Thing 18 – Final Blog

Well what a roller coaster ride. Did I enjoy it? Yes in parts, though I felt all along that I didn’t really have an aptitude for it, didn’t feel comfortable with most of it (including this blog which I notice is not nearly so whizzy and exciting as most people’s), and would have liked a lot more time to explore and develop familiarity with the Things we looked at.

Don’t think my attitude has changed much since the first blog, maybe a little less apprehensive and a little more prepared to try things out! If I can understand something and get it to work and see a purpose for it, I can get quite excited about it, but some of the Things leave me cold!

I guess the best Thing for me was Protopage as I do find it quite easy to use, quite versatile, and I do see a potential usefulness in our service delivery. Other Things that that might have applied too we are already using like QR codes and Wordle. Meet-o-matic will certainly have potential but I don’t know that I’ll find a use for Library Thing other than for fun (to record my collection of elephant books for example!).

I found the whole experience useful, informative, on occasion exciting, frustrating, and mainly not having enough time to do it justice. But it definitely has given us an opporunity to explore these Things and at least to sound less ignorant about them even if we don’t use them.

I thought the course was extremely well managed and presented, with just the right amount of information and encouragement, and response to queries. I take my hat off to all those who found the time and energy to put this course together and deliver it, you have done us all a huge favour!

Reflection week

Haven’t had a lot of time to look at anything to be honest. However, I have been looking for a more efficient method, and one that I can understand, of disseminating etocs for the journals that we actually pay for. I have been having a go at using Protopage for this, and it really does seem to be simple enough, even for me. See here for work in progress: http://www.protopage.com/salisburylibrary (will that work as a link I wonder?). The question that remains is how to effectively direct customers to it, will they like it, and will we know if they have looked at it? I do aim to pursue it though as sending out etocs already takes up a lot of my time, and we will have even more next year. We have definitely learnt some awesome things on this journey!

Thing 17 – Reference Management

This is the first time I’ve had a go at using any reference management software (yes I know, about time too!). It’s interesting to explore but as ever I haven’t really time to do it justice. There’s lot of things I think it ought to do but have no idea how to do them, and can’t really work out what I’m doing at all anyway. I managed to import some references using URLs but half of them didn’t work anyway. I ticked some to export but it exported the whole lot not just the ones I’d ticked. I feel completely at sea using it to be honest. What order are they in? Can I change that? Can I create several different lists? I’m just not technology savvy enough to get to grips with something like this without my hand held. Do normal people really use these things? At the Socail Media day in Winchester one of the speakers introduced us to Mandy (?) who was doing some research on something (was it pressure ulcers?). The first thing she thought was – I’ll get some reference management software. Really? I don’t know any Mandys! I have no doubt it has great potential and is used by academics etc but I can’t get my head round it. At least I’ve tried it out!

Thing 16 – Library Thing

Is this where the title came from I wonder, I mean the 19 Things?

I’d heard about Library Thing but never used it. Now I have had a go with a pile of books in the corner of my office, and I have even added the permanent link to my protopage without being told to – now there’s an achievement! We’re looking at different ways of producing current awareness at the moment – providing something like a protopage with feeds, rather than an emailed document like we do at the moment – Library Thing would sit quite neatly in that scenario, so lots of potential here, if only we had the time to address it!

Things 14 and 15

We must be on the home straight by now… I have used Meet-o-Matic before but only as a respondent, I had no idea how to set one up and no idea it was so easy – what a dream! Now I have to think of lots of things to have meetings about so I can use it!

Thing 13

Thing 13 – I chose a good week to be off on hols, a reflection week, so very sorry I didn’t really have time to reflect, as I came back to 458 emails…  However I have been lookng at other people’s blogs anyway, and I did get a comment posted on mine which I managed to respond to, so hope that counts. I have to confess that when checking back to make sure I’d done everything, I had no recollection whatever of having done Thing 12 but I’d blogged about it so I must have… that’s a refection anyway, on my age! Can’t believe just a week ago I was still in Sorrento….

Thing 12 – Pubmed feed

Awesome I am up to date (well I’m off on hols next week so I’d only get even more behind). This was a really useful exercise, forced me to use Pubmed (which I don’t usually – what a confession), increased my familiarity with RSS feeds (do you know what rock bottom starting point some of us are at!), and found out how to send updates from My Library – I will be getting a very overfull inbox now! I fear I will always need to use the click by click instructions to do any of this, and I do find it awkward to find my way around the My Library page – where’s it gone now, and how do I get back to where I was? But I guess this comes with practice and familiarity.

Thing 11 – My Library

So far this hasn’t worked very well – keeps saying unable to display, and hasn’t offered me the option to receive an email update and I can’t see where I would find this. I can see this could have potential, if it worked.. Or maybe I’m just doing something wrong (more than likely). Later – found how to get updates sent now.. slow but sure progress…

Thing 10 – add RSS feeds

This is fun too and offers great opportunities. The links work fine. Some web pages don’t display very well in the widgets. If you click on the link in the RSS feed, it crosses it out once you’ve looked at it, which is a bit odd especially if it were a public page – perhaps it wouldn’t do that then? Don’t really get the question about a start page – is this a start page?

Things 8 and 9 – Protopage

This was quite fun but really you could spend hours making the most of it. Just knowing it’s there and having a go at it is good – it’s quite simple to use, most of it is done for you. It certainly has scope for use in our library service and I look forward to investigating how to use it – for example a way of disseminating current awareness rather than sending out monthly word documents by email. No time for more than a taste, and I am still waiting for my photo to load! I can keep regular check on the weather in Italy where I am going next week….

Everything was working very slowly today so I couldn’t even check what everyone else has said on their blogs, because the page won’t load…