23 things Cambridge (cam23)

And just to prove I can, here is the cam23 presentation by lettylib!

23 things Cambridge (cam23)

View more presentations from lettylib.

Slideshare and the perils of powerpoint

On to Thing 11 and this time it's Slideshare. I looked at the presentations suggested by 23 Things Cambridge, and Heriot-Watt looks like they might have had a change in policy or personnel or something, since the last time they added a presentation was 2 years ago! I picked the exam survival guide, and immediately felt nostalgic for the time when all I had to worry about was exams! I also checked out one by Phil Bradley and despite this course feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Web 2.0 "stuff" out there - Pageflakes, Squidoo, Tagxedo &c., &c., &c... Still, I once spoke to the man himself about this, and his advice was plain and simple: try it out. Have a go. If it works, keep it, if it doesn't, lose it. And don't try and read everything on the internet! With these words of wisdom ringing in my ears, I blithely skip through the others suggested and then have a look at the search window.

I typed in "cambridge library" to see what came up. I found the slides from a presentation I attended during the libraries@cambridge 2009 conference, and to my surprise a presentation put together by a fellow cam23er! I also found some potentially interesting presentations about how to improve your library with tips for increased visibility, improving user experiences and so on.

I don't like sounding negative, particularly given I have only spent the sum total of about four hours browsing the site, but I think Slideshare doesn't really do it for me. The reason comes back ultimately to use of Powerpoint and/or other presentation software. In my experience as a student and as a conference attendee, I've probably been subjected to about 30-50 presentations which used Powerpoint, and possibly 10% of them were any good. People make a variety of mistakes when using slides, notably putting too much information on them, and then reading everything out verbatim, or adding slides which are distracting or irrelevant. The biggest mistake however, is taking them out of the presentation forum. I couldn't find slidenotes to accompany any of the sets of slides I looked at (maybe I'm being useless again). Now, if the presentation is good, and the use of slides thoughtful and serving to enhance the presentation, then the slides tend not to make sense without the presentation. On the other hand, if the presentation is bad, and all the information is on the slides instead of in the presenter's talk, then the slides are useless as a means of accompanying a good presentation... I'm not sure I'm explaining myself well here.

Basically, I doubt I would look here for new slides to accompany a presentation I want to give. If they're from a good presentation, I won't necessarily get the point they are serving to illustrate if the slidenotes aren't there. If they're bad, then I condemn my presentation to be bad by using them, but they may well serve as a tool for creating my own, better presentation. Looking at the one from the conference I attended, I can get a sort of gist of what was discussed, but without looking at the notes I made on the day itself, I couldn't tell you what the main arguments are just from the slides. Epic fail for this one!

Flickr part 2: The Image Strikes Back

MMMMmmmmmm. If I had a thousand hours to spend browsing images of beautiful old libraries, Flickr would be my favourite website. The Creative Commons search was wonderfully simple to use, as was the advanced search (I guess learning to grapple with Newton has given me transferable skills). I managed to find a picture of a page of a version of the Shah Namah (Book of Kings):

 

Image by Beesnest McClain on Flickr

which is on my mind recently since there'll be an exhibition about it at the Fitz in the autumn.

 Image by Curious Expeditions on Flickr

So I'm very happy with using Flickr. I am less happy, however, with using images in Blogger. I have two problems which I'm really struggling with:

The length of time it takes to use images from other websites. So far, every photo I've wanted to use comes from a website. In an ideal world, I click on "Add an image", then select "website address" and insert the URL, and a few minutes later, an image appears. However, I've been waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and nothing appears, so I've had to download every (or nearly every) single image I've wanted to use so far, in order to upload it from my hard drive instead (which takes seconds).

Captions. I want to credit the people who took the photos I'm publishing, I really do, but why is it so complicated to add a credit in Blogger? I tried following various instructions on help pages, but it involves an understanding of HTML that I really don't have. I lose my place very easily in the code, but I feel there needs to be a better way of adding a clickable caption than by just taking the text, shrinking the font and centring it underneath a central photo. Ideally I want a caption to be part of the photo so that I can have a photo and caption on the side of my text, but my experiments have been messy at best - as you can see!

The next step will be experimenting with image manipulation software and using it for work. Alas, I've never progressed beyond MSPaint, and cannot install anything at work, so this will be an experiment for another time. I have come across Gimp before, and found it utterly incomprehensible, so I think I shall try out a different program when I do.

Far Flung Flickring

These are the images from my searches on Flickr. So far this is all I have done for this particular thing. I found I had to be quite specific in my searches and I was surprised by the search results when I searched for "fita star", a particular kind of badge you can achieve in archery - fewer than half of the images on the first page were actually relevant, and quite a few were about shoes! Out of interest I Googled for images with the same search terms and came up with much more relevant results... I haven't set up an account with Flickr yet, but I might well end up doing so. It's one of those things I kept meaning to do, but not being much of a photographer (and only recently getting a digital camera) I haven't felt the need to be all that pressing.

Finally, a question to muse upon: Idlethink's pictures of the UL violated Library Syndicate rules, which forbid photography, but the resulting pictures are beautiful records of the building and its treasures. How would you feel if you came across similar pictures of your library?

I'm a bit pedantic by nature, and I follow rules as a whole. My personal opinion is that if you want to take a photo so badly, you should ask permission - there's no harm trying (particularly if it's for study purposes). There are often good (and maybe less good) reasons why you can't take photos of libraries, or galleries and museums, or people's places of work, or events - copyright issues, trade secrets, over-zealous subscription to child protection laws, damage to the item being photographed...

If someone had taken photos in our library without permission and posted them on the internet, I think I would ask for them to be removed and the photos deleted. However, I'm not sure what I would do if they ignored my request. Therefore I was quite pleased to see there weren't many photos from the inside of my building on flickr!

Tagging

I read the essay by Clay Shirky with fascination. The concept of classification is one I'm very soon going to be tackling in my librarianship course, so this is something I shall be investigating much more thoroughly over the coming weeks (okay, months - I'm quite slow!).

Before I start playing with tagging, my initial thoughts are thus: I am not a fan. Yes, I love Google over Yahoo for the reason that I don't have to know what directory something is in - I type, I find (or refine, or give up...). However, people tag according to how they perceive, and I generally find I don't perceive the world in quite the same way. In fact, I get quite uppity about tags I think are inappropriate for the object being tagged, and feel like someone is enforcing their world view on me!

I have added tags to all my cam23 blog posts. I'm not an imaginative person, so they are almost all tagged with three things. Anything to do with cam23 things (ie pretty much all of it) is tagged 23 things; each thing is tagged by its number (thing 1, thing 2 etc) and then if I've used a particular program or widget, I've tagged by its name (so Twitter, Doodle etc). Beyond that, I can't really think how I would need to tag anything. Did I mention I was unimaginative? I did like the idea of Yay/Nay/Meh, but I find I need so many qualifiers: "this one is mostly yay but there's this bit which is nay so I'll tag it as both" is too spammy to be worth me using it...

Twittering about Twitter

I've now had a bit of a play with Twitter. I've signed up to follow various people, and a few have responded in kind. I've logged in a few times this week to check it out and have a play, and when this blogpost is finished I shall be tweeting about that too.
I've become fairly comfortable using it. The use of only 140 characters wasn't too bad for me, though it is shorter than a text message! However, I did notice that a number of the conversations made use of a lot of abbreviations I didn't recognise. The slightly more chatty, less formal ones I was able to decipher largely with Urban Dictionary's help, and gradually I muddled my way through. On the whole, I can see this as being a good way to keep in touch with the latest news. It's very "drop-in, drop-out" and relaxed in a way I wasn't expecting.

I don't see myself as being much of a personal twitterer (or twit?), simply because I usually have very little of interest to say, and that's best left to Facebook status updates with which I can spam my friends! The other minor issue I had was that my work doesn't support use of Flash, so all the really interesting-looking links ended up taking me to blank pages! But I suppose use of Flash is a gripe for another day ;)

However, I'm going to strongly recommend that my work use Twitter as a way to publicise events. Ultimately, it's another way to increase presence on the internet, and that would be great for work, since there are often lots of things going on in the general institution which could use the extra publicity. Things like new exhibitions, talks and concerts - these would definitely be things worth tweeting about.

All in all, a greater success than I was expecting.

EDIT [19/07/2010]
I discovered recently that my work is on Twitter. However, it could only be found going direct from work's website (which I never use), and searching for it on Twitter in the "find people" option drew a complete blank. So much for web presence =\

Technology headaches and Twitter

On to thing 7! My account is duly created on Twitter. I update my status. So far, so good. I try to follow the cam23 list. I don't know, perhaps it's because I've left it so late (I am 6 things behind at the moment!) the list is too long, but for whatever reason, it crashes, taking Firefox and my computer with it.

Not a problem. I reboot, restart Firefox, and try again. Most of the list are saved as people I'm following, so that's probably fine. I'm now following MLA and CILIP too.

I need to reply and retweet, and check in, so I'll update how I'm getting on in a while. In the meantime, I am going to be proactive and find a way to add Twitter to my iGoogle page.

[EDIT] I've added it, and my reader looks empty because I gasped in horror at the number of posts I had to read (234), panicked, and feeling overwhelmed, read three and promptly marked all the rest as read. I feel guilty, because I'm used to reading everything, but I know I can't possibly do that and try and continue doing my own things. But how do you tell what's useful? And when everything you read is useful, how do you limit yourself?