#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!

#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.

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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!

[CPD23] Thing 9: Evernote

By nhanusek on Flickr

Evernote is something I started playing around with last week for Cam23 2.0, and I think it’s going to be very useful. I can see it coming in handy when studying for my MA next year, to keep all my notes in one place.

I’ve downloaded the desktop application, the website clipper addon and the Android app, and made a few test notes. I like that there’s an Android app, though so far I’m a bit disappointed that searching the text in the photos I’ve uploaded to experiment with hasn’t worked yet. To be fair, my phone doesn’t have a flash and I’m taking it by the rather dim light of an energy-saving light bulb, so my pictures are a bit fuzzy! I think I need to do a bit more experimenting with this.

I've been reading a few other blog entries on Evernote, and a few people have been worried about the privacy and security of having things in the cloud. I've never been too worried about this - maybe I'm being naive and foolish but for me the benefits of being able to access everything I want wherever I am far outweigh the tiny risk that someone is going to steal all my notes and photos. And if they did, then they wouldn't be getting anything that juicy to be honest, it's not as if I save my bank account details as a Google Doc...