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.