Thing 11: Who is that girl I see / Staring straight back at me?

A girl who knew all about reflection
Photo from fanpop.com

...As Mulan said. Now, I'm not saying that the effect of Cam23 2.0 on my life is as great as the changes she had to make, but it has been a formative experience work-wise, and has made me evaluate more closely the ways in which I work and the changes I may have to make before October.

Most of the Things in the programme have not been new to me, but through exploring them more closely I have come to use them in slightly different, and hopefully more efficient, ways. As an example, I was always aware of Google calendar and had used it at work from September, but now it has completely replaced my paper diary and has made things simpler in (an aspect of) my life outside of work, too.

Of the new Things, there are a couple which really have filled a gap: taking screenshots may not be a crucial part of my working life but Lightshot makes it infinitely easier; Netvibes and RSS feeds combined have allowed me to keep in touch with much more information from a wider sourcepool; and I think that my sporadic and disorganised bookmarking habits will gradually be replaced by a much better-looking and effective platform in Evernote.

Other Things have had less of an impact: Pushnote is definitely being consigned to Room 101, and whilst Twitter is growing on me (and produced a very amusing conversation yesterday about Koine Greek and mooses' upper echelons), I'm struggling to see how it will be truly useful once I leave the Cambridge library mafia (sad days ahead).

After being stuck in a bit of a bubble, I'm finally breaking out again
Photo from Wikipedia

And so to the wider application of the Things and the programme generally. I have realised that my organisational skills will be key in order to succeed (and stay sane) on my Masters course next year, and that it is OK to write things down in order to remember them! I have also learnt that, in order to get the most out of web 2.0 technologies, you have to be prepared to put in and keep putting in, even if you occasionally feel like you're shouting into the wind. Which leads me on to the thing (with a small 't') that I have most enjoyed: having the motivation and the material to get me writing again, not only because I needed to get back into the habit for academic reasons, but for the pure enjoyment of manipulating language, the self-imposed discipline of proofreading and revision, as well as becoming more aware of other people's styles and how writing needs to be adapted for different new media.

Extra Thing 3: Library widgeting and Thing 9: Drowning under Documentation? Google's lifebelt

As my mammoth catch-up mission continues, this week I'm tackling another two Google applications; one directly, and one indirectly.

My exciting 30th August:
Return library book.
Water plants.
What a rock'n'roll lifestyle.

And as we all like a good beat-about-the-bush, let's start with the indirect one. We have had the library widget on our Classics library page since the last Cam23Things, and it was an incredibly useful tip during the days of buggy Newton. I hadn't realised, however, that you could link your account to your calendar of choice - in my case, the ubiquitous G-word one. It's dependent on the way Google indexes information, so it can be quite slow and, as Lyn pointed out, it's not ideal for our undergrads as our loans are only 2 days whereas, by my reckoning, it took the best part of a working day for Google to update and display my new loan on my calendar. However, it could be useful for our tirelessly-hardworking and techsavvy grads, or our increasingly dippy academics (you know, the kind who forget their kids' names but could reel off line after life of the Odyssey. In ancient Greek.)

A nice, tangible representation of the capability of Google Docs
And it's German :)
Photo by EDO lounge

The other Google application on this post's menu is Google Doc(ument)s. Again, I have used this tool a few times, finding it useful in group work situations during my final year at University, when we had to complete one of the more bizarre tasks of my degree, a group Syntax essay. We saved a considerable amount of time and inbox space by using Google Docs to email round drafts etc., even if we still decided to come together in physical space to finalise things like formatting, which Google Docs is less happy with. I have also used it as a kind of online jotter pad, creating documents to store quotes, poems or links which I want to use later. I hope, however, that some of the bookmarking tools in this week's Thing will largely supplant that.

Google Docs has also been useful from a library perspective; our Google spreadsheet is useful for collecting book requests, and our 'Ask a librarian' form has attracted questions from all over the place, even internationally. I can see how it would be useful for small-scale, embedded surveys, and the information is easy to manipulate from the resulting document.

On a less techy note, I spent my entire weekend (and, thanks to my lovely boss and an empty library, half of Friday) at the Cambridge Folk Festival. A fantastic, eclectic mix of people in the stunning Cambridge sunshine. I recommend Feufollet, Peatbog Faeries, and Ange's superb headwear...

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