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.
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that things won't stop there - the world of social media is constantly changing and knowledge can quickly become outdated.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.
Sunday, 28 August 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, 21 August 2011
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.
I then searched for "space" and got some menacing aliens:
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 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!
I then searched for "space" and got some menacing aliens:
![[mb] Space Aliens 3 by Merrick Brown, on Flickr](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/73/200178169_9b13ffdb94_m.jpg "[mb] Space Aliens 3 by Merrick Brown, on Flickr")
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 AZRainmanI'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!
Wednesday, 10 August 2011
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.
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.
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| Making links - Chain by Pictr |
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.
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
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.
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.
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| 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.
Friday, 5 August 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, 2 August 2011
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.
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 ......
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| King's Library's PKP bookmarks |
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 ......
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