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 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 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 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 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...