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.