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Saturday 10 September 2011

Punchline...

Why did the librarian slip on the library floor?

It was the non-friction section.

Thing 23

The final thing to do on this blog is reflect on the 23 things I have just done (plus a 'few cool extra things').

This has been a superb programme.  I thought I was fairly tech savvy at the start of this programme, and as you know from reading every single one (ha!) of my blog posts I had done a few of the things already.  Little did I know how much more there was that I had previously missed and this programme has highlighted many things that I have been delighted to start using.  I am also pleased that on occasion (thing 15) that I have found other websites offering similar services perhaps better (zoomerang vs. surveymonkey).

My criticism of the programme must be how much there was to do.  At times it felt like an uphill struggle to get the things done, and particularly with prezi I felt demoralised by how complicated it was to do the thing.  However, I have got so much out of the process that all of that is entirely unimportant now.

I have two observations to conclude this blog with.
1.  Web 2.0 is the future of the internet.  Now that we are used to uploading content onto available platforms, sharing our thoughts and work online there is no turning back.  The internet is no longer about gathering information, it's about participation, comment and collaboration.  The future of the internet redefines our spaces and our audience, it opens up possibilities beyond our immediate surroundings and allows us to find information that anyone has produced.  However, this in itself is a danger, because content may be less accurate as a result.  In turn this suggests to me that the role of the librarian, the arbitrator in checking sources and teaching how to reference work correctly, is even more important.  Librarians must be aware of new social media and keep their pulse on internet developments, so they know how to use new tools in order to help students make a useful (and legal) contribution online.

2.  The world of web 2.0 reveals much about ourselves.  While tools like delicious demonstrate socially more about our work, twitter in particular blurs the boundaries between the professional and the private.  Great care must be taken when tweeting, so as to protect yourself from revealing too much.  There are so many stories of employers watching their employees and people getting burgled as a result to slip-ups on twitter.  I would like to see twitter take security seriously and steal a little from Google + and its use of circles.  Surely twitter would be enhanced by selecting who you were tweeting?  If someone tweets 'I have a spare ticket to a gig tonight, anyone want to come?'  It's surely aimed at the friends that follow you, rather than those you don't know.  This will probably happen.  Surely inspired by Google +, Facebook now allows you to control how can see your status updates and photos of you as a new 'security measure' but I suspect as a first step to tapping into a similar circles idea.  It makes sense, and is a great innovation.  It's just a shame that Google + has failed to become a platform that anyone I know actually uses.

The reason I protected my tweets was less to do with what people could see about me (I don't say anything outrageous) but because I dislike twitter spam.  Being mentioned by 'users' in Thailand, or being tweeted unpreviewable links is quite frankly annoying.  Twitter is a generator of much spam, a problem that disappears through protecting your tweets.  In conversation with colleagues and friends, no one I know thinks creating a professional twitter persona is a good idea (separating my professional and personal tweeting).  It's one I'm still mulling over.  What I do know is that I dislike spam, but also when I go to library camp in a few weeks I want to be able to tweet publicly.  I think it's most likely I'll just go public when I feel compelled to do so.

This programme has really led me to reassess blogging and I will be blogging my new job as a graduate trainee researcher at www.oliverrobert.wordpress.com, so do bookmark that link and add it to your RSS reader.  I only just set it up and it's a work in progress.  I've not enjoyed my blogger experience, it's very clunky.  My introduction to wordpress is going quite badly!  So far I've changed the colour but that's about it.  Blogging is a great way of sharing your experiences, as long as there's something useful to share.  I think the amount of information available to LIS enthusiasts about the work of private libraries/information units is small (whether it's a charity, bank, trade union, etc.), and hopefully I can blog once a week for the next 9 months and help demystify this line of work.  I'll also be putting some posts in about my MA at UCL, which progresses in a couple of weeks.

Well world, goodbye.  I'm moving to wordpress now to blog about some other stuff.  I hope you enjoyed reading this blog, I very much enjoyed the programme and being a graduate trainee at City.

Delicious

I've been using delicious for some time now.  It allows you to save your bookmarks to the site, share your bookmarks with others through tags and find other related bookmarks on the site.

These are all very useful, but the real advantage is that you can access your bookmarks anywhere.  Bookmarking is always a useful way of retaining links to websites (particularly one off finds when doing research) but the problem has always been that your research in location A and then do some more work in location B and because the bookmarks are saved on computer A, you can't find the websites again on computer B.  With delicious, your bookmarks are always with you.  When I was doing my university undergraduate dissertation I kept a word document of links to sites, with delicious that will no longer be necessary when I write my masters thesis.

As with Prezi and doodle, this is a very simple innovation, using the internet to replicate and enhance an already existent function of your computer.