Thing 22/23: Reflections

So... its Monday morning 22nd of April and I am still behind on thing 22 and 23. I'm slightly confused though:  is Thing 22 writing this last blog and Thing 23 registering it? That I can do!!!

23 Things turned out to be a lot more work than I expected but at the same time a lot more interesting as well. These last weeks have forced me to look into so many things I knew existed but never had the time to explore. I catalogued my daughters book collection and was able to give her some recommendations, I managed to delete my second Facebook account, feel more confident with regards to copyright of images and know where to look for advice, shared documents with my colleagues on Google drive, created a lovely looking tag-cloud, promoted our new book and DVD acquisitions with QR codes and most important of all........ I learned how to blog!!! Overall, 23 Things has been a time consuming but positive experience.

Last post done, and as a tribute to 23 Things (and all marathon runners and spectators) and true to my Jogblog, I can happily say that after weeks and weeks of not being able to run because of an injury, this morning for the first time in weeks I am going to try to go for a short run in the sunshine before starting work at 11 and registering my blog.

Thing 21: Google drive

After a 2 week Easter break, finally the last thing to reflect on!! Before the Easter break I had already made an effort to log on to Google drive, to upload a document and share it with a colleague. Unfortunately she was not able to edit anything at all. Only after I converted the initial Word document to a Google doc. last week, editing became possible. I shared the converted document again and this time it was possible to make changes. 

From my experiences so far, Google drive seems to be a useful and (once you master a few additional tricks) easy way to collaborate on a piece of work. Especially the' Revision history' option is useful to identify addition and changes made to the document by different people to different versions. It clearly shows who made the changes and what those changes are. I also liked the option to restore previous versions. 

Thing 20: Slideshare

Now we're almost at the end of 23Things, I thought it appropriate to look up and post the powerpoint presentation of Helene Blowers, initiator of the 23things programme (2006) found on Slideshare.

Below is her 2007 Powerpoint presentation and a link to her original 23things programme ( Website and Blog). It looks like initially there were 43 things to do instead of our 23!!! (see slide 8)

Learning 2.0 from hblowers

http://www.heleneblowers.info/2012/08/6-years-of-23-things.html

http://plcmclearning.blogspot.co.uk/ 

Slideshare is an usefull and easy to use  tool. I found many interesting presentations and will definitely use it again.

Thing 19: Word (tag) clouds

Tag or word clouds first appeared on early Web 2.0 websites as Flickr and Delicious as a means of visualising the frequency of keyword metadata (or tags) used on these social websites. User tags on these websites are personal, subjective and not bound to any rules and are therefore very different from the official cataloguing world of library subject indexing  many of us are dealing with on a daily basis.

Nevertheless, since I'm currently working on producing a list of Artists' Film DVDs available in WSA Library using data taken from their Marc records, I decided to use this list to produce a word cloud and see which words (not just subject headings !!) are used most frequently.

This is the result:

I think we can conclude from this that Andy Warhol and Takahiko Iimura are the best represented artists in our collection. The words 'Video', 'Artists' and 'Filmmakers' also stand out, but that of course is not really surprising since we are dealing here with films made by artists.  I thought I had taken out the-not-so interesting words as 'Exploring', 'Includes', 'Works', 'The' and 'Min', but after saving the word cloud I noticed they were still in there. I shall have to do a little more experimenting with this fun little toy!

Thing 18: QR codes

Today I created a QR code and attached it to the 'Recent Acquisition' heading of the WSA Library blog. See below the A5 size poster I created with  text and code  for users to scan and access the WSA recent acquisition posts:

I think Qr codes are a great way of promoting library services.  Drawback is that not all students have a smartphone or Ipad (although surprisingly many do!)
For those users (and I'm one of them), good old-fashioned paper lists can be produced.

Thing 17: Creative commons

Don't park your bike outside the designated area, a photo by lambertwm on Flickr.

The above photo is taken from Flickr, using the 'Search only within Creative Commons licenced content' mode. Attribute requirements: credit original author, no permission to re-use the work for commercial purposes and use it whole and unedited. So that's what I've done!  It's a bit of a minefield and I can only hope I have complied with all copyright  rules and regulations by adding links to the original work and author.

The image below I found and downloaded from Wikimedia Commons and inserted it into my blog by copying/pasting its HTML code. Here I also added links to the original author and title.


It's winter in Amsterdam, a photo by Jos van Zetten on Wikimedia Commons

Overall, the Creative Commons website gave me some helpful insights into licencing and copyrigh of images. I have not had time yet to view the recommended Youbube video but will do as soon as I've finished all my other 'Things'.

Thing 16: Flickr

                        Cat behind books, a photo by Igagrijs on Flickr.

For someone who has often started, but never managed to fill up more than the first few pages of a photo album, Flickr is a fantastic way to organise and share photo's.  So much fun to search through the huge amount of interesting (and not so interesting) images of others! A place where you can get lost in images, all indexed/tagged  by users themselves. That's what I call democratic indexing! No rules, no regulations, just describe your image any which way you like, either to make it accessible to others or just for yourself.

I've uploaded several images to Flickr which was easy and straightforward. I organised some of them in sets, added 23ThingsSoton as a contact and submitted some photo's to the competition, including the above picture of my little cat. For many, books are a great get-away from the daily hassle of life.  For my cat, who obviously can't read, the books in my bookcase  serve as a (rather uncomfortably small) safe haven away from noisy children, vacuum cleaners, and threats of a few hugs too many.