Flickr

I've never used Flickr before, but I know quite a few people who are avid users. Not owning a camera means that unfortunately I have not images to upload and I'm not particularly arty either, but I would definitely use Flickr if I needed to find images for something.

I started by looking for images of libraries and found a really nice one from Christopher Chan (http://www.flickr.com/photos/chanc/) of the Mitchell Library in Sydney :

You seem to be able to find pictures of almost anything on Flickr. It would be a good place to start if you needed a picture for a presentation or something. I also like the idea of being able to have a photostream if you're a keen photographer.

I was amazed to find so many pictures of my local town, Sudbury. Thanks to Jacek.NL for a picture of the famous meadows:

I think being able search for Creative Commons material is a good idea. I have to say I would have no idea what images I could or could not use and under what capacity, so being able to search in this way and easily check the conditions is great and could save a good deal of hassle.

So far out of all of the things we have covered I can see Flickr being the most useful. It's a great idea to have a virtual tour of the library and Emma-Jane (Leaps & bounds) has already started taking photos in preparation for next term!

Tag!

I'm not sure what to say about tagging.

Tags could be quite a useful system for libraries. It seems to be a good way of organising information, and as long as everyone's sensible about the tags they add then I can't see a problem with it.

Having had a look at the way Ann Arbour District Library uses tagging, I can see that it is a good way to organise things by using the terminology that readers are actually searching with. Terminology naturally changes over time and I think tagging in this way is a good method of keeping track of such changes.

However I think that there still is (and always will be) a place for standard terms, such as those used in LCSH.

Twittering away....

I have to say I've always avoided Twitter like the plague. I have quite a few school and uni friends who use it religiously to tell everyone what they've had for breakfast and why the don't want to go to work, etc etc. And without wanting to hurt anyone's feelings, to be honest I don't see the point of it (and don't care either...).

However I have given it a go for the purpose of the 23 Things and will try to keep an open mind. At Education we do have a Twitter page (edfaclib) which we use to advertise opening hours. I think it can be a good thing for libraries to use as it's another way in which we can keep in touch with readers (and generally the more options the better!). But I think we do have better and more efficient ways of keeping in contact with readers - CamTools is more useful as all the relevant information is in one place and it can be tailored to the needs of different user groups.

Having had a look at a few profiles, I have to say that I don't think it's the most intuitive thing to use either. But maybe that's just me not really knowing what I'm doing!

In summary, I think Twitter can be very useful if you've actually got something to say. But you do have to filter out an awful lot of rubbish to get to the good stuff.

And it has given me a good excuse to find a cute picture.....

Oh and my twitter page (is that what it's called?) is hrs23things. Not that I shall be tweeting much...

Google calendar

I've now set up my Google calendar. Much like Doodle, it's dead easy to use and I can completely understand why people use it. But again (and I think I'm starting to sound like a right killjoy...) I can't see myself making much use of it. Certainly not on a personal level anyway - I've got a paper calendar at home that's well used and if I'm out of the house I tend to use the calendar on my phone.

However I think this could be very useful for libraries, and the fact that lots of other libraries make use of it on their web pages shows that it has some very practical applications. It's nice to have events and opening hours in one place. And I guess that if you have a lot of meetings to go to (which I don't) then it can be very handy to have it on the web instead of a diary that you have to carry round.

Doodle

I've now had a go at scheduling a meeting in Doodle (might be a bit of a non-existent meeting though because I kind of made it up as I went along - I'll try to schedule a real one at a later date!). Doodle is really easy to use and I can see why some would find it useful. It can even email people about your meeting for you which could be handy! In a library context I can see that it could be quite useful, especially if you have lots of staff or lots of meetings to attend.

However I've always thought of myself as a fairly organised person anyway so I think using something like Doodle would just get in the way.

Thing 4

Well I've now had a little while to play around with Blogger and also have a look at some other Cam23 blogs as well.

On the whole I've found Blogger fairly easy to use, although I'm still finding it a little bit strange trying to put some of my thoughts about the "things" into something that's coherent! I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually....

It's been really interesting looking at some of the other blogs and finding out how others are getting on. It's also nice to know that other's have no idea what to write about either!

In a library context I guess blogs could have some use, such as informing readers about new books or developments in a certain field. However, much like the RSS feeds and libraries widgets, it does rely on people actively going out to find the blogs and taking the time to read them. I think I shall remain sceptical about their uses for now, but I am willing to be proved wrong!

iGoogle and RSS Feeds

I quite like the idea of iGoogle and setting it up was quite fun! However, it's so easy to spend ages looking through all the different things you can add to your page and playing round with the themes and layouts that all of a sudden you realise that 2 hours have gone by and you haven't really achieved anything! It's the easiest way to procrastinate that I've ever found...

I added the RSS feed for the Education Library, as well as a couple of other things such as the Cambridge Library widget. I think these things are a nice idea but it is very reliant on readers adding them to their own pages, and I'm afraid to say this is probably unlikely to happen. At Education we use CamTools to send out announcements to specific groups which I think is a much better system as we're not then putting out information just in the hope that a reader will chance upon it one day!

My first ever blog

Well this is the first time I've ever written a blog so I'm not quite sure what I'm doing or what to expect!

I've had a look at the list of the 23 things we have to go through and I'm ashamed to say I have no idea what most of them are... My experience of Web 2.0 and social media has mainly consisted of Facebook (which I was press-ganged into joining at uni) and just generally browsing, so hopefully over the coming weeks I'll be able to learn about some useful (and probably not-so-useful) stuff.

We shall see...