Thing 23 - Worldle and blogging about my Cam 23 experience

Well, what an adventure 23 Things has been! Definitely feeling exhausted but exhilarated too, just like the lions of Zimbabwe!

This has not been the smooth ride that I was hoping for, as I've bumped a few times across personal hurdles mostly to do with blogging, hence a delayed start and a few personal demons to slay en route. In all honesty though I can see many advantages to blogging, not least the professional community it builds and the exchanges that spring from comments and posts. I guess you could describe me as a reluctant convert. I'll try to stick with it though, let's see how it goes.

However I've also hugely enjoyed discovering various tools I was more of less familiar with and taking the time to assess them for my personal use, a potential professional use, and from our library users' point of view. I was surprised to discover that I had strong opinions on some of these.

Some of the Things have become firm personal favourites, like iGoogle and LibraryThing. Some were already old friends, and Google Calendar, Doodle, Facebook and Twitter are definitely here to stay and be explored to the limits of what they have to offer (for me or for the library).

My colleagues and I also took this opportunity to start our Library Facebook page and start Tweeting for the Library, although this will really take off when we reopen on Monday 6 September.

Other Things I have (re)discovered and will be using enthusiastically from now on: Flickr and SlideShare are firmly on the radar, Creative Commons and Podcasts and wikis I'll have to get to grips with, but will carry on exploring those. Zotero I need more time with but it's too good not to continue with, from a personal standpoint but it's also a fantastic tool to promote to our students.

Some on the other hand I didn't get on that well with: I'll give LinkedIn another go but probably won't persevere with it, Delicious I'll give another go and see how I get on with it. There are definitely advantages to these tools, but my heart's just not in it.

There's so much potential there, and to me there's no doubt that Web 2.0 technologies are the way of the future for libraries. It's up to us to embrace these and turn them to our, and our users', advantage.

In conclusion, 23 Things has given us plenty to look at, evaluate, offering new ideas and new strategies, and hopefully we'll implement some of them within our library. To paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, '(wo)man's mind, once streched by a new idea, cannot return to its original shape' and that has been a true gift from the six leaders who set up the programme. My grateful thanks to every one of you!

And last but not least, here's my 23 Things Wordle:

Thing 22 - wikis

Well, I haven't as yet got much experience of wikis, I've only come across them a few times so far. I appreciated the info posted on the 23 Things website, they suddenly make a lot more sense!

Like several others I'm sure, my main experience with wikis is actually Wikipedia, a good source for a first point of contact to get a quick idea on a topic. I'll echo Trainee Mermaid Dives In 's musings on Wikipedia, I've never had a problem with it, but have nevertheless taken the information there with a pinch of salt and to be double-checked - especially since Gary Delaney, a stand-up comedian we went to see at the Edinburgh Fringe last week, freely admitted with a dirty chuckle to spam Wikipedia for the fun of it. The librarian in me definitely bristled at that!

As for other wikis, I wasn't aware of the Library Success wiki about best practices in libraries, but got quite excited when I came across it reading up on the subject. I've been dipping in and out of it and have made it a favourite, watching out in particular to see which areas get updated.

Thing 21 - Podcasting (YouTube, Audacity and iTunes)

I'll be totally honest, to my great shame I knew very little about podcasts until a few months ago. Yes, I knew they existed out there and that various people (but who?...) used them, but more than that I hadn't got a clue. Didn't know exactly what they were not what they were for, and to my shame I never really took the time to investigate further.

... until I started singing lessons and my singing teacher was aghast that I didn't use YouTube to compare singers and performances. She pointed me in the direction of Sarah Connolly's incredible performance as Julius Caesar in Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto at Glyndebourne in 2005. It was love at first hearing! Sarah Connolly is indeed extraordinary, just see and listen to Va tacito e nascosto and Non è si vago e bello - oh, and Aure, deh, per pietà, it's heart-renderingly good! Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra is also well worth having a listen to, in V'adoro, pupille for example. And I can't not mention one of my absolute favourite arias, Sesto's Cara speme, by the fantastic Austrian mezzo Angelika Kirschlager. Truly superb! Goosebumps stuff! Oh, and one last one: the duet between Sesto and Cornelia, Son nata a lagrimar, 'I was born to cry'... Will it surprise you to hear that I went to Heffers Sound to buy the DVD that very lunchtime?

Anyway. Enough of all that. You may have guessed that since this YouTube revelation, I'd become a huge fan of podcasts in general, although since it's honesty hour I was extremely relieved to hear that we weren't required to create a podcast in order to "pass" Thing 21, just comment on them. Phew! I also realised while working on Thing 21 that I had at various times been sent links to podcasts and thoroughly enjoyed a lot of them... without even realising that that's what they were. Gnargh!

Since we were required to look at podcasts from the point of view of marketing libraries, I did of course look at (nearly) all of the ones recommended and in true 23 Things spirit have now subscribed to a few podcasts and started working my way through them all. I've explored podcasts as yet another current awareness tool that I'll be using long after the Cambridge 23 Things programme is over - and have a look at Audacity at that point. iTunes I do use already but to upload music I already own onto my mp3 player rather than to purchase, download or subscribe to anything new.

As for whether or not we'll create our own podcasts for our Faculty Library, I personally think it's way too early to tell. The medium clearly has a lot of potential for quick audio-guides for example, perhaps to complement existing print ones, or give virtual tours of the library. We however are not quite there yet. I'd rather be cautious about it at this point, since I am very aware that library podcasts, if not carefully crafted, all too easily fall into the "dad at the disco syndrome" that LottieMSmith mentioned in her post about Facebook: trying too hard to be trendy but in truth just awkward and cheesy and plain embarrassing. This will require a lot of work to get right, much more so than print resources or a new website, so podcasting is a Thing we'll bear in mind for the long-term future but not necessarily for the short to medium term.

Thing 20 - Creating a Google document and sharing it

Google Docs are not new to me so I'm back on more familiar grounds here, although I'd not shared a document before. Google Docs on the whole are very straightforward, convenient tool for storing documents on the Internet rather than on a hard drive.

My main concern, as mentioned when blogging about Thing 1 a little while ago, stems from questions teased out by Prof. Lilian Edwards during her Arcadia seminar talk regarding privacy settings and ultimate ownership of any documents housed on a Web 2.0 platform: can we really trust that Google does not take a peak at them (spy?)? I don't believe that. And what happens more specifically in the case of confidential documents? Or when someones dies, which was the basis of Prof. Edwards' talk?

All in all, I'll carry on using Google Docs as a convenient emergency measure but wouldn't be happy to use it for sensitive documents, despite the ease with which it allows us to share working documents with colleagues.

Thing 19 - The Things in Library marketing

I thoroughly enjoyed this week's reflective Thing and was surprised at how strongly I agreed with the various posts that Andy had put up for us to peruse. Truth is, I had never given much thought to the difference between 'advertising' and 'marketing' our services before, aside from the fact that 'marketing' seemed more active than simply 'publicising' or 'advertising' what we did. Reflecting on the new opportunities at our disposal however, I found myself vigorously nodding at various sentences.

I wholeheartedly suspect that there will be a direct link in the next few years between how well libraries manage to merge the 4 Ps of product, price, place and promotion with the 4 Cs of content, context, connections and conversations, and the value our users will continue to place on our services, how central libraries will remain in our users' lives. In short, this could well make or break library services. It's not 'Out with the old and in with the new' though, but more a case of making room for the new ways of communicating with our readers alongside the more traditional ones.

I would very much like to point my readers back to my favourite SlideShare presentation discovered when dealing with Thing 11 (slideShare):

Social Software in Academic Libraries for NYPL

On a different note, I had not imagined when I embarked on the 23 Things programme, that even more than the Things themselves, and the content and contexts I started to master, it would be the connections between people I would grow to value so much. I have learnt as much from colleagues' blogs as from the official site and discovered a wealth of expertise I didn't even know existed. Add to that the unexpected comradeship and the professional thrill of connecting with colleagues I hadn't yet met, and I'll have to doubly cheat on this week's task: I can't limit myself to just one Thing . Despite all my reservations, blogging - or rather reading other people's blogs for the large part - will be one of the Things I'm hoping to keep up to date with.


Our Library had already decided to implement a Library Facebook page and a Twitter account, so it would be misleading to say that these were a result of the 23 Things adventure. My choice of tool to start will therefore be SlideShare, for the immediate opportunities it offers us right now.

Oh, and by the way - LOVED the Tweeting and Facebooking that's going on in the Orkneys, and pleasantly surprised at the Library of Congress - thanks for sharing these!

Thing 18 - Zotero

Zotero and I got off on the wrong start. It was easy enough to download... except the logo wouldn't appear on my browser, and then everything went wrong. I didn't find it very intuitive to start with, it definitely took me a while to get going with it, but I'm glad I persevered: it's an incredible referencing tool and once I get the hang of it we'll be best buddies, you mark my words. I'll just have to tame it first!

Here's my first attempt at saving references in Zotero, which was easy enough, not complaints there. Tags will become more familiar, I'm sure, as time goes by.



I didn't help of course that I was trying to look at it while on holiday with friends in Keld, on my way to the Edinburgh Fringe. My mind wasn't quite with Zotero!

I was impressed with what I saw various libraries doing and liked the Medical Library's introduction to referencing with Zotero. I'll look and learn there!


Mendeley and Bookends I'll have a look at in a few weeks' time, if/when I can carve a few hours of professional development time in my busy day - so after the close of the 23 Things programme then! Mais ce n'est que partie remise, as the French would say. As Libby mentioned in her post about Doodle, it's all about time management, and I've tended to find the time for the 23 Things programme outside of work so far. Making this conscious decision to lay aside for a couple of hours a week the urgent tasks that take our attention during the day is something else I'm working on as part of the programme... but I suspect that the fact that I've done most of it so far during my home time indicates it will not be an easy battle for me to win.

Thing 17 - LinkedIn

This week's Thing to explore is LinkedIn and I must say, I'm not particularly enamoured with it. I've had an account for a couple of years (invited yet again to create one by a friend and colleague of mine) but haven't really used it as such. I can appreciate its strength as a purely professional networking tool (exit the frisson of Facebook with its blurred boundaries between work and social life) but have had too many people I barely knew, or didn't know in a professional context, sending me Contact Invitations to not view it with a hefty dose of cynicism at this point - especially since LinkedIn warns us that by accepting the contact invitation, we could potentially be asked to write a reference for this person at some point. Right now LinkedIn seems to me to be the poorer parent of Facebook (more fun) and Twitter (more vibrant), and I'm not sure I can find the time and energy to devote to yet another .

At this stage I'm also starting to suffer from Thing Fatigue (a brand new syndrome currently claiming many victims among the Cambridge librarian population) and while I have enthusiastically embraced several of the previous Things, I simply cannot muster the energy or the enthusiasm for LinkedIn. Will I persevere with it and do my best to reap the benefits of it? Yes, certainly. Will it ever become one of my favourite Things? I strongly doubt it.

Thing 16 - Facebook

As a hopeless Facebook addict who half-heartedly tried and failed to wheen herself off Facebook (neither cold turkey nor gradual withdrawal worked, been there, tried that) due to the widespread concerns over privacy settings and the long-standing rumour that Facebook may one day suddenly start charging for the privilege of being an addict, I thought I knew this tool well. When I first joined Facebook, I set my privacy settings so high that even genuine (outside of Facebook!) friends who were looking for me couldn't find me unless they were friends with one of my friends. Whether this is still the case I'm not sure - Facebook sure seems to be changing its privacy policies fairly regularly and though I try I'm hardly up-to-date with the latest Facebook-induced outrage. I've read all the extra articles posted about this with interest and an inevitable sense of doom.

Setting up our Library page for the 23 Things programme (still a bit bare, but then we're closed at the minute!) actually forced me to look at various policies and I was sobered by what I found there and the acute need for training and increased awareness of Facebook's less friendly side. This starts at a younger age and I know that schools do actively tackle their pupils' acute need for an increased awareness of the pitfalls of posting anything online willy-nilly, apparently protected by the erroneous assumption that "only my friends can read/see this anyway".

I thought I knew a fair bit about the potential benefits to be had from a Library Facebook presence: controlled, reliable information that stays there and is available within a setting that most students already use, that people can flit in and out of without, and that appears magically as part of their status updates (which - let's face it - is what most people use Facebook for, along with sharing photos) instead of asking them to go to a separate page for library information. How wrong was I! A little bit of eavesdropping at one of the 23 Things help sessions ended up opening so many more possibilities promoting resources that my mind has been whirring and working overtime on this since, and I'll be doing a lot more work on our brand new Facebook Library page to promote subject-specific resources and services. Colleagues beware, I may well end up pestering quite a few of you for advice and liaising over resources on Facebook!

To finish off, I found on SlideShare a survey analysis on the use of Library Pages on Facebook, reiterating the importance of having a presence on the social sites our readers use:

Librarians, Libraries And Facebook

View more presentations from Jane Secker.

Take a look and feel free to let me know what your thoughts are!

Things 14 and 15 - LibraryThing

Ooooh, what a marvellous toy LibraryThing is! Being able to catalogue all your books, read reviews, get new ideas for interesting reads and share favourites with others - why, that's the pull librarianship had over me as a child, that's the reason I became a librarian in the first place, aged, well, something negligeable! I've created my brand new LibraryThing account in less time than it's taken me to type this and will be spending a lot of time on LibraryThing over the next few months... you see, I have a fair few books at home. How exciting!

I was interested to read more about LibraryThing's background in Aaron Rutkoff's Social Networking for Bookworms which I thought helped put some aspects of the site into perspective, mainly this curious cross between nerdy (some of us at least!) booklovers and fashionable social networking.

From a librarian's perspective however, I remain circumspect about its possible use in a "real" library (sorry, I just mean a "non-private" library): I can understand why people would jump at the chance of creating their own tags and gaining ownership of the organisation of material, but the inevitable confusion that ensues when tags get mixed up, forgotten, partially updated, and the obvious fact that tags can be so personal since a word/tag/label can mean one thing to someone and something completely different to someone else... must give us pause. For in this information overloaded world of ours, why would anyone want to invite more chaos than exists already? I wouldn't want to use it as a main OPAC tool, but would cautiously welcome its use for a virtual new books display for example, pending further investigation and sneaky peaks at what uses other libraries have already made of LibraryThing.

Thing 13 - Reflection week (cross that off: reflection hour for me! Sorry!)

Well, this week I discovered I have a multimodal (VARK) learning style - in practice this means I'm greedy, I'd like a little bit of everything in the way the tasks are presented please! I've found the 23 Things website posts very good in the pointers they gave, the balance of articles to read and optional ideas to explore the Things further just right for me - thank you to Emma, Libby, Andy, Kirsty, Emma-Jane and Sarah!

The photo on the left was taken in India in December 2007: Margao market encapsulated my whole experience of India, a whirlwind of an assault on the senses: so much colour, so much noise, so many (strong!) smells and unusual tastes (to me of course): I truly loved it, but my two weeks in Goa felt like a blur and an onslaught on the senses.

And that's pretty much how I feel about the 23 Things programme.

So far I've very much enjoyed exploring various new technologies I knew precious little about before starting, but by not taking as much time as I would have liked to explore several of the Things in depth, I've forced myself into a whirlwind of new technologies which can sometimes be frustrating. I totally agree with various colleagues that however much time people choose to devote to it is entirely up to them - I just wish I'd given myself more time on this, at work or at home, earlier on.

On a much more positive side, I do feel a lot more confident about most of the new technologies we've looked at so far and am very glad I finally got going with this. A lot of these (LibraryThing, Delicious, podcasts, Zotero, ...) I'd heard of but had not given myself time to get to grips with them. Some (SlideShare) I'd never heard of before. This, thankfully, is rapidly changing now, and I'll be championing some of these Things for my library with other enthusiastic colleagues; this new technologies adventure has opened up a whole new world of possibilities within my own workplace and part of me is jumping up and down inside, extremely keen to critically explore potential uses of these new technologies for my library.

One unexpected side-effect that came with reading so many excellent blogs, engaging, well-written and reflective, has brought in sharp relief how many excellent librarians we have in Cambridge: as a profession we have much to be proud of, let's make people aware of it and let's make the most of it!

So, surprisingly, if I were to recommend just one Thing to a colleague at this point... it would probably be blogging. How odd! I'm loving reading everybody else's blog but am still not convinced about blogging myself. Some perceptions change slower than others!

Thing 12 - Delicious

I was grateful to Emma Coonan for giving us the opportunity to look at her Delicious bookmarks without having to create a page myself to start with, and going through the whole rigmarole of setting up yet another account with yet another set of usernames and passwords.

Anyone who uses more than one computer will immediately see the worth of a tool such as delicious and not having to set up bookmarks on every machine used: add to that the relief at keeping personalised bookmarks and tagged websites on a shared computer and you have a worthwhile tool indeed. This means that within a library context, delicious could be an interesting tool in a hot-desking environment, to keep track of personal bookmarked websites and other customised settings; or for several part-timers sharing the same computers for example.

I very much like the idea behind it and way it works, but 23 things fatigue has now taken a strong hold on me and I don't just want to set up another account. I've realised over the past few days and weeks spent blogging about 23 Things that I do have a fair few out there and will be concentrating on those first. Plus, she says sheepishly, it looks clear and uncluttered but in all honesty... rather dull too.

Personally, I have little use for it at this point in time and while I'm sure I'll come back to delicious at some stage, I'll be spending the time I'm freeing for 23 Things exploration for other Things first. Delicious will still be there in a few months' time if I decide then to give it a serious go I'm sure, but for now I won't be pursing it.

Sorry!

Thing 11 - SlideShare

I found SlideShare fairly straightforward to use even as a novice, and the resources there were some of the most useful I'd come across so far, so I'll be grasping the full scope of opportunities that SlideShare gives me, both for professional development and for use in our Faculty Library. It's an easy way of sharing documents in their original formats (Word, PowerPoint, pdf) which would otherwise not sit well on a website (pages of uninterrupted text just copied and pasted anyone?). Such a tool can be used to make available all sorts of information which would otherwise be awkward and non web-friendly to share, such as reports from library surveys, annual reports, guides and help documents... It's versatile, slick and engaging which makes it efficient from both the librarian's and the reader's point of view.

As for the content, why reinvent the wheel when others have produced and shared good material? SlideShare's strength lies in the free access to quality documents shared by respected colleagues.

I particularly liked the following PowerPoint presentation which seemed to fit in perfectly with what we're analysing on the 23 Things programme, making a very strong case for the use of Web 2.0 technologies in libraries and outlining how crucial it is that libraries embrace these technologies if they want to stay connected to their users. I loved the balance between quotes, screenshots and examples, and pure bullet-point facts, and thought they covered the topic extensively:

Social Software in Academic Libraries for NYPL

View more presentations from Ellyssa Kroski.

I also liked the following report on a survey looking at the innovative use of new technologies to attract new readers, as it's an area I'm interested in:

Social Media, Libraries, and Web 2.0: How American Libraries are Using New Tools for Public Relations and to Attract new Users - Second Survey November 2009

View more documents from Curtis Rogers.

I was impressed to find Keren Mills' Arcadia report there too. SlideShare was not a place I'd even thought of looking for Cambridge-related documents (well, obviously, since I'd never heard of SlideShare before, so how could it have been on my radar?), but that's changing as of today!

University of Cambrigde Information use on the move

View more documents from Fred Zimny.

Last but not least, I loved Andy Priestner's presentation on plagiarism, complete with clear examples and survey results highlighting the scope of the problem, as well as advice and guidelines for avoiding plagiarism:

The Plagiarism Code

View more presentations from priestcam.

All in all, SlideShare turned out to be another one of these 23 Things gem: I'd not heard of it before but it's made my top 5 list in just a couple of hours. I'm grateful to have been introduced to it!

Things 9 and 10 - Flickr and the Flickr Creative Commons

Exploring Flickr for the 23 Things programme jogged my memory and reminded me that I already had a Flickr account, created in a previous lifetime when Flickr was all the rage and the best thing since sliced bread. I never used it that much myself, being once again more of a consumer of information and content than a producer of one, but my keen photographer of a husband for one uses it all the time: we both belong(ed) to several social groups (see right for the altercation between Hermia and Helena in Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night's Dream with our am dram group - and below for a photo of Victoria Falls from helicopter during our Southern Africa trip in 2006),

and are aware that some people use Facebook for sharing photos, some Flickr, some both. From a social point of view, it's a great way of sharing memories and browsing through beautiful arty pictures. My better half even managed to get one of his photos, Lone Ant (below - there really is an ant, see if you can spot it!), included in an art photography book - the editors found his photo on Flickr, contacted him to ask for permission to use this particular shot, and hey presto! Although to this day we don't know if the book ever got published, but that's a different story altogether...







Now, looking at Flickr with my professional glasses on was an interesting process. In all honesty, at first I simply skim-read the instructions and was not entirely convinced by some of Librarian in Black's examples quoted in favour of using Flickr for promoting our libraries and our services: it seems to me that to promote our services to our own, existing readers, a library website with photos would do just the trick, or a Facebook page, or even a library blog come to think of it; simply putting photos of our library up on Flickr just for the sake of doing it or for promoting ourselves to the wide unknown world out there seemed, well, rather pointless (sorry!!). But then again, my current thinking is limited to the academic library context and more specifically to the Cambridge set-up. I realise I would be thinking very differently were I working in a public library for example, which has certainly got me mulling over blinkers I may have that I wasn't aware of until now... help, I need more imagination and the gift to think outside the box! (Cue to read fellow participants' blogs avidly and make the most of people sharing their expertise and good ideas).

However, revisiting Flickr in more depth (after having to set up a new password for it of course, since the original one was long forgotten), reading the instructions properly and more specifically setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts for my library completely changed my views on the beast and rekindled an old flame: I came across the whole concept of Creative Commons a few months ago when told that our computer officers had various photos of the building and the library in particular available on Flickr for anyone to use, and I've certainly read up a bit about it and made good use of it now. I'm also keen to contribute some photos of our library to Flickr and will carry on using it for any future promotional material both in print and electronic formats.





I've also had a better look at the advanced search features now and ventured outside of my "Flickr comfort zone", and suddenly the proverbial lightbulb has come on. It's true, the possibilities really are endless! Another useful (re)discovery, thank you Cambridge 23 Things!

Thing 8 - Reviewing my blog tags

Having read this week's task I'm now adding a couple of tags to my posts here and there, but overall I'd sorted out the structure and types of tags I wanted to use from the start, so going back over what I've already written I'm not finding that many tags to add.

I found Clay Shirky's article 'Ontology is overrated' interesting and thought-provoking, although he did lose me a couple of times on some of the finer details.

As for blogging itself I'm slowly but surely starting to see the benefits of it, although my personal ambivalence about the whole process is still alive and strong.

Thing 7 - Twitter

Now this is one post I was actually very much looking forward to writing! Our Library had agreed a while ago that having a presence on Twitter and Facebook would be beneficial, and we had been planned to set it up this summer, so I took advantage of the 23 Things programme to kill two birds with one stone - check us out at MMLLib!

Personally I am a fan of Twitter, having been introduced to it last year by one of my colleagues who is one of the most enthusiastic Twitter fans I know. I find it an excellent professional tool and use it mainly for professional development, which inevitably involves keeping up to date with what more intelligent people (and wittier) than yours truly have to say on various issues I would probably not bother seeking a regular update on. Interestingly, I've noticed that I've become much more dependent on it since I've set it up on my shiny new BlackBerry, which tends to support Twitter much better than Facebook as I want more out of Facebook than simply the status updates. But beware, Twitter has a very addictive side to it, you won't be able to leave it alone.

One of the drawbacks of having greatly delayed my start on the 23 Things programme is that I missed out on so many interesting comments posted by fellow professionals here in Cambridge: I do find it slightly disheartening to know that the more people you follow, the more likely you are to miss useful/interesting comments due to the sheer volume of information tweeted. For example, it is seriously making me rethink the number of newspapers that I follow on Twitter. Ah, the drawbacks of our information society...

I tend to disagree with LottieMSmith's point that Twitter has more to offer libraries and their students than Facebook: my experience so far, though far less comprehensive and in-depth than hers, is that Twitter works extremely well for us librarians, however I fear that students have not embraced it with the same enthusiasm as us. Having promoted our upcoming Twitter and Facebook presence wherever possible and whenever appropriate to students and staff alike (why let a perfectly good opportunity to promote our Library services go by unattended?), I've noticed more of an interest at the mention of our Facebook page than Twitter. I am not losing hope that they'll see the benefit of it though, and we'll certainly refine our use of both tools to show off how well they complement each other rather than compete with each other. Time will tell if Twitter and Facebook will deliver on their promises for our library, or if our hopes will be cruelly (and very annoyingly) dashed.

I would be interested to know how well Twitter, and Facebook for that matter, will be received by our academics, or if its use will stay confined to the students and library world colleagues. I'll most definitely be watching this space and working hard to integrate Twitter and Facebook as important tools to communicate with the readership we support.

Thing 6 - Google calendar

I must say, I'm quite a fan of the Google calendar and have been using it on and off for several years. It's an easy and very efficient way of keeping track of various commitments, or even various types of commitments (work, home, friends, family, anything you like really...), you don't need to have your paper diary with you all the time (and I must admit, I don't take my work diary on holiday with me for example!) but you can update it from wherever you have an Internet connection. Yes, the downside is that you delve a little bit deeper into the dark clutches of the Evil Google Empire... but then again I'm there already, doomed as can be, so what the heck, eh?

I'm saving even more time now since I've manage to sync it to my BlackBerry calendar, although to be fair I'm still ironing out some niggles there. I can see potential there though and will definitely persevere with it.

Several points I mentioned when looking at Doodle also apply here, mainly that we don't really need Google calendar within our small, straighforward library environment, since our old-fashioned paper diary works just fine and we all work closely together. However, I can see Google calendar being a useful tool for split site libraries, or for managing libraries where staff work shifts or flexible hours: it allows everyone to see who's busy when and can save a lot of time from the tedious to-ing and fro-ing involved in setting up a meeting - even better, use it in conjunction with Doodle to target days and times when people don't already have commitments before sending out a Doodle link. Since you can set up several calendars, the possibilities are endless: you can have one for your own commitments at work, one for each of your co-workers, one for your family commitments, one for your spouse/partner's commitments, one for each of the children... and you can choose who you share each on with.

One little dampener on this general enthusiasm though: while I can appreciate Google calendar could work brilliantly within Cambridge, for coordinating meetings with people from various libraries for example, I would still be slightly wary about using it outside of the Cambridge environment. Something about it looking a little bit too much like fun maybe?

Yup, there's no two ways about it, I'm definitely a fan and will carry on using it for my personal organisational headaches (no more triple-booking myself, hurray!), though not necessarily at work.

Thing 5 - Doodle

Aha, now I'm a huge fan of Doodle for setting up any kind of appointment or meeting, and the more people involved the better a tool Doodle becomes, as it removes the flurry of emails and subsequent waste of time involved... or so you'd think. The last three times I've used it people have rather annoyingly reverted back to email to qualify their statement or even worse, repeat it. Now people, that was the whole point of setting up a Doodle link in the first place!

On the plus side, it's incredibly easy to set up and removes so much unnecessary faffing about: Doodle calculates the best date and time for your meeting based purely on numbers and what people have input, end of story. With 5 day-time staff our Library is too small to make using Doodle an efficient internal tool - our good old paper diary does the trick just fine thank you - but to set up meetings with anybody else, be they academics or librarians at other libraries, it's just invaluable. I love it.

Thing 4 - Registering my blog

Right. My blog is now officially registered. It also means it's officially visible, and that's the bit that troubles me you see. I am seeing the advantages of blogging more and more, and as LottieMSmith points out in her thoughts on Thing 4, it's an extremely versatile tool that offers endless possibilities, of which creating an interacting online community of people with common interests is an important one.

However, I also tend to think that there's quite a jump from being a consumer of information and knowledge published in the blogosphere and on the Internet in general, to becoming a producer of such information, and that too much space is already taken up by people who love to broadcast to the world what they've had for breakfast, hence my current reticence. This may change mind you... but then I'll become one of these annoying people whittering on about inconsequential things and cluttering the blogosphere. Can't win.

As for the required screen shot of my (by now) well-used iGoogle page, here it finally comes!


Hurray!!

I must say, I'm quite glad that the programme is nudging me to finally learn how to do this, since it's been on my list of things to do for ages (the screenshot bit, not the bloggin bit!). It's three cheers for the 23 things programme from me!

Relief!

Having just read that the deadline for completing the 23 Things programme has been extended until 31st August, I'm getting back to it with renewed energy and lifted spirits - I was not relishing the prospect of rushing through 2/3 of the programme in a couple of days.

Part of me does feel slightly deflated for missing the boat of the online professional community: one important benefit of the 23 Things programme lies in the active networking that has been going on within the Cambridge librarian community, a bunch of smart, switched on professionals keen to explore and/or keep up with new tools, who have now found a brilliant new way of exchanging ideas. Yes, I am coming round to the idea of the usefulness of blogs, I've definitely benefitted from my fellow participants' ideas and expertise.

I'm also hoping that the 23 Things blog will stay up well beyond the closure of the programme, allowing participants and others to go back to some of the Things they didn't spend as much time exploring as they would have liked - any chance of a 24th thing on safeguarding blogs you're interested in before they disappear?

Thing 3 - Creating my Cam 23 blog

Well well well... this is the one that's taken me aaaaages so far! Once fellow participants started blogging and posting challenging, thought-provoking offerings, I started reading avidly and postponing the inevitable: blogging myself. "Mañana mañana daaaarrrling" is what I told myself... with the secret hope that nobody would actually read this.

The first hurdle was settling on a name. How vain, I can hear you think already... and you'd be right of course. Nevertheless, it remained a stumbling block. Since I couldn't think of anything witty after three days of racking my brain and waking my husband in the middle of the night to ask if he'd found any good names so far, and having decided against anything that could be construed as racy or so cutting-edge that people would actively want to follow this blog ('Don't judge a librarian by its cover', 'A librarian for the Noughties', 'Shhh! Librarian blogging', 'Librarian by day...' were all considered and rejected), I settled on this one. I knew that I wanted to keep this for professional purposes (well, 23 Things purposes really) while still being a blogging infant, and the 23 Things programme, to me, also fits very well with something I care about, which is shaking the tired old librariany stereotypes and making people understand what we do all day. And how our role is just as important now as it was 30 or 50 or 100 years ago (if not more, I would argue), it's just that our job description has evolved with the times, that's all. Shame the image hasn't. Yet.

I can see some of the advantages of blogging: a blog is a very flexible format that can be customised to be as formal/professional or as personal and laid back as one wants, that is easy to use (yes, even I admit that so far I've found Blogger remarkably problem-free and user-friendly), and into which one can cram an awful lot of interesting stuff and relevant links. How useful a tool it can be in a library setting remains to see. I'll be open-minded about it but am not convinced yet.

Screenshot to follow, once I work out how to do it...

Thing 2 - Adding the Cam 23 RSS feed to my iGoogle page

Can there be that much to say about adding the Cam23 RSS feed to my iGoogle page? I did it, it works fine, keeps the 23 Things programme on my mind (as in, "I've really really got to start doing it now!")... that's it, folks!

Actually... not quite.

I do find that I use RSS feeds more and more for professional purposes, and I'm terribly grateful that they exist at all since they save me a huge amount of time. I set up a bloglines account for professional current awareness purposes a few months ago and return to it periodically to catch up with what's been going on in the world. The Library world that is.

They are also relied on more and more by our users, precisely for their precious time-saving qualities, and as such are an invaluable tool for our library, providing information about recent acquisitions or new developments in our services for example. The catch of course is to get people to subscribe to them!

As for a lot of other things, I'm completely at a loss as to how they actually work, and more often than not a little confused about how to add them to whichever account I want to add them to. It does require a little bit of concentration sometimes, as I found out when the same RSS feed wormed itself into three different places, none of which was the intended location. Practice makes perfect!

Thing 1 bis - Setting up an iGoogle page

I enthusiastically set up my iGoogle page a few weeks ago, and promptly became addicted to it; while the idea of getting all the information I'm interested in in one place and customising this page isn't new to me, the 23 Things programme actually prompted me to investigate this a little deeper and set it up. The main drawback I've encountered so far relates to Google itself: I already use Gmail and as all Google applications hang off the same account, I regularly log myself out inadvertently. Annoying but not life-threatening, and practice will sort it out I'm sure.

As far as using iGoogle in a library context, I suspect I would find something like Netvibes more useful (pending further investigation!), but I'll definitely use my iGoogle page to gather various RSS feeds on professional matters... until I come across a better tool that is...

Thing 1 - Setting up a Google ID

Well. There we go then. The pressure's on... now that I have finally registered my empty blog and therefore am officially registered with the Cambridge 23 Things programme, I "only" have 10 weeks' worth of Web 2.0 discoveries to catch up on and blog about. Better get going!

Thing 1 itself was a bit of a cheat for me, since I already have a Google account as I use Gmail as my personal email. I do like it a lot although some of the comments made at Prof. Lilian Edwards' excellent Arcadia seminar on “Death 2.0: What Becomes of Digital Assets after Death?” gave me a lot of food for thought (the good old privacy issues that keep popping up, and the importance of knowing where a online company is based for legal purposes... all sorts of things I'd never actually thought about before).

Not sure yet how Google itself can have a useful, viable application in a library context - I'll be exploring this a bit more in-depth later on I imagine, and will come back to that one.