23 Thinged

In summary:

iGoogle page - still using this for combination of links to my RSS feeds, and the 'Days Since' and 'To Do list' widgets, but I haven't set it as my homepage.

Blog - still hoping to keep this up, though I'm considering moving to a different host.

RSS feeds - this has been one of the main highlight and benefits of the 23 Things programme for me; these certainly help me keep up to date on various interests.

Flickr & Picnik - I'm not a big photographer, and I don't really want to share my efforts with the world. When I do want to share pictures, I put them on Facebook, or email them, or possibly even have them printed out and pass them around, although that feels slightly like blasphemy amongst the Web 2.0ers...

Delicious - I feel that I missed the point on this one. It was useful to mine the lists of a couple of people/places, but I won't be using it in a regular or dynamic way.

Podcasts - ho hum. I found a few intersting ones, and it was good to be given a bit of nudge towards finding and listening to some, but I can't say I found anything professionally useful.

Facebook - I've used it for ages, not sure about its usefulness or libraries (see my humble opinions at greater length below)

LinkedIn - Can't believe that anyone has ever made contacts which were both new and useful on this clunky site, and even less found a job.

Twitter - Fun for a while, but the novelty soon wore off.

Wikis - Useful within online communities, Wikipedia to be used with caution...

Office 2.0 - Could be very useful between colleagues.

Widgets - Handy and fun!

I noticed whilst writing this, that I've said almost nothing about libraries. I've learned a great deal about Web 2.0 for myself, and have definitely acquired new skills. I don't think many of them could be productively applied in my library, which caters mainly for academics and researchers visiting once only, but I'll bear them in mind for when I get a permanent position...though by then I expect a couple of these Things will have fallen by the wayside, and a few more arisen...

The Word Widget...

used to mean 'tv remote' in my friend's house, or a thingy in beer cans to make the fizz. Still, I was familiar with adding widgets, as I'd already various bits and pieces to my blog and other things, so it wasn't difficult to add the photostream or to put my Delicious links onto my start page. The only downside is that I haven't kept up Flickr or Delicious...

Officey stuff

Anyone who waded through what surprised me by turning into a mini-rant yesterday will be relieved to see that I don't have much to say about Office 2.0 - either Google Docs or ThinkFree. Both are potentially very useful, and could save the sending of a lot of email attachments; I don't need to use them at the moment, but I'm pleased to be a bit more familiar with them (had used Google Docs in a small way before), so that they will spring to mind next time I need to share documents.

That's all, folks.

Wikis

My previous experience/impression of wikis came from googling something to do with Doctor Who, and coming across a wiki with minutely detailed episode guides and character summaries for (apparently) every creature who ever had a second of screen time, or was even obliquely referred to. Ditto with Harry Potter.

Still, I had a good browse over the Oxford Web2.0 wiki, and made a couple of pedantic updates.

Adventures in Wikipedia were much more interesting, as I was unsurprised to see that the revision history of the 'Israel' article has multiple revisions every day, and that people were even getting into arguments in the notes which give the reason for revision.

I use Wikipedia quite a lot, either for an introduction to something about which I know absolutely nothing (or have never even heard of), or for basic facts about something. For these tasks, it's ideal (though I sometimes want corroboration from other sites once I think I've found the answer I want). However, looking at the pages for my own 'specialist subjects', I can see its problems. Everything present on the page for All Souls is factually correct, there are a lot of important things which should be mentioned and aren't, and it doesn't really represent either the history or the current state of the college very well at all.

Similarly, the people who wrote the article on Ben Jonson clearly haven't read my masters thesis. (And to stop you leaping to Wikipedia, suffice to say he was a friend of Shakespeare and mainly known for his plays) he Understandably, there was a lot about the plays and masques and bit about the poems, but nothing about how they were printed and his unusual involvement in every detail of the process from the quartos onwards, or even the significance of the First Folio. Similarly, there was very little about the intellectual and literary culture he was operating within, and his aspirations for drama as a genre. In short, the article is biased towards providing what people are looking for.

I realise that this might seem an odd thing to say - that's what wikipedia is for, isn't it?! - but it seems wrong that all someone looking at this article gets are the basic facts that an A-level student reading The Alchemist or Volpone wants to fill out their essay. The encyclopaedic presentation of Wikipedia strongly implies that it is authoritative, and whilst readers might be aware that they should check their facts in other sources (I corrected a statement that one masque was lost, when it was actually rediscovered several years ago), they wouldn't realise that there are highly significant facets of Jonson's life and work which aren't even mentioned.

Collective wisdom is a powerful tool indeed, but we have specialists for a reason. I have to confess that I hadn't really thought about the limitations of Wikipedia until I looked at the entries for things I already knew about and could see not just what is wrong, but what is missing.

I certainly won't stop using it - how else could I find out in under 10 seconds who Barry Crocker is ("a popular Australian singer, with a crooning vocal style"), or confirm my suspicion that Tweededum and Tweedledee are only in Through the Looking-Glass, not in Alice in Wonderland? - but I will be more wary in future.

Falling Behind

Oh dear, I'm slipping - not only did I not finish the Twitter Things, I missed my regularly scheduled Sunday evening blogging session, so I'm several Things behind. I engaged with Twitter a bit more, and kept it open for a couple of days at work, replying to people, using hashtags, etc. However, because most of the people who follow me are also following the rest of the people I follow (are you following?!), I didn't find anything I considered worth retweeting, because I knew everyone who would be interested would have already seen it...

I did find it reasonably compulsive for those couple of days, but I soon grew bored. It's just the same as facebook status updates (in fact, often they are facebook status updates), but you don't get to see people's photos, new contacts, events, or entire conversations, so I find it much less interesting. I might occasionally sign in for a nosy, but, much to my relief, I don't feel the pull that many seem to!

Twitter

I was looking forward to this Thing; Twitter is mentioned so often that I was intrigued to see what the fuss is about. To be honest, though, I've been disappointed. I've found other trainees to follow and a couple of other people/things, but apart from the same sorts of status updates I get from facebook, I haven't gained a lot from it, nor have I felt the pull that leads people to become hooked (thankfully! I have enough addictions...).

As a result, I have to confess that I forgot about Twitter for most of the week, and possibly I haven't put enough in to Twitter to get much out of it. I'll try to be more active about it, and see if I can fulfil the criteria for Thing 16 before too long.

In more exciting and early modern news, I've got going on my project. I'm working towards a producing a catalogue of one of the college's most interesting manuscripts - a collection of letters, poems, speeches, masques etc from the early 17thC - so most of my time and enthusiasm are taken up with that.

LinkedIn

Verdict: Not Impressed.

I deleted my account almost immediately, as it seemed like a very shoddy sort of site. It was very difficult and counter-intuitive to navigate, and from the way that there were two separate University of Oxford 'companies' and an 'Oxford University', it didn't look to be very well managed. In addition, there weren't enough people on it to make it seem worthwhile setting up a profile, as it seems unlikely that any useful potential contacts would be looking at (if they were even able to find me!).

Facebook

Not much work required from me for this Thing, as I've been a member of Facebook for about three and half years now. I've found it perfect for staying in touch with people and sharing photos, but the novelty of not-quite-spying on primary school classmates (after all, they know what they're making public!) and looking at blurry and vaguely embarrassing photos of my friends has long since worn off. Gone are the days when I could spend hours facebook-stalking, finding more groups to join, and link-hopping until I found myself reading conversations between perfect strangers. Interestingly, a YouGov survey I took last week asked me if I am getting bored with social networking sites, which suggests that I'm not alone.

As for libraries on Facebook, that's a difficult one. I've been a member of the 'Duke Humfrey Appreciation Society' and 'The Bodleian's Upper Reading Room is Hallowed Ground' groups for years, but never expected or wanted any interaction with these groups. Moreover, it was clear that these were fan groups (from the days before pages), created by readers independent of the libraries themselves, and I would feel disturbed if the libraries did try to do something to entice me in. I've seen several pages created by libraries to represent themselves, and whilst they have fans, in the same way that I joined the two above to show appreciation, I've love to know how many people actually want/take something from these pages other than a sense of connection with others, and the joy of giving something the equivalent of a thumb's up.

The Queen's College has what I consider to be a terrifying page, with accessions lists, links to SOLO, Jstor, COPAC and lots more, but whilst it has nearly 2000 fans, I wonder how often these functions are used. I have to say it would never occur to me to go to Facebook to look up a book, and, when I was a student, if I'd come across one of the search widgets whilst on facebook, I doubt I'd have used it. I may be looking at Facebook for work now, but back in the day, if I was on Facebook then I was Putting Off Work, and wouldn't want to be made to feel any guiltier than I already did by being confronted with the very thing I was avoiding.

Book Tech Support

Well, this was a Thing I was already very familiar with. I can't say I've ever used it for work purposes (not quite the same as not using it at work, but never mind), and having looked at the uninspiring material on Youtube Edu, I'm not sure I will.

I did find a very amusing video called All Souls College - if you want to see 9 minutes of someone videoing parts of the college, zooming shakily in to one tower, then out, then back in again at the other, and similarly at the reredos, then enjoy! I especially like the opening scene where the camera zooms for ages...at Exeter College!

Still, my time wasn't wholly wasted as I found two of my favourite book-related clips:



and from the brilliant Mitchell and Webb - this is hilarious, but only if you've ever caught yourself doing it. Otherwise, it goes straight over people's heads. Personally, I think flank-patting should be introduced university wide to speed up book retrieval...

(if you do have a look, apologies in advance for the earthquake survivor gag, which obviously isn't appropriate at the moment)

Codcasting?

I've subscribed to a few podcasts, but haven't had chance to actually listen to any of them yet. From the BBC, I went for Front Row highlights, as a programme I always mean to listen to, but never do, and In Our Time. This is a favourite of mine, especially as this week's programme is on an Early Modern topic. This felt somewhat artificial, though, as I already subscribe to the email which lets me know when a new programme is released anyway. I couldn't immediately find anything of interest on podcast.com or Podcast Alley, but might have a closer look another time.

Still, the University lecture podcasts were good for a giggle. Before I actually went there, I thought 'I bet all the English lit ones are by Stuart Lee', and I was pretty much correct! In fact, I remember him telling us he was recording them for podcasts way back when I was doing my Old English Mods paper in 04-05, and although they've been re-recorded htis year, I'm sure they're basically the same so if I have the urge to revisit the Battle of Maldon or Dream of the Rood, I'll have the bizarre experience of listening to myself listening to a lecture...

One of the only two non-Old English items is a series by my own Masters supervisor on early modern drama - she was one of the best lecturers I heard, and they're on early modern drama, so I'll try to listen to them soon. Still, these are complete series, and aren't going to be updated, so it seems a bit pointless to actually subscribe to them - I know they're there now, and that's enough!

I can see that the Bod has done some Bodcasts, but I'm not sure that the Cod will be producing any in the near future!

Not too tasty

I'm pretty sceptical about the usefulness of Delicious for me. I've added several of my favourite websites, and added the History Faculty to my network. However, I have a lot of static bookmarks on Mozilla that I use on my laptop, and I've arranged it so my most frequently used ones begin with unique letters, so Hotmail is the only H, and Googlemail the only G, etc. This means there's a big time/hassle difference between going Alt+B+[letter] and having the page instantly load, and going to Delicious, signing in, finding the pages I want and opening them in new windows, as I usually want several at once.

I suppose there might be occasions when I'm at an unfamiliar computer and would want them, but a quick google search would do the job just as well, as I only have a small number of sites I use all the time. I'm not actively looking for new sites to visit, so whilst I might mine the HFL page for some ideas, I don't habitually need to find more 'delicious' websites to sample all the time.

As for library pages, I don't think Delicious has (or will) become well-known enough for it to be worthwhile. I've been asking quite a lot of people, mainly students, and no one I know outside of library work has heard of it, or of social bookmarking. I'd be very interested to hear about students who are using it, and do know all about it, though, so if anyone has had a different experience, please do drop me a comment!

I couldn't resist...

Magdalen
Originally uploaded by Fiona_at_New

...messing with Magdalen. As my college (New) has a friendly rivalry with Magdelen (something to do with rowing, the King of Sweden, and New just being a generally superior college...), I couldn't resist playing with this picture - not sure how this superpower would help me at work, however!

Oxford in the snow

Oxford in the snow
Originally uploaded by Fiona_at_New

This was going to go in the previous post - I cropped it, sharpened it, and added a border, but as I said, I was pretty happy with it beforehand!

Tactical Error

Krakow
Originally uploaded by Fiona_at_New

The small selection of pictures I uploaded to flickr were ones I was really pleased with - I'm vain enough not to want to publish blurry attempts to get my friends all in one picture, and all those night shots that didn't quite work out (there are enough of those on Facebook, anyway!).

That meant, though, that when it came to editing on Picnik, there wasn't very much I wanted to do to my favourite photos!

Still, I changed one of the ones I showed below to sepia, as you can see.

I usually pride myself on being able to work out how to do computery thing just by trying things out, or, if all else fails, reading the instructions. I can't, however, work out how to
a) drop photos from flickr directly into my blog
b) put more than one photos into a blog post, as I'm doing this directly from flickr.
c) save the photos on flickr which I edited via Picnik, back onto my computer.

Any suggestions? Perhaps I'm just expecting things which aren't possible, but I'm getting very frustrated!

Technical Difficulties

I'm still having to deal with this blog in IE, and, as a dedicated Mozilla user, this means that there's a bit of a mental barrier to me just posting bits and pieces whenever they occur to me as I have to open a different programme to do it.

There seemed to be a similar barrier to my use of flickr - the bulk uploader kept crashing, and even the 'simple' uploader would only let me do one at a time, instead of five. Perhaps there's something wrong with my settings or my computer, but it was all a bit annoying and consequently took ages (and put me in a bit of a bad mood!). Anyway, my patience held out to six pictures, including some of Oxford in the snow,


and some of my travels (this one is from Krakow):


It was good to see the variety of pictures in the 23 Things flickr group - glad to see they weren't all of libraries...

Jumping the gun

As I like to press buttons to see what things do, in the process of establishing my start page, I ended up setting up Google Reader and subscribing to the 23 Things blog before I even noticed that it constituted a Thing. Putting off laundry may also have had something to do with the intensity of my curiosity.

Even though I'm writing this post just before the next Thing is assigned (writing Thing with a majuscule - note the bibliographer-in-training! - makes me think of aliens and blob monsters from sci-fi films like this one), I did subscribe to a few other RSS feeds at the start of the week.

I added the posts and comments of the Graduate Trainee blog, and the 23 Things (they're behind you...run!) of some of my fellow trainees. The one for CILIP was swiftly removed, as I was instantly bombarded with stuff that no amount of kowtowing to the idea of professional development was going to make me actually read.

I swapped it for the feed of the CILIP Rare Books and Special Collections group, of which I am a member, but apart from an advert for a conservation course taught by someone who will be conserving books in my library for a month in the summer, it's been very quiet.

The only not-quite-work-related one I found was the blog of the Centre for Early Modern Studies. I was hoping to get a feed of all the Early Modern events, but for some reason that resulted in being sent a single list of all the medieval seminars for the term. Still, as all the seminars start during working hours, I suppose it doesn't matter whether I hear about them in time or not! At least I can go to the History of the Book sessions, which are considered part of my training, and are amongst the closest to my own interests.

If I ever get round to evolving this blog beyond the 23 things programme (does it seem better in minuscule?), I'll expand on my love of the Early Modern, and hopefully make the blog live up to its title. And if I've intrigued you, you can go here for a very inadequate wikipedia definition of a commonplace book.

More blogging

Returning to my slice of cyber-space after a hectic week in the real world, I'm pleased to see that I have indeed had some visitors in my absence. And now that I've turned on the comments notification function, I might find out about them a little sooner from now on...

I came to tinker with the settings and add a tag cloud, as well as catch up on the 23 things homework, but I've just spent a frustrating half-hour trying the add the above as a reply to the comments on my previous post. Is this just not possible on Blogger? I just assumed it would be an obvious thing that bloggers would want to do. I tried to just post a comment as a reader, but it wouldn't let me do that either, and deleted what I wrote - I originally pondered the potential value and vanity of blogs a little more, and how they seem a very paradoxical way to communicate, but I can't be bothered to write it out again.

Any comments about comments gratefully received.

Tangled thoughts about blogs

I've dutifully looked at quite a few of the other 23 Things blogs, and made a couple of comments when they've written about non-programme things. At this stage, however, I'm guessing that most of 100 or so blogs are almost identical, and so not the most exciting read.

Then again, neither is this - it feels rather like self-indulgence, both to write when I have nothing to say, and to assume that people are reading it...

My Start Page

Another thing I'd never heard of...

This was the task for last week. I already had a Google account, but I hadn't used the iGoogle function.

I've not found a background I really like, but this will do for now...

I added a load of gadgets to it, including:

• To Do list
• Wikipedia
• Weather
• Googlemail
• Shakespeare Sonnet
• BBC News
• Daily Literary Quote
• Facebook (a bit temperamental - it doesn't always load)
• Days Since (to create guilt about things I'm putting off!)

I do like the idea of having everything in one place, and replacing the myriad scraps of paper littering my desk that are my To Do lists, but I'm witholding judgement for the moment, as there are a few things I'm not so keen on. I'm concerned that the condensed versions of Facebook, Gmail and BBC News show me far less detail, but at the same time will give me enough to stop me visiting the actual sites, so I'll be less, rather than more connected to the wider world. I'll keep BBC News as my homepage for now, and see how much I use the start page...

23 Things

I've started this blog as part of the Oxford 23 Things programme, but as I've been thinking about starting a blog for over year, I'm pleased that Thing 3 has finally forced me to get round to it! That's why the title of my blog isn't related to the programme - I'm really hoping I can keep it up, blogging about other topics, so if I manage it, there'll be more about it anon...

I'm participating in the programme because I had never heard of Web 2.0 when I was given a talk about it during my first session as a library trainee. I had thought I was fairly up-to-speed with all things technological, even if I wasn't actively using them, but this suggested that I wasn't. In fact, it was mainly the term itself I didn't know, but it was about time I got using some Web 2.0 tools other than Facebook anyway!

Apart from reasons of personal/professional development, I'm interested to find out how Web 2.0 might be used in my library, the Codrington Library at All Souls College. We're a very unusual library (even by Oxford standards!) in terms of our who our readers are and what we do for them, so whilst some of the more common Web 2.0 tools probably wouldn't help us or our readers much, I'll be on the lookout for those we can adapt and apply.