The end is where we start from

This is it, the end of 23 Things Oxford and the final posts are starting to pop up on many blogs.   I've been enjoying reading people's thoughts on the programme now that they have finished and seeing what they have found useful or not so much.   My aims with the programme for myself were a little different from most of the participants; as one of the team organising the course I was mostly looking forward to seeing how other people got on with the tasks and with their ventures into web 2.0.   I've found it really rewarding to see so many people making so much progress and enjoying discovering new things that could really help them personally, professionally, and in their libraries.   As a web 2.0 enthusiast myself it's great to see other people 'getting it'!   I've particularly loved hearing people say that their confidence with internet tools has grown and their fears dissipated by discovering both that it's really not difficult and that it's fun.   And I think it's fabulous that the 23 Things programme has turned out to be a real shared learning experience, with people talking about it to each other with real enthusiasm and helping each other along the way.

It's also been really interesting to read people's thoughts, both positive and negative, about the value of these tools, and I've often been prompted to think further about my own use of them in response.   This, combined with writing my own blog posts, has meant that 23 Things has really forced me to reflect on what I have done, still do, and could do in the future with web 2.0.   It's prompted me to do some much-needed housekeeping: I've given the VHL blog a makeover, pruned my feeds, and played around more with our Facebook page.  I've also been prompted to return to some tools I had tried out but abandoned in the past (iGoogle mainly, not that I'll probably ever really be a convert, despite completely understanding how useful it should be!), and been exposed to some new ones too - Picnik, LinkedIn, and ThinkFree.   I have to say I'm not sure how much my web 2.0 usage is likely to change from the programme - I think that having been playing around with web 2.0 tools for a good few years now I'm fairly settled in what I find useful and why - but it's always good to be challenged and to be prompted to reflect in this way.

Needless to say I'm a huge fan of what web 2.0 tools can do for both people and libraries.   They make it easier for us to find our way through the vast quantities of information on the internet, easier for us to talk to other people and to share bits of information that we find with each other.   This is all so completely up the librarian's street that it just seems odd to me that librarians wouldn't want to embrace these tools!   I'm delighted that I've been able to be part of running this 23 Things programme and I'm really looking forward to seeing what more web 2.0 services are introduced in Oxford libraries as a result of it now.

A widget it has got

In my opinion, widgets are one of the best and most transformative things about web 2.0.   It's fantastic that you can take little chunks of websites and put them in other sites, and bring things together so easily.   Considering one of the potential pitfalls of using these sites is 'spreading yourself too thin', it's very important to build prominent links between all your online profiles, and widgets allow you to do this in a nice, visually appealing way.   I populate the sidebars of all my blogs with widgets to everything else that I think is related and that I want on the page - as Penny said in her introductory post on the main blog it allows you to make a 'you central' - a one-stop shop for all your web content.   It's one of the things I really like about the VHL blog as opposed to our website, that it's so easy for me to do this.  And as it is just a case of copying and pasting code that the sites generate for you, you really don't need any technical knowledge at all to create a really rich and dynamic site.   In short, widgets plus RSS feeds are the answer to the question: how do you find time to keep all these different things updated?  

I've been adding various widgets (Flickr, delicious, Twitter) to my blog as I've gone along, so this Thing was really done well in advance.   I haven't been quite so on the ball with adding things to my iGoogle page (probably because, no matter how many times I try, I never quite get converted to using iGoogle), but delicious was one of the gadgets I chose back in week one.

Why then should the mind not climb right out?

I was both impressed and unimpressed with Thinkfree Office.  I haven't come across it before, and it's always good to discover new alternatives to applications.   Compared to Google Docs it has a lot of nice functionality - it looks almost exactly like MS Office, it offers you all the same choice of fonts as you have installed on your machine, and can save directly as PDFs too.  And the HTML notes function is nice, although I do wonder whether it's not a little bit behind the curve, seeing as there are so many web 2.0 tools which make publishing content to the internet so easy already - why would you use their travel template when you could blog instead for example?   However, as many people have said already, it's just so slow!   It took an absolute age to load up the first time, and despite assurances that that was just because it was the first time, it was still not exactly speedy when opening things the second and third and fourth times.   And if that wasn't offputting enough, it was even sluggish when actually using the application, leaving me to have to wait for it to catch up with my typing.   I also found the interface rather unintuitive.   To be honest, these are dealbreakers for me.   It's nice to know that if I do get frustrated with the limited functionality of Google Docs, particularly where presentation is concerned, there is an alternative, but I can't see me using it a lot unless I really do need to overcome that limitation and am prepared to deal with it's slowness.

Paper's for wimps

This may be becoming a bit of a theme, but I'm a big fan of Google Docs.  So much so that when I got my new laptop at home last year I decided not to fork out to buy MS Office, and just use Google Docs for everything.  That isn't to say I'd advocate abandoning it entirely in all circumstances, but to be honest I found I was using Google Docs far more than MS Office for most things at home anyway.   I love that if I use Google Docs, I have access to the document no matter what computer I'm using, I love Google Docs as a filestore (now if I'm giving a presentation I usually upload the file to Google Docs as well as putting it on my USB drive to take with me - that way if I forget the drive I've got the online back-up), I love the sharing function for collaborative documents (so much better than emailing things back and forth the whole time), and I love the plethora of file formats supported (exporting as PDF is a particular favourite, much the easiest way I've found to do this without Acrobat or similar).   I don't use them so much generally, but I love the forms as a really easy way to create quick questionnaires and get the results automatically delivered into spreadsheet form for you - this is exactly how we as the 23 Things team dealt with you all registering your blogs, and you'll register completion as well via a Google form at the end of the programme.

As I said, I use this all the time, but I have just now used it to create our Saturday staffing rota for Trinity Term and shared it with the staff concerned, which satisfies Thing 19 nicely.

It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

As I said in my introductory post on the main blog, I think Wikipedia is the best example of what the 'wisdom of crowds' can achieve.  Say what you like about the merits or otherwise of the site, it can't be argued that it's very existence is hugely impressive.   That that many people have contributed so much time and knowledge for free, and have produced such a vast repository of information that is all freely available, is just incredible and wonderful, I think.   And by and large, Wikipedia is a fantastic resource.  It works very hard to ensure that it is as error-free and neutral as any such project could be, and I think the onus has to be on users as well to recognise that Wikipedia should be used with caution.   Like many 23ers I use it a lot, and to be honest for finding out basic information it's my first stop, even ahead of Google.   I think the practice of warning students off Wikipedia is not helpful - as with so much on the web, you should be taught to understand the tool, not be blanket-banned from using it, and that's always the approach I would take.   Interestingly the first person to tell me about Wikipedia was my tutor on the information skills module at library school!   But for any serious research you should always double-check elsewhere - that's just good research practice, regardless.

I have rarely ventured into the world of Wikipedia editing though, for no other reason than that I rarely find an article I feel strongly that I could improve.   Occasionally I find stubs or missing articles for something I do know a bit about, but it always seems too much effort at the time to write something then and there, and then of course I forget about it!   For this Thing though I have made a couple of minor additions to the American Studies in Britain page, adding that Oxford now has the US Congressional Serial Set (one of our new eresources) and that we have the Early American Imprints too, which was listed as only at the BL, NLS and Cambridge.

Quick, now, here, now, always

I think wikis are terribly useful, and along with blogs are a great example of web 2.0 making it easy for anyone to create websites and web content.   Using a wiki site means you can get a site up and running in minutes, and they are (mostly) fairly intuitive to navigate and put together.   Obviously for groups they are great, as you can all contribute, and host discussions etc within the site - as I said on the introductory post for this week, they are excellent whenever a 'quick and dirty' site is needed that multiple people can edit (without any particular 'web editing skills').   I set up the Oxford web 2.0 wiki exactly for this purpose back in December 2007 when web 2.0 stuff in the libraries was in its infancy and people were first starting to want to know what it all was and how it could be useful for us.   Since then the site has grown with the help of all sorts of other Oxford librarians, and rather like a garden it's got rather messy and needed weeding and tidying up at times.   But it's been a useful site to have as a repository of information relating to web 2.0 in Oxford libraries, as a central place to point people to.   The most useful part I think is the case studies section, and it's been great to see that grow as more libraries have started using web 2.0 sites.   Hopefully after 23 Things more libraries will be inspired to start web 2.0ing and it'd be really helpful if anyone who does can share their experiences here.

For this Thing, I have updated the VHL page, and also subscribed to the RSS feed of the updates for the site so I can be alerted to the changes other 23ers are making as the week goes on (and afterwards).

It's about flocking. And togetherness.

Like many of the Things, I have multiple twitter accounts that I maintain for different purposes.   As with my blogs and delicious, I have both personal and 'professional' accounts, as well as one for the library and one for the Rothermere American Institute.   My personal one I use in a manner somewhere in between Facebook status update and blog - more stream-of-consciousness than both - as well as for sharing links to interesting things.  My 'professional' one is more passive - I use it to follow library/web-related tweeters of interest, and when I tweet myself it tends to be passing things on, retweeting or sharing links.   The VHL and RAI twitter accounts are used much like our Facebook pages, as another place to disseminate news, and our blog feed posts there automatically too via a third party application called twitterfeed.   I also make use of the 'send to twitter' function from delicious to tweet our new saved websites, and keep an eye on the twitter streams of other Oxford libraries in case they post things of interest to retweet (and save me writing the same thing out myself!).   In this way, with our blog and its RSS feed pointing to our website and Facebook page and Twitter, I can write one single news update and have it publish in a variety of locations, all automatically, so that our readers can receive that news in whatever way suits them best.   As Emma said in her 23 Things post about social networking, with no duplication of effort, you get maximum reach via duplication of content.

As a consumer, I find with twitter that it is like the internet at high speed - so much coming in so fast and if you're away from it for any period of time the amount to catch up on is overwhelming.   However I don't view twitter as for anything other than the up-to-the-minute ephemeral things, and don't worry if I miss stuff, unlike my RSS feeds.   Just like RSS feeds though, I've found you need to be selective about who you follow to avoid getting deluged, and as most sites now offer both newsfeeds and twitter feeds you can choose which way you want to keep up with any individual site.   It's also a great way to get a digested overview of what's going on, and in many cases now I first hear of breaking news stories via the twitter chat rather than conventional means - I was looking at pictures of the Sydney dust storm in September via twitter the night before there was any mention of it on the BBC, for example.   This is where hashtags really come into their own, along with the trending topics, and you can get a real sense of community or shared experience if you 'watch' unfolding events on twitter.   I remain rather baffled though as to why Justin Bieber seems to be almost permanently trending...  Anyway, I've subscribed to the #ox23 hashtag in Tweetdeck (which I use to manage my multiple twitter accounts) and am enjoying seeing all the 23ers popping up and in many cases taking their first steps into the twitterverse.