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