Thing 23: The end of the beginning

The summer has gone away as quickly as it arrived, my time in Cambridge is coming to an end, and what better way to round it off than with a bit of reflection about our rerunning of the Cambridge 23 Things programme.

I have greatly enjoyed blogging on a regular basis; it has helped keep me writing and reflecting in my post-graduation period and I hope I will manage to keep it up during the years to come, even if the focus of the posts might shift a bit. 

My blog, in Wordle format! Created using http://www.wordle.net/

There is no doubt that a lot of the Things which I have learnt about in the programme will come in handy in the years to come, though admittedly, some will see greater use than others - I'm going to start my reflection with the less successful Things (but only so I can end on the good ones!)

Bottom of the class

• LibraryThing was an unmitigated disappointment for me. The design was poor, the interface complicated, and the results inaccurate at best. A great idea wasted, in my humble opinion.
• Google+. I know this wasn't a "Thing", but it popped up during the programme and again, promised so much but delivered...not a lot. It claimed to be "the" successor to Facebook and 101 other media tools but frankly (FB's new update and all), it really has to step up to compete with existing applications, not to mention taking a good hard look at its privacy policy...

by  rich115

My Cam23Things end of term report

Must try harder
(N.B. It's really me that should try harder, rather than the applications...)

• RSS feeds are a fantastic idea and I am using them in a small way via my Netvibes homepage. However, I am yet to find a reader/streaming program that really works for me, but I'm sure there is one out there.
• Evernote is a great resource, but I've yet to make it a real part of my online routine. Initially I used it for links, but Delicious overtook it. I have saved some images to it but I'd rather just keep them all in the "My Pictures" folder on my PC. I really like the idea and the design of Evernote but is it really useful to me? The jury's out.
• I need to get into the habit of using Creative Commons licensing tags because a) it's far more professional, b) provides more information for people who might see my reuse of stuff and c) it's an excellent idea that needs promoting! The problem is getting the formatting to match up to the picture, but once I get to grips with Ange's very useful workaround, I will develop better CC-tagging habits (see above for my first attempt!)

Gold stars all round

• Lightshot - lauded by all, so I won't bore you with any more hyperbole about the incredibly easy-to-use, superb, immensely useful and all-round Best App in the World Ever. 
• Prezi's popularity is attested to by its prominent position in the Wordle cloud above, which was unexpected...but then I really did enjoy all the neat tricks and formats it provides (to be used in moderation, of course)
• The Thing I use with the most regularity is probably Delicious - so much clearer than browser favourites and accessible from everywhere, it's simple but superb.
• I'm ready to hang my head in shame as I admit that Twitter is the second most used Thing that I have used in this programme. I only use it during work hours but as a medium for sharing professional information and engaging with others in the profession, it's unparallelled. I have also benefited from it in a personal capacity in terms of hearing about culturally exciting things (the Short Story Tweetathon, for one) and understanding certain issues better (mental illness, for example).
• Finally, all the amazing Cam23 bloggers, who have brought their own take on the Things offered and presented them in their individual and inimitable styles - it has been a privilege to read so many interesting things by interesting people that I had never heard of before.

On that note I'm going to finish with an homage to on of the other participants, my fabulously supportive boss Lyn, who has inspired me with her fantastic final post from last year's programme:

Blogging 'bout Things
Like a Doodle or two
Things
Like iGoogle for you
Things
(Things?) Like a Wordle cloud
Turn that podcast right up loud

Things that Flickr makes so pretty
Things that make a blog so witty
Screencasting for all the world to see
Though wikis may not be the Thing for me

Read about Things
On an RSS feed
Things
On Delicious to read
Things
Filed in Zotero
(Oh Oh) Reflecting on the Things you know

Things
Like the Lightshot feather
Things
That Link(ed) us In together
Twitter is the Thing we're talking through
And Facebook is one Thing we like to do.
(You can find Bobby Darin's somewhat more lyrical original "Things" here)

Thanks for the good times.

Becky :)

A glut of extra things (but lots of pretty pictures)

It's a bit of a last-minute rush, but I simply couldn't bear to leave all the pretty Extra Things undone before Cam23 is over for another year.

Starting with the prettiest of all the Extra Things, the data visualisation section has cheered up many of our blogs, as well as celebrating blogiversaries and even, crucially, promoting libraries!

I have used Wordle in the past and will be using it as part of my final post (*sob*) so I decided to give Tagxedo a go for this extra thing. I like Wordle very much but Tagxedo allowed me to produce this:

Although Tagxedo is a little less straightforward to use, it offers a much more simple way to shape your word clouds and create something perhaps more coherent with it. I chose a lightning bolt because the Cam23 programme has been full of little flashes of inspiration, as well as the occasional bolt from the blue! 

I was looking forward to Gliffy after seeing all the lovely floorplans that have popped up liberally across the Cam23 blogosphere. However, whilst I could try to recreate my lovely new terraced house in York, I've only spent about 15 minutes in it to date and therefore can't really remember what it's like. Instead I've decided to try something a little more serious with a Venn diagram about the overlap between librarianship and academia:

Created using www.gliffy.com

As a disclaimer, it is, necessarily a bit of a generalization on both sides. It's actually quite a difficult topic to expand upon though, because there are so many almost-correlations, and a lot of myths on both sides. I used this helpful post by Betsy and a careers case-study to help, not to mention sending my Classics colleagues into a right old debate in the office - so I hope that you agree with some of my ideas, and if you disagree with other, please let me know why and we can carry the debate on here!

Back to data visualisation for the moment - what better way to promote your library/webpage/blog/links than with a personalised QR code? The codes in themselves are a very clever marketing ploy (as long as your target audience is smartphone-savvy!) but are eeeeven cooler if they reflect the product (for want of a better  word) as well. Something along these lines, perhaps...

Created at http://vanity-qrcode.com/

Shameless, shameless (and in this context, slightly pointless) self-promotion.

What's left for this whistlestop tour? I blogged about list-making software and, naturally, tried out all the ones that I blogged about. In fact, some of my opinions are pretty thinly veiled in the Cam23 thing post here. My favourite was TeuxDeux, and I'm pleased to report that it has been successful...at the other end of the office, where Lyn raves about it! But me, I'm devoted to my scrappy bits of paper and notes stuck to the computer monitor - call me a luddite, but there's something very satisfying about tearing up a completed task, altering an ongoing one, or doodling all around the job you're putting off (as opposed to on Teux Deux, where your outstanding tasks chase you from day to day!)

Another very pretty Thing (or couple of Things) is the Tumblr/Posterous brand of short blogging. I haven't used either of these programs but I can definitely see the usefulness of them. I think the kinds of images and quotes I like to share are a little too random and unfocused to warrant a whole Tumblr page, for instance, and so I tend to share them as individual weird ideas on Facebook or Twitter (this was today's offering, which really made me smile!) I find that Facebook also allows me to discuss such things with friends more easily, because of the extended contacts that I have built up over 5 years (!) of using it and because it is an accepted (maybe expected?) way in which my friends and I utilise the Facebook News Feed. However, I think this site is a brilliant use of the software (even if the premise itself confuses me a little) so if I had a coherent and clearly defined point to make, I would definitely look to these kinds of tools.

And finally, I cannot forget Dropbox from weeks and weeks ago - I have an account because a friend sent me some large files using it some time ago. I must admit that it worked very well on that occasion...and that I haven't used it since. Photos I send via email, documents I share using Google Docs, resources I have posted up on Wikis...these all seem like perfectly viable ways of working, so for the moment, Dropbox is a bit redundant. Never say never though.

Thing 21: The End(note) is near at the close of this (Zot)ero...er, era...

Er...not sure that one's going to hold up, my friend...
Image by Papertrix

Cam23 2.0 is coming to an end and so is my traineeship...so it seems incredibly apt to focus on what happens at the end of a long effort...in academia, that's usually the dreaded bibliography. It seems so simple but the perils and the pitfalls are many; one too many sloppy references and you're headed for a plagiarism charge, so it makes sense to spend your time ensuring that everything is as perfectly referenced as possible.

But how do you get to that point? And why should you take all that time when, really, it's not necessary? I actually used to enjoy compiling my bibliography as an undergraduate (Gareth, you're not alone...) - I've always found formulaic things relaxing, but of course I was really just procrastinating, and I still managed to get some of the punctuation or the formatting wrong. Besides, the accuracy was dependent on my keeping good notes on everything I'd read, and the bibliographies that I'll be producing in York will be considerably longer than my undergrad efforts.

Is this how time will seem, as my postgraduate years stretch out
before me? Image by Darren Tunnicliff

Luckily, there are quite a few different options out there to help ensure that your bibliography is relatively stress-free. I'm not going to look at Mendeley, though I've heard good things about it; instead I'm going for two extremes - the intuitively easy Zotero, and the ridiculously complicated Endnote. I define them based on the ease with which I was taught how to use each program; Zotero took around 15 minutes with an excellently prepared session by Catherine at FAMES, versus a two hour session at Computing services accompanied by 40-odd pages of notes for Endnote. It seems ridiculous when the end result is virtually the same, plus Zotero is free, PLUS it is accessible from anywhere. Endnote is developing its "web" arm but the registration process is onerous. In all honesty, I'm fairly sure that I've forgotten most of what I learnt already...apart from the fact that the one thing that was incredibly easy to do in Endnote was deleting everything you'd been working on. And this is how they must be judged - the main advantage of reference management software is the time-saving aspect, and if the software is so unwieldy, complicated and linked to one lone PC, then I might as well have done it myself and got my geeky kicks at the same time.

Thing 17: Casting a Pod into the wide, wide sea of information

I was hoping to present something a little more exciting for this Thing by actually creating a podcast, but sadly staff shortages and the training duties that have come with a new trainee have put paid to that, and my attempt at a podcast remains at 4 short, quiet clips of a croaky-voiced and unusually posh (posher that normal, anyway) me, chatting away about how many books we have in the Classics library (around 68,000 items in total, don'tcha know).

Not the same kind of shuffle, but
entertaining nonetheless.
Photo by The Loopweaver

My own podcasting aspirations may have to wait, but in fact I used to be quite a prolific consumer of podcasts, of the audio variety anyway. I don't download and listen to them on a regular basis, as I tend to be a reader more than a listener when it comes to news, and an iPod shuffle isn't conductive to coherent listening.

However, in my final year at Sheffield, podcasts came in very handy in the entrancingly entitled Transcription, Translation and Subtitling module (no prizes for guessing the four-lettered shorthand name for that one). The aim of the game, once in January and once in June, was to transcribe a short French video clip (usually a news report) and translate the result into coherent subtitles. There were lots of conventions : two lines per 5-6 seconds, absolutely no more than 39 characters per line, two hyphens for new speakers, et cetera et cetera ad nauseam. But before you could dream of this stage, you had to turn what you could hear into coherent and competent French. Bearing in mind that this is a language which has twenty spellings for every vowel sounds, this is easier said than done (literally), but podcasts were invaluable for practising picking up on all those pesky sounds that get swallowed away in normal speech. My podcast of choice was "Savoir être" from France Info, "the psychology of daily life", apparently. My parenting skills improved as I listened to half of France's daily troubles, but the firsts I received in each exam were testament to the effect of the podcasts on my language skills. Podcasts were also used in Sheffield as accompaniments to lectures, and in one Linguistics module, a method of assessment.

Are you listening?
Photo by McBeths Photography

Podcasts, unsurprisingly, appeal in particular to those who learn through listening, and it is important to cater to all types of learners in libraries and in academia in general, not to mention making use of all the technology available to us, including mp3 players. For this reason, I am looking forward to becoming more au fait with the software and the conventions, until maybe I too can present an inaugural lecture as a podcast, like Paul Cartledge did here. Of course, by that point, technology will have taken another leap lightyears into the future...

Thing 22: Wikis get on my wick(i)

I know, I know - my method of following the oh-so-carefully organised and logical steps of the Cam23 2.0 programme has gone from a little bit sporadic to completely haywire, but as I encounted a wiki of mine today, it is perfectly logical for me to head straight to Thing 22 (in my head, anyway...)

A "petite pachyderm"
Photo by John Carleton

Aside from the glorious glut of garbled knowledge that is Wikipedia, which I myself have never contributed to, my experience of wikis pre-Cambridge was nil. Then I arrived here and was slapped with the mammoth task of scanning endless articles and chapters for our (spoilt) classicists' reading lists and putting them onto our VLE, Camtools - a pachyderm-esque piece of software if there ever was one. I dutifully scanned and tweaked and uploaded to Camtools, at which point I discovered ...

...the Wiki.

Dramatic, I know. All Camtools pages have a wiki option, which wasn't being used at all by the Classics library, and I thought it might be a slightly more interesting and friendly way to make all these scanned resources available to the students. Here was the result:

My attempt at a Classics resources wiki page

It's not great, but it's not horrendous either. I wanted all the icons alongside each other, but the software, combined with my limited HTML knowledge at the time, conspired against me.

Lots and lots of reading for the
finalists!

But it was at least a good excuse to break up the white space with Raphael's version of Plato and Aristotle in his Scuola di Atene (if you haven't been to the Vatican to see it, it's well worth it). The pictures relate to some of the core courses in each year, and the link underneath brings up a list of (linked) resources, arranged by course. 

The full Scuola di Atene, if you
were wondering...
Image (appropriately) from Wikipedia

As Suz points out in her blogpost on this subject, it's a little clunky, and I certainly wouldn't choose a wiki to do anything more sophisticated than bung up a load of documents, but for that precise purpose, it's actually pretty useful...as long as you accept its limitations!

Thing 18: Cam23 2.0 - useful stuff in abundance

A stunning reflection on
Indianapolis Central Library.
Photo by Serge Melki

A little late maybe, but there's a lot to reflect upon. In fact, I think there's more to think about this week than last time, as this second block of 'Things' has seen me try a lot more new stuff than in the first.

The most useful Thing so far has to be Delicious. As I said at the time, I was dubious as to how useful it would be, considering the implicit panning it took in the first Cam23 programme, but it has turned out to be a gem. At work I move between three different computers, and of course my laptop at home makes 4, and being able to access all the interesting stuff I've come across in any of those 4 places is a boon. The tagging system took a while to get used to, in terms of the punctuation and in terms of working out the most efficient naming method for my purposes, but it's now doing exactly what I want it to do, with little added things popping up all the time, for example the ability to make notes on bookmarks for future references.

Transcribing poorly-handwritten Greek. All in day's work for
a librarian.
Photo by lemurph, manuscript at Trinity Hall, Cantab.

The other Thing seeing more use than I could have imagined is Twitter. I only use it at work, as the vast majority of tweets that come through relate to libraries (with the odd whimsical aside to keep me smiling during the long vac!), but it's already proved its worth : lots of people helped me with my research for this week's list-making app post, and a Twitter plea from lemurph about a strange Greek character* was answered using yfrog, a JRF and an Honorary Citizen of Sparta (who happened to be knocking about the library at the time).

It's not over just yet though. I have only just embarked on my Prezi journey but I can definitely see legs on that one, I've yet to perfect either of the reference management tools that we're looking at this week, and whilst I'm greatly enjoying Cam23 2.0, I will be putting in the effort after the programme has finished to try and continue to blog solo...I hope I can manage that!

*Character in the orthographic, rather than idiosyncratic person sense, of course. And if you're at all interested, it was a quote from Galen taking a dig at "the followers of Moses and Christ". Nothing to do with a moose's upper echelons at all, Helen and Katie...

Thing 19: Slides for Sharing

*This is was scheduled to appear sometime last week...I'm not sure how it slipped under the net, but here it is anyway...*

Yet another Thing that has only come to my attention since being in Cambridge, and which is so eminently sensible, I'm surprised it didn't crop up before.
I don't yet have an account, but here's an example of how I've been vaguely involved in its use in libraries - librarian extraordinaire Annie posted this just after our presentation at the Libraries@Cambridge conference 2011: Libraries@Cambridge 2011 - Graduate Trainees' presentation

View more presentations from Annie Johnson

The only thing I would have maybe added to this was to attach the appropriate part of the script to each slide, but it's still useful for non-attendees (and nice for our own nostalgia) to able to reaccess the slides so easily, wherever we are and whichever computer we might be using. Bless the cloud, eh.

There are many other librarians, superb advocates in particular, who make use of Slideshare to continue to share their excellent points with those who maybe couldn't make it to the original presentation. As far as I can tell, you can't yet put Prezis on Slideshare, which is a shame, but maybe this will come in the future.

I can very much see the use of Slideshare in my future career too. I intend to get involved with presenting papers as soon as possible, so it will be useful to have a record not only for the reasons detailed above, but also to form part of my online CV and presence, for anyone who's interested! It would also be very useful for teaching, as any delinquent, lecture-skipping students can get the slides any time, as well as those dedicated ones! It's also far more eco-friendly than printing out the slides on handouts every time.

All in all, a great tool which I may not have made much use of yet, but I certainly will in the future.

Thing 20: Prezis...and it's not even my birthday!

I was so interested in this Thing that I'd actually made my very first Prezi just last week (I might not yet have caught up with myself, but I'm also ahead of myself...does that make me Doctor Who?) It took a bit longer than the average .ppt would to put together, but to be fair, I'd never used it before! I was a good little librarian this time, taking my time to watch all the "how to" prezis, and the software, which is not exactly intuitive, does become easier to use the longer you play.

Gratuitous picture of the supremely gorgeous Tenth Doctor,
à la Library Wanderer. He would have been a Prezi user, too.
Photo from Needless Things blog

So without more ado, here is my very first effort, on the stunningly exciting topic of the in-house classification system we use at Classics:

Classical Faculty Library: Classification System on Prezi

I hope you enjoyed that! I loved being able to mess around with the bookshelves, and zooming around to different bits of the library to illustrate how it's all divided up. The presentation which really inspired me was this incredibly creative effort by Ned Potter, which also happened to be the first Prezi I'd ever seen, at the CILIP New Professionals Day in October 2010. Watch and learn...

Everything you need to know about technology and working in libraries on Prezi
Thanks to theREALwikiman for letting me pass it on!

However, there are a couple of issues with Prezi. As the lovely Andrew pointed out, I think it's important sometimes to rein yourself in because, just like a glut of .ppt effects which leave the audience cold, it's possible to make them feel seasick with Prezi if you go overboard on the zooming.

Also, as Prezi is still developing as a product, there's a few things that it doesn't deal with very well yet. It's more-than-a-bit-of-a-faff trying to attach sound to Prezis (watch this space...) at present, but hopefully they'll find a way to incorporate the common types of sound file into the software soon.

Overall, I'm quite a fan! I won't cast off all allegiance to .ppt, as its simplicity is still a virtue when it's used properly, but there's something fun about Prezi without being too frivolous, and who wouldn't want a little more fun in some of the meetings and conferences we all have to go to?