What I've been reading in July

Mashcat

I found Mashcat a really interesting unconference. I won't pretend to have understood everything that was talked about, but I definitely learnt a lot! These are the slides/blog posts from my favourite sessions.

Ed Chamberlain, Text to data [slides]

Gary Green, A Travellers Map in Yahoo Pipes (Really cool visual way to search subject headings referring to places)

Owen Stephens, Boutique Catalogues (Includes demonstration of how a catalogue could be customised for musicians, creating faceted indexes for key, bpm and time-signature)


Presenting

Ned Potter, Good presentations matter


Libraries and the Internet

Lauren Smith, Internet Access and Public Libraries

Phil Bradley, Libraries charging for internet access is wrong

Voices for the Library, Free internet access should be a cornerstone of every public library

Ian Clark, Barking libraries - tiny cuts or massive scars?

CILIP, Act risks limiting internet access in libraries, schools and universities


E-books

Alison Flood, Call to 'move libraries into 21st century' sparks ebook lending review


Volunteer libraries

CILIP, Value of staff at heart of revised volunteer policy

Dalya Alberge, Authors face royalty threat from volunteer libraries

Ian Anstice, Surrey chooses volunteers over paid staff at the same cost


Online learning

Emma Cragg, Where next for 23 Things?   (I've heard a lot about coursera lately, and I'm definitely going to look into it when I finish my MA. One course at a time though...)

By Guillermo Esteves on Flickr

#CPD23 Thing 10, revisited

A year ago when I wrote about Thing 10, I had almost finished my graduate traineeship, and had a place at UCL on the MA Library and Information Studies course. A year later of course, the end of my MA (read: dissertation deadline!) is rushing closer and closer, and I'm thinking about what I'll be doing after this is over.

On the whole I've really enjoyed my MA, I feel that I've learnt a lot, and the variety of assessments have given me experience that would have been difficult to get at work (such as writing a collection management policy, and coming up with a budget and staff structure for a library in the Management module). I was lucky enough to get a bursary for this year, but before I found out I'd got that I'd been prepared to fork out for the £5000-odd fees. It's a lot of money, but with an MA under my belt I can apply for professional roles with a bit of a pay-rise and it'll hopefully pay for itself within a few years.


I think if I hadn't got a bursary I would have still felt I got my money's worth at £5k, but as Jen shows with her pretty pink spreadsheet, next year UCL's fees will be up to £7750 for the full-time course, and City is going to be charging a whopping £9000 (there are still some relatively affordable full-time courses, such as MMU which is £4000, but in a few years I imagine they'll all be raising the fees). As Jen says, this puts the traditional masters firmly out of reach for an awful lot of people. Distance learning courses are cheaper, but aren't for everyone (I don't think that style of learning would have suited me well, I like lectures and seminars and working with other people). I really hope we don't get into a situation where there is a divide in the profession between those who can afford the qualification and those who can't, but I'm worried that this could well happen.

Doom and gloom post, sorry. :(

#CPD23 Thing 9 revisited

As a Christmas present to myself I bought a Samsung Galaxy tablet when it was on sale in January. It was definitely something I wanted rather than needed, and I spent weeks debating whether to splurge that much money on something I didn't actually need. However I've been using it for all the time, for emails, Twitter, Facebook, reading e-books, taking notes in lectures, playing games... etc. etc. I still love my laptop, but it's pretty big and heavy which makes it a bit of a mission taking it out and about, so it's great to have a portable alternative.

Evernote interface

I've found that some of the tools I discovered in 23 Things but didn't get that excited about, have suddenly become much more useful now I'm using the tablet, in particular Evernote. The interface on the mobile version is so much nicer than the rather dull PC version (see right), and it's very intuitive. I'm using it for my lecture notes and quotations I want to put in essays, nothing too fancy, but it's working very well. I could have used Google Docs for the same thing, but I find editting Google Docs quite fiddly on the tablet, even in the app version.

I think I still haven't taken full advantage of Evernote yet, as it has all kinds of things like OCR for images and handwriting, and I discovered entirely by accident in my last lecture that it has a recording feature, and my tablet has a microphone, so I could have recorded all of my lectures as well as taking notes. So when I get a chance I really need to sit down and explore all of the features I don't use, because some of them are probably very useful!

#CPD23 Thing 7, revisited

I'd hoped to be able to go to the CPD23 networking event in Cambridge yesterday, but unfortunately Rory needed our car in the evening, so I'll have to settle for writing about Thing 7 instead!

I've not blogged about any of the Things so far this year, as I'm still using them in pretty much the same way as before. However since last year's post on face-to-face networking, I've made a real effort to do more offline networking. Taking advantage of the fact that I've been in London a lot this year, I've been to a couple of LISNPN meetups with lovely London graduate trainees, met up with several people I know from Twitter, and I've started going fairly regularly to London Information and Knowledge Exchange events which has been a great way to meet information professionals from other sectors.

I said last year that I thought joining a committee might be something I'd try at some point in the future, well with some encouragement from Chris, I joined the Cambridge Library Group committee in September, which has been a really worthwhile experience so far. In a few weeks there's the CLG garden party at Newnham, which will be the first event I've organised for the group. I've got my fingers and toes crossed that all goes well and it doesn't rain!

Like many librarians, I'm somewhat of an introvert, and find "networking breaks" with rooms full of people I don't know to be a scary prospect.  But the lovely thing is, the more events you go to, and the more people you meet, the more those rooms become filled with friends rather than scary strangers.

If you're a fairly new librarian and like me are a bit nervous of networking, I'd really recommend LISNPN meetups if you see one going on in your area. They're very informal, usually in a pub, and I've met some really nice people through LISNPN. Getting to know people online before you meet them face-to-face helps tremendously too. So, if anyone fancies another LISNPN meetup in London at some point soon, let me know!

Tweeters getting out and about. Image by tanakawho on Flickr

A couple of plugs...

CPD23
 
My 23 Things for Professional Development post Thing 4: Current Awareness is now up on the CPD23 blog, and covers Twitter, RSS and Storify. I hadn't used Storify before trying it out for this Thing, but have since used it to gather together tweets from CILIP New Professionals Day, and will definitely continue to use it.

Back from the Stacks

Newnham College Library now have a blog, Back from the Stacks. We're going to share beautiful and interesting items from our special collections, and there are a couple of posts up already about exhibitions that are up in College at the moment.

#CILIPnpd12 - Bethan Ruddock

To end the day we had two brilliant key note speakers - Bethan Ruddock and Phil Bradley. Here's the storify of Bethan's presentation on the New Professionals Toolkit (also available on the Storify website)

#CILIPnpd12 - Ned Potter

Yesterday I spent the day at CILIP HQ in London, for my second New Professionals Day. I live-tweeted most of the day (apart from when my hands were full with lego or a giant burrito), and as I have recently discovered Storify, I am going to post a few Storifys of my tweets from the day rather than writing it all out again in a big old blog post. Here's the first bit, Ned Potter's opening keynote speech (if the embed doesn't show up, the link to my Storify is here).

#CPD23 strikes again

By fatllama on Flickr

We are repeating the 23 Things for Professional Development programme for those who missed out or didn't finish last year. This first 2 Things (creating your own blog, and investigating other people's blogs) went up on the CPD23 blog today, and an updated version of my post on current awareness tools will go up on the 21st May.

I'm not going to participate properly this time around as I'll need to concentrate on my MA dissertation over this summer. However I've really enjoyed looking at people's blogs as everyone has been signing up and writing their first CPD23 posts. As always I tend to be drawn in initially by the blog name (e.g. Dewey Decibelle, Cat(andClass)woman and Veggie Haggis) and I always like to be nosey and read blog posts by people I know (including the ever brilliant Boolean Berry and equally excellent Rosie Hare). It's great that so many people who took part last year are having a second go now (for instance dpgreen and SoldierMumLibby), as well as having totally new blogs to explore (such as Cup of Tea & a Scone and Of Libraries, Cataloguing and Things). There are some really great blogs on the list, so if you haven't yet, take a look at the Delicious list and see for yourself.

What I've been reading in October

Save Libraries

Peter Walker and Alison Flood, High Court Bid to Halt Library Closures Fails 

Lauren Smith, Just Another Liberal Whinger? (A brilliant response to this article by John McTernan) 

Alison Flood, Philip Pullman declares war against 'stupidity' of library closures

Voices for the Library, 22nd October 2011: Library Campaign Conference (includes full speech of Philip Pullman's speech) 

Library Camp

Paul Stainthorpe, Let them tweet cake: why Library Camp was unconferencing done right

Gaz Johnson, Camping

Saint Evelin, Library Camp: Call me Sarah if it makes things easier...

Presenting

Ned Potter, 5 Easy Ways to Create Fabulous Slides 

Ned Potter, Student Induction, Libraries, Prezi, and Interactive Maps

Digital Resources

Micah Vandegrift, The Digital Public Library of America

Dan Cohen, Digital Ephemera and the Calculus of Importance

eBooks and eReaders

Simon Barron, Why I got a Kindle

Ian Clark, Why I have not got a Kindle... (I'm considering buying something to read ebooks on - Kindle, Kobo or Android tablet - so Simon and Ian's posts came at a great time! Any other advice would be very much appreciated.)

Digital Divide

Ian Clark, Follow your dreams - but it will cost you

Mark Herring, Fool's Gold: Why the Internet is no Substitute for a Library (London: McFarland, 2007)

Jobs and Careers

#uklibchat, Summary: Thursday 22nd Sept 2011. LIS Jobs and Careers 

Simon Barron, Thoughts on Military Librarianship

Carley Deanus, My Graduate Trainee Year: On Reflection... 

Games and Gamification

 Gerard LeFond, Why Education Needs to Get It's Game On

by Cindiann on Flickr

[CPD23] Thing 23: Reflection - What next?

I've been putting off writing this post, partly because I don't have much time but also because then it will be over, and what will I write about when I don't have CPD23 people telling me what to blog?!

To be a master...
Photo by .noir photographer on Flickr

But of course, like most librarians I am a completist, and so I simply must write this last CPD23 post. I've never kept a Professional Development Plan before, and like the CV database I think it's a really good idea, and definitely something to have to hand when applying for a new job. I've copied Niamh's template and started to fill it in. I hope that doing a one year Masters degree will focus my energy into completing several goals this year. Well I hope I can complete number 1 on the PDP list, which is simply BECOME A MASTER! Another thing I want to accomplish this year which is already in motion is to get some committee experience, and last night I went to my second Cambridge Library Group committee meeting. Assuming I get nominated and seconded in absentia at next week's AGM (and you know what they say about assume...) I'll be editor of the group's newsletter, so that will be a good experience to put on the ol' CV. There are a couple of other things on my newly formed PDP that I hope to achieve this year (and have just thought of another as I'm writing this) so we'll just have to wait and see how productive I end up being!

And finally, my 6 word story. Ooh this is tough! How about: "Made me think, engage, try, reflect", or perhaps simply "Wish it didn't have to end..."

#libcampuk11 session 5: #uklibchat and social media

The final session I went to yesterday was on #uklibchat and using social media to cross sectors. Four out of the five #uklibchat team members were there to lead the discussion - Adrienne, Sarah, Ka-Ming and Sam.

The aim of this session was to explore ways to move forward with #uklibchat.

What people like about #uklibchat: 

• Having a set time that you can turn up and know you can have professional chat. 
• Good for solo librarians who can feel isolated. 
• Can watch without needing to join in. 
• Agenda can be anonymous and means you can think about your answers beforehand. 
• Write ups are great. 
• Focuses twitter energy!

What could be improved: 

• Intros at the beginning mean people might feel discouraged from joining in halfway through. 
• Having an "agenda" feels rigid (possibly calling it something different would solve this). 
• Having it at a specific time is at odds with how people use social media. 
• Impression that it's just for students but it's not!

Other similar chats to look at:

• #tlchat - teacher librarian chat - not at specific time
• #ukedchat

General thoughts on social media:

• Twitter is mysterious if you don't use it, who to follow, hashtags etc. Possibility of using the blog a bit more with tips and How To guides.
• Twitter is less formal than mailing lists, you need to be grown up on mailing lists! They seem like things that you need to be experienced librarian to use. Twitter reaches the wider world so good for cross pollination. Generational divide between listservs and twitter - is uklibchat offputting to older people?

Ideas for the future:

• Partner with experts for chats in particular area.
• Encourage people to use the hashtag outside of the set time as well, to discuss anything library related.
• How To guides for using Twitter, including clients.

                                                                 ---

Okay I think that is literally everything I have to say about Library Camp! Normally I end up writing one massive blog post after a conference, today I have ended up with 6 slightly shorter ones, I don't know which is better! Using Evernote to make my notes yesterday has made blogging about it afterwards a lot quicker and easier, so I will definitely be doing that again in the future. So a bit of CPD23 win in there too!

#libcampuk11 session 3: Mobile apps etc.

Another session pitched by Andy Walsh, and another topic I'm very interested in. Andy said right at the start that he had lots of questions but no answers, which is how I feel a lot of the time! The discussion bounced around quite a few areas of mobile library services, from general points to specific examples and back again.


Questions

• Nowadays people rely on phones for reminders, meaning our memory is now in the cloud. Does this allow you more brain space to think rather than remember? Or just leave you with a terrible memory?
• Museums get a lot of downloads for their apps. Why?
• When people ask questions using a library's app, where are they, what kind of questions do they ask compared to face-to-face/email? Users say they would ask library questions from their mobile while in the library but not outside - seems strange, but the library isn't somewhere they think about when they are not there.
• Apps vs mobile websites? Desktop.vs browser?
• Is it good to have a mobile technology strategy?
• How long should we spend thinking about and testing a new tool before launching it? Long procedures and checking means that when new tool appears it is out of date quickly, but untested apps can flop miserably.
• Should we be teaching users the best ways to use mobile tech/cloud services such as dropbox? Not just how to use tools but how to organise stuff so that it makes sense and how it can be useful? E.g. CPD23 is about learning with peers, exploring and sharing ways it can be used not just how to use it is more useful than being given a static lesson on "this is how to set up a blog". 
• Could we combine task apps with games? (See also my notes on Session 2: Games and Gamification)
   

Libraries are geared for people to be in a fixed location - but now we need to be wherever the person is at the time. However we're still in an office at a static desk so it is harder to explore mobile tech with users. Embedded librarians and roving support (sometimes even with an iPad) are becoming more common but there is still often a fear that "away from desk" means "not working". 


Members of senior management often get given an iPhone, then do nothing with them, it would be a better investment to give them to librarians!

Lots of academic databases are providing their services in a mobile format now but students have mixed feelings about them. Apps should be about making your life easier - tasks like topping up printer card, finding classmarks etc. are useful to do on a mobile, but reading articles and databases aren't necessarily things you would want to do on a mobile. It shouldn't be just about the device but about context/location.

The good thing about mobile apps is the cleanness of their design, with all everything pared down and unnecessary stuff removed. Standard websites could take hints! At the moment a lot of libraries aren't even getting basics right like making the home page mobile friendly.

Things to look at:

LukeW blog about mobile technology.

[CPD23] Thing 22: Volunteering to get experience

So far I haven't really done any volunteer work in libraries. It's something I would be quite happy to do to get experience if I was missing a criteria from a dream job's description, however I would always check that I wasn't taking a job away from paid qualified staff. I think there are a lot of ways that volunteers can do a lot of good for libraries though. I had a quick look around a Volunteering Fair at UCL yesterday, and Westminster Libraries had a stall there recruiting volunteers for a homework club scheme they run across the area. Running this kind of thing would take up a lot of staff time, and a library degree really isn't necessary to help kids with their maths homework, so this is a nice way to use volunteers to supplement core library services.

Okay so what have I done? I have done the odd bits and pieces of voluntary "stuff" such as lending a hand occasionally as an assistant Cub Scout leader, organising Cam23 2.0, and I've recently joined the Cambridge Library Group committee. Things like this always seem to be very useful things to be able to talk about in job applications and at interviews, as well as being good fun to do!

PS: Since I wrote my Thing 21 post about job applications and interviews, the summary has gone up for the #uklibchat on LIS Jobs and Careers, which is well worth a read.

[CPD23] Thing 21: Promoting yourself in job applications and at interview

A lot of thinking to do for this week's Thing, but right now job applications and interviews are just about the furthest thing from my mind! I have just started my MA, which I had an interview for waaay back in December, and another interview for funding a few months ago. It's nice to know I've got a break from applications for a little bit, while I concentrate on doing the thing I actually interviewed for! I do see the sense in keeping a record, or "CV database" of things that I've done, and I did keep an Excel file of this kind of thing while I was a graduate trainee so I'm going to aim to keep the habit going.

I feel like a total cop out leaving it at that, but I have bookmarked Maria Giovanna's excellent tips, and I solemnly swear to do this Thing properly next summer before I start applying to professional posts.

Here are a few blog posts I've bookmarked in the past because they have handy application and interview tips:
Laura Wilkinson, Tips for applying for library jobs
Becky Woods, Application, application, application
Katy Wrathall, Gizza job - from both sides of the desk
Ned Potter, What's the key to a good interview - beyond the usual trueisms we all know already?

And here's a blog post that I wrote last year about practical tasks in interviews. (Includes a crowdsourced list!)

By David Davies on Flickr

[CPD23] Thing 17: The medium is the message - Prezi and Slideshare

It has rather amused me reading through the CPD23 feeds over the last couple of weeks and seeing the number of posts along the lines of "This is a placeholder post for Thing 17, order must be maintained! *twitch*" I have to say the thought did cross my mind to do the same! Oh librarians :)

Prezi
I've only recently started using Prezi, after we covered this in Cam23 2.0. At the moment I'm still playing with it, and making frivolous presentations such as this one of my Dublin holiday:

Dublin, September 2011 on Prezi

When I start at UCL I'm sure I will have to start giving proper presentations, so I may have the chance to use this tool then. In the meantime I made my second complete Prezi for CPD23, which condenses my instruction post on Twitter into Prezi form:

Twitter: What's it all aboot eh? on Prezi

I really like Prezi as a presentation tool, it's intuitive to use and for an audience it is nice to see something other than Powerpoint slides once in a while. When I do use it I'll make sure not to whirl about madly and make people sick!

As a project for the future, I would like to have a go at making an interactive map of our library using Prezi, something along the lines of this one by Ned Potter.  I’ll probably need to practice a bit more before I attempt that though...

Slideshare
I’ve only used Slideshare as a creator once before, when I wanted to share a presentation the graduate trainees made for the Libraries@Cambridge conference. Surprisingly, our presentation was chosen as one of Slideshare’s ‘Featured Presentations’ (I’m not sure why, it seems quite a niche topic!) and then went on to get over a thousand views in a week, which was a bit of a strange experience! Again, I think this is something that will become increasingly more useful in the future as I start making more presentations.

Apart from that, I have used Slideshare quite often to view other peoples’ presentations. After conferences or other events I will usually have another look at the presentations, which are often hosted on Slideshare.

I think if you were going for a job in design or marketing, a slide-deck CV could be a good way to show your skills off. If I was going for a job which asked for these skills in the job description, I might consider putting together a Powerpoint or even a Prezi CV. It obviously couldn't contain as much detail as a traditional CV (at least, not without filling your slides with text and making a rubbish presentation) so I don't think it could replace the paper one.

I'm glad the last weeks of the programme are going to be spread out a little bit more, as I start at UCL on Monday. However I think the last few Things are going to be some of the most useful and interesting, so bring it on!

[CPD23] Thing 19: Integrating the Things

I'm quite glad there's no new Thing to think about this week, as the programme seems to have flown by and it's good to be prodded into doing some reflection on what we've already covered! 


"Old" Things

About half of the "technical" things have been ones I'd tried out at least once before. Doing CPD23 has made me the explore things that I hadn't given much time to before (Zotero and Google Calendar in particular) more closely, and now Google Calendar has made its way into regular use. I think Zotero might well be very useful next year in my MA, and anyway as Jen says, it's a useful thing to be able to tell our students about. I was already a regular user of Twitter, RSS feeds and, of course, blogging, and these remain some of my favourite Things!


"New" Things

Of the technical Things I'd not tried before, I really like Evernote, screencasting and Prezi, though I haven't had much reason to use any of these yet. I've made a LinkedIn page and have joined a few groups. I'm finding it quite useful to follow the discussions but I haven't joined in much myself, it's just one social network too many at the moment! Even though I wrote the instructions for Pushnote, and so should perhaps be feeling some fondness for it, I didn't find it useful and have deleted the addon from my browser.

'Thinking' by Karola Reider on Flickr

Although I may have done some of the professional development activities before, I'm lumping them all in together under New Things because I'd never really thought about them properly before. These have been the Things where I've most enjoyed reading other peoples' blog posts, even if they have been much harder to write posts for! I think rather than integrating any one of these "thinky" Things into my work life, the most useful thing I could take away from this programme would be to get into the habit of keeping reflecting on what I'm doing both at work and outside of it, and thinking what I could do better/more.


"Extra" Things

While I've been taking part in CPD23 and Cam23 2.0, I've obviously been trying a lot of different tools. And from reading other participants' blog posts I've picked up several tips for other handy tools, of which I have started using three fairly regularly.

Ifttt allows you to create tasks based on the format "if this, then that." Ifttt currently supports 33 different channels, including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Dropbox (no Blogger yet unfortunately). This allows seemingly endless possibilities for the tasks you can create. So far I have set up three: If I publish a new Tumblr post, automatically tweet the link (the rest of the message can be customised when setting it up). If I'm tagged in a Facebook photo, download it to my Dropbox folder (thanks @SuzanneStage for that one!). If it's forecast to rain in Cambridge tomorrow, send me an email (I never seem to check weather forecasts!). At the moment Ifttt is invitation only, but if anyone would like an invitation I have a few. Thanks @meimaimaggio for inviting me!

PrintFriendly is a really simple idea, which is both useful and environmentally friendly, saving ink and trees. If you drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar, then it allows you to convert any webpage into a print friendly PDF in a few seconds. You can change the font size, and click on any pictures, logos and even paragraphs that you don't need to print, and it gets rid of them for you.

Picnik is a free online photo editing tool, you don't have to download anything or even register, so it's very quick and easy to tart up your photos (which you can either upload or grab from Facebook, Flickr, Picassa etc.). You can also add text, frames and effects to the photo, so could be used to make posters as well. Thanks to @jimmy1712 for introducing me to this!

[CPD23] Thing 18: Screencasts and Podcasts

There is quite a lot going on in this week's Thing, but luckily we have covered both screencasts and podcasts before in Cam23 2.0. I haven't done much extra exploration though, as I've just got back from Dublin and have a lot of laundry and stuff to do!

Screencasts

I hadn't heard of Jing before, but had tried Screencast-o-matic for Cam23 2.0. I think I would most likely be making screencasts at work rather than at home, so won't be able to download Jing there. I was quite happy with Screencast-o-matic though, so I think that will do for me!

Here is the screencast I made for Cam23 2.0, showing how to create bundles in Google Reader. I didn't think I had a microphone so I didn't do a commentary, but when I played it back I heard my LOUD TYPING NOISES, so clearly I have a built in mic on my laptop! I'm learning so much doing this programme ;)



Podcasts

I didn't know much about Podcasts before doing this Thing. I’ve never made a podcast and had very rarely listened to them either.

I don’t use iTunes, but Lyn had suggested a few other places to find podcasts. First off I had a look at Podcast Alley, but I was a bit disappointed that all of the podcasts I clicked on there hadn’t been updated for several years. This doesn’t matter for some podcasts of course, but for the technology stuff this is not much use! My next stop was the BBC, which as Lyn said has a wide range of podcasts from its radio and TV shows. I subscribed to Click, which I enjoy watching the TV version of. Moving on to the CILIP Communities Podcasts (I didn’t know this existed!), I’ve subscribed to Adventures in Library Instruction, a monthly podcast on the topic of teaching information literacy.

Seeing as I didn’t have much luck searching on Podcast Alley, I hit Google and started searching for technology podcasts and books podcasts. I subscribed to the Guardian Books podcast series, and taking a recommendation from Mashable I’ve subscribed to the How Stuff Works podcast. I'm ashamed to say I didn't know the Arcadia seminars were available as podcasts! Thanks to MG for the tip off, I will have to have a look into those.

Podcasting is fairly similar to presenting, in that I think I will keep my mouth shut and listen to other people doing the talking, at least for now!

[CPD23] Thing 14: Zotero

Argh. It was such a frustrating thing to learn these existed just after I completed my undergraduate dissertation, which had over 100 footnotes and a 6 page bibliography. I had the style guide by my side and went through and typed out each new reference in the right format, and then there was a lot of copying and pasting going on. So when I first heard about reference management tools earlier in the year I downloaded Zotero straight away and vowed to get to grips with it now so I'd be a pro by the time I had to write my MA dissertation next summer. And then...I forgot all about it.

Thank goodness for CPD23 reminding me about that little button sitting on my toolbar, and prodding me into exploring how it works. I've had a go at adding references for books from our library catalogue and from Amazon, which worked well. As you'd expect, Zotero could fill in more fields from our library catalogue than from Amazon, where I had to look up where my book was published. I added a couple of websites to my test bibliography, but for these I had to fill in several of the important fields such as author and date. Even though you might have to put some of the details in yourself, the genius of course is that all of your references are stored in one place, can be organised into collections and can be made into a bibliography at the click of a button, in various different citation styles.

Some of my test references

It's good to know there are several different reference management tools out there with various features, but I think I'll stick with Zotero for the time being. We'll see how it works out when I'm using it "for real" next year!

End of Graduate Trainee year round up

Today was my last day as a graduate trainee. Wait, what?

...

The year's over?

...

Already?!

Wow. That went incredibly quickly. I guess that shows how much I've enjoyed myself this year! I won't bore you with an in-depth, blow-by-blow account of the whole year - I've blogged about most of the interesting parts anyway so I will just take the moment to remind myself (and you, poor thing) of them!

I've learnt the basics of being a librarian, and for the first time seen all of the workings of an academic library throughout the entire year, as opposed to just during term time. Along the way there's been funny times, stressful times, and "oh crap" times. I've been to read-ins, seminars, conferences, and been on more library visits than you could shake a stick at.


I've dipped my toe in the world of library advocacy and was lucky enough to win a place at the New Professionals Conference as a result. I've seen how, spurred on by one of the papers at the conference, #uklibchat has sprung into being and I have thoroughly enjoyed taking part in this each fortnight.

This year I've helped to organise a rerun of the Cam23 programme for librarians in Cambridge, and CPD23 for information professionals worldwide. Both organising and taking part in these programmes have been great experiences, though pretty much consumed all of my librarian-energy for a while, especially back in May!

And I've met (whether in person or virtually) a ton of lovely people, both in Cambridge and beyond, who are mostly responsible for getting me involved in all of the above!

In a few weeks I'll be off to UCL to start my Master’s degree, meanwhile I'll be staying on at Newnham as a part-time library assistant.

[CPD23] Thing 13: Online Collaboration

Over halfway through now, and this week's Thing is exploring tools for online collaboration and sharing. I already use the three tools that Jen highlighted, some more frequently (and to better effect perhaps) than others.

Google Docs

This is the tool I use most often for collaborating with others. We've been using it a lot to organise CPD23, with Word docs for planning who on the team was doing what and when, and a big big big spreadsheet of everyone taking part. Just thinking about how big that spreadsheet is makes me so thankful for Google Docs! There are well over 700 people taking part, imagine if we had to manually add these to a spreadsheet? I love living in 2011 :)

I also use Google Docs if I'm going to be working on something at home and at work, or if it's the sort of thing I'm going to want to add to whenever I get a bit of inspiration. There is an app which I have downloaded for my phone, but I use this to read Docs rather than write them mostly, as I find typing on a phone keyboard fairly tedious.

Dropbox

No more of this! Image by Craft*ology on Flickr

I'd been hearing about this for a while before I started using it. I didn't immediately think I needed an account, as I don't often share big files. However after hearing quite a few people recommending it as a life saver, I thought I'd try it and see what the fuss was about. When I realised that there was an Android app and I could share files between my phone and my laptop, I was totally sold. Now instead of rooting out the cable that has got itself inextricably tangled up in a million other wires and cables, or faffing about with the fiddly micro SD card, I just upload my photos or docs to Dropbox, and 30 seconds later there they are on my laptop! Definitely recommend, for this purpose alone!

Wikis

As Jen says, the graduate trainees in Cambridge use a wiki to collaborate on our group website, CATALOG. Since there are seven of us managing the website, we keep a rota, keep a note of changes we have made or need to make, and upload backup files to a password protected wiki. Our wiki is hosted on the university's VLE, and while it doesn't look particularly pretty, it does the job well. Apart from this and my little contributions to the Library Day in the Life Project, I don't use wikis that much. However, I've seen some nice examples of pages set up for particular courses at the university. One example which I liked and thought could be used in a library setting was where a lecturer uploaded the reading list for a course, and then got the students to edit it, annotating, adding their own suggestions and striking out any resources they didn't find useful.


So while I use all three of these tools, I don't actually use Dropbox for collaboration. We aren't allowed to install it at work, but as I never find myself needing to share large files I don't see it would add much to my work-life even if we could. Perhaps when I'm doing my Masters next year it will be handy for sharing presentations etc., although Google Docs can be used for that anyway! Much the same with Wikis - I don't use these in any particularly exciting way...yet?