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: