Thing 5 (at last): Screendump no more

After a long period of unsuccessful wrangling, hand-wringing and shaking of the office computer, I have finally realised that it really wasn't it, it was me, and now Lightshot is installed...and what a huge amount of time it shall save with these very posts! Once I had finally succeeded in attaching the pleasant purple feather to Firefox I wanted to play with my new toy straight away. I wasn't quite sure at first why my screen had become greyed over, but then I realised that it was my turn and within about 5 seconds I had my first painfree screenshot. Lovely. I genuinely found no issues with it and it did exactly what I wanted it to do. Cam23Things nirvana? Maybe. Although the other new toy that I chose to take the image of may yet, in time, prove to be infinitely more useful...

I'm intrigued to learn more about Google+ and what it can do for me

P.S. If you're also on Google+ you can find me here, all suggestions of how to maximise its potential welcome!

Post-holiday pile-up: Doodle and Google Calendar

I feel that it is somewhat ironic that all sense of organisation and good timekeeping has fallen down around my ears just as the section "Organising Yourself" comes along.

Strandkörbe (Beach baskets) on Juist
Photo: wetterolf on flickr

Admittedly I have a pretty good excuse in having spent the last two weeks jollying across Europe (and a smidge of Asia), as four plane journeys through 8 different airports, along with an assortment of metros, trams, trains and horse-taxis (no, really) saw me have a cracking week in the historic yet contemporary city of Istanbul, followed by a week of winding-down on the West Frisian island of Juist.

However, dreams of sumptuous Ottoman luxury and white North Sea coasts must be put to one side as I peek nervously at my Hermes inbox and try to work out where the hell I'm meant to be in the next couple of weeks. Handily, Things 7 & 8 are here to help me out.

Though I have never initiated a Doodle poll myself, I have participated in many as they seem to be the Cambridge librarian's (certainly the grad trainee's) tool of choice for getting lots of busy people in the same place at the same time. It's pretty basic but it does the job: it allows you to offer plenty of dates, to see what people before you have been thinking (sheep logic still prevails, we cannot deny it) and recently it has been developed to allow you to express a preference - who knew that orange was the colour of indecision? However, it is limited in that if there's a dead heat, you're still going to end up having a long-winded email thread. Oh, if only there was an online coin you could flip...wait, how about here? Or the slightly more direct:

The virtual universe has decided for me...
From www.random.org

So once I know where and when I'm going, it's all about how I'm going to remember. My memory swings between pretty good (especially with random factoids) and pretty awful (with most things useful), so clearly something to check against would be useful. Like Gareth, I was a slave to my pocket diary during my degree, particularly during my Year Abroad when I was teaching English in a lycée without around 200 students under my belt. Responsible, non?

My life = a candy-striped bundle of things waiting
to be forgotten

But out in the big, wide, deadline-less world (well, mostly) my diary has been somewhat ignored this year. Through luck rather than judgment (and thanks in no small part to the insane organisational skills of Erin) I have not missed anything important this year (if I have, I can't remember it!), but of course with so many and varied responsibilities at work, plus the need to liaise with colleagues, relying on my memory is unlikely to cut it. Luckily, our library is quite a heavy user of Google Calendar, and my reliance upon it has definitely increased over the year. While I'm not convinced that my colleague's permanent and repeated notice to WATER PLANTS has had any effect on my horticultural awareness, it is easy to plan holidays, mark in trainee trips and even include reminders to chase periodicals using a platform available to the whole team. I'm even trying to extend my use of it outside of purely work - I can view the work calendar on my personal calendar so I'm reminded of trips away and, though this may sound a bit odd, my boyfriend and I have shared our calendars with each other, as he starts as a junior doctor in Salisbury on Thursday. It just seems like a less messy way to know when he's on nights than a) asking all the time or b) ringing up at the wrong time...

Enough of that. The downsides to Google Calendar? Well, the new Google update isn't pretty, that's for sure. There is also a temptation solely to mark things as "All day" events, because ones with specific times can get lost on small screens and collapse down to +3 more if it's a busy day. I'm also unconvinced by the reminder system - my Gmail inbox is increasingly clogged with reminders, but Google Calendar has to be permanently open for the pop-up box to be useful...what I'd really like it to do is just read my mind and fill in the gaps, but I feel the technology isn't quite there yet.

Anyway. As a last little bit of library geek-out before I go, and because it has become customary for the trainees to take pictures of libraries whilst on holiday, here's the fantastic ceiling display at the library in Istanbul Modern art museum:

Photo: Pascal Gillet at Traffic Magazine

Thing 6: (Screen)Casting a spell over my PC

Some of the more eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that Thing 5 seems to have fallen by the wayside - in fact, I was very keen to give Lightshot a go, especially after Ange's excellent blogpost, but admin allowances on my work PC have scuppered attempts and outside work I've been manically busy, so it will have to wait until post-holiday, I think.

Anyway, screencasting is the first Thing which has been a completely new venture for me, and I'm very excited about it. All the other Things are useful for me personally and have indirect usefulness for my job, but this Thing can directly benefit our library users and potentially solve a problem which I've been puzzling over for some time.

Back in March, I tried to organise drop-in sessions on the theme of electronic resources for our users. Here in Classics we've really jumped on the electronic bandwagon as far as possible, and our lucky students have got loads to choose from here. The problem is that they're either not sure where to find them, or they don't feel confident using them. I hoped to solve this with my friendly drop-ins, but despite posters, emails from student reps and seeming enthusiasm, I spent a few Monday lunchtimes alone before giving up the ghost...

...until now! Our relationship with our students is excellent, but no matter how friendly you are, some people just won't admit to needing help. And that's where screencasting comes in - they can anonymously click, watch a video and hopefully gain the confidence to go ahead and learn more themselves.

So here's my first attempt: my internet isn't super-speedy so it's a bit longer than I'd like, and my mouse-use is apparently a bit butterfly-like, but I hope it's a decent introduction to using one of our larger databases, Année Philologique:

Muppet that I am, I didn't choose to post it to Youtube, but it is also available (with better clarity) on Screencast-o-Matic's own site here. I'm also hoping to embed it into the Classics faculty website at some point, but obviously I need Lyn's approval first!

I feel that this will not be my last screencast, as they're easy, effective and hopefully attractive to bashful grads and anyone else who wants some anonymous aid.

This will be my last blog post for a short while, however, as I'm off to Istanbul - see you in two weeks!

N.B. A very important point that many other bloggers have raised: there's no soundtrack as I haven't got a microphone on the issue desk computer (and whispering instructions would be a bit weird anyway). However, Gareth's clever creative way round it impressed me greatly...

Thing 4: Follow, follow, follow, follow the Twittering horde...

Yup, Dorothy, that was the look on my face at my
first Twitter attempt too!
Image from winnipegcyclechick.com

This week I am Dorothy in the Land of Twitter, with the Cam23 2.0 team as my trusty companions (I'm not saying who would be the Cowardly Lion!) and the huge, overwhelming might of the Twittersphere as the scary Wizard.

I have had my reservations about Twitter for some time, as I could not (and really still cannot) see how you can say anything of real insight in 140 characters.

But through this programme, I have realised that that's not really the point. It seems that most people in librarianship use Twitter for professional purposes, which isn't something I'd considered as Twitter = Stephen Fry and Graeme Swann in my head. But professional it is, as all sorts of work queries and LISNPN events and so on... are advertised via retweets, Twitterfeeds (more on that later) and lots and lots of interested librarians keeping within the character limit.

Consequently, after an aborted attempt at tweeting back in the winter, I'm going to try a bit harder this time and avoid trying to be a comedian in such a short space. In fact, I felt the benefit of Twitter before even returning to it, as my most recent non-Cam23 blog post (see here) was advertised on Twitter by Annie and Katie, leaving me quite shocked to find last night that it had received 100 pageviews in less than half a day.

This Twitter thing is seriously effective, it seems! Well, it is certainly effective at directing people towards links and other documents of interest quickly. I am less convinced by its use as a way of following events and conferences at a distance in real-time, as the posts are so short the meaning is sometimes lost and I'd probably rather read a comprehensive, well-written blog post after the event.

However, I feel my negative attitudes towards Twitter may be on the turn - I even had a go at this week's extra thing by setting up a Twitterfeed from this blog and using bit.ly (I think my previous post's success may have gone to my head, but we'll see!) I'll make a concerted effort to keep the tweeting up as it could be useful for library-related queries in the future.