Library twits

I blogged a while back about my use of twitter and how I find it a beneficial network to use both professionally and socially.  Twitter has become marketing tool number one for many libraries, a way to vocalise your presence and reinforce your service offer.

I follow a variety of different librarians and libraries.  Among the libraries are the internet phenomenon that is @OrkneyLibrary

OrkneyLibrary Orkney Library

Today the safeword is 'scullery'. If you get scared during the book issuing process, just utter the safeword and we will cease immediately.

as well as my friends at the Scottish Poetry Library: @ByLeavesWeLive and @SPLshop (among others).  I tend to find that although following individual libraries is interesting and can show you what other institutions are doing, there are other information professionals on twitter who are more useful to follow at my stage.  If I was head of information literacy, then seeing what other libraries are investing their time and money into would be extremely useful.  But that's not me.

@LISNPN, the twitter feed of the LIS New Professionals Network is a great feed, and has job adverts, interesting articles and links.  In preparation for Library School at UCL in September, @UCLDISStudents has had some interesting tweets to share too (the twitter feed for the UCL LIS student blog - though it's not the most active feed).  I follow a few other trainees who blog and enjoy reading about their traineeships.  The feeds from the British Library, CILIP and JISC are also excellent to follow for the links, articles, conferences and retweets they share.  

Twitter feeds are invaluable conference tools.  If you are not at a conference you can still follow the action from the hoards of library tweeters who are tweeting the main points from the conference hall.  For attendees, twitter provides an archive of notes from the conference by yourself and the other participants and a network of contacts to follow up information with.

I've really started to question whether my approach to twitter is benefitting me adequately.  23things has demonstrated to me the benefits of sharing as well as accessing the fruits of other people's sharing.  On twitter I sometimes have something to say that would add to the debate perhaps at a conference or event, or even just to enter the competition to win tetley tea for a year (@tetley_teafolk every Friday!)  Since I use twitter as a very social medium as well, I think I'll split my tweeting between social me and professional me, and not worry about some inevitable overlap in between.  While I don't think the world wants to know about my holiday plans and (occaisional) pub quiz wins, my friends do.  Likewise I want to share my thoughts on libraries, my course and conferences in the public sphere.  That way I can also keep my spam at zero on my personal feed.  Using tweetie for mac or twibble, managing two accounts is also simple, so all in all it seems like a good time to be doing this, particularly as I'll be balancing two different information related activities (work and uni) and continuing my training and development.  I'll share my new twitter persona when I create it, and it will likely correspond to my next blog (which will not be on blogger - how crap is this?) but more on that for thing 23.

Beyond my window

Not far away from my window is a big mast.

By

R/DV/RS (attribution license)

rising above the trees, and giving the impression HG Wells fiction is actually real and London has been invaded by contraptions from Mars. 

This is in fact the ghostly home of the BBC

By Matt From London (attribution license)

Alexandra Palace was originally built as a North London 'People's Palace' very much like Crystal Palace south of the river and opened in 1863.  It became the BBC's home in 1936.  While no production takes place there any more, the antenna does still broadcast to your radio (though probably not your TV anymore).

While the Palace is in a sad state of repair, it still has wonderful palm houses and hosts concerts.  Sometimes there are fireworks.

By wwarby (attribution license)

It's a comforting sight when I go past it on the train or see it from my window and it makes me feel at home. 

Flickr has all sorts of pictures, and with CC attribution licenses you don't worry about breaking the law.  It may take a little longer to find what you want than a google image search, but it gives you piece of mind and spreads willing photographers work to audiences who wouldn't otherwise see it.

Show your Meta-l

Zuula is very good.  I like the way that the site recognises that Google will probably give the best results, and then there are additional tabs to see results that Google did not find from Bing, then Yahoo and then all sorts of other search engines that I had never heard of.  Unlike Dogpile (what an unpleasant name) and Metacrawler, Zuula shows you explicitly what Google found and then what other search providers found on top of that.  Dogpile and Metacrawler just give you a heap of information from all of the big search engines.  I wasn't keen on Dogpile or Metacrawler, the interface is poor on both and they were more like Mama than anything else I've used recently with 'Obama' and 'Wheel of Fortune' featuring as wholly random, poor suggested searches...again (see yesterday's post).

Search algorithms are fascinating.

I hope that library school will shed some light onto how retrieval occurs, though I'm quite sure that much of it would pass me by (UCL is quite traditional so I'm not holding my breath in any case).  What I will learn is how to use search tools most effectively and how to pass on that expertise.  In my next job I will be using databases a lot, and effectively searching will be essential.  In my current job I search extensively through different online catalogues and repositories to find information from UK and international institutions for interlibrary loan.  Searching really makes you realise how important grammar is in your search, how refined terms are so much more effective and that small differences in your search terms have massive consequences for your results.

Any online search engine will find results.  What's important is to find quality results and here the search engine makes all the difference.  I still think Google is the best content finder, and will continue to default to that.  However meta search engines have opened my eyes and I will certainly go to Zuula in the next instance.

Refining your search and being specific is the most important thing.  I find it really interesting that on Zuula I searched for my name and result no.3 was my last.fm account (I actually forget it's there, I rarely use it and have never had it synced to itunes) and my username on last.fm is the same as my twitter name.  I then searched for my twitter name and Google only found my last.fm profile as result no.19.  I think this just goes to show that you really need to look closely at your results and not just assume that the best result is at the top of the list.

We also shouldn't be too reliant on search engines.  When you're looking for information for an essay you would look first on the library catalogue (search engine, by analogy) and will find useful results.  However, these results will not exclusively point you towards the best content, use of bibliographies from the books and articles you use (tags, links on websites, by analogy) will also play their part.  Good internet research cannot be confined to Google; there's so much more beyond.

Googling/Binging/Yahooing/Mamaing

Google is the great search engine of our time; the word has seamlessly entered our vocabulary and the site is so important in our daily lives that it's hard to remember that it's just a private company based in California.  In an entirely anecdotal study I will compare Google with three rivals: Bing, Yahoo and Mama.  My search term for all of the search engines was "2011 stirling prize" (referring to the RIBA Stirling Prize 2011, the shortlist can be found here).  Since it's a prize organised by the RIBA, I was anticipating that my search would bring up a link to their website because that is the official website of the Stirling Prize.

1.  Google

I like the way that on Google there are quick links to refine search results for content within specific time frames and to switch to different searches for different types of content (image, map etc.)  The RIBA website comes top of the list.

2. Bing

Bizarrely Bing doesn't bring up the RIBA as the top result.  The official site actually isn't on the first, second or third page of results (after that I got bored and googled instead).  Coupled with not meeting my expectation it also has a silly name.  Again, you can refine results by date and even turn on search history without having to do an advanced search.

3. Yahoo

Yahoo doesn't have the same quality interface of the first two engines.  This one has a sponsored link (well, they need to make money somehow, I suppose) and presumably the links on the left have sponsored the site too.  Vimeo, The Guardian and Telegraph are a slightly random collection of sites to refine the results by, and once again the RIBA site is not at the top of the list.  Just like Bing, it really struggles to find the RIBA site.

4. Mama
I used to use Mama when I was at school, because the concept of the name, the tag line, the picture all appealed to my 15 year old persona.  Here's what Mama looks like:

Oh dear.  Mama is the most blatantly commercial of my straw poll.  The top links are all sponsored sites and there are no quick refinement options on screen.  The search suggestions are poor, containing either 2011 or prize 'has Obama earned Nobel prize' and 'wheel of fortune 2011' among them...

I told you this wouldn't be very scientific.

I should go a little more in depth.  Let's look at advanced search options, which for in proper internet research is essential.  Mama scores nil point: there is no advanced search option.  I think Mama's had her day.  Bing has options to add search terms, search specific domains, web pages from particular countries and particular languages.  I don't like the look of the advanced search box, though, which allows you to make individual changes to your search one at a time, rather than filling out one large web form as on Yahoo and Google.  All of these search engines essentially have the same advanced search options though.  You can helpfully remove results that contain unwanted words and add exact phrases that you require.  Searching "Simpson family" but excluding Homer and Bart brings up interesting genealogical results.

My conclusion has to be that any of these large, reputable search engines do much the same thing.  I think Google has rightfully earned the reputation it has, though.  I am instinctively drawn to it, because it has a user friendly interface and tends to bring up the better option first time.  Performing an advanced search on Bing is less intuitive than Google, and Yahoo tends to have too many sponsored links (though google isn't perfect either).  Yahoo is also too purple.  Google also has no rival when it comes to the Google Doodle, which like Wikipedia's featured article, is a daily internet delight.

Podcasting

Urban dictionary has many faults, but also many virtues and can help pass the time on a rainy afternoon.  It tells me that the word Podcast is derrived thus:

Short for: Personal On Demand broadCast are audio files you can download into any MP3 player or computer. These audio files are broadcasted over the Internet automatically to subscribers of specific podcast channels.

Thanks for that, although I think the past participle of 'broadcast' is just 'broadcast'.  I like the idea that pod stands for something, although I'm not wholly convinced it doesn't have something to do with Steve Jobs' seemingly existential music playing device. 

I've only ever used podcasts that are either radio 4 programmes (taking after my mother here...she downloads The Archers' omnibus every week to listen to in the car...) and foreign language podcasts to aid my attempts to learn Dutch.  They're great, but they can bombard you a little too much.  This is the irritation with many RSS feeds, you simply don't have time to keep up.  I cancelled my today programme podcasts because I was swamped and heard a fair amount live as I got ready for university each day and had the internet to read up on the rest.

The term seems to be used more loosely to refer to any MP3 download that is either spoken word (but not audiobook) or home made.  It's not a podcast unless it automatically starts to synch (or could do using the right technology like itunes).  I will check out the British Library podcasts, I love their blogs and perhaps could listen to this in the morning sometimes on my way to work.  As for individual universities - well I'd be interested to see what their download stats were like and then whether those people ever listened to them.  It's a neat idea, but when I was/will be a student I know I have better things to do with my time!

How do podcasts fit into web 2.0?  Well it's sharing, it's multimedia but it's not interactive.  Unlike youtube where you can comment and have debate about video content, in the podcast world it is entirely one way traffic.  What'll be interested to see is if anyone finds a way to make podcasting more collaborative.  It's a blue sky thought, I have no suggestion or answer.  The internet's full of clever people who come up with innovative concepts, so we'll just have to see.

For now podcasting is basically subscription radio (at least on the BBC), which in an age of constant backlash against the license fee, greatly unsettles me.  All it would take would be a small charge per download and then...

"YouTube if you want to"

- wrote Hazel Blears to Gordon Brown after she very publicly resigned from his cabinet.  She went on to say

But it's no substitute for knocking on doors or setting up a stall in the town centre.

Now, libraries and politics tend to mix quite well, but politics and the internet is normally thoroughly divisive/exasperating/not worth it, especially on this particular blog, so the politics of this example is not going any further.  What I wanted to note was this very famous example of criticism of YouTube as one-way traffic of communication.  You can't ask YouTube and you can't get a tailored service, YouTube gives information on what the creator wanted to give information about.

In libraries, this is very useful.  Imagine walking into the library to photocopy for the first time and being able to watch an explanation of how to buy credit and use the machine on your smartphone or tablet.  Similarly, imagine watching videos about your library's classification system to make it easier to find a book.  This is really useful, but when it comes to 'why do I have that library fine' you really need to talk to someone in person.  Video technology certainly does have a role to play, although it is easy when preparing to make a video to view all users as homogeneous.  In reality there are numerous specific factors that will alter every users library experience. 

For information literacy, specifically advice on finding, using, digesting, referencing information effectively, videos can be very helpful.  This video (on 23thingscity blog)



is absolutely superb.  But why?  Well, I'm inclined to say its because of the production values.  It is exceptionally well made, and is more authoritative as a result.  Unless you make your video deeply ironic, or take off a 70's kids TV show it just looks a bit lame.  Any library that wants to invest in making videos that are engaging and informative need to seriously consider the quality of the sound and the images.  If the sound is poor then why not use slideshare and upload a presentation.  If the images are no good then why not make a podcast?  Both have to work together and be high quality to make your library look professional; it's not about staff having fun making the thing, its about the end user.

I really like this video, the music reminds me of Pinny's House, but I'm left wishing she had gone to more effort to make the text legible and didn't have the tacky end.  If she'd perfected the video it would work so very much better.



One of the things I love about librarians is their drive to be excellent, to learn how to do new things, and their ability to stay one step ahead, and a lot of librarians I know would make fantastic videos.  To those I hope they do, and use these videos as a dynamic presentation tool both online and included as part of their training sessions.  To those who can't YouTube, then I advise that they simply stick to the presentation.  In either case the training session is still key, because videos about information literacy are bound to throw up some quite specific questions for users who are digesting the information and making it applicable to them.

Wikibiccie

Coutesy of Pen Waggener

Wikibiccie would be a site devoted to biscuits.  It would be a truly encyclopaedic place to learn about every conceivable tea-time crunchy treat (cakes excluded, I'm afraid).  You would even be able to go to some far flung land, discover a tasty treat and add an entry.  If you hold invaluable resources to add to the age-old Jaffa Cake debate, which was always bound to be controversial, you can share them with the people who want to know.  Unfortunately for all users of the world wide web, wikibiccie is not a reality.  It's a fantastic idea that I just made up (though I think it has potential - watch out when I learn HTML at library school!)

What would tell you that wikibiccie allowed you to add your own biscuit entries and edit other peoples?  One word: wiki.  It has become a universal expression of interactive publication.  Oxford English Dictionary defines 'wiki' it as

a website or database developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content.

It is a way of publishing material that utilises the perceived wisdom that more heads are better than one.  The best possible content will arise through a collaborative community of authors who can add, edit, delete, flag and insert additional sources.  On this blog I can publish an outrageous lie:

The 23thingscity project has been running since June 1972.*

All you can do is comment and tell me I'm wrong.  If this was a Wiki you could actively participate and change that defect.  You would be improving the quality of this blog, which really demonstrates that wikis are more useful than blogs.  The revisions are also open to be viewed, so that major alterations are glaringly obvious.  This time trail can be very useful when assessing the quality and reliability of the source.

If you have ever edited Wikipedia then you'll know there are many tags to navigate in order to format the wiki correctly, which can be learnt quite easily but takes some thought when you first get started.  The gift of many other wikis, such as UK Library Blogs, is that they are much simpler - writing a wiki is just like word processing.  I have added my blog to their list.

*the correction to this outrageous lie would be that 23thingscity began in June 2011.

Share and share alike

Just a test

View more presentations from OliverRobert.

'Just a test' is probably the most boring presentation...ever. As the name suggests it is just a test so don't worry 23thingsadmin/information literacy guru, I've not gone completely mad.  I just wanted to create a SlideShare account, which required me to make a quick PowerPoint to upload as a test so that I knew what the website was like (I used a few of the images from my previous Prezi - see below).

At first glance I hadn't realised what slideshare was.  I thought it was an online PowerPoint-a-like, like a more static Prezi.  On closer inspection I discover that it is actually a presentation sharing website, a simple but excellent idea.  Once you upload a presentation to the site, you control whether you share publicly or privately and you choose whether to allow others to download your presentation or not.  Others can comment, follow your presentation uploads using RSS and you have a single profile holding your archived presentations, each one tagged for ease of searching.  To view presentations you don't even need to register, and if you do register and upload it's incredibly intuitive.  This is a simple innovation for Microsoft's well loved PowerPoint programme: it creates the potential to share presentations, a potential only possible in this way through social media.

What is the application of SlideShare?  In an academic setting (ie a university class) this tool would probably be surplus to requirements, because presentations can already be uploaded and shared through the institutional VLE, but in other settings this is a really useful concept.  Conference presentations can be shared on SlideShare, without hundreds of paper handouts being printed.  University students can use it for group work without having to be physically together: when working on a presentation they can share, download, edit and re-upload it remotely.

Slideshare supplements Prezi perfectly.  Prezi is both a zooming presentation creator, and a zooming presentation sharer because all prezi's are on the site and (with public settings) are viewable to anyone.  SlideShare allows all other presentations to be viewable to anyone (PowerPoints, Google Docs and even PDF's).  Together, they allow any currently conceivable presentation to be sharable, downloadable, able to be viewed multiple times and therefore make presentations much more flexible (and I'd say useful) than presentations have ever been before.

Drum roll...

Prezi is great.  It allows you to create a really different type of presentation from PowerPoint or Slideshare.  Since it's currently a novelty presentation tool, I suspect as time goes on we'll all calm down a bit and find them a bit mundane.  There's nothing about prezi that makes it better, but an engaging presentation is a successful one.  For now, however, they are hot!

I do have some criticisms though.  Like Frankenstein's monster it sometimes seems to have a life of its own.  We all know the saying about the bad workman blaming his tools, and I'm sure that's what I am about to do, but it's not always the most intuitive thing to use.

1. I don't understand the lack of spell check.  This is a reckless assumption that we can spell, and frankly it's not one of my key strengths.  It came as a surprise to me when my boyfriend pointed out that I had the word oppountiy (opportunity) in my presentation.  When you are creating a presentation for other people to take information away from, the need for accuracy is even greater. 

2. I don't see the sense in a lack of standardised text sizes.  In a couple of instances I created two text boxes for one frame and found that it was ACTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE to get both blocks of text the same size.  Who's crazy idea was that?

The great drawback of Prezi is that it takes a long time.  I found the information on the website very useful, the videos explaining how to use (the strangely named) 'Zebra' were really helpful.  Actually getting down to learning, however, is very much trial and error.  I discovered that creating a plan on paper of the route helps and avoids too much nauseating zooming and gave my presentation coherence.

The pressure to make a good prezi is phenomenal because they are still a novelty, and the brave presenters who are putting them out on the internet are good at using this type of tool.  Mine is far from perfect, it has room for improvement and any input on how I could make it better would be welcome.  I will happily update this. 

For now, though, without further ado, I present my offering.  I hope anyone wanting to be a trainee, or my replacement trainee on September 1st at City will find this a valuable thing to watch.

Traineeship on Prezi