this tool to create sets of bookmarks for our Library. Only the pay versions are ad-free.

I decided to download the ReaditLater app for my ipod touch, and managed to do this without too much trouble, although installing the bookmarklet on the ipod's Safari browser was a bit fiddly. Once I had done that, I successfully bookmarked an article and downloaded it for offline use, but subsequently discovered that downloaded articles will only remain on the app if you leave it permanently logged in - log out and everything you have stored is deleted. I suppose there is no harm in leaving the app logged in, but I just usually prefer to log out of something when I am not using it. Still, this is not a major issue, especially if the app is used simply to keep track of things to read, rather than as a place for long term storage. After all, other applications such as Evernote can perform the latter function. I like the fact that if I wanted to, I could bookmark articles on my computer, and then sync them with my ipod.

I think social bookmarking tools in general are a great way for libraries to point people towards useful resources, and I love the flexibility of organising things by tags. One link can have many tags and appear in various different sets of bookmarks. Doing this Thing has now inspired me to tidy up and reorganise both my own and the Library's Delicious bookmarks  ... goes away to do this ......

Reflections

A flock of sneaky water drops, by Steve took it

Since I had very little to say for myself at the Cam23 2.0 reflection week meetup on Monday, I thought I had better use my blog to express my thoughts about the programme so far.
Most of what we have explored to date has been entirely new to me - I've been a bit slow to explore social media in general, although I did briefly have a sadly neglected LiveJournal account at one stage. I've enjoyed getting to grips with lots of new stuff, and also reading the blogs of other people following the programme, although I haven't got into the habit of commenting much yet. Highlights include discovering LightShot and Screencast-O-Matic, which will definitely be useful in a work context and which I have already recommended to friends and family. I'm still feeling my way with Twitter, but will keep exploring it. I've used my iGoogle page more than I expected, and am trying to keep up with the blogs I've added to Google Reader, but finding the time isn't easy.
Google docs and Evernote have already been useful as places to save thoughts and images to use in this blog, and I will continue to use them. I don't really need to use Doodle at present, but will remember it for possible future use. So far, my paper diary and Outlook email are winning the battle against Google Calendar.

The only thing I don't like and definitely won't be using again is Pushnote, for the reasons given in my previous post.

Roll on the next 12 things!

Pushnote and Evernote

I share the reservations others have expressed about Pushnote. If people have something to say about a webpage or site there are already plenty of ways to express it without scrawling it all over the site itself in a way that cannot be removed, especially if it is only a fatuous comment like "This is rubbish" or "This is so cool". If they have a serious point to make about a company's business practices or the quality of a product then they can contact consumer rights services like Consumer Direct or organisations like Which? Making a complaint inside an application like Pushnote, which can only be viewed by others signed up to the service seems a bit pointless to me. How do those reading the comments know whether they have any truth to them anyway? They could easily be malicious. I don't think this is something I will be following in the future.

Evernote is much more benign, and although I haven't explored it very far yet, I think it could turn out to be quite handy. I've downloaded the Web clipper version and clipped a few things from various websites to store on my notes page. The process is straightfoward, and the advantage over simply bookmarking a particular page or website is that you can preserve the content exactly as it is at a certain point in time, whereas the live page could disappear or totally change its content. This could be particularly useful to researchers wishing to archive the content of a page for future reference and citation. It is also handy that notes can be emailed into the notebook. I may well use Evernote for saving and organising copies of things like order confirmations, travel tickets and online forms. I will also probably use it to save quirky images I come across online like this:

The M Team

Google Docs

 I think what could turn out to be the most useful aspect of Google Docs for me is the ability to save files to it which I can then access both at work and at home, without any need to email them to myself or carry a flash drive around. When it comes to sharing files within our library, we already have a networked drive which we use for this purpose. There is also a College wide drive for sharing files with other departments. It is true that these drives are only available from computers linked to our admin network, so they can't be accessed from home or be used for sharing files with anyone outside the College, but attaching them to emails works fine in most cases - we don't often need to work collaboratively on files with external people. However, there are some circumstances in which sharing files via Google Docs may come in handy - Gareth has already suggested that we could use it when working with Pembroke College to prepare for our annual PKP summer school programme - and I can see that we might also be able to use it when working with external individuals involved in developing, managing and publicising our library's Global Warming Collection . We could also add a form to our website allowing anyone to recommend books for the collection. Our library catalogue already incorporates a form allowing students to request books for their courses, so it is not necessary to create one for that purpose.

Wordle image

Thinking about the Global Warming Collection, I then produced a simple flyer promoting the collection, which I have made accessible to anyone with the link. I did find some aspects of the formatting of document files a bit difficult to get the hang of at first. The layout looks very much like Word, but it doesn't seem to operate like Word in all respects - for example, when I inserted the picture I found that couldn't move it around on the page very easily, and I had trouble centering the text on the page. However, other features of Google Docs, such as importing files and changing the access settings, are very simple to use.
I also had a look at the various document templates shared by other users, and although there is a lot of rubbish available, I did come across one or two useful ones, including quite a nice recipe template:

Master my recipe template by Nr13730

Using some of these templates could save time when creating particular types of document.

Google Calendar

So many things - ipods, phones, email etc - offer calendar functions these days, trying to make use of them all could lead to utter confusion! At work I currently use both Microsoft Outlook's calendar and a paper diary. The paper diary shows the whole week at a glance, and I can quickly refer to it even if I'm logged out of my computer. I can also take it home when I need to. Outlook can only be accessed at work, but it allows me to set pop-up reminders for appointments and tasks, and since I'm always logged into Outlook when I'm at my work computer, I can be sure I'll get these reminders during the day. When it comes to Google Calendar, I can see the following pros and cons for me personally:

Pros:

1) I can access it online from anywhere.
2) I can share it with others if I want.
3) I can have it display on my igoogle page and access it easily there.
4) It has a very clear layout, is easy to update, and the agenda view listing everything coming up is particularly nice.

Cons:

1) Email reminders will go to my personal Yahoo email, since that's what I have used to create the Google account, and unlike Outlook, I'm not constantly logged into Yahoo during the day, so I won't always see the reminders. As far as I can see there is no option to have them sent to a different email address.
2) I assume that popup reminders only appear if you are logged into Google, and again I won't always be logged in to that at work.
3) Although I can access it from home, I will need to be online to do so. A paper diary does not require hardware or electricity.

I'll try using it for a while and see if the pros outweigh the cons.

Our library opening hours at King's are pretty straightforward and unchanging, and our students get 24 hour card access anyway, so there is not a great deal to feature on a calendar, but I suppose we could use it to inform people of events like open days and exhibition days so they have forewarning of dates when the library is likely to be especially busy. For libraries which vary their opening hours more, or host more events, I am sure Google Calendar can be very useful.

Doodle's a doddle!

Doodle is very easy to use, and it's particularly nice that you don't need to register to use the basic functions. Keeping track of what usernames and passwords you have used for which account can be taxing, so I'm always grateful when I don't need to create one. It is also good that you get emailed as each person replies, so you can keep track of how the poll is progressing. I'm assuming that if there is no conclusive result - eg two dates are equally popular - you might still have to contact people separately or run the poll again with alternative times/dates, so it can't remove all the potential hassle of organising an event, but it is definitely better than going back and forth with email messages.
I don't personally organise that many meetings or events at work, so I'm not sure I really have a great need for Doodle at the moment, but it is certainly a useful tool to have available.
I had a little play around, and created the poll shown below:

Teddy bear's picnic poll

 You can see a bigger image of the poll here. If you go into the woods on the 23rd of July, you'd better go in disguise!

Screencasting

From screenshots to screencasting in one bound! Below is my first attempt at using Screencast-o-matic. It can be seen as a companion piece to the How to place a hold video created by Gareth 2.0, since it demonstrates another facility offered by the King's College webcat - namely the ability for students to make online book purchase requests.



Despite the process of creating a screencast being very easy to pick up, it still took me quite a few attempts to produce this, since I kept moving the mouse around a bit too erratically and mistyping words. You have to be very calm and measured to get things to happen smoothly. The finished version is still not very polished - no soundtrack for one thing I'm afraid - and I may have gone a bit fast in places, but I think it does the job it is intended to do. I like the captions facility, and the ease of slotting them in at the exact second you want them, but you do have to remember to allow for the fact that when they appear they obscure the lower part of the screen.
Rather than upload the video to YouTube, I created a Screencast-o-matic account and uploaded it to their own facility, which gives it its own page where further editing can be done and other people can make comments if they wish. It also provided me with the code I needed to embed the video in this blog, although sizing it to fit the space available means the text is very small. You can click on the pop out button in the top right hand corner of the video to view a bigger version, or view the full size version here.
I'm sure there are lots of ways we could use screencasts to demonstrate various library processes, but we would have to be very pro-active in making students aware of their existence, otherwise they would be a waste of effort. Maybe they would be best featured on our Facebook page, and highlighted at the beginning of each academic year.

Screenshots

I'd never heard of LightShot before, and enjoyed exploring it. It was easy to install on my Firefox browser and the controls are straightforward. I like the fact that screenshots can be immediately uploaded to the web and even be given their own page which can then be linked to. Also, I'm now able to add a few pictures to liven up this blog a bit. I've even managed to add captions! For starters, here is my igoogle homepage, created as Thing 1:

Anna's igoogle homepage

Having browsed through the massive number of other available addons for Firefox, the only one which I've added so far is ColorfulTabs, which simply colours each tab you open on your browser with a different colour - like this: 

Example of coloured tabs

 I like it just because it is simple and uses pleasant colours. Reading comments and grumbles on the download pages of many other addons made me reluctant to use them. However, I'm sure I will find more I want to download as I explore further. I have used StumbleUpon in the past, but it is a bit of a distraction, and I have too many of those already! 

Twitter

Well, another new experience to report on. I have looked at a few Twitter feeds before, but have always found them quite difficult to follow, what with all the snippets of conversations and # tags etc. I must admit, having now begun to tweet myself for the first time, I'm still finding it a bit confusing - every tweet posted by others offers an opportunity to branch out somewhere else, following link after link until you are miles from where you began! It feels like I've wandered into a labyrinth! I realise that this is what the internet is like generally, but Twitter just feels even more tentacled and fragmented. I suppose I'll get the hang of it eventually. Here are my baby steps into this world. Not much to say for myself yet really, but it's early days.
So, having set up my account and linked the feed to this blog, I then looked for feeds to follow. I began by adding sensible book or library related Twitter feeds like Guardian Books and  CILIP info , only to loose focus a bit and meander into adding feeds like Zombie Apocalypse! This latter is partly because I came across a mention of the brilliant Library of the Living Dead guide on Annie's blog and partly because I've got a bit of a weakness for zombie related material. I wish our next library guide could feature zombies!
Having looked at some of the examples of libraries using Twitter, I can see that it does offer a brilliant and concise means of communicating with users, and of providing them with up to the minute information. I can also see that maintaining a truly responsive and useful feed could take up an awful lot of time.
As extras, I tried out Bit.ly which is a great little tool, and I've signed up for Twitterfeed so that even if I don't get around to tweeting very much, my feed will at least be populated by updates to my blog.

RSS feeds

Well, this task has opened my eyes to the vast number of interesting blogs out there - library related and otherwise. It's a bit daunting really. Even adding them to the Google Reader - which is very easy to do - doesn't give me great confidence that I'll be able to keep up with and absorb more than a small amount of all that information flowing towards me. Still, I can see that gathering the feeds together in one place is at least a start, and I like the way that they can be organised into folders by topic. I've added the Reader to my igoogle home page, so that I can reach it easily. I had a look at the 2011 Salem Library Blog Award winners list as suggested in the instructions for this thing, and I've added feeds for a few blogs from there that took my fancy, including A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette , which made me laugh and also reassured me that others share my daily irritations and frustrations with minor things such as chairs not being pushed back under tables.
I was already an occasional reader of blogs like thewikiman and Phil Bradley's weblog and having now added them to my reader, I'm sure I'll be following them more regularly in future. I've found the latter blog very useful in the past for technical tips such as where to find free online pdf file creating services. 
Moving away from libraries, I've added some news feeds and various other things, and I also had a look at the pre-packaged bundles of blogs on offer. These are useful if you want to quickly build up a selection of blog feeds on specific topics, but I've found that the titles can be a bit misleading. I added one bundle, called SF, assuming that all the blogs would be about science fiction, but they turned out to be about San Francisco!
I think this is a tool I'll keep using long-term, but I think I'll have to restrain myself from adding too many feeds, as I think many of them would never actually get read!

Adventures in blogging

I found the process of creating this blog very straightforward, and now that I've finally found some time to play around with the design, I'm a lot happier with how it looks. I've selected a background that seems more appropriate for the blog title I'm using, and I've made some alterations to fonts and text colours etc. I've added search and link gadgets, and moved all the gadgets around a bit. I found all this fairly easy to accomplish, and I particularly appreciate the previews you get of each slight change you make, so you can decide what works best before applying it more permanently. It is also quite easy to reverse any changes you make. The potential for tweaking and altering things is huge and could easily occupy you for hours. Whether that is the best use of anyone's time is debatable, but the flexibility of Blogger does provide enormous scope for crafting something very unique and personal. It also means that your blog can shift and change over time, either to reflect changes in your mood and world view, or just to incorporate new things you encounter. I've noted, for example, that there are gadgets for RSS feeds and Twitter, so I expect I'll be adding those and probably others to my blog as I progress through the rest of the 23 things. Overall, my experience of blogging has so far been very positive, if a bit inwardly focused. My next task is to turn my gaze outwards, to the blogs of others, and start commenting!

Exploring igoogle

I've quite enjoyed setting up my igoogle page and arranging it to suit my tastes and needs. I particularly like the vast range of themes available, and I've discovered a very sweet animation of waddling penguins to add a bit of life to my home page. However, I found the process of adding gadgets a bit unresponsive at first - I'd add a gadget and it wouldn't immediately appear on my home page, so I'd add it again, and then end up with two of the same gadget. I also initially had trouble getting the weather gadget to remember Cambridge as my home town, and I added a "To do list" gadget and wrote a list, only to have that list forgotten the next time I logged in! However, all this may just have been due to my impatience and/or problems with my browser, and things do now seem to be working smoothly.
Having said that, from looking at gadget reviews, it does appear that there are many faulty or badly designed gadgets out there - but I suppose that is inevitable given the number available and the range of people that create them. I'm sure there are also many very useful gadgets around, and I expect that in time, I'll find the ones that work best for me. It is very tempting to add lots of games, but then I'd probably end up wasting time playing them instead of completing the rest of the 23 things!
At present, I'm not convinced that igoogle is going to make a massive difference to my internet use, or save me a great deal of time reaching the sites I use regularly - Delicious bookmarks and basic google searches have served me fine up till now - but I realise that I've only just begun to explore its functionality, and there are many more aspects to learn, such as incorporating RSS feeds, so I'll try to keep an open mind for now.
Right, now I need to get back to customizing this blog, and then my next post will let you know how I've got on with that!

Beginnings

So, here we go. A brand new blog to play with. To introduce myself, I'm Anna, and I work at King's College Library. I've created this blog as part of the Cambridge 23 Things programme since I thought it was about time I got a bit more familiar with social media. My previous experience extends only as far as using Delicious social bookmarking to set up lists of useful links for our students. One such list covers sources for free online texts and has been posted on the King's College Library facebook page, set up and managed by my colleague, Gareth.
I'm hoping this programme will introduce me not only to lots of other useful tools but also to lots of interesting Cambridge library bloggers!