The last post

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to investigate 23 things. This blog will self-destruct in five seconds."

13 weeks ago Cam23 felt like a mission impossible. I had never written a blog before and had almost no experience of the Things we were asked to evaluate. The blog itself has been the hardest part of all from choosing a name and still ending up with something fairly unoriginal (my first idea of "23 Things from Downing Street" I rejected for fear of being mistaken for a political manifesto) to trying to think of interesting, different and sometimes witty things to write. Some posts have been more successful than others in that respect. As the only blog I followed religiously all the way through was Miss Crail's Ruminations, I feel she has a lot to answer for in setting such a high standard. I have to admit there were days when I would try to find anything else to do other than write another blog post. It's amazing how appealing the thought of doing the annual stock check can become.

However, despite all of that I have enjoyed Cam23. I liked being able to work at my own pace and the Plain English videos provided for many of the Things have been an excellent introduction to the topics. I will go back to some of the Things later on when I have more time.

I will finish with a summary of the Things we have covered.

iGoogle - Lots of fun but can be distracting. Works less well as a homepage as you have to log in with your Google id.

RSS feeds - Had big problem with these to begin with until I realised I was trying to import them from the wrong place. Have to remember to look at them regularly or it defeats the object of having them. I prefer email updates.

Doodle - Loved this. Easy to use and a great way to set up meetings. Will be using Doodle to organise the rota for Saturday invigilation this year.

Google calendar - Loved this. Very simple format, easy to add, delete or change events and can be shared with other people. The only drawback is in having to access it via your Google id so am less likely to remember to use it. A paper calendar seems so much more convenient day-to-day.

Twitter - Full of irrelevancies. I like the brevity of the posts, some people may be more likely to read a few sentences that get straight to the point than an email or blog. We have a Library Twitter account that we should try to publicise and keep more up-to-date.

Flickr - Loved this but can be distracting. Gave me much more choice of photos to illustrate my blog with. Felt like a kid in a sweet shop. Could search for only those with Creative Commons and had clear guidance on what you could do with the photos copyright-wise.

Slideshare - Rather unsure about this. Wouldn't be the first place I would look for presentations, the company/institution/personal website seems a more obvious place.

Delicious - Very useful. Like a massive electronic personal desktop. Like the fact you add your own tags which are searchable. Everything is added in chronological order so no need to organise and sort things yourself. Will think about creating one for the Library.

LibraryThing - Good for personal collections of books. Easy to search for books and add them to your own private library. Can share collections and recommendations with other users. Less relevant to a library as you woudn't want to create a retrospective of your stock.

Facebook - May be an effective form of communication as I suspect most of the students have an account but on the other hand would they want a Library prescence on there? From our point of view it would be yet another thing to keep updated but we will ask the students in the next satisfaction survey if they would look at a Library page.

LinkedIn - A professional social networking site with CVs as opposed to personal profiles like Facebook. More relevant to the business world than the library community.

Zotero - Fairly simple once I had downloaded Mozilla Firefox and worked out how to drop things into my reference list. Will experiment further with this and also try Endnote and Mendeley for comparison so that if I'm asked about citation managers I can make a confident recommendation.

Googledocs - Good way of producing a document that requires input from others. Can be sent to selected people with the option to allow edits or just view. Had difficulty opening a document sent to me. May be useful when producing our library committee minutes.

Podcasts and Youtube - Listened to some interesting podcasts. Liked the library tours which could be downloaded to an ipod etc. Can download talks and radio programmes that you've missed the first time. Enjoyed Ninja Librarian on Youtube. Lots of fun and can distract you from work.

Wikis - Similar to Googledocs but on a much larger scale. Anyone can edit the content on a wiki which can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on the accuracy of the information. Wikipedia is the most famous but some of the infomation needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

I think that more and more people are using Web 2.0 technologies to share information and communicate with others in different ways and libraries are becoming a part of that. The trick is to find which ones are the best for your library and the audience you are trying to reach.

THE END

Wikis

Remember these? by nathanborror

Well, we're nearly finished. After being sucked in by Youtube last time watching frivolous videos (all in the name of research!), I felt it was time I did some proper work. To ease my guilt I donned the hair shirt and decided to attack the stockcheck single-handed. Not in quite the same league as Ellen MacArthur sailing solo around the world but still a big undertaking. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised when I managed to complete it in three days although I only did the open shelf books and not the journals or the rare book collection. So after checking through over 5,000 books I found two missing, despite the prescence of security gates designed to emit death rays to anyone trying to steal our stock (o.k. so it only has a loud alarm and flashing lights - the budget wouldn't stretch to death rays).

Penance paid, I took a look at some wikis. As time is slipping away before we must complete Cam23 I am going to take the easy option and blog about Wikipedia. A free online encyclopaedia is a wonderful tool and unlike a paper version can be updated instantly. Entries are easy to find and there is probably one for almost anything. There are links to other entries creating a vast network. For example on the entry for Queen Elizabeth II there are links in the text to family members, countries in the Commonwealth, and historical events from her lifetime. The point of a wiki is that it can be edited by anyone which is the major drawback to Wikipedia. Misinformation can be posted either in error or deliberately and as Wikipedia is so vast it is difficult to check the veracity of all the information on it. Unless you know the information to be true, you should check other sources before taking it as fact.

I think that wikis resemble Google docs with the principle of creating something that can be edited by other people. The difference is in scale as wikis can be changed by almost anyone and Google docs only by selected people. The Library runs a small field course library and we need to change the way the list of books is arranged. I would like to produce an updated list and get input from other people on its construction but I think this would be a job better suited to Google docs as I would restrict it to a handful of people.

And so, the end is nigh ...

Podcasting and Youtube

Angelina Jolie by Gage Skidmore

An even easier task this time, requiring only that you sit at your desk, plug headphones into the computer (we should set a silent example to the students - even when they're not here to see it) and watch/listen. This was easier said than done as I had a picture but no sound. I was given a new computer recently and am still trying to find my way around it. After consulting our computer personnel I was given a cable to plug in which gave me sound at last.

The Plain English video about podcasting was easy to understand and informative. I clicked on the link to British Library podcasts but it came up with University of Aberdeen, the next one on the list, instead. I viewed a vodcast about searching the Library catalogues. It was a step-by-step guide to finding a book and it showed all of the clicks and searches used as the narrative progressed. There were also vodcasts on finding books and journals and using electronic databases. I thought these were a really good idea for students who are away from the Library, rather like having a member of library staff available whenever and wherever. The Goldsmith library tour was also interesting and I have been to tourist attractions that use the same principle of an audio tour with numbered points to match the commentary. These work well in larger libraries like the University Library but we are fairly small and besides, I would miss doing my air hostess impression every year when giving our library tours (the computers are located here, here and here).

Youtube is an amateur actor's/director's paradise. You can upload a video which will potentially be seen by millions of people. Susan Boyle found national fame on Britain's Got Talent but when the video of her audition was uploaded to Youtube and mentioned on Twitter by Demi Moore that fame became global and the video has now had over 95,000,000 views. My favourites among the library videos were The romance of the living book because it was a fun demonstration of classification, Librarians do Gaga as it tries to dispel the image of stuffy librarians and Ninja Librarian because it should be shown to all students at the beginning of term as a deterrent to noisy mobile phone users. I would be nervous about appearing in a video myself but I could be portrayed by an actress resembling me. Only someone less like Angelina Jolie and more like Olive from On the Buses should apply.

Google docs

Sharing by ryancr

A return to something easier. As I already had a Google account I could just go straight in and create something new. I chose to do a document as it would be quick to produce but then couldn't decide what it should be about. I finally thought of a list of books missing from the Library with the information displayed in a table. Once I had produced the document I went to 'File' but the save option was blanked out. There is an icon in the top right-hand corner, next to the 'Share' button which says 'Saved' and this seems to have worked. I shared the document with two other people on a view only basis but after responses from both of them about it I decided to change the sharing settings to "can edit".

I have also received documents from two people. I couldn't open the first one as I kept getting a message saying I had entered the wrong password despite trying my Google, Raven and Hermes passwords. This may have been because I didn't have anything in Google docs myself but when I had produced something I was able to open the one I had been sent and add a note to it. Now I can't open the second document either and can't remember what I did to open the first one. Senility must be creeping in.

Google docs is a great way of sharing documents when multiple input is required in their production. It can be sent to as many other people as you like and you can restrict those who you don't want interfering with it to a view only basis whilst still getting the opinions of those who matter. This tool would be useful in our library when writing the minutes of the library committee meeting. A draft version can be produced and sent out to the committee members for their thoughts and additional items which have been forgotten or need correction.

Marketing

market day by sunstarrr

This is a tricky one. For the first time I felt I needed some inspiration from fellow Cam23 bloggers before I started. Having looked at some of the other blogs I found not only ideas but also that I am not so far behind with my blogging as others.

I think that social media offers lots of new ways to reach library users but it can be difficult to decide on the best ones to use. Facebook and Twitter are two of the most popular forms of social communication at the moment but it wasn't so long ago that Friends Reunited was the one people talked about. There will always be something new which is both the good and bad side of progress. How many people change mobile phones regularly because the technology that was new and exciting a year ago is now out-of-date and obsolete.

Okay, now I've got that off my chest, I would just like to state for the record that I am not opposed to social media, just it's overuse for trivialities. Anything that gets the library out there must be a good thing. The Librarian recently posted a survey to our undergraduates on the relevant Camtools sites asking them what they thought of the library service and some of them replied that they couldn't possibly comment as they'd never heard of us. Part of the problem may have been that the survey referred to us by our library name and not by the Department name but it was still disappointing. The Librarian has decided to include a question next year asking people how we can best communicate with them. This may lead in the future to the creation of a library Facebook page.

As for the adoption of a tool or strategy to promote the Library, I would choose Twitter, which we already have. It's very popular and needs only short notices so it's very quick and easy to maintain.

Zotero

love hearts by duncan

Having read Miss Crail's post entitled "I think I'm in love", I ran towards Zotero with open arms expecting a similar feeling. Unfortunately, we got off to a rockier start than the England football team in the World Cup. Firstly, I had to download Mozilla Firefox in order to be able to download Zotero. I think I must be one of the few troglodytes who only uses Internet Explorer for their web browsing. I have duplicated all of my bookmarks and my homepage to Firefox but now every time I open it I get an annoying message saying "Firefox is not currently set as your default browser. Would you like to make it your default browser?" No, I wouldn't, thank you very much! Once I had downloaded Zotero I wanted to add some items but I made the classic mistake of not reading the manual first. Overexcitement + overconfidence = failure.

I could find records for books in Copac and then add them as items via clicking on the handy little instruction entitled "Export this record as: Endnote, Zotero". Simples! But when I tried looking for papers on Web of Science, I hit a wall. I just couldn't figure out how to get the bibliographic details of the chosen paper into Zotero. It was then I decided the time had come to bite the bullet and look at the Quick Start Guide. I quickly found that you need to look for the icon at the end of the web address on the tool bar, one click and the item is sent to Zotero. However, not all of the papers on Web of Science seem to show this icon. Is this right or am I just being thick?

Once I had got into my stride, I tried adding articles from electronic journals and finding books on Newton, all of which worked perfectly. I also added a link to a website to one of the items and attached a PDF copy of an article to another item. The books I downloaded from Copac came with a large choice of tags which you could choose to keep or delete or add some of your own. Searching within Zotero is easy, a simple search for one keyword or phrase and a more advanced search to narrow things down.

All in all I think Zotero is an excellent way of managing a reference list. I had heard of Endnote and Mendeley but I hadn't tried them out. I will do now to see how they compare with Zotero. So it isn't love but maybe the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Linkedin

LinkedIn smurfs by 99zeros

I have had a week's break from blogging for two reasons: the first being that the Librarian and I embarked on a major stock check of the rare book collection, trying to discover how much of it is catalogued online. We made the wild and totally unfounded assumption that it was all on there somewhere. The first hour quickly disabused us of that hope. We finished the basic checking of over 6000 books in a week but the queries and adding of missing records will keep me busy for much longer. The second reason is that after Facebook I needed a lie down in a darkened room with a damp cloth on my forehead before I felt able to tackle the next Thing. Last Wednesday, faced with a choice of more blogging or poking about among old and dusty tomes, I'm afraid that age and dust proved to be the greater temptation.

OK, finished with digression. Must concentrate. I looked at all of the suggested profiles on Linkedin. Some had more on than others, like Facebook you can reveal as little or as much about yourself as you like. The big difference is that Facebook is more of a personal networking site whereas Linkedin is solely professional. You can put your CV up there and find other people in the same areas of business. All users wanting to see the whole of your profile have to ask first so you can reject any undesirable suitors. Twitter feeds can also be added to a profile but this would depend on the kind of tweets you receive. Should a profile be completely professional or does it matter if some of the personal sneaks in?

I can see how this would be a useful tool in the business world (and popular with Smurfs as well!) but less so in the library community.

Facebook

Facebook by laikolosse

I had just managed to catch up on all my Cam23 Things before I went away for a week and now I'm back to find four new things vying for my attention. Thing 16 is Facebook which is not the best thing to ease my way back into blogging with. I didn't have a Facebook account until I set one up with the most basic of information and following Cam23's instruction that you didn't have to be truthful, I changed my date of birth. Thinking about this afterwards though, I realised my mistake as not only had I hidden it on my profile but I had actually made myself older. When lying about their age, people only make themselves older when they are under 18 and wanting to buy alcohol or nearly 60 and wanting to pay concessionary prices.

But, back to the original subject. I looked at some of the library Facebook pages. My favouriteswere Jerwood Library, Trinity Hall and the English Faculty Library. They had updates on changes in opening hours, reminders to return books and other news items. They also had photos of events and images of books held in the library. I can see the value of Facebook for a library as a further way to publicise your activities, in the same way that Twitter can. However, this would also be another form of communication to keep updated. Whenever the Balfour Library has news to impart, the Librarian already has to do some or all of the following: put it on our website, post it onto our blog, send out a Department-wide email, post it on several Camtools sites, write a piece for the Departmental newsletter and tweet about it on Twitter. The libraries' Facebook pages mentioned above both had over a hundred followers each, mostly students and academics, I presume, so maybe this would be a more popular way of staying in touch than some of the other ways.

From a personal perspective, I don't like Facebook as I feel it's too intrusive and it can be easy to get caught out. A recent example was a group of pilots from a very well-known airline experiencing industrial unrest who posted rants on Facebook criticising their passengers. They may now be facing disciplinary action. Social media is not like having a conversation or writing a letter, it is there for everyone to see.

LibraryThing

Yes, would you like to buy a book?

by Oolong

I like LibraryThing. I think it's a very easy (and cheap) way of cataloguing a personal collection of books without having to add too much information yourself. You just type in the author, title or ISBN and it does all the searching for you. A list appears of all the books that could match your search term, you click on the one you want and hey presto!, all of the book details are added to your individual catalogue. This is especially useful for someone with the complete collection of a particular author's works. They only have to do one search and can cherry-pick all of the titles they need. I experimented with Agatha Christie and came up with over 8,000 results from Amazon. This includes all of the different reprints, formats, changes of title and omnibuses. I like the links with Amazon which provide reviews of the book and also suggestions for similar books and authors which readers may not have heard of. If you find someone else with similar reading tastes, you can check out their catalogue and chat with them. You can swap recommendations which in turn leads to new books and other readers ad infinitum.

As a tool for a library, I think it would be more useful in advertising the books we have bought recently. We have nearly 20,000 books and even with the ease with which a catalogue can be built, it would take a long time to produce a retrospective record, especially when you have to add your own tags. It would perhaps suit a smaller library better, one that doesn't want to spend a lot on a system or have to catalogue to a prescribed standard.

Reflection

"Reflections of a Grasshopper on my Windshield"

by MrClean1982

The story so far...

I started Cam23 as a complete beginner. I had barely heard of many of the Things let alone used them or thought about their relevance to libraries. I had also never written a blog before so this has been a very steep (almost vertical) learning curve for me.

Fortunately, the step-by-step instructions we are given for each Thing are easy to follow. The problem I have is in writing my blog. As there are over 100 people taking part in Cam23, all blogging on the same things, it's difficult to find anything new to say. For that reason, it's perhaps an advantage that I haven't had the time to look at many other blogs. I am a follower of two and also dip into several others when I need inspiration. When Cam23 was launched, it said you only needed to spend a short amount of time each week on the Things but I am finding it taking up far more than that. Thankfully, I have a very supportive Librarian who has been actively encouraging me.

I like the fact that Cam23 allows you to go at your own pace. I am a short way behind at the moment but because all of the Things are blog posts I know they won't disappear suddenly. Most of the Things are exploration-based so you can look at subjects which interest you as opposed to being told what to search for. I couldn't work out how to embed a Slideshare presentation into my blog using the instructions provided but I got round that by typing in the web addresses instead.

I hope to get quicker with my blog posts for the rest of the course and to find more time to read some of the other blogs. The Things I would recommend are Doodle because it's an easy way to try and organise a meeting and Flickr for it's vast choice of images on almost any theme.

Delicious

Granny Smith apple. D'oh! Golden Delicious. Says right there.

by fortinbras

I didn't know what Delicious was until I looked at it for Cam23 today. I kept seeing it mentioned as a bookmark option every time I did a Copac search. Now I understand that a catalogue record can be bookmarked onto a Delicious account for future reference without having to go into Copac and perform the search again.

I checked out Emma Coonan's bookmarks and found a large variety, mostly professional but some personal. The knitting patterns and recipes are a good example of one of the uses of Delicious as an electronic scrapbook of "cut out and keep" things to try at a later date, far better than a box filled with scraps of pages torn from magazines. If you like what you've made you can share the pattern/recipe with others and if you don't you can just delete it. Miss Crail found the same thing useful for all those links to websites you can explore when you have more time. As she points out, an electronic desktop has infinitely more room than a wooden one.

I also looked at the Judge Business School's bookmarks. I can see how this would be useful for students as it filters out some of the vast array of information on the Web. Having a one-stop shop with links to the most relevant and recommended websites in that subject area will help broaden their research and introduce them to things they wouldn't otherwise have discovered without trawling through Google et al. If you can get suggestions from academics and other teaching staff, so much the better.

The tagging element is excellent as you can see the most used tags but also do a search to find other relevant ones. It's also helpful to know how many people have saved a website, although popularity isn't always the best indicator of accuracy.

Slideshare

I hadn't heard of Slideshare before I checked it out as one of the 23 Things. I found some interesting presentations on there.

When I clicked on the link to Heriot-Watt University Library's presentations I looked at one on finding resources in the library, database searching of references and academic writing. It gave a simple step-by-step guide aimed (I believe) at undergraduates using a library for the first time. I think a similar online induction guide would be very useful in our library for when a user wants to know about the library but is either elsewhere, out-of-library hours or too afraid to ask (we aren't that scary - I hope). I couldn't find the code I needed to embed the link so I have copied the web address below:

http://www.slideshare.net/hwul/books-journals-articles-what-find


I found a presentation from the Fifth CILIP CoFHE UC&R Joint Conference at Exeter University held in June that my colleague had attended. It's entitled "Library - what library? - or Ensuring a bright future for academic libraries". This had some interesting insights about the future of libraries, especially in the current economic climate of cuts, cuts and more cuts. Again, no code but the link is below:

http://www.slideshare.net/UCRGroup/library-what-library-ucrcofhe#


I think Slideshare is an excellent way of putting Powerpoint presentations out there as an individual but surely if they are produced by, for or on behalf of an institution their own website would be the first place any searcher would look. I agree with Miss Crail about the legality of some of the items put on there. When I typed "libraries" into the search box one of the presentations was for the 1984 BBC film of "The body in the library" by Agatha Christie, starring Joan Hickson. It claimed to be a free download of the movie but when I clicked on the link the "Pop-up blocked" message appeared. I'm sure this contravenes copyright so I don't see the point of putting this on Slideshare in the first place.

And finally, just for fun, a presentation entitled "Do not believe everything you see". Again link below:
http://www.slideshare.net/valimar/do-not-believe-everything-you-see-v-m

Flickr

Corn Exchange Street: Cambridge UK

Taken by Prisoner 5413

I LOVE FLICKR.

I could spend hours on it looking at all the beautiful pictures but then I would really never get any work done. I took a look at Sir Cam's photostream and saw quite a few familiar places. I especially enjoyed the pictures from the 800th anniversary light show beamed onto King's College and the Senate House.

Searching is easy and as with everything on the Web, the finding of what you want is only as successful as the quality of the tagging of the posters of the data. (Apologies to any grammarians reading this for the number of "ofs" in the last sentence).

I was able to find an excellent picture of Winston Churchill to illustrate a previous blog post on Twitter which I have now added. When I entered his name in the search box the most relevant results went from pictures of the great man himself through to statues of him in various locations and even people posing as lookalikes. These findings were then narrowed down further by checking for images with Creative Commons-licensed content. As all images on Flickr have an icon you can click on with information about copyright, it is easy to ascertain what you can do with the picture.

The picture I have chosen to illustrate this post is of the Department of Zoology with a small section of the Balfour Library's windows visible. Not a very attractive view but this demonstrates that you can find pictures of almost anything if you look.

Tagging

Well, I took a breath (figuratively) as suggested but all I was able to inhale was the smell of Mr Sheen as our cleaner had been polishing the furniture this morning. So once I had expelled the fumes from my lungs, I began to reread my previous posts.

I am a couple of weeks behind with my Things at the moment but there is method in my madness. I have been saving them all up for this week when I am at a bit of a loose end because of the Voyager upgrade. Very little Circulation, no Acquisitions and especially NO CATALOGING. Ah yes, a whole week without having to go through any old and very dusty, seemingly straightforward, volumes only to find that the benefactor who gave it to us (in an attempt to save themselves a few bob) had had bound several small books into one large tome. This is not so bad if all the parts have some connection to each other but when they are completely unrelated I have to create a note field the length of an essay to ensure all the relevant information can be retrieved. A hundred years ago people obviously never thought that one day some poor library assistant would have to computer catalogue their donation and still meet the bibliographic standard. Hmm ... maybe this upgrade is not such a bad thing after all.

So, back to tagging. I reread all of my previous posts and added some more subject-based tags as opposed to just Thing 1, Thing 2 etc. which was all that identified them previously. I can see how tags can lead people to your blog who otherwise would not have found it in the vast number of blogs that are out there. However, one of my labels in my blog about Twitter is "Winston Churchill" so anyone out there searching for information about the former prime minister and wartime leader might be disappointed by my distortion of one of his most famous quotes.

Categorization is necessary in library cataloguing as it means we all work to the same subject classification, although there are some libraries in the University which use alternatives to the Library of Congress. LC is very good but it has its limitations. I found this out several years ago when I back-catalogued all of the theses the Zoology Library has copies of. Because they are so specialized it was sometimes difficult to find appropriate subject headings so I had to settle for very generalized ones.

Twitter

"Winston Churchill 30 December 1941" By Yousef Karsh

To misquote Winston Churchill "Never in the field of human knowledge has so much been written by so many about so little." An accurate description of Twitter I feel. You can find everything on here from the useful (Haddon Library website and photocopying down) to the irrelevant (Phillip Schofield arrived home late on Monday night) to the downright bizarre (Jonathan Ross tweets that he must sing to one of his dogs). As Miss Crail blogs, do we need to know that someone is about to make a cup of tea?

Some people have thousands of followers and in turn follow thousands of others so with tweets of their own + reading other tweets + replies they must spend all day on Twitter. I have trouble keeping up with the blogs I'm following, let alone anything else.

I found it easy to set up an account, fortunately nobody shares my obscure name. The good thing about Twitter is it forces you to be concise, with a 140 character maximum you can't afford to ramble on and on.

I can see how this would be a useful way to keep in touch with library users but like all social forms of communication, be it Twitter, Facebook or blogging it only works if the audience wants to see it.

Doodle & Google calendar

Well, this weeks things have been a success. I completed them both in under half an hour.

Doodle was easy to set up, the only thing I had forgotten was to enter my email address in order to get updates when someone filled my poll in but even that was easy to go back and change. The first poll I was sent had three options and an explanation for each: "red" for do not have time, "yellow" for could make time if necessay and "green" for have time. When I created my own doodle I could only find the two options of "red" and "green" so I'm not sure how to create the extra option. It's good to have a third option as yes or no can be restrictive.

Five of the Cam23 participants set up Doodle polls, although we based our meeting on the dates and times from the first one to send theirs out. A meeting was suggested at 2am on Saturday but unfortunately we were all busy so we met last Friday, although our meeting was less about Cam23 and more about gossip and eating biscuits. We really must take this more seriously.

I think Doodle would be useful for my library as every term we have to set up a rota from a pool of graduate students to do Saturday invigilation. We usually send them an email with the dates and they tell us which ones they can or can't do and the rota is established. Although this tends to be changed halfway through when they remember prior engagements they'd forgotten the first time round necessitating much swapping round of dates.

I loved Google calendar. It was simple to set up and add things to. When you enter a start time, the end times to choose from also state the duration (handy for seeing how long that meeting will really last). I forgot to specify "all day" when entering my week's leave, thus my holiday began at 8:30am on Monday and finished at 4:30pm on Friday (a very short holiday). The librarian and I thought about creating a calendar we could share between us. We presently have a paper one with a different meerkat for each month (including one that looks as though it's posing for Playboy) which we add to constantly and we can always see. Google calendar relies on both of us logging on to a) remember to add new events and b) remember to check it before booking a new event.

Other people's blogs

I have read many other blogs and commented on several. This was a scary process as everyone seems more web-savvy than me and are happily blogging away. It takes me half an hour and several drafts to get a short blog on each subject so I applaud those who are producing long and witty posts.



I particularly liked the picture on BirdBrain's blog and commented on their iGoogle page. My Cam23 Diary had a very good tip for people like me who spend ages thinking what to write. They said to start blogging when you have a short amount of time to do it in so that you are not looking at a blank page hence the fact I am writing this ten minutes before the library closes. Miss Crail's ruminations has an interesting blog about blogging and getting the information you want to convey to your intended audience.



Must close as my ten minutes are up.

RSS feeds

I have added the Cam23 RSS feed to my iGoogle page following the simple instructions. I also added feeds from my own library's blog and the one belonging to the Central Science Library. They were all easy to do as they had options for subscribing with Google. However, when I tried to subscribe to feeds like BBC News and Weather I found they would only subscribe via my Internet Explorer web browser. It took me a good half hour (and much frustration) to realise that you must find the feeds from the "Add stuff" list on the iGoogle page. So I now have the BBC News updating frequently and a weather feed showing predictions of the next six hours.

I think RSS feeds are a good way of getting updates without having to remember to visit a website regularly.

iGoogle

Here is my iGoogle page. I found it easy to set up, it actually took me longer to decide on my password as I was trying to think of something complicated but memorable.

I chose the peacock theme as I wanted something zoological but the downside is that the "Add stuff" link is practically invisible now. There are so many themes to choose from but when I searched for meerkats I didn't like any of the pictures. They don't do them justice.

I have added a brain tuning gadget consisting of 20 simple sums to be answered as quickly as possible for when this exercise isn't brain training enough.

I also added a joke of the day gadget, some have been better than others but I thought the one on the first day was particularly relevant so with apologies to any blondes reading this here it is:

A blonde goes into a shop and asks the salesman for some curtains for her computer screen.

The salesman replies that computers don't need curtains.

The blonde says "Hellooo, I have got windows.

Cam23

I haven't tried anything remotely like this before so I am a complete beginner. My knowledge of Web 2.0 and social media begins and ends with names such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. I have heard of them but never used them before. I am hoping to learn about these things myself and their relevance to libraries so that I can say at the end that I have now joined the 21st century.