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?

Extra thing, Week 9: Common creativity

I'm skipping podcasting for the moment (I'm cooking up a little something though, hopefully it'll be worth the wait!), so for the time being there will be a few more pretty pictures and a bit of serious discussion, as I tackle Creative Commons licensing.  

Share and share alike...
Image by  Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious

The whole idea of a creative commons license, brought about by a non-profit organisation founded in 2001, is a spectacularly good one. As individuals we can bring a lot of different skills to the collective (now usually web-based) table - for example, you might be a whiz with words but poor with pictures, so you might find it difficult to beautify your product, be it a blog or a book, and get it noticed. What's more, a lot of us don't have the money or the inclination to fork out for royalties and access to copyrighted material. Luckily, the more artistically-challenged of us now have a vast array of striking images at our fingertips, thanks to some talented people with an open, giving personality. Such as the cyclist photographer who snapped this sign, which I think wouldn't go amiss in Cambridge! (On the subject of images though, I inserted both of these using imagecodr - a cracking idea but the formatting seems to go haywire if I want to centre or move the image around...any suggestions?)

Of course, pictures are only the tip of the iceberg. The Creative Commons infrastructure is used by some huge names, such as Al Jazeera TV, rock band Nine Inch Nails and famously, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) group of journals. I can understand that some artists/creators would want to jealously guard their work, as it is their livelihood, but Nine Inch Nails proved that you can share content and still make money, as they simply legislated for what their fans were probably doing anyway, and in so doing won a lot of respect from music fans everywhere, which bore fruit when their next tour was a massive sellout.

A little more sharing
Image by by  Duncan~ 

Of course, that is but one example. A more pertinent one for libraries is the set-up at PLoS. I went to one of the Arcadia seminars in the winter about open source publishing (see "Reengineering the scholarly journal" here), some of which was laudable (sharing databases of results and disseminating vital scientific research as quickly as possible) and other aspects of which were a bit worrying (cutting out the human element of the review system and publishing articles before they've been vetted at all). However the creative commons license deals with and facilitates the rapid dissemination of results and research, which is crucial in our community, where new diseases and issues can spread across the world within weeks and need to be targeted as quickly as possible. So socially it's great, but even better, it doesn't harm the authors of the content; they don't generally receive much (if anything) for writing the article at all, but transmission of their name and reputation worldwide is critical, as academic salaries often depend on that oh-so-difficult-to-define phenomenon, "wider impact".

All in all, I think we can agree that the CC idea is A Good Thing for content-makers and content-users of all shapes and sizes.