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.  

Think it's too late to pitch a tent?

I'm feeling a strange wariness towards LinkedIn.   It could be that the name of it reminds me of an episode of Stargate, where a community of people are living in an ever shrinking biodome on a toxic planet, and are permanently connected via a direct neural interface to something called the link which, as well as providing them with access to information, also revises their memories so that they never know that it's gradually sending people off outside to their deaths.  So it was with some completely unwarranted trepidation that I signed up to the site and started poking around.   I'd heard of LinkedIn before, and knew it to be a professional networking site - the non-social version of Facebook, if you like, but had never explored it myself.   I can entirely see the point of the site - I like to keep my personal and professional identities largely separate so to have a place where you can get the benefit of social networking but also be sure that your holiday snaps and party photos are well out of the way (not to mention all the insight into your life outside of work) is a great idea.   However I'm not certain I'm entirely comfortable with the public-ness of LinkedIn.   It really does seem very geared towards networking in terms of finding professional opportunities, and pushes you to almost advertise yourself on the web, which is not really what I want to do.   The edit profile tab just scares me away with all the big green and blue 'add this information here!' exhortations, far more in your face than Facebook (from what I remember, anyway).   I talked about privacy settings in my post about Facebook, and how I think it's really important to have control over what information you put out on the web, so the first place I went was the 'edit my public profile' and unticked most of the options, just the same as how on Facebook I've closed everything down to friends-only.   To be honest, I haven't put much information on LinkedIn anyway, and what is there is what I'd consider to be public information - my name, work email and where I work.   Perhaps I'm oddly inconsistent where the web is concerned, as I've merrily put all sorts of information about myself all over the place, but I like to do so on my own terms and for a reason, rather than just in a 'look at me' way.   It's one of the reasons I deeply disliked Myspace (which I was on, for a while), and I think sites that have this approach do turn people off.   I've heard many complaints from people about web 2.0 in general that it's all about broadcasting or advertising yourself, which I don't actually think is right, and it's certainly not what attracts me to it personally.   For my library, sure, I want to put us out there and broadcast and advertise as widely as possible, but I want to market my library!   I don't want to market myself - I just want to keep in touch with people and share things and find information and contribute to the global conversation, almost, and I love how there are so many sites that make that possible and easy now.   Admittedly, having only just signed up, I haven't explored LinkedIn fully, but I think if it sold itself more on that aspect (as it does have groups, for example) rather than on 'look at me, here's what I can do, give me a job' aspect I'd find it more appealing.

Textbook enigmatic

Like many people, I've been on Facebook for several years now and use it a lot.   I love the way it enables me to keep in contact with so many different people so easily - I have a lot of friends living elsewhere around the world and Facebook means that when friends move away it's much easier to keep in touch.   I'm also in touch a lot more with extended family than I ever used to be through it - even my Nan is on there and she loves keeping up-to-date with all her grandchildren and nieces and nephews (and great-nieces and nephews!) through it.   I particularly like that it enables you to see a lot of the more mundane things - the kind of things that you might not bother to explicitly write about it in an email or tell someone over the phone - and so you feel closer to people as a result.   The flipside of this of course is that there's an awful lot of people who you end up knowing far more about than you might necessarily want them to, by virtue of being friends with them - and of course the definition of a friend on Facebook is not necessarily the same as a friend in the real world!   Facebook comes in for a lot of criticism, at times, sometimes fairly, sometimes not, but in many ways its problems and benefits really reflect its users - it all depends on how people use the site.   One of the most important things I think for anyone on there is to remember that you control your information - it's the usual rule for the internet multiplied.   Don't put things on Facebook that you aren't comfortable with having people see, and make sure that you adjust your privacy settings.   I'm always quite cautious about what is publicly available, and have set all my privacy settings to friends-only so that only people I approve can see things.   I also take care of the problem of the 'friend' who's really only an acquaintance (or the old school friends getting back in touch out of curiosity) by using the lists feature and customising what different categories of friends can and can't see.   Facebook is a fantastic tool, but like everything, it should be used with thought and care!

Libraries and Facebook

Facebook was the first web 2.0 tool I tried out for the VHL, and at the time I set us up, the page function had yet to be introduced.   I therefore made a group for the library, thinking how great it would be to be able to get readers to communicate with us through the site, and with each other too and discuss library things.   A few people joined, but nothing ever came of it.   This was my first lesson in how the participatory ideal of web 2.0 just doesn't necessarily work in practice - expecting users to contribute just leads to disappointment when they don't!   However, soon after that Facebook introduced the pages feature, and so I moved the VHL over to that (although the group does still exist, just unused).   I think the pages feature has had the effect of changing people's expectations of what is on Facebook and what it's for.   It was quite a big concern a few years ago that organisations going onto Facebook were somehow intruding on a personal space, and I think that was pretty valid with the original set-up of the site.   However pages have created a space for the corporate within the site - there used to be a link right on the homepage saying 'create a page for your business or organisation' (or something along those lines - it's not there any more!).   And as more organisations have set up pages I think people have stopped viewing them as an intrusion onto a personal space and have started expecting, almost, that they'll be there.   I think there's an increasing expectation that everyone and everything is on Facebook now, and if nothing else I think this is why it is important for libraries to be there too.

Looking around at library Facebook pages, the most common approach is to basically replicate what's on your website or elsewhere, and this is really all that I've done with the VHL page.   I view it as another place to push out our news and updates (our blog feed imports directly to the page) and to have our basic information listed - contact details, opening hours etc.   I know that people who sign up to be fans get our news through the site, in the same way as anyone subscribing to our blog feed or following us on Twitter does.   We also have a SOLO search box on there - as adapted by Jen at the EFL (the code is on the web 2.0 wiki if anyone wants to use it for their library page), which again is just giving people another place to access the library.   It's therefore low-maintenance and an easy way to expand your web 'reach' without too much effort.   Looking around at other library pages, this approach seems quite common, and I think it's perfectly fine!    There are some really impressive Facebook pages around for libraries, with a lot of extras - Manchester Library & Information Service is a particularly great example, but for all the customisation they've put in, they still seem to be using it in much the same way as we are ours.

Giant worms. Huge.

I think YouTube is fantastic - one of the things on the web that has really changed how we do things.   I know copyright infringement is rife (and an ongoing source of controversy), but how amazing is it that you can find clips of almost anything and everything that's ever been on screen?   Technology like the BBC iPlayer and its like mean that you never actually need to miss anything on the TV if you're otherwise occupied, but it's YouTube that fills all those odd little niches and provides instant satisfaction.  And this is how I mostly use YouTube, to see things that I missed first time round, that I wouldn't otherwise have seen, or that I did see and want to see again.   I'm a strongly passive YouTube user - I didn't have an account myself until just before Christmas and never comment (YouTube comments are generally some of the worst on the internet, to be honest), and I also use it almost exclusively to view stuff that technically shouldn't be there in terms of copyright.  

Copyright on the web is a hugely complex and controversial area, and YouTube is right on the front lines.   I'm not going to go into detail about the ins and outs of it here (and I'm not an expert by any means!), but where YouTube is concerned it's been interesting to see the two approaches being played out in changes to the site.   On the one hand you have the copyright holders that are cracking down hard on any infringement (or perceived infringement) - there was a huge fuss last year when YouTube went through and removed the audio from thousands of fan videos, essentially rendering them pointless.   Now when you upload videos it will run automatic checks on the audio and may block the video if it discovers copyright infringement, depending on whether the copyright holder demands this.   (Of course the usual response by the person who made the video is to try another, less restrictive, site, like Photobucket or Bam Vid Vault, or will just share via a filesharing site like Sendspace or Mediafire, so it doesn't actually stop the videos from being made and distributed!)   But not everyone is taking this approach - many such videos now have pop-up adverts along the bottom which tell you the song that is used and link you to iTunes to buy a copy - thus using the illegitimate use to generate sales.   The other way in which copyright holders are working with YouTube is to put content up themselves, figuring that if they make things (or parts of things) freely available it might reduce the amount of stuff put up by other people (and YouTube allows some corporate users to put up longer clips than the standard 10 minute limit).   The Monty Python channel is a great example of this - they explicitly say so (and check out the trailer for the Not the Messiah film if you're there - my Dad's in it!).  

Anyway, having said I wasn't going to say much about YouTube and copyright I seem to have done so!   If anyone wants to read more about copyright and the web though I can recommend the writings of Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig in particular - their two recent books are both in the Staff Library and also available as free PDF downloads, so take a look. 

• Cory Doctorow: Content
• Lawrence Lessig: Remix 

OK. Enough about copyright.  Back to the original point of this Thing.

Much like the rest of the web, YouTube has enormous potential for libraries and educational institutions, as well as students and researchers, as long as you are able to apply those critical faculties and sort through the haystack in order to find the needles you want.   YouTubeEDU is YouTube's equivalent of iTunesU for podcasts, and just like iTunesU there's some really amazing stuff there when you browse through.   However I want to highlight an excellent library-specific example, again from the Library of Congress.   They use their YouTube channel not only to put up information about the library and videos of their events, but also for video footage from their archives, making these clips more widely available in just the same way as they do photgraphs via the Flickr Commons.   Again they also put up a lot of this kind of material on their own site, but YouTube makes them more visible on the web and more easily findable by people that might not otherwise go to their site, as well as presenting material in a more accessible and user-friendly way.




Before I go, a quick note about subscribing to YouTube channels.   At first glance, YouTube only seems to let you do this via your log-in to the site, but you can do so via RSS - fellow 23er CybrarianBeta has blogged about how to do this if anyone is like me and would prefer to subscribe in Google Reader.

Kree!

Podcasts are one of those things that I like the idea of very much but never seem to get around to using!   I think it's mainly because I've never got on well with things I just have to listen to (other than music) - I don't like spoken radio, don't like audiobooks, and therefore also struggle with podcasts.   I find my attention wanders and I start doing other things and then miss half of what is said so I never usually bother.   Which is a shame because there's some fantastic stuff out there to listen to, but I guess it's just not my medium.

Anyway, personal foibles aside, podcasting is a great way to get audio content out, and as with all these web 2.0 tools there are so many different ways you can make use of the technology.   From a library point of view I think they are great for user education, obviously, but also for things like audio tours - I heard a good talk at the OULS Exchange of Experience day in 2008 about the podcasted induction tour for Oxford Brookes library, for example.   But where I think podcasts are really great is for more interesting things like talks and lectures - at the Rothermere American Institute we've been starting to record some of the talks and seminars that take place in order to reach a wider audience (our podcast of Professor Robin Kelley's Harmsworth Lecture in November was in the popular downloads section for a while), and this is of course where Oxford's venture into iTunesU is so fantastic.   I was also particularly excited to discover that Oxford is now releasing a lot of podcasts with creative commons licences, which I think is brilliant and highly commendable.

Being a non-audio-fan-type-person I haven't ever really subscribed to podcasts much, but for this Thing I've made myself overcome my reticence and looked some out.   I subscribed to the RAI's podcasts via iTunes and my Google Reader, and mooched about some of the other material on iTunesU - some really fantastic stuff and, if you're so minded, you can follow entire courses and lecture series from many universities.   It's an awesome resource - I really should try and get over my dislike of just listening someday!

The secret masters of the Universe

I'm surprised, reading this week's blogs, to find such a lukewarm reception to delicious - I think we as the 23 Things team were expecting this one to be a hit, as we're all big fans of it and also it seems to speak right to librarians' hearts (collect things! classify them! show them to everyone else!).   But I'm getting the impression that a lot of people are a bit unsure about it, and that perhaps not everyone is realising quite what it offers, or why people are so keen on it.

The first thing I'm noticing people asking is why use delicious instead of saving bookmarks in your browser?   My answer to this is that it's not 'instead of' - I still have favourites saved for the sites I go to most frequently, and in many cases don't have these saved on delicious at all.   Delicious, for me, is more like my web library - all the things I've read on the internet that I want to save for future reference, or just in case, or because I don't have time to read them just yet but want to come back to, or just because I thought they were good/interesting/entertaining etc, as well as all the sites that I don't visit that often (and so don't want to have cluttering up my browser bookmarks), but do want to be able to find quickly and easily on occasion.   It's therefore full of individual articles and pages rather than whole sites - links to specific things like YouTube videos, short stories, reviews, comic strips, articles, blog posts, picture galleries, fics, forum posts...  you get the picture.   It's also, as I talked about in my previous post, a really useful discovery tool, but for this kind of thing - not whole sites, but for what is being talked about and produced on the web.   I suppose, to continue the library analogy, it's like my browser bookmarks are my quick reference section, whereas my delicious page is my whole collection.

The idea of delicious as a discovery tool has also perplexed some people, with complaints about volume/quality of information etc.   To be honest, my initial answer to this is 'in what way is this different or worse than Google?', but fellow 23er Laura has addressed this concern excellently in her blog, so I will say no more and refer you to her!

Finally, this week's things have really introduced the idea of tagging on a mass scale, and the concept of folksonomies.   I found this excellent article by Clay Shirky saved by someone with the ox23 tag (via my Google Reader - see what I mean about delicious tags as a resource discovery method?), which explains why classifying the web in a traditional sense doesn't work, but tagging does.   And secondly I'm going to embed a really good presentation here by Tim Spalding (founder of LibraryThing - another site that uses tagging heavily) wherein he explains the benefits that tagging offers as compared to library classification schemes like LCSH.   It's a really thought-provoking talk, and while I'm not going to be a complete traitor to my profession and advocate throwing out LCSH completely, I do think that tagging has a lot to offer library catalogues as an additional feature.   Of course, we have tagging functionality in SOLO, but as both Shirky and Spalding point out, tagging only works if a critical mass can be achieved, and SOLO is nowhere near there yet!

Learning is delightful and delicious

I adore delicious. It is one of my favourite web 2.0 tools, and along with RSS feeds is the one I'd say has definitely changed my life!   I have been maintaining three delicious accounts for over two years now - a personal one which now has getting on for 1000 saved links, a work-related one that I set up to keep track of and share specifically work-related and web 2.0 related things, and finally the VHL's account, for useful links for our readers.   I use the first one all the time, saving anything and everything that I might conceivably ever want to come back to, but it is distinctly designed more for me rather than for sharing with others - I make use of the 'mark as private' feature too so that I can save things there that I'd rather not broadcast to the world.   The other two accounts are designed more for other people, a way to save and share things that I think other people might find useful.

For the library, this has been a particularly useful tool.   There are so many really useful websites and free web resources relating to US Studies and US History in particular, and before I discovered delicious I was trying to build up a links page on our website in order to save some of these for our readers.   It was cumbersome to maintain though as I had to log in to the CMS every time I wanted to add something, and also there were difficulties in deciding how to organise the links and make the list appear manageable and have everything easily findable.   Delicious makes this all really easy - I can save links quickly as and when I come across them, and by using tags I can make that list browsable and break-down-able into smaller lists.   Our tags do need a bit of work - I keep meaning to go in and sort them into bundles but never quite getting round to it.  Perhaps I'll try and do that this week as part of the Things.   I know that the Education Library has made good use of tags to offer lists broken down by course and subject, and that's the kind of thing that delicious does really well.   Another useful feature is of course expanding on the sharing by putting the links elsewhere - our latest links show up in the sidebar of our blog, on our website (although there have been problems in general with getting delicious widgets to display in the CMS and whether they show up or not can be rather hit and miss), and are pushed out to Twitter and via RSS.

Another way in which I find delicious particularly useful is for discovering new content.   As everything saved on delicious (and similar sites) has been done so consciously, social bookmarking sites become a kind of 'best of the web'.  This means that searching delicious can have distinct advantages over searching via Google, particularly if you are looking for something which is likely to have a specific tag.   And of course then you can subscribe to that tag (or to other users if their interests coincide with yours) by RSS and get automatically notified when new things are added.   This is a feature that I use quite a lot as well, and have promoted to people as a good current awareness service.   As part of this week's Things therefore, I've subscribed to the feed for the ox23 tag in my Google Reader.  

I only really use the networks insofar as getting notifications via RSS - as I tend to only visit delicious to find something specific, I'm not going to go and browse my network just to see what's new, but RSS takes care of that for me too.  

All in all, my thoughts on delicious can be summed up as follows: delicious by name, delicious by nature!

Indoors, with waiters and tables

Picnik is a new tool for me, and so this Thing is particularly exciting.   I'm a Photoshop addict, and have spent quite a lot of time over the last few months learning the tools and tricks, and would now consider myself a pretty competent user, but equally I know how unintuitive I found it when starting out.   I know there are a lot of tools around that aim to let you do the same kind of editing and manipulation but in a far more user-friendly way, but hadn't ever really explored any other than the functions on Picasa on my laptop at home.   Picnik seems like a really good option for this kind of tweaking - the way it links directly with Flickr is great, and the editing options are helpfully labelled with actual words rather than the not-so-obvious images you find in the likes of Photoshop and GIMP.   I played around with a couple of the photos I'd uploaded of the VHL, mostly just fixes like sharpening and adjusting colour/saturation/contrast, and also tried out some of the extras like the vignette, soften, Lomo and sepia tools.   I'll have to have a play with some of the wackier options another time!   For me though, much as I'm impressed with what Picnik offers, I don't think it'll tempt me away from my Photoshop.

Time future contained in time past

Georgia oat field? Southern U.S. (LOC)

One of the library-related web 2.0 projects I have been most impressed by in general is the Flickr Commons.   It has been up and running for two years now and contains a vast collection of photographs from libraries and archives all over the world, all made available via Flickr.   It began as a pilot project with the Library of Congress (whose web 2.0 activities are particularly impressive in general), and has since grown to include 32 institutions including the US National Archives, New York Public Library, National Galleries of Scotland, the National Maritime Museum, and LSE Library.   It describes itself as having two aims: to increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and to provide a way for the general public to contribute information and thereby increase the knowledge about the people, places and events in those photos.   I heard a talk from Michelle Springer of the Library of Congress at ALA last summer where she described how participation in the Flickr Commons had benefited the library, including demonstrating how their catalogue records have been enhanced with information contributed by Flickr users. 

I think the Flickr Commons is a fantastic resource, and I've promoted it a bit to readers here at the VHL, as there is so much there for US historians.   I think it's also a wonderful example of how libraries and web 2.0 sites can work together to really promote and increase access to resources, not only to their traditional users but reaching out to a worldwide community of web users.

Slipping and sliding and flickering through dreams

This week's things are right up my street, as I'm a picture addict.   Friends and family find endless amusement in the sheer quantities of photos I am able to take when I have my camera with me (current record is 587 for one week's holiday), and over the last couple of years I've been teaching myself image manipulation software - first GIMP and now Photoshop.   I have accounts on three photosharing websites - Picasa, Photobucket and Flickr - and I use them all for slightly different purposes.   Picasa is my site of choice for bulk uploading of photos to share, as I have the Picasa software on my laptop at home and so uploading there is incredibly easy.   Photobucket I use to store images that I want to post elsewhere individually, on forums or blogs/LiveJournal, or (with a URL shortener) on Twitter.   And Flickr is where I post my 'good' photos, more as a showcase.   I also use Facebook for photo sharing with friends.   Obviously all the sites basically do the same thing, but I think the way that I use them is quite reflective of how they are used in general.

For Thing 7, I'm therefore already well on my way.   The photos I have on Flickr already are a selection of pictures taken on various travels around the UK and the world in the last few years, and I've cropped and touched them up in Photoshop before uploading.   I have given them all a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence which means that I've chosen to permit other people to redistribute and modify my images as long as they credit me, and allow the same conditions when reposting or modifying.   I really approve of Creative Commons licences as a way to choose a less restrictive form of copyright, and as someone who also creates from other people's work I benefit from other people doing the same.   Since putting my photos up on Flickr I've seen my licence used, as I was contacted twice by a company producing free online travel guides asking for permission to include images I'd taken on their website.   These are the images that were used:

Included in Schmap Guide to Washington DC


Included in Schmap Guide to Brisbane

This week, for Thing 7, I have uploaded a few new photos that I took of my library in the snow in January, and added them to a new set to keep them separate from my other photos. I've joined the Ox23 group and added one of my photos to the pool - hopefully later in the week I'll have time to take a few more photos of the VHL and add those too.   I've also had a lot of fun geo-tagging my photos - as most of them were taken on my travels and so I had to zoom all over the world to find the locations to tag them with.

A little tip for when you can't find a feed

In reading quite a few of the other 23 Thinger's blogs this week I've noticed some people bemoaning websites that don't have RSS feeds and therefore cannot be subscribed to.   Well, the good news is, with Google Reader, they can anyway!   Google Reader will create custom feeds for sites that will let you know when there has been an update - all you need to do is type the website address or URL into the 'add a subscription' box, and Google Reader will give you the option to create a custom feed.   Sweet, huh?

The Wire is hungry

I am a big fan of RSS feeds and have no idea how I used to manage without them!   I remember the feeling of utter revelation when they were demonstrated to me, and have enjoyed seeing the exact same expressions of wonder and delight on the faces of other people at various training sessions when the joys of RSS have been revealed to them too.   I love knowing that I'm not going to miss things, and it saves a huge amount of time.  However there are drawbacks too - if you're not careful you can go a bit too nuts with subscribing to everything going, and end up with a severe case of information overload.   Returning to your Google Reader after being away on holiday is every bit as bad as getting back to your email inbox - you feel like you'll never get back on top.  And also like my email inbox, I have long given up the notion that I will ever get to zero.   However, unlike email, you don't actually have to read everything - these are things of interest, rather than something you might need to know or respond to.   The 'mark all as read' button can be your friend, as well as the 'unsubscribe' button.   If you find you are skimming over a feed and never seeing anything you actually want to read, or often marking them all as unread, then perhaps you should just get rid of it completely.   I've learnt that it's vital to be selective in your subscriptions, and I've used some of the time for this week's Things to have a good prune of my feeds.  I've also added the feed for the 23 Things blog, as well as a lot of the participant blogs, so that I can easily keep up with the progress of the programme.  

One of the things I like most about Google Reader is its search function.   I'm very bad at organising things into folders and categories in general (I know, I know, and yet I am a librarian), and tend to prefer to make use of search to find things.   You can search read items as well as unread, and what this means in practice is that you can search the entire archive of a site's feed.   Many has been the time that I knew I read an article on a site, but didn't save it and couldn't find it any more, only to search in Google Reader for it and up it comes, straight away.   Really very useful.

Just how far from the pack have you strayed?

Today I have been taking my turn at adding the blogs registered by participants to the sidebar of the 23 Things blog, and I've been having a good snoop along the way.   I am really impressed and encouraged to see so many people registering and starting out on the 23 Things 'journey' together (excuse the foray into Strictly Come Dancing-esque lingo there).   The enthusiasm with which this has been embraced is wonderful to see - especially having had more than a few fears that the whole thing would flop!   There seems to be a real buzz and excitement about learning something new and giving it a go, and a lot of pride in the achievements so far.   I also love that people seem to be finding it fun, and I'm particularly delighted to see the community feeling that is already developing.   This was one of the real hopes for the programme, that people would help each other along the way.   It's so heartening to see this in action, with people commenting on each others blog posts, and mentioning how they're working with colleagues or how they couldn't do something until a fellow 23er helped them out.   And even away from the blogs I'm getting a real feeling that this has given people something new and fun to talk about.   I think so far, we're achieving all the goals we set out for ourselves - getting people with all sorts of levels of technological knowledge to join in to whatever degree they feel comfortable with, getting people to overcome their fears that web 2.0 is somehow 'difficult', or their assumptions that it's pointless, getting people to share ideas and experiences, and getting a real variety of considered thoughts about both the positives and the negatives of all these web things.   One of the main things I am hoping to get out of the programme personally is to have my own opinions challenged by reading the variety of perspectives from all the web 2.0 'newbies' (and not-so-newbies in some cases) - I think there's often a danger that the librarians and web people who are 'in to' web 2.0 (myself included!) can be guilty of just talking to each other, and therefore getting assumptions reinforced rather than actually thinking afresh and coming up with new ideas.

I was quite nervous about this week, as it is one of 'mine', so there's also quite a hefty dose of relief to see the blogs set up and that the instructions were clearly OK.   I have learnt that my 'assume no knowledge' policy in writing them wasn't always quite assuming little enough for everyone - a few people not knowing about the Paint program for making screenshots when I'd assumed everyone did, for example.   But the aforementioned community spirit seems to have overcome any failings in my instructions for the most part, and I really hope this continues for the rest of the programme.   I'm really very excited now to follow along with the blogs and see how the rest of it unfolds - good luck everyone, and congratulations for all your achievements so far!

I Google You

I've never been a huge fan of start pages.  I like the idea very much - bringing all those bits together in one place like that appeals to me, but somehow, despite setting up several over the years, I've never actually ended up using them much at all and still go to all the individual sites.   It's odd, considering I'm a huge fan of RSS feeds as a way to cut down on visiting websites, but there you go!

Returning to iGoogle for Thing 2, I was impressed with some of the improvements since last time I looked at my page, in particular the huge variety of themes now available and the way you can maximise or click through each gadget and get more information from the links in the left-hand sidebar.   I notice it's gone all social too now, with the possibility of linking up with friends and sharing things, which I guess is not a surprising development, but it is interesting to see how Google is adding this social aspect to its services in the wake of the success of Facebook etc.   I'm not sure whether any of these improvements will overcome my inexplicable lack of enthusiasm for using iGoogle personally, but I'm going to make an extra effort throughout the 23 Things programme and see how I get on.

Thoughts on blogs

Blogs are one of the web 2.0 things that I find most useful, both personally and professionally.   I think they are a great example of a tool that makes something that was previously hard really very easy (publishing on the web), and that can be used in so many ways for so many different purposes.   I have several blogs personally, the most useful of which is a travel blog which means I can share my experiences with friends and family while I'm away, and also then have a record for myself of what I did and saw.   I also used a blog to report on my trip to Chicago last July to attend the ALA conference, which was a really easy way to do this.   For the library, I set up a blog for the VHL back in November 2007, which I use to publish all our news.   It gives me several advantages over the way I used to publish news (manually updating a page on our website):

• Quick and easy to publish, and also to add pictures etc.
• RSS feeds, so that readers can subscribe directly.  And by using Feedburner the RSS feed is converted into an email subscription service too.
  
• RSS feeds also allow me to push the content to other places the VHL has an online presence, namely Facebook, Twitter, and back to our own website.  This means that one piece of news reaches multiple locations, and gives readers a choice of how they keep up-to-date.
• Another page to put information about the library and publicise things like saved links and new accessions.
• News is searchable, and also browsable by tags.
  

This is one way to make use of blogs in libraries, but the thing I love most about blogs is the wide variety of uses to which they can be put.   Blogs really embody the idea of web 2.0 as a tool, and are therefore potentially useful in so many different ways - straightforward news (like the VHL blog), archives of FAQs, guidance/tutorials, discussion of and links to resources, all sorts of things!

And so it begins

After months of preparation, Oxford's 23 Things programme is now up and running!   I was really keen to be involved in running this, as ever since I came across the original program I thought it was a great way for non-technologically-minded people who might never otherwise take the plunge to learn about web 2.0 tools and technologies.   Having a couple of small tasks a week spread out over an extended period seems to me to be a great way to learn a lot without feeling overwhelmed, and also to make it easier to find time to do so.   I really hope a lot of people sign up and follow along and find the programme fun and useful!

Our 23 Things programme has been put together and is being run by a group of five of us, from different roles and libraries - myself, Laura Wilkinson, Emma Cragg, Angela Carritt and Penny Schenk.   We are each taking responsibility for different weeks of the programme, and I'm looking after weeks two (blogs) and nine (wikis).   We will all be following the programme along ourselves too, and I'm looking forward to completing the tasks myself.   23 Things is designed to be do-able by people with all sorts of different levels of experience with web 2.0.   The tasks themselves are very basic, but there is scope for people to explore further, so if they are already familiar with a tool they can use the time to learn something that is new to them.   Looking at the tasks ahead I know that even though I am familiar on at least a basic level with all the tools we are covering, there are plenty of areas within them that I haven't really explored fully, and I'm excited to see how everyone else gets on too.