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