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.

Librarything

Yesterday I created my Librarything account and started adding my daughters library to it. She is 11 years old and absolutely addicted to reading. When I (have to) take her and her 10 year old sister (who is more of a fashion addict) shopping, the first call is always Waterstones. There she chooses a book and for the rest of the shopping trip I'll be holding her by her neck, directing her through the busy crowds while she happily reads! Although she does have a lovely group of friends around her who frequently recommend books to her, I though it a good idea to catalogue some of her books on Librarything so she can check out other peoples library collections and recommendations.

Here is a screenshot of her favorite books I've added so far:

Anthony Horowitz, Robert Muchamore, Mystery and adventure books; those are the ones she likes best. I've been trying for years to get her to read my favorite childrens books (mainly (Dutch) historical fiction) and to encourage her to read them, I've added those on her wishlist in Librarything:

I am under no illusion that she will actually read them (especially since most of them have never been translated in English and reading Dutch is, compared to reading English, slow. This of course is rather frustrating when you are used to finish a book in one evening!)

Overall, Librarything definitely the most interesting 'Thing' so far.

(Catching up) Finally thing 14: Delicious, Mendely and Endnote

This week I created a Delicious account, installed the Bookmarklet and added some film-related websites to it (Moviemail, Lux, BFI, Imbd) using Firefox (could not get it to work on Explorer).  After that I had a look at other people’s accounts but left it at that and moved on to Mendeley and Endnote.  

Having just finished my MSc, I was curious to see what I might possibly have missed in NOT using a bibliographic software tool.  I did do a bit of fiddling with Mendeley but not too much. Since  I was most interested in changing and editing reference styles and this can’t be done in the Mendeley Web version,  I only created an account, installed the (very handy!!) import to Mendeley button and imported some articles from various databases.  

Then I moved on to Endnote. I downloaded the software, created and Web of Knowledge account and imported some references in my Endnote Library. With these references saved to My Library, I changed the reference style to APA and inserted these references in a Word document. How wonderful!! I wish now that I had taken the time to look at Endnote when I was slaving away, typing in all those references one by one. At the time I was so obsessed with finding information and writing it down, it seemed too much of an effort to experiment and getting to grips with a new software tool.  Too late for me now (and I won’t be doing another MSc!!), but will be recommending Endnote  to others!

Facebook!!!

Contrary to my expectations, thing11 Facebook has been the best thing so far simply because it forced me to finally take the time to de-activate my Facebook account!!! A few years ago I created not 1 but 2 Facebook accounts by mistake. This caused a lot of confusion and annoyance and I ended up making more enemies than friends by not responding to friend requests and messages.   Yesterday I managed to deactivate this cursed second Facebook account successfully and it really wasn’t that difficult! If there are other silly people like me out there who have two accounts instead of one and don’t know how to get rid of it, below are the instructions!:

Click the little flower icon in the top right corner of any Facebook page.

Click “Account Settings” on the drop-down menu.

Click “Security” on the menu along the left side of the Account Settings screen.

Click the “Deactivate your account” link.

Scroll down and select the reason you are leaving Facebook.

Click “Email opt out” check box to opt out of receiving future emails from Facebook. This step is optional.

Click the “Confirm” button to cancel your Facebook account.

Easy enough! Just skip the page where Facebook kindly reminds you that by deactivating your account friend so and so ‘is really going to miss you’!!!!!!!

After this happy experience, I had a look at the Soton Library Facebook page and was surprised to see how many users actually use Facebook to ask library related questions and make comment on their library experience.  For these people having library information such as library opening times, scanning problems posted on Facebook is ideal. I also looked at the University of Utrecht library page and the University of Wales Aberystwyth library page. Neither are very good and only have some photo’s on their page and not much else. The University of Portsmouth library however is very similar to the Southampton Library page containing library announcements and user questions and comments.

I would never have thought about either advising a user to use Facebook or use Facebook myself to check library information or post a library related questions but students clearly do. I guess Facebook is just another way to get library information out to students.

With regards to my own experience with Facebook, I do occasionally check my friends messages and photo’s, but have never really posted anything myself and don’t think I will.

several 'things' together

I'm now so behind on blogging about my 23things experiences that I don't know where to start anymore! More than a week ago I looked up some old colleagues on linkedin and that was straightforward enough. Since I'm not on Linkedin myself, I wasn't able to get into their full profile any further and just left it at that. I’m not sure whether having my own profile on Linkedin would be something I would like although some friends who are on Linkedin are enthusiastic about it (then again, most people with a Facebook account are enthusiastic about it and I am definitely not)

Next I started on the browser exercise. I have to admit I’ve never (knowingly!!) used either Firefox or Chrome, but do use Explorer at work and Safari at home. Both work well for me, but having gone through the 23things instructions I realised I do not use either Browser to their full potential. The bookmark/ favourite functions are so much more elaborate than I realised and will definitely use this function more. Overall, a useful experience but for now I think I will stick to Explorer and Safari (and explore their options a bit further)

Doodle

I doodled myself a teabreak with some colleages a week ago and since then participated in a few more doodle polls (cataloguing meeting, another teabreak and the knitting group meeting) All straightforward, just a little bit too many doodle emails filling up my inbox.  Not sure wheter I will use it more often but at least I know how it works now!

Running thought 2

Ever noticed how many manhole covers litter the pavement? This morning on my 1,6 km morning commute jog, I counted no less than 215 boring grey manhole covers! In comparison, the above Japanese manhole covers are so much more interesting.

To promote street art, I've added the following Amsterdam street art RSS feed to my dashboard: www.amsterdaminpieces.com

My Netvibe dashboard is know populated with Amsterdam street art, Dutch newspapers, Sot23things (obviously), the weather and more...

Running thought 1

Why is it that when overtaking another runner it seems so much easier to run away from the other runner after the point of overtaking than it is to run towards the other runner to the point of overtaking. 

Mathematically, when the speed of both runners remain constant, there should not be any difference between running towards and running away from another person.

If no mathematical formula explains this phenomenon, is it just a trick of the mind? Does the rewarding act of overtaking really boost energy levels enough that it feels like running speed has increased?

Now, have a look at this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skM37PcZmWE

Running in the Common last Saturday on slippery, icy paths desperately trying not to fall.

True to my Dutch heritage, I should have worn my iceskates instead of trainers!

Iceskates apparently are a joint Finnish/Dutch invention.

Not sure about origin of the sledge