23 Feedback and reflections on the program

• How could you draw on what you have learned in 23 Things to help you in your work?
  

I've incorporated a number of the 23 things into day to day work practice, and perhaps more into the sort of background awareness/professional updating that we need to engage in to keep our work relevant and engaged. google reader I hadn't used before but now I use, and I'm going to try using igoogle more.

• How could the library use the technologies featured in 23 Things to improve its service?

We need to think how we can put our services out there, where the users are, in places like youtube and facebook, and we need to think of ways we can genuinely get more of a two way flow of content and information in the way our services are delivered.

• How do you think the 23 Things program could be improved in the future?

I think the approach is good. I think its had a very positive impact in raising awareness of lots of the fundamental concepts, and its expanded everyone's awareness. Perhaps some of the tasks were a bit technical for some people, and the level of technical difficulties was offputting and perhaps defeated the intention.

• Do you think you'll keep blogging or keep using any of the other tools you learned about?

Yep. I started another blog which alas is on holiday at the moment but I hope to pick it up again. Time is always a problem, and its easy to slide back to just using what you've always used.

22 Second Life

SL might be the start of something profound for libraries, as some people claim, but I can't see any real signs of it. A couple of months ago, I got myself a second life account, and managed to navigate my way to info island. I can see that everyone is having a great time over at aphrodite island but I seem to be marooned in the desolate space of info island. In my few sessions, I've only ever seen one other avatar there. Seems like an incredibly cumbersome and haphazard way to find anything.

A recent report from uniserve summed the SL nicely:
"Initial searches for information on the use of SL uncovered a great deal of discussion and
speculation concerning its potential, but disappointingly few examples of actual use in teaching
and learning."

An update of the July 2007 “snapshot” of UK Higher and Further Education Developments in Second Life

I think we need to focus our effort where our users are, and I doubt many of them are on SL.

21 Podcasts

An impossibly long time ago, when I was a small child, long before television appeared on the scene, our house had two radios, one in the kitchen one in the lounge room. We'd listen to serials and weekly programs on the radio as a family, sitting round the fire with the dial glowing and the lights out. But we also had crystal sets - contraptions with arials composed of very long bits of wire slung out over the roof and round the chimney and ear phones that looked like surgical appliances, and a tuning apparatus that was so hair trigger if you could pick up the same station twice it was a miracle. But with the crystal set you could lie in bed and pick up incredibly faint scratchy radio stations all by yourself. It was somehow much more immediate and personal than the broadcast radio in the family spaces. The real buzz was that you could listen to what you wanted to.

Podcasting is a bit like that. I don't think I could bear commuting without podcasts, which I download onto my pocket pc. My favourite at the moment is Coffee Break Spanish - Mark and Cara deliver a charming weekly podcast Spanish lesson in beautiful Edinburgh accents. If you want to learn Spanish, give them a listen.

20: Youtube Library Videos

Why is that a search on "Library" turns up so much weird stuff? Is that representative of what's on Youtube or are the videos people make about libraries particularly weird?

And why don't we put a tour of the Swinburne library on? I liked the Harper College one, for example. Its a neat idea, and the idea of putting our content where people might find it is novel.


But would an introduction to the Swinburne Library add to the weirdness of library videos, or move the balance a bit towards something resembling sane?

19 - Photo of pet on the wiki

Two dogs, two pics on the wiki - one of Bessie and another of Bessie and Rusty on the stairs at home.

I like the Pets page.

18: Library 2.0

I find reading about Library 2.0 intensely depressing for a number of reasons. It seems to spark off a sort of debate that doesn't make anybody much the wiser, it seems to generate a lot of bad temper, and it makes me remember we have a long way to go. With some notable exceptions, a lot of our service offerings seem pretty low on "the information and ideas flowing in both directions" that is the hallmark and aspiration of Library 2.0. EBL is a nice example of library 2.0 that we have led the way in implementing. But is there any good example of a library 2.0 opac or discovery interface? Would our users actually be bothered tagging or reviewing even if we made it possible for them? Our blog was an attempt to be Library 2.0, but it gets close to zero input.
As a sort of generic name for rethinking the role of our users in our service offering - for genuinely including real scope for user generated input - "Library 2.0" is useful as a short hand term. An interesting question to ponder, what can we do to make our services more Library 2.0?

17 del.icio.us

Love it. When you are walking or cycle touring, one maxim is to only take things that have more than one use. del.icio.us earns its place on those grounds - great to be able to get bookmarks independent of which machine I'm on (great now I have two workspaces) and it has the network effect where I can discover other stuff that people who share my interests have added. I love the firefox plug in which makes it all one click away, without which I tend to forget things, no matter how good they are.

16 - igoogle

Yep, igoogle is nifty. Coming to do this task I discover I've had an igoogle page which I must have set up sometime and forgotten. Which tells me something about how that sort of functionality doesn't seem to fit my sort of usage. Or is that we all have too many portals - are we all portal'ed out?

Still, I've added my google reader feeds now so maybe I'll start using it.

What would be really nice would be to be able to put some of the work applications in as gadgets - get groupwise mail, drop the catalogue/resource discovery front end into igoogle. Maybe we should add that to the spec for the ILMS?

15. google books

I love google books. As I tend to be a serial faddist, I find can read plenty about whatever subject happens to be top the list of current interests. For example, I've recently been reading a wonderful book, Voyages of Delusion, on the search for the North West Passage. With Google books I can go and read some of the original accounts that are referred to - because they are out of copyright, the full text is there, as much as I can be bothered to sit and read.

For stuff that is in copyright, I still find it useful. We're researching the Camino di Santiago as a possible future adventure, I can read sizeable chunks of the considerable range of texts on the topic.

As a consumer I think its great. I think unlocking that material is brilliant - all that long tail of content that otherwise would be mouldering away somewhere. If I was a publisher I might have a different view. As a librarian, I think it shows us what is possible. Now if we could get a good e-paper ebook reader that could easily download the stuff from google books, we'd definitely be getting somewhere.

14 - Google Docs

Google docs is a great idea, but somehow I never use it. For a while when my son had disabled our microsoft office suite (downloaded the trial version of Office 2007 which blipped Office 2000 and then expired) I tried to get the family to use google docs but we were all relieved when I got a full version of 2007 which we could run from the desk top.

But I guess if you were travelling, google docs would be useful.