Library Wanderer

The Casting and The Killing (also known as #cpd23 Thing 18: Jing and podcasts)

2011-12-13T09:49:00.001Z

This post may include references to The Killing/Forbrydelsen. But there are no spoilers. Promise.

I've been putting off tackling Thing 18. Partly it's a priorities thing--my attentions have been focused elsewhere. The more generous among you might presume it's the dreaded d-word that's been my main distraction. Thanks for that. Actually it's been The Killing II. I'm struggling to shake off the belief that possession of several excellent jumpers will be better for my career than my ability to use Jing (it is, after all, really flipping cold in our Old Library). But also I have to admit that I'm not entirely convinced about the value of screencasting, and podcasting, or any other kind of casting (except Sofie Gråbøl et al., of course) for my professional development.

Here's the issue. With stuff like screencasting and podcasting there's a huge gulf between the experience of the producer and consumer. They're totally separate. But they have something in common: if their participation is to be really worthwhile, the end-product has to be of a really high quality. Professional quality, even. Worthy of BBC4 quality, even. We're talking Faroese jumper quality. And from the perspective of the producer, he or she has to be really convinced of the purpose of the screencast or podcast not only because he or she is about to exert a whole world of effort, but also because the tools used to produce them aren't particularly flexible or adaptable. They're not applicable in loads of different circumstances unlike, for example, Prezi.

Knit your own jumper? Instructions here.

The consumer, meanwhile, is relatively passive in this whole process. He or she is sitting and watching, or sitting and listening, ramping up the need for the content and presentation to be really hot and relevant. And neither type of casting is interactive, amplifying this even more. Let's think again about The Killing II: the fact that, despite my conviction to the contrary, my conversational Danish is actually as non-existent as the Christmas presents I've bought so far, means I've got to sit and read the subtitles on the screen. A second's distraction and I've missed Lund's latest execution of poor, yet exceedingly well-knitted, judgment. It makes me passive. And the same can be applied to podcasts and screencasts. Consumers, like producers, also have to be really convinced of the purpose and value of the screencast or podcast. Otherwise that little cross in the right hand corner of the screen will be clicked quicker than you can say "Nanna Birk Larsen".

The truth is that neither of these tools are for me. I'm sending them to Gedser. But there's something approaching professional development in knowing this, and just being aware that screencasting and podcasting have actually been invented. And the ability to learn, or to know, that there are doors you don't want to push against is pretty valuable. Now there's a lesson that Sarah Lund could learn.

Prezis of the Caribbean (also known as #cpd23 Thing 17: Prezi)

2011-11-04T09:53:00.003Z

Just a quick one this week, proving that miracles really do happen. And I'm going to focus on Prezi because, first, I wrote about Slideshare last year, and because, second, Prezi is So Much More Fun. You know I'm right. Slideshare is like the clearly printed, legible and comprehensible fire safety warning to Prezi's irresponsible teenager playing with matches: there's a much smaller chance of fireworks, and a much smaller chance of total catastrophe. And I love Prezi. In fact, I do believe that it is a truth universally acknowledged that it is little coincidence that the words "Prezi" and "precious" share the same first three letters and have the fifth in common too. Prezi is the social-media-presenting-tool equivalent of Johnny Depp about a decade ago. Yes, you read that right. Prezi is that good. It's pretty, AND it's got a bit of substance.

Pretty, with substance, and also quite a weird elbow

But let's dwell for a second on the "about a decade ago" bit. It's a disclaimer, sure, but a necessary one, for two, almost three reasons: the second and third (and presumably fourth) Pirates of the Caribbean films. Let me explain. It is no understatement to say that Mr Johnny Depp, as the spicily and charismatically dreadlocked Captain Jack Sparrow, just about rescued the second and third films from cataclysm in such a profound, heroic way that even Lassie would've been impressed. Johnny Depp just about made sure that the second and third Pirates films were successful, despite being poorly made, audience-inappropriate and, frankly, rubbish. But Prezi won't do that. Or not yet, anyway. A Prezi is only as good as the person who created, crafted, directed and presented it; it is only as good insofar as it meets the needs of the presentation's audience; and it is only as good as the content is in the first place. We've all heard of "death by Powerpoint", but "death by Prezi" isn't a fiction: it's just that the former is the common cold to the latter's more exciting tropical disease. Still death, though, innit.

The trouble is that Prezi's a bit tricksy and it's got a tight grip. It takes a proper, real amount of investment to understand its foibles and its quirks; and it takes bags more investment to get it to work for you effectively; and the whole luggage collection at John Lewis' worth of investment to learn to resist twizzing upside down for every third point. It's little wonder, then, that Prezi's bedfellow is the temptation to use it for All The Presentations. After all, you now have the Skillz! But please, please, I implore you, don't. For two reasons. First, because if everyone uses Prezi then it stops being exciting and impressive and dramatic and breathtaking (and as Disney taught me, if everyone's incredible, then no one is), just like if Johnny Depp was in All The Films it might get a bit boring. There's the fact that all Prezis look a leeeetle bit similar, for one. But also the main chunk of a Prezi's impact is centred on the fact that it is Not-Powerpoint. And once everyone's using Not-Powerpoint, then Powerpoint might make some kind of retro comeback. And no one wants that. Not even Microsoft want that.

The second reason, and the more important one, is that just because we know how to do something doesn't mean we ought to do it all the time. (The only exception to this rule is the ability to make cakes, but only because there are no losers if everyone's constantly baking). Giving in to the temptation to use Prezi just 'cos you can, and chucking in some irrelevant zooming and twizzing about and turning upside down and flying about as quickly as Edward Scissorhands can do topiary, might shroud the reason you're using it in the first place: presumably, to get a message across to a group of people. Prezi is only ever the vehicle for that message. And the Holy Grail of knowing how to present well is being able to make the decision about what vehicle to use: the Ford Focus (Powerpoint); the plastic red and yellow one from Early Learning Centre (none at all, but just talking); or the bus from Speed (Prezi). And, see, I'm not the only one to think this: Andy reached a similar conclusion, and he has actual evidence, rather than conjecture and car analogies.

I'm going to bring this madness to a conclusion with a bit more, and finish with the old typical Blue Peter-esque adage: here's one I made earlier. A Prezi, that is. An example of bad practice, yes, but just a bit of fun too. And not featuring Johnny Depp at all. I don't know what I was thinking.

Prince of Bel-Air on Prezi

This is what we do* (also known as #cpd23 Thing 16: advocacy)

2011-10-24T16:45:00.000+01:00

It's high time that I gathered up the fast-decaying pieces of cpd23 and looked at Thing 16, in the interests of finishing at some stage before Father Christmas wheezes himself down a nearby chimney. At the moment, alas, it's looking less likely that I'll finish by Crimbo than that heartbroken Harry from Spooks, the fragrant Sue Perkins and the small one from 3T will join forces and release a cover of The Village People's In the Navy, earning themselves, in the process, the coveted Christmas no. 1 spot, and a much less coveted interview with Fearne Cotton. I'll admit: I've been procrastinating with Thing 16. Advocacy and activism is a daunting topic, right? It's daunting because the need for both is undeniably patent: the situation in Brent, and Kensal Rise, and Bolton, and all across the country, demonstrates how important advocacy and activism are, more clearly than when you're Johnny Nash and the rain has gone. It's daunting because it's one of those areas where our intentions are often as mismatched with our actions as Highclere Castle and the cheapest tent Asda can get away with selling. And hell, putting those facts together can make us feel as inadequate as your average Bullseye contestant (with less chance of going home with a speedboat, too), and as guilty as a nun who's just nicked a bottle of vodka from her local Spar, stored it in her wimple while she snuck it into the convent, and is doing shots from the bottle cap while watching back-to-back episodes of Kavanagh QC. It's doubly, triply, daunting because, so much of the time, the stakes are as high as a giraffe's eyebrows.

Harry, and not Sue Perkins. Or any member of 3T.

Talking about advocacy and activism is a bit tricksy. For one thing, while they're not the same thing, they're not complete opposites--they go together like rama lama lama ke whatever it is; and for another thing, they can take place on more fronts than Brighton and Blackpool combined. The one that's glaringly and eye-poppingly obvious at the moment is public libraries. I'll be honest: I'm not in the camp that thinks we have some unmitigated, inescapably grave duty in our roles as librarians and info pros to advocate for other libraries and librarians. It's not, of course, that I wish people wouldn't; rather, I'm just not in the business of telling other grown up people what they should be doing or thinking. I'm a leeeetle bit nervous of any views that demand that we all, without exception, should be fighting tooth, nail and hairpiece to save the libraries as endangered as the panda from ending up as dead as the Barry White.

Not Barry White.

But, hellfire, where would we be without the people who are fighting tooth, nail and hairpiece for them? I'm not always entirely in agreement with how arguments are made (I've seen, on occasion, expressions from the pro-library band of sisters and brothers which display marginally counterproductive levels of aggression and fury, borne of frustration and nowt else, most of the time), but the arguments themselves are usually bang on the money. I'm definitely guilty of the intention/action disparity when it comes to public library campaigning and I should do better. But it's in the best interests of most that I wait until I've got a bit more time and a bit more cleverness, because at the moment my very best and shiniest argument in favour of public libraries is based on an analogy of Hawaii-Five-0. You wanna hear it? OK, then, here goes. Public libraries are good. So was Hawaii-Five-0 (the original). But then them in charge got rid of Hawaii-Five-0, and then they realised what a mistake this was, and they brought it back. So if them in charge also get rid of libraries, then they're bound to realise their mistake, and bring them back again. But instead of the brilliant original, they'll end up with the equivalent of the remake. Hawaii-Five-0 became about vapid, pretty boys with, granted, excellent quiffs and a propensity for taking their shirts off at uncharacteristically regular intervals. It may have the same theme tune, but the resemblance ends there. And if the same thing happens to libraries, well, they'll sort of look the same, and they'll sound the same, but they'll also have huge plotholes, and too much of the budget will be spent on hair gel, and they'll go in for entirely unjustified toplessness. And no one wants that in a library. Well, not every day, anyway.

Not librarians.

Then there are other types, other directions of advocacy. First off, it takes place in our individual libraries. I'm pretty lucky to work somewhere that's really valued by users and under no ostensible threats from them upstairs. But it is shrouded, just a bit, by a misconception of what we do, a myth perpetuated by people who should know better (i.e. academics). So most of the time, advocacy at work consists of saying things like, well, yes, young student, we do have books, but hark! the herald electronic resources sing! it is also available as an ebook. Open up that there laptop. And why, thank you, young student, we are a handsome place to work, excuse the blushes, but we are more than just a pretty face overlooking the river. We can also teach you how to find things, and organise whatever you find, and create sparkling bibliographies that are so thrilling that it would only be a little bit weird to unveil them with props including a tape casette of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and a truckload of dry ice. It's the kind of advocacy that resembles a slow-cooker more than a microwave. It's the kind of advocacy that's about turning the users one at a time, and fortunately for all, is a lot less cultish than I've just made it sound.

Also not just a pretty face.

Last, there's the bit of advocacy that involves the profession itself. If I had a pound coin for every time I've simpered, "no, really, truly, I don't stamp books and I don't shush", I'd have, well, about five pounds. Not that much, then, which might be a sign that the message is finally getting through, just a bit, that it ain't necessarily so-lely about the dewey decimal system. I've got this bad habit of trying to make what I do sound a bit esoteric, so I talk about the secrets of the open access repository, and try to make Marc21 sound as complex and nuanced as an ancient Assyrian dialect (not that it isn't); it's like a bad, persisting hangover of long-word syndrome. I might be better off emphasising the core of what it is that I actually do: help people to find the resources to be better at whatever it is they're doing, and preventing them from drowning in irrelevant information while they're doing so, and ensuring that if U2 were in the room, then by now, they'd definitely have found what they were looking for. If only so I could show them the door post haste.

*Yes, I am quoting MC Hammer. And the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You got a problem with that?

Morning campers! (also known as #libcampuk11: Library Camp)

2011-10-10T22:32:00.008+01:00

I'm taking a little break from cpd23 to write about my Big Day Out in Birmingham last Saturday. Despite having argued countless times with countless people about the fact that Birmingham is, yes, in The South Of England (oh yes it is), I'd never actually been. Birmingham, the home of cheap shoe shops (based on what I saw, Brummies, please don't be cross), of a deservingly disreputable train station, and at least one Gap. I decided early on to travel there and back on the day, despite Cambridge's location on the rail network. For those of you who don't have the "privilege" of living here, it's approximately harder to get to Cambridge from any part of the UK that isn't London than it would be to get from Bognor Regis to Timbuktu with a road map of West Bromwich and a rickshaw as your only companions. Anyway, this all just about meant that I had to get up at 4.30 in the morning and as I normally only concede to a 4am start when there's a fortnight's holiday at the end of it, my standards were incomparably high. Would there be beaches and cocktails, ice cream and palm trees? No, because we were going to Birmingham, and even I'm not completely bonkers. The best we could hope for was Shirley Valentine with Midlands accents and (hopefully) less sleaze and (hopefully) fewer evidently dyed moustaches. Worse still, we were travelling by train. And no matter how hard you try, there is no Brief Encounter-esque spin you can easily impose on a Virgin Pendolino train, especially with its lingering aroma of "panini" and spilt lucozade. The journey was NOT like a Noel Coward film with less Rachmaninov and more Watford. And watching the sun rise over Coventry is not as richly deserving of a Merchant Ivory production as you might initially think.

Not set in New Street

What I knew about Library Camp before I signed up could be written on the inside of a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer wrapper. First, it has a superlative name. I like things with Good Names. (Hello, Benedict Cumberbatch). Second, everyone else was signing up for it, and I am a sucker for Missing Out Syndrome. While this may imply that I am merely a character from Shaun the Sheep but with thumbs and access to the interwebs, it is nonetheless as remarkably potent a motivator as the eponymous gentleman from GMTV circa 1996, and even better, all without the yellow lycra. Third, lots of the other people that were signing up for it were people that I follow on the twitters and the prospect of being ~~allowed~~ able to follow them around in real life for a couple of hours was a temptation of near-biblical proportions.

The unconference idea was totally new to me. Its basic premises--a deliberate lack of speakers, sorting stuff out on the day, seeing what happens, going with the flow, rolling with the punches--were aces. And though I'll admit to being a little disappointed that I misunderstood what "voting with feet" would actually entail (I imagined some kind of aerobic metatarsal abacus), the way that it was run--a semblance of disorganisation underpinned by weeks of careful thought and planning by the genius organisers--was as new and as fresh as the three-week old birthday cake on our kitchen table is old and rotten (no one will take responsibility for it, so it will still be there at Christmas*). And it was as interesting and as enlightening as those Aviva adverts you have to sit through to get to the historical hanky-panky on Downton Abbey are tedious and depressing.

I went to four sessions during the day and didn't write down a single thing. So I am drawing what follows from the deepest darkest depths of my brain where it is wedged in between the lyrics to Billy Joel's We didn't start the fire, some limited knowledge of the filmography of Will Hay, and my list of (pathetic but long-lasting and increasingly insane) reasons why I haven't ever, and don't want to ever, watch Star Wars. Fortunately for all concerned I am certain that there will be a great group of more precise, sensible and talented bloggers than I could ever hope to be who will write up the important stuff. But anyway, in the interests of joining in, let me try to briefly précis them and see what I brought home with me:

On cat and class: the difference between what librarians actually do, and what systems librarians wish they'd do and ask Father Christmas for every year; the inherent flaws in the concept of having bibliographical standards; the terror and terrorisation of MARC; and essentially how cataloguers are So Damn Cool that I'm starting to believe that Squeeze's seminal hit was not about felines after all (music cataloguers, take note, your subject headings are wrong).
On special collections: what they are and what it means to deal with them; the balance between making stuff available and controlling the hordes; why the phrase 'to have and to hold' might need to be split in two when special collections are involved; forming partnerships and knowing when to give things to other people to take care of (a strategy which I intend to adopt if I ever have to deal with children).
On legacies: adopting and battling against the ones you inherit and are stuck with; how they're perpetuated and by whom; how they're tricksy and self-protective and can preclude us from chucking them all out and starting from scratch. And about the extent to which we've all, as a profession, inherited this bigger, near universal legacy, a blooming Voldemort-at-the-height-of-his-nose-free-power of legacies, and that's the one that's edging libraries closer to the Bermuda triangle now. There was also a small amount of talk about Frank Skinner in the buff but I think we all regretted that. And no, I was definitely not in any way responsible for that. (And no, I'm not protesting too much before you get there).
On FE colleges and HE colleges: how they deal with different and competing user groups and staff concerns over different levels and extents of service; how individual libraries don't often face problems that are particularly unique: often we're all in the same boat and maybe if we share some solutions we can make sure that the boat we're all in isn't the rapidly sinking Titanic but the one from Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons and instead of being about to drown, we're going on an adventure in the Lake District (where there's a far greater possibility of cream tea). And how buttering up the IT staff is often a solution to all the world's problems.

Much better, yeah?

During the last hour of the day, I muscled in with the #knitcamp crowd and as a non-knitter I enjoyed my own little #skivecamp and had a quick brew and a nice sit down. I've said this countless times, but there aren't half some talented folk in them there libraries. Katie was demonstrating the four needles approach to knitting: but give me four needles and I'll make that joke from the Two Ronnies, realise it doesn't work and poke my eyes out hanging my head in shame. Sian and Sam had these amazing and confusing circular knitting needles: but give me those and I'd be guaranteed to accidentally strangle myself within seven seconds just by trying to work out what in the heck was Going On.

There's been a gaping omission so far in this blog post. I haven't yet mentioned the C-word. Get your mind out of the gutter, I don't mean cardigans. The other C-word. Cake. I am a self-professed and perfectly content non-baker, but that doesn't meant that I don't remain in a consistent, staggering state of awe of those who don't believe that the natural origin of a Victoria sponge is a Marks and Spencers. I've never seen so much cake in my entire life. Special mentions of course must go to Katie's award-winning beetroot cake, and a doff of the hat also to Jenni's peanut butter cookies, and the unknown makers of the Welsh cakes and the proper Scottish tablet**. Add in the couple of pints in the pub while avoiding New Street and waiting for the train home, as well as what Bonnie and Clyde (also known as Ed and Elizabeth, but I won't say which one's which) bullied me relentlessly into having for tea in King's Cross Station, it was no wonder that Sunday was a day for my fat pants.

Last of all, then, a lofty and genuine CHEERS ME DEARS to everyone who rocked up in Birmingham, who shared their thoughts and their wisdom and their jokes, especially to them from the twitters who pretended to know who I was, and to the organisers for a cracking idea, an even better execution, and for the promise of another one next year (can I just propose the idea of a library nunconference where we all have to wear habits? Go on, I've not worn mine for years). Anyone want to get a book going for how fast the ticks will go next time? I'll give you good odds, promise...

*Amazingly, while I've been writing this, one of the genius housemates has taken one for the team and got rid of the cake.
** Edit (Tuesday morning): I am reliably informed by Jo that the maker of the delicious proper Scottish tablet was the illustrious and marvellous Jaffne. Thanks Jaf! It was almost as yummy as Gary Barlow. (That's a compliment).

We're the Chipmunks (also known as Thing 15: Conferences and events)

2011-10-01T18:40:00.001+01:00

In the words of Dinnerladies' Petula Gordino: "I'm back! New venue, new caravan, new kidney". OK, so I haven't got the kind of excuse for going AWOL that would match moving house or getting an organ transplant or ... buying a caravan. I haven't got anything at all new. But the only other references I could think of for "being back" involved either the Backstreet Boys or Eminem and, well, let's just stick to Julie Walters. No, my excuse is that I've been hiding out in Aberwristwatch, both the town itself and the concept, writing an essay and, now it's done, it's time to pick up the shattered pieces of my floundering and flailing attempt to stay even vaguely up to date with cpd23.

Aber. Possibly with a bit of artistic license.

Fortunately, Thing 15 is about conferences and seminars and events, all of which I like. At best, you meet good people and learn good stuff; at worst, you get a day off work and are able to practise the art of the regimented drinking of lacklustre tea. Katie asks us in the main blog to look at conferences and events from three angles: as attendee, speaker and organiser. I do like a nice trichotomy. Trying to think of a way to frame the discussion was fun too. The Musketeers was an option but I only really know about Dogtanian and the Muskehounds, and I've realised that I mention Dogtanian with a worrying frequency already. Harry, Ron and Hermione: too overdone. Fathers Ted, Dougal and Jack: too sweary. Larry, Curly and Moe: would require Actual Research, and I've made it this far without that. Then it dawned on me. The winning concept. And by winning I mean that holy trinity of being not totally irrelevant, malleable enough to make it fit what I want to say, and in the 80s enough that anyone reading this will have forgotten what they need to contradict me. It's Alvin and the Chipmunks. The TV version, obviously. And as a self-respecting childless woman in her mid-twenties, I haven't watched the movie. OK, I'm lying. I'm in my late twenties, and I don't have that much self-respect. If I did I'd be drinking gin somewhere rather than writing this drivel. But I still haven't seen the film. Promise.

Attending conferences: the Theodore Seville approach

Theodore was always the lovely Chipmunk. Sweet, gullible, perhaps a little naive, and always hungry. Let's begin with the last attribute: hungry. The food at conferences is always REALLY important. There's something about eating to schedule that aggrandises how crucial soggy sandwiches and strange samosas actually are. It's mainly because it's free, so it transports us back to our student days, where the prospect of a free meal was more appetising than a first class degree any day of the week. And by free, I mean paid for so far in advance that we've forgotten about it. Conference food is usually pretty good: the Danish pastries at the Libraries @ Cambridge conference are worth attending for alone.

But then there are Theodore's other attributes, as I've said: sweet, gullible, perhaps a little naive. This is us at conferences. We rock up, wide-eyed, blinking, a little confused, and expecting the best. We anticipate meeting a whole cast of wonderful, fascinating people; we foresee learning magical and magnificent things; we imagine ourselves leaving feeling more inspired and more energised than a Duracell bunny. And for the most part, we do. For the most part. But I've never been to a conference where all the papers were great, nor where all the speakers were bursting at the seams with charisma, nor where I felt engaged or interested for the entire day. It's not that the papers or the people were boring; it's that speakers can't please all the people all the time. Battling that after lunch slump where the puniness of the tea you've been supping really becomes apparent is no mean task. And there are always speakers who are talking about something so far outside your field of awareness, let alone expertise, that you're as confused and bewildered as you would be if you went into a post office and there wasn't a queue.

The best bit about conferences leads me straight back to Theodore. He acts as the safe-for-children adhesive that bonds his often warring brothers together. Attending conferences lets you meet people. And no matter how good buddies you are on Twitter, or the fact that you've emailed each other once, there's nothing like meeting up and bonding over the ever long queue for a plastic cup of some boiler water masquerading as tea, to make you allies.

Speaking at conferences: the Simon Seville approach

OK, OK, let's just ignore the fact that Simon's supposed to be the "clever" one. Of course I don't think that people who speak at conferences are cleverererer than their listening, or snoozing, counterparts. Of course. But what Simon does is this: he uses the opportunities he's given and he's pretty brave.

Speaking at conferences is undeniably an opportunity. If your topic is interesting to some people in the room, or if you're a good speaker, then it's an opportunity to teach people something, or to make them think about something differently. It's also, marginally more self-interestedly, a way to raise your profile or get your name known. But speaking at conferences is also something that requires a bit of courage. I know this from experience: earlier this year, I spoke at the New Professionals Conference, I directed a Q&A at the Libraries @ Cambridge conference, and in a couple of weeks I'm going to the CPD25 conference on applying to Library School to take part in a Q&A and big up Aber.

I'm not too fazed about speaking in public, especially if I can prepare in advance. Years and years of being forced to do masses of it while I was at school has numbed me to the nerves. When I was 17, I gave a Prizegiving speech to about 700 people, including my friends, classmates, teachers, school governors, guests, and more. I was meant to thank the main Prizegiver who was, fortunately, really interesting, and was (I think) one of the executive producers of Queer as Folk. The bit where I had to speak didn't bother me particularly: I'd memorised the speech and had it written down on index cards in my pocket. It was the bit where I had to carry a microphone to the front of the stage before speaking into it that bothered me. I was convinced that I'd trip over some wires or my feet and fall head first into the choir. It also bothered me that while I was doing all this I was being forced to wear a suit and high heels and make-up. There was such a lot of displacement going on there that the fact I had to say something faded entirely.

I don't mean to suggest for a second that a lack of fear translates into any particular oratorical skill; nor am I really suggesting that you make yourself forget about the bit where you have to say things out loud to people by doing a load of other stuff simultaneously that terrifies you more. Don't juggle fire, please, while giving a paper on the digital humanities--if nothing else, the conference organisers will have coronaries. But what I would say to people who are nervous about speaking is this:

One, offer to speak, or submit a proposal. If you get turned down, try again. If you get accepted, there's no going back. You can cross the bridge of terror when you come to it.
Two, prepare properly. Both the proposal and the paper. Makes the slides good. Practise enough so you know the gist and flow of the paper, but don't memorise it. Be comfortable with what you're going to say. Take out long words that your tongue trips over, for example.
Three, remember everyone in the audience is just very happy that it's you that's speaking and not them.
Four, no one is really focusing on your nerves. At the start, they're thinking about their stomachs, or last night's episode of Glee, or why whoever chose the uncomfortable chairs they're squirming on thought hot pink and orange stripes would be a good design choice. Once you get going, they're thinking about what you're saying, and still not whether or not you're nervous.
Five, remember they're all Theodore. They're gullible, sweet, perhaps a little naive, and looking up to their big brother Simon, who has all the answers.

Organising conferences: the Alvin Seville approach

OK, then, Alvin. The lead guy, the main dude. Alvin is impulsive, confident, inspired, and full of boundless energy. I imagine that if you're organising a conference or event, these traits would fall into the "essential" category, rather than simply desirable. Conference organising takes a whole host of valuable, brilliant skills of which I am totally envious. It's everything from booking venues and getting speakers and choosing samosas and making name badges to taking the risk of contracting arthritis by keeping your fingers crossed for the seventeen days running up to the big event, and hoping that something unexpected like an alien invasion doesn't happen to scupper all these well laid plans. I take my proverbial hat off, and offer three cheers and a bottle of gin to everyone involved in the organisation of next week's Library Camp! Organisers are SO talented.

It's not something I've ever really done; I kind of helped out with the Libraries @ Cambridge conference in January this year, but that really just consisted in attending a hilarious meeting with Andy, Lyn and Rose, showing up early to give out name badges, and holding a microphone whilst worrying that I wouldn't fall (actually, that's a theme. I wonder what it is about microphones that makes me think I'm going to tumble to my death or, worse, utter humiliation). So anyway, I can't take much credit for that conference. But maybe one day I'll get my chance. If ever there's a conference on the impact of Benedict Cumberbatch on the information society, you'll know who's behind it.

Why I only have eyes for Zotero (also known as #cpd23 Thing 14: Reference management)

2011-09-07T16:48:00.000+01:00

What's that you say? Write another ode to Zotero? Go on then. In fact, I'll just talk about Zotero. Call it cheating, if you will, but I prefer to think of it rather as giving both my readers a small reprieve from the depressingly overlong drivel I usually present (and the fact that I've nicked that joke from Terry Wogan of all people proves the point). I say another ode because this time last year I went on and on and on (in a style not dissimilar to one Mrs Doyle) about how brilliant Zotero is. If you're a glutton for punishment, look, here. And, at this point, my assessment was entirely prognostic. I hadn't used Zotero, but I predicted that it would be wonderful. I compared Zotero to Sherlock Holmes, who would definitely have made it into the song if I had been responsible for The Sound of Music's My Favourite Things. I registered a measly, mean 15% cynicism, centring around the fact that I felt coerced against my will to use Firefox. A year on, though, and I've actually used Zotero. A year on, and I can confirm that I had quite the premonition. To hell with this librarian business, I'm going to the registry office or the post office or the petrol station or wherever it is you go to change your name, for surely I am the spiritual descendent of Mystic Meg. Perhaps if I'm lucky I'll be able to forge a new career for myself predicting lottery numbers, and appear weekly alongside Eamonn Holmes on some abysmally lobotomic Saturday night quiz show. (Please, please, don't let this ever happen to me). A year on, though, and I can confirm that Zotero is really rather good indeed.

It's BACK SOON

Not only that, but I've since learned that while my earnest entreaties to the good folks at Zotero for a Chrome plug-in have fallen on deaf ears, the geniuses (for surely there is no other word) have gone one better and created a desktop version, liberating me forever (I presume) from my Firefoxy prison, and making the whole thing sturdier, more robust, and less likely to be discontinued or decommissioned or discarded as if it were a bag of Primark shoes and Fun House VHS' outside a charity shop. (This is all supposition, I should say, but Mystic Murph might just triumph again). In any case, this has been the best news I've had since Bolton Wanderers managed to cling onto Cahill in the football transfer window (and yes, it has been a slow week).

Hurray!

If there's a direct alternative to the ghastly cliché about not knowing what you've got till it's gone, then I need it here, but I can't remember it. Maybe something along the lines of not knowing what you've got until you've suffered through several thousand years of manual referencing? Or not knowing how good Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi is until you've endured Janet Jackson's torturous sampling of its chorus? Like most sane people, I hate doing actual, pain-staking, manual referencing almost as much as I hate an empty bottle of gin. It involves far too much checking of full stops for my liking, and takes such a lot of organisation to do it properly and efficiently. Having said that, I do think that there's a huge amount of value in actually knowing how to do it yourself, without some fancypants software to take the trouble out of it on your behalf. But this is teetering a bit close to a "in MY day" story now, and frankly I'm just not old enough for that, so I'll change the subject.

She totally deserves a picture.

Reference management isn't something that we'd directly use for CPD, clearly, but for our potentially plethoric publications, essays, reviews, and so on, that clearly we are all writing, all the time, this kind of tool is invaluable, and it's good to know how it works. But Isla's Thing 14 post made me think about something else too. Isla mentioned a couple of alternatives to Zotero, namely Mendeley and cite-u-like. I'll admit that I saw Zotero and totally shunned the other two. This is, very partially, because of time constraints, and perhaps the next time I have a free moment I'll look at the others, but as things stand that'll be in about seven hundred years and I'll be prising the laptop open with my cold dead hands. But, mainly, it was because I saw Zotero, and thought, hello Zotero, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again, and wondered why on this luscious earth I'd ever bother with the others.

What was that reaction?! At first, I thought, loyalty. To Zotero and to me, because I've invested bits of time figuring out how it works. And then, I thought, satisfaction, because Zotero does everything I need it to, apart from presenting me with tea and cakes for every fifteen minutes that I spend having to cite things. Or gratitude, perhaps, that Zotero fundamentally limits my association with the deepest and gloomiest depths of APA referencing. Or a combination of the three. The conclusion I had about Zotero was that it works for me. And that'll do, pig. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

But then, I thought, that isn't generally our response to Web 2.0 tools. When Google+ was launched, librarians flocked to it in droves. It was like that bit in Braveheart when the Scots attack, but with a far smaller percentage of people faking Scottish accents. With some Web 2.0 tools, then, we adopt the "ain't brokey, no fixy" approach, and with others, it's more like a "ain't brokey, but look at its potentially better, more attractive cousin". Sometimes we're dead loyal, sometimes more committed than I am to Take That (which is A LOT). Sometimes we move onto what we perceive (wrongly, perhaps) as the better, more popular model, as if we were Brad Pitt and social media tools were Angelina Jolie and poor old Jennifer Aniston. My seven minutes of thinking about this while typing this paragraph makes me think that it all boils down to what the tools are for, and whether their purpose is clear-cut, because that determines whether we can two-time them usefully, legitimately, and positively. So because I use Zotero for references, I have no need for Mendeley; because I use Diigo for social bookmarking, I have no need for Delicious. Using two reference management software packages, or using two social bookmarking sites, would be more a monumental waste of time and/or more confusing than the success of The Inbetweeners film at the box office. But because Twitter, for example, can be used in loads of ways, and because its purpose isn't clear-cut, and because it's multifunctional, it's harder to replace, and harder to displace, with some exciting new innovation. Like Google+.

I'm TOTALLY digressing now. So I'll stop. In sum: Zotero is lovely, Twitter is indestructible. But then so was the Titanic, until it sank. And on that bombshell...

Dropbox it like it's hot (also known as #cpd23 Thing 13: Collaborative tools)

2011-09-03T19:33:00.001+01:00

So call me the Maradona of cpd23, but I'm going to cheat a bit here and focus on Dropbox. Partly because I've got further behind with these Things than the plans for the tram in Edinburgh, and partly because I've already written about wikis and Google Docs, and in the words of Take That, I have "said it all". (And probably, also, in the words of Take That, I have "nothing to say that matters".) Anyway, if you want to read the posts, they're here: wikis and Google Docs; but if you've got more sense than that, here's just a quick précis. Wikis, I decided, were like Blackadder. It wasn't a successful analogy (surprise surprise), but my cunning plan (more cunning than a f... you know how it ends) was to disguise the rubbishness of my analogy by shoehorning in a load of brilliant quotes from Blackadder and a few pictures of Hugh Laurie. And I got the quotes from wikis, thereby justifying their worth indubitably. Google Docs, I said, was "like ER circa 1997". It wasn't fiddly or insane or confused; and it didn't require any particular cleverness or any particular George Clooney. Having used Google Docs to make my teensy contribution to cpd23, I can confirm that it doesn't require any particular cleverness, and George Clooney is nowhere in sight. The minor problem that when a document gets a bit long and unwieldy, it would be easier to drink Irn Bru from a colander without spilling it than figuring out who said what and when. In the scheme of things, though, it's still pretty good.

I think I prefer this George to the Clooney.

Dropbox, on the other hand, isn't pretty good. It's utterly brilliant. I have one message for you, Dropbox: no one likes a show off. There it is, sitting on my desktop and twinkling away, silently advertising its ease of use, and the fact that it can sync across more computers than there are camel's eyelashes in this world. Dropbox, with its lack of prejudice about the type of files that can be 'dropped' in it, offering quietly to save you the endless minor irritation of having to email things to yourself, and letting you share your things with the Other People. Seamless, that's what Dropbox is. And really, really good. It's the first-class-complete-with-honours graduate of the social media universe.

Just checking though.

The problem with Dropbox is that because it's so reliable and effective and seamless and good and simple and pleased with itself, it is, to entirely misquote Nat King Cole, totally forgettable. Dropbox just sits there, wiling away its time, unobjectionably, unobtrusively, waiting for me to drop a file in it and let it spring to life like when you give a pound coin to those moving statues. This is an Unfortunate Attribute. The positive thing about this unfortunate attribute is that IN THEORY remembering that Dropbox exists is a bit like when you go to an 80s night and the DJ plays "Waiting for a star to fall" and you remember just how flipping AWESOME that song is. It's joyfully revelatory. (No? Really? That just me?). The negative thing about this unfortunate attribute is that it never, ever happens like this. No, instead, it's like hearing "Waiting for a star to fall" at 4 in the morning through the taxi's tinny radio on your way home. When it's too late. The moment has passed. Because the second you remember that Dropbox exists is the second that you open a file you've just emailed to yourself. Or that someone's emailed to you. When the deed is done.

Definitely right first time.

Dropbox is, unquestionably, really pretty brilliant. It could do with promoting itself a bit more, though. And by "promoting itself", I mean adopting an irritating feature to encourage me to remember to use it. Might I suggest that when you open Dropbox it plays a short version of Snoop Dogg ft. Pharrell's "Drop it like it's hot"--memorable enough to ensure that you, in the words of Take That, "never forget", but not so annoying that it'd put you off using it. Because the trouble is that while Dropbox might be the first-class-complete-with-honours graduate of the social media universe, that ain't no guarantee of a job these days.

Rumpole of the social media (also known as #cpd23 Thing 12: Putting the social into social media)

2011-08-25T21:42:00.004+01:00

If the situation ever arose that I had to make a list of all the things that I really liked and cherished and made false idols of (it's unlikely, but go with it), omitting all the sentimental guff like people, and all the necessary stuff like food and oxygen and Alan Rickman, I reckon social media would be pretty high up on the list. It'd probably be just above Green Wing and probably just below genius housemates' homemade lemon bars made with real proper lemons. (NB Genius housemates have much better things to do with themselves than read this gibberish, but I'm practising the art of Sledgehammer Style Hint Dropping). Anyway, seeing as I'm so behind with the Things, and seeing as the Thing 12 posts I've read have covered all the crucial points (this one, for example, says everything I could want to say better than I could ever say it), I'm just going to witter on for a few paragraphs about social media, be both prosecution and defence, and cover some of the less crucial points. And by "less crucial" I, of course, mean less coherent and more deranged. And wearing a silly wig.

I mentioned him, so it's DEFINITELY allowed.

Saying that you "like" social media doesn't actually say much, apart from the fact that it shows you may well have been brainwashed by the lingua franca Facebooka. If someone tells you that they like music, you don't necessarily assume that they like everything from JLS to John Taverner via Iron Maiden, or from East 17 to 10cc via Mike Oldfield. It may be the case that you LOVE all of the above, but it's certainly the case (and possibly even advisable) that you can like music and not appreciate Tubular Bells. Social media is SO varied. It includes bits which are to the Internet what Kajagoogoo is to the music industry, bits which are as niche as Bombay Bicycle Club, and bits which are as exclusive and acquired as Wagner's Die Sarazenin. It's got bits as good as Take That and bits as bad as most of the stuff in the charts. It's got bits which are noisier than Outkast singing Hey Ya while standing in the middle of your eardrum, and bits which are quieter than John Cage after a nasty bout of laryngitis. So saying that you "like" social media can mean all kinds of things. Having the one catch all term is useful, but it also opens up the Door of Ambiguous.

Really, then, social media, the entity, is like an octopus. Its head is the thing they all have in common. It's the thing that makes them social media, the ontological bit, and that's something to do with interaction and communication on this here Internet. Its tentacles are the varying forms and incarnations of social media. One of these tentacles might be wearing a sharp suit and carrying a laminated CV, and that would be LinkedIn. Another is wearing a rather fetching pink crocheted scarf, and that's Ravelry. The tentacles have something in common, but they're not necessarily the same. They're not necessarily competing in a synchronised flailing competition. But there's another thing they have in common, the blood supply, let's say (I'm no biologist, so if this isn't true, let's just pretend, this analogy has run its course anyway). The blood supply is ME and YOU and US and THEM, the people that actually use the sites, without whom they'd be diddly squat. The social media octopus is just any old octopus, but we give it the personality and the meaning and the purpose. We turn it from being just any old octopus to being Squidward Tentacles from Spongebob Squarepants. Or Ursula from The Little Mermaid (half octopus, half sea-witch, and yes, I looked it up), or Pearl from Finding Nemo. We make it The Kraken from 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, or Octopussy (yes, I know, not technically an octopus, go with it), or Paul the Octopus from the World Cup or his Blackpool-based successor, Ollie. Or, even better, Professor Inkling from the Octonauts. We can make it whatever we want. It's still an octopus, but it's our octopus. And the fact that social media is SO powerful and yet still SO malleable is one of my favourite things about it.

In fact, I think the BEST thing about social media is that it breaks down the barriers of time and distance and money and rank and position and role. Social media is like the world's worst hurdler. It's what would happen if I tried to hurdle, just without the broken bones and the chaos and the screaming. I'm not going to be naive and say that it's the great leveller just because the hurdles have been knocked down. Knocking the hurdles down just makes it a regular sprint, and the fastest runner is still going to win the race. But social media does open up communication by broadening the range of people you can communicate with. It chucks "local" into the food processor, and shoves the possibility of sharing thoughts and ideas into a place where your position, geographic or otherwise, matters just a bit less. As long as your position puts you within arms' reach of some device that has Internet access. And, for the sake of taste, within arms' reach of a gin and tonic.

Best photo ever? From Stephan Geyer.

Librarians and info pros are in a pretty good position when it comes to social media, though. We can praise it to the M25 and back because the people we want to talk to and network with are actually already there. Other professionals in other professions aren't so lucky. We happen to be in an industry where there's a big party going on and social media is its venue. I know of some libraries who are actively advocating that their users get their asses on Twitter because It Will Be Good For Them. This is a brilliant idea. We should accept that using social media is a skill that takes time to be learned, personally, and we might even think about how the fact that we've grasped this skill, for better or worse, can be shared with other people, in such a way that doesn't involve making it part of an A-level syllabus.

...at school.

The WORST thing about social media, though, if I can go back to the hurdles thing (and let's just be grateful for a second that I'm not returning to the octopus thing), is that sometimes these hurdles are useful. Social media extends your working hours because it takes a baseball bat to the notion of 9-5. Dolly Parton's big money number would be very different these days. It's not that you have to bring work home because you've been procrastinating, but because you carry the conversations around with you. They're on your phone, in your computer. This has its benefits, and it has its disadvantages too. Sometimes the interaction is best done locally, and figuring out when it is, and when it isn't, is another skill. Social media has become an intrinsic part of our workflow, and we rightly worry about privacy and tone and language and all of the stuff related to our personal brand, but we should also take the time to figure out how we can integrate social media into the bit of our workflow that involves us sitting in front of Grey's Anatomy in our Captain Jack Harkness pyjamas, drinking beer and eating Haribos, and definitely, definitely, not thinking about libraries.

I'm going to finish this post with the most crucial, cutthroat and convincing point so far, the bit that's going to pull the rug from under the tentacles of social media, or whatever they have under the sea instead of rugs. Here it is. Before we unthinkingly worship at the altar of social media, remember this. Chances are, if it weren't for social media, you wouldn't be reading this now. And with that, m'lud, I rest my case.

PS Billions of thanks to the lovely Twitter people who helped me out with all the famous octopuses/i/odes, and to the genius housemate Beckles who told me loads of stuff about music.

WLTM: Mentor. Must have GSOH, and Werther's Originals (also known as #cpd23 Thing 11: Mentorship)

2011-08-14T22:34:00.010+01:00

I am ALMOST COMPLETELY on board with this mentorship thing. I mean, if this blog isn't a cry for help, I don't know what it is. (Well, I do, but let's not go there). I don't actually have anyone that I'd class as a "formal" professional mentor, but that should be blazingly obvious. A mentor worth his or her weight in breezeblock, let alone gold, would have by now taken heroic measures to prevent me from ever blogging again.

Photo from Ferran.

That said, there are lots of people whom I'd class as informal mentors. Some of them are even librarians. I'm a lot happier with the "informal mentor" thing than the "formal mentor" thing. Informal mentorship seems to be a lot more natural, more organic, more holistic, even, than formal mentorship. I think it's normal that professional relationships would eventually take on this cheerful yet hierarchical structure. I know it's not unique to our profession, but it is very typical of librarianship, full to the brim as it is with all that intrinsic benevolence and mutual interest. I'm not surprised that it's a key part of chartership. It's sweet and it's good. It's Giles and Buffy. It's Miss Jean Brodie and her crème de la crème. In my head, when I think of mentorship, I see a remake of the traditional Werther's Originals scenario: the older, wise and wizened librarian endowing the young, fresh-faced and eager whippersnapper with pearls of sagely advice and caramel flavoured sweets. On a train.

Ideal mentor?

BUT I am having a little bit of trouble with the "formal mentor" thing, mainly because I'm not sure how the formal/informal or official/unofficial categories fit together. And, although Meg does mention that it's a bit scary asking someone to be your formal mentor, I can't be the only one to think that it smacks hugely of asking someone out on a date. This is what I would generally envisage:

Me: *nervous, ashen, perspiring* Willyoubemymentor?
Serious, professional, busy librarian [let's call him Mufasa]: No.

On a scale of one to rejection, I'm not doing particularly well. It seems a bit overwhelming to approach people whom you've been professionally respecting and admiring (read: stalking) from a safe distance, and outing yourself as a big old fan girl. And even if it goes really really well, such as:

Me: *nervous, ashen, perspiring* Willyoubemymentor?
Librarian Mufasa: Yes.
Me: *picks self back up off floor* Cool.
Librarian Mufasa: Good.
Both: *burst into rendition of Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now by Starship*

Well, what then? I'm not entirely sure that I see the point in "going steady", as it were, with your informal mentor, or what the point really is in suddenly changing your status from informal to formal mentee. I like to think that I know my informal mentors well enough (and some of them may even know who I am) to email them if necessary when I've got some career problem or concern. And, more to the point, I've got a professional network of library people who, although not necessarily more senior than I am, have different experiences and perspectives and would probably offer me cracking advice, just perhaps not quite with the same helping of twinkly-eyedness I'm now beginning to expect from any formal mentor as a matter of course. So I don't quite see why, if you already have some friendly, engaging and mutually beneficial professional relationship with Librarian Dumbledore, revolving around boiled sweets rather than horcruxes, and mainly consisting in thinly veiled but entirely ignorable hints about Making The Writing Stop, you'd suddenly go and make it all official. Are we going to have relationship statuses on LinkedIn now? It strikes me that formal mentorship is only ever going to emerge out of an already informal mentoring relationship (even it's quite a formal "informal mentoring relationship"--the language is tricksy, isn't it?), and I see no real necessity in cleaving yourself interminably to a more senior professional and shoving a label on something that was working perfectly well, thank you very much. Even in my ideal scenario, above, all that's changed is that a potentially previously unknown mutual adoration for 80s music has been revealed, and while that is a manifestly EXCELLENT development, it is also patently unnecessary.

Image from Natalie

Let me not for a second denigrate the idea of mentorship. I believe this post has proved beyond a molecule of doubt that a mentor would be pretty useful for me (any offers, leave a comment, and I'll get back to you. I won't hold my breath). The benefits, especially for the individuals being mentored, are to "obvious" what the fact that Dirty Dancing is being remade is to "perturbing", "disquieting" and "frankly sinister". Actually, that's not particularly clear. The benefits are very obvious. So very obvious, in fact, that I haven't mentioned any of them in this post. Let's move past that quickly.

Once again, though, I'm troubled by the semantics of the whole enterprise, which has become a bit of a theme so far in these posts. This time my minor unease is encased in the need for some imposition of formality onto a previously informal professional partnership which is, by definition, working pretty well. (Although it has just dawned on me that there could be some kind of Pokémon-style card-trading game among us potential mentees, which might be fun. It'd be like Top Trumps but with librarians, and instead of it being a comical distraction it could be our real lives.) Anyway, I digress. Maybe it is just semantics, and maybe the strict delineation into the two categories isn't necessary at all. I don't know. However, what I do know is that my thoughts are coloured by the fact that I haven't any direct experience of formal mentorship. As well as by the fact that I'm now totally incapable of disassociating the entire issue from the works of Starship. What was it that we built this city on? Oh yes. As if I'd forget. Rock and roll.

It's not lupus. It's libraries (also known as #cpd23 Thing 10: Routes into librarianship)

2011-08-11T11:01:00.003+01:00

The last time someone asked me why I became a librarian, I replied “for the craic”. Usually, though, my answer is a variation on the following statement: I already had the specs and the cardies, and though my hair is not bunned, I make that two out of three, and what's good enough for Meat Loaf is good enough for me. If they fail to notice the simmering irony, I'll add "and for the money", just for good measure. I don’t really have a straight answer to the question, so I usually just deflect it. I’m now struck by the thought that if a bearded half-giant bearing a strange resemblance to that bloke out of Cracker had shown up on my doorstep when I was 11, wielding a pink umbrella and uttering the words “you’re a librarian, Helen”, I might have saved myself a lot of time and faffing about. I was never one of those kids who found solace in the library, and I grew up in a house packed to the rafters with books, but this didn’t mean I wasn’t always in the library. Our school librarian was lovely, if a bit bonkers, with an obsession with Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (I mean, whoever heard of a librarian who was overtly and overly interested in rubbish telly?!); and I occasionally went to my fantastic local library (three cheers for Bury Library!) to do my homework, and I still get warm-and-fuzzies about it. But I never even briefly considered that I might eventually grow up and do this for my Proper Job.

You're a wizard, Helen.

In 2006, I graduated from the most gorgeous and lovely university in the entire world, St Andrews, with a degree in Theology. This subject had clearly been selected by the 17-year-old me for its sparkling employment prospects. I realised, part way through my final year, that I'd never become the new Samantha on I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, and after swiftly excommunicating teaching and the law from the prospective job horizon, I decided to carry on studying. I moved just down the road to the second most gorgeous and lovely university in the entire world, Edinburgh, and started an M.Th. in Theological Ethics. And I had a brilliant time. So when the idea of sticking around for a PhD was gently proposed, I went for it. I continued to deflect questions about my future employment, and figured that I’d become a slightly mad, liberal, feminist, disobedient theologian, and would spend my days wailing and writing and setting cats among pigeons. And, if that didn’t work out, I’d do the honourable, sensible thing, and join up. Become a nun. Duly accepted to the department, duly assigned a highly esteemed supervisor with several titles before and a novella of letters after his name, and with a vague outline of a vague topic, I began work on my PhD.

LOOK HOW PRETTY

Fast forward seven months. There I was, knee deep in sixteenth century covenantal theology, burdened by a smouldering hatred for John Knox and all who sailed in him, cursing the fact that I wasn't fluent in German and Greek and Latin and Swahili and Klingon, and wondering what on this fine and sweet earth I'd got myself into, I quit. Just like that. It was a snap decision, but the best one I could've made. There were things about the PhD that I loved, to be sure. But mainly I hated it, and mainly I had a rotten time. It was isolating, and isolated. I feared I’d never get a job, and was crippling my employment prospects by lumbering myself with a degree that would over- and under-qualify me for everything out there. Considering I’d be graduating now, this was quite the premonition—paradoxically, enough of a premonition to secure me employment as a fortune teller on the pier in Blackpool. My recently formed career objectives were dissolving as quickly as a Skip dissolves on your tongue—theologians are, like, well clever and stuff, and comparatively I am a buffooning idiot. And while I stand by the idea that I’d have made an exquisite if wildly subversive and frequently seditious nun, I’d heard a rumour that gin and tonics and Converse trainers were hard to come by in the convent, which promptly eliminated that potential career move.

GRR.

I was grateful that Edinburgh let me degrade the PhD into a(nother) Masters, saving me from the immediate bleak prospect of unemployment, and ensuring that I could remain safely cushioned in my ivory towered academic haven for a little bit longer. But I knew I had to start thinking about getting a Proper Job, and despite having spent six years living for, and essentially living in, the library, it never crossed my mind to swap to the other side of the counter.

I decided to become a librarian one afternoon in April. You know that moment in every House episode where, despite lots of mistakes, errors, crashes, analogies and diagnoses of lupus, Hugh Laurie suddenly just knows what the matter is? That. I was studying away in New College library (in Edinburgh, not Oxford!), and thought that it would be all right if I could just stay where I was, if I could just stay in the library. It was potentially a throwaway thought—I had probably, that very morning, considered careers as a tightrope walker (but I’ve no balance), a baker (but I can’t cook), a writer (but if you’re reading this drivel you’ll know that was a no-go), and professional northerner (but I’m not sure this actually exists). New College library is such a beautiful, brilliant place that I defy anyone not to reach the same conclusion if they stay in there long enough and, with this little idea planted in my head, I braved the arctic temperatures of spring in Edinburgh, and moseyed down to the Careers Service in the hope that they’d be able to shove a bit of fertiliser on it. They did. They gave me a ringbinder. Within fifteen seconds of starting to read the factsheet headed “Librarian/Information Professional”, I’d decided to become an academic librarian. It genuinely took me longer to figure out how the ringbinder worked than to make that decision. It just fit, and it made such a lot of sense. A bit more research got me even more worked up—I already had some of the Big Key Skills and the job descriptions sounded really cool and fun and interesting. And I genuinely couldn’t believe that I hadn’t thought of it before.

I mentioned him. Ergo: legitimate.

By this point, though, most of the deadlines for graduate traineeships had passed. I applied to the few that remained, and counted my lucky stars that New Hall, now Murray Edwards College, took a punt on me and offered me a job. I got my head down, wrote up a thirty thousand word dissertation, left behind a world of Irn Bru, of vowing to walk five hundred miles, and of John Knox and his monstrous regiment, and moved to Cambridge. I am enormously grateful for my year at Murray Edwards. How I got the job, I'll never know. I had no experience, a woefully inadequate knowledge of the sector (I could tell you more about Neil Tennant right at this very second than I could about libraries back then), and I had no real career plans. But once I'd begun, I got a brilliant introduction to the profession, and a very cool grounding in all the Big Key Skills wot librarians supposedly need.

Rosemary Murray Library

Despite joyfully ignoring the inevitable further study looming ahead of me for as long as I could, I eventually faced up to it, consoled by the extra letters after my name and comforted by the knowledge that there was no need to study full-time again. I prioritised getting a decent job over getting the degree, and by the time my traineeship ended, I had sorted out my current position, at Trinity Hall, and got myself a place on the distance-learning course at Aberystwyth.

Aberystwyth

I started the course at Aber in April 2010, and I’m getting close to the dissertation now. The course is almost entirely very very good, and I’d completely recommend it. The folks at Aber are a good crowd. But my experiences so far, and I’ll concede that they're painfully limited, leave me with a teensy reservation about this “principal” route into librarianship, this route where it’s anticipated that we’ll get ourselves a higher level degree in librarianism or information ninja studies or whatever it’s called. Before I go further, though, I need to stress three BIG OLD disclaimers. First, this is BY NO MEANS a criticism of Aber. Really, truly, definitely not. Didn’t I just say that I liked Aber? Second, this is BY NO MEANS a criticism of library school, of information postgraduate diplomas, of Masters degrees, or of information studies as a subject. I am well in favour of them, and think they’re valid and useful, and I completely agree that the diplomas or degrees equip us well to become information zookeepers and provide a well-rounded overview of the profession. Third, this is BY NO MEANS a rehearsal of another argument that I’ve seen elsewhere, the argument that abundantly more stuff, and abundantly more relevant and pertinent and up-to-date stuff about our jobs and our sector, is commonly gained through actually working in it, through the people we meet in the course of our work, through Twitter and networks and conferences and so on. I do agree with this point, to an extent, but I don’t necessarily see how the utility of our information wizardry qualifications is somehow invalidated by the fact that we can learn bags of stuff from Twitter too. I think it’s wicked that there are so many many sources out there that we can learn from.

All right, this one's gratuitous.

No, my slight reservation is this, and it’s still a bit embryonic and a bit of a thought experiment, so don’t hold me to it. Ours is a gloriously, fabulously, gorgeously varied profession, in which there are lots and lots and lots of different roles, and in which lots and lots and lots of different skills and backgrounds and knowledges are valued. I love this. But I think that, just maybe, the sorts of routes into the profession should reflect this diversity of roles, and should be proportionate to it. Maybe the routes into librarianship are a bit rigid. And maybe there are other qualifications out there that, while being perhaps less directly relevant to the profession, are equally valid, helpful, productive, and generative of a massive skill and knowledge base. I’m talking about qualifications like MBAs. Like PGCEs and MEds. Like degrees in Computer Science, and Manuscript Studies, and Paleography. I realise it’d be much, much harder to accredit, and I’m genuinely and completely NOT suggesting that we do away with traditional kickass librarianship degrees, nor do I intend for a second to denigrate the skills and knowledge they provide. But I do think that if we had some professional librarians who knew a little bit less about the information society but a hell of a lot more about programming; or librarians who had genuine supercool backgrounds in marketing but maybe weren’t as well versed in the inner workings of Dewey, our profession not only wouldn't suffer, but might even be better for it. I’m suggesting that, perhaps, opening up the routes into librarianship might be a good thing. That making it all a bit freer and a bit more relaxed, and allowing prospective librarians to choose alternative paths into the profession, like an MBA or like a PGCE and still qualify, might be really good for us and might just make it all a bit more exciting.

Look! A book!

Three years into my life as a librarian and I’ve loved it, which is, frankly, a damn good thing because I’ve got at least 74 working years left before I’ll be able to retire. I’ve never once regretted my decision to give up reading books myself for describing them and promoting them to others. My main priority for the time being is getting my degree sorted, and becoming a proper professional librarian rather than a big faker like I am at the moment. I’m much more aware of what kind of job I want to have in the future, and what kind of library I want to work in. I'm even thinking about the possibility of, at some stage, going back to my research routes for a jaunt. But I do sort of wish that Hagrid had knocked on my door a million years ago and told me that I was going to be a librarian—or at least, that somewhere along the way, someone (and I include myself in this) had suggested it to me, and preferably before I had to suffer through six months of John Knox. Maybe, though, it was never meant to be a Hagrid situation; maybe me becoming a librarian was always going to fail the “Ollivander test”. Maybe, when it comes to librarianship, the wand doesn’t choose the wizard after all.

Cracking out the corsets and the crinoline (also known as #cpd23 Thing 9: Evernote)

2011-08-08T09:30:00.001+01:00

I like Evernote ever so much. It's no love affair, though; or if it is, it's a match made less in heaven than in Croydon. I don't love Evernote like Belle loved the Beast, or like Caroline loved Mac, or like Gavin loved Stacey. I love it more in the way that Lumière loved Cogsworth, or like Boyce loved Dr Statham, or like Gwen loved omelettes. I've been using Evernote for about a year now, though not regularly. I don't depend on it particularly, and if it were banished from the Interwebs tomorrow I wouldn't mourn for it or grieve its loss. So it's not that I couldn't live without it, or that I want to spend every waking moment logged in and creating notebooks or clipping websites. I just appreciate, very much, that it hasn't been banished from the Interwebs. I appreciate that it was once created, and whoever created it saw that it was good, and made it free. It's not the best thing since sliced bread; it's not even the best thing since that ghastly My Family was decommissioned, but it's still a positive force in the universe.

Tale as old as time

There's one big stumbling block with Evernote, and it's this: it doesn't appear, on the surface, to be particularly unique. All its features, from the creation and editing of documents, wherever you are and whether or not the resident billpayer has coughed up for the wifi this month, AND the clipping of websites bit, AND the tagging and the organising, AND everything else that it does, are well thought through, and easy to use and navigate, easy to download and useful and helpful and so on. This is all very good. The bad bit is that none of them is unmatched elsewhere: there are other applications out there doing all the same stuff. Google Docs, for example, does the document creation and editing whatsit, AND it has more users, so if you want to do something collaboratively with a bunch of people, it's probably easier to set something up with Google Docs than with Evernote. Dropbox is pretty good at making things available in lots of different places, AND it's compatible with all the Office packages that Evernote isn't so keen on. Diigo and Delicious are pretty good at the bookmarking/web clipping stuff and these days there's plenty of scope to annotate and organise the bookmarks and a clever little browser extension, just like with Evernote. I haven't found any other apps that has the same devil-may-care attitude towards being on- or offline as Evernote, but if the technology is available then I'm sure they exist too. However brilliant Evernote is, and I do think that it is, there's no denying that it's got big brothers and big sisters out there doing the same thing and, in some cases, doing it better.

This all sounds a bit like a criticism of Evernote. Really it's just a description of the market in which Evernote exists. There's a huge amount of competition, and if another Web 2.0 thingy has been designed with a more specific, more limited goal in mind, or if it's a platform that people are more familiar with, then Evernote has a big battle ahead of it. But I'd like to spring to Evernote's defence. I think Evernote is the Web 2.0 equivalent of Downton Abbey. For those who haven't seen it, Downton Abbey was a frankly superb costume drama set in a big posh house in England in the years leading up to the First World War. It was awesome, and I loved it. But there's nothing that Downton did that hadn't been done elsewhere first. It was a bit of a copy of Upstairs Downstairs and its theme tune wasn't nearly as good. It wasn't as well acted or as well produced as Brideshead Revisited or Cranford. It wasn't quite as luscious and sumptuous as Howards End or A Room with a View or any of the other Merchant Ivories. It wasn't as funny as To the Manor Born or as witty as Jeeves and Wooster. It wasn't as socially acute as Gosford Park. It didn't feature any moments nearly as climactic as that moment in Pride and Prejudice. Like Evernote, everything Downton Abbey did had been done better somewhere else.

But what Downton had, and what Evernote has, in its favour, is that it does ALL of it. If you break it down into its component parts or features, then you're bound to find alternatives that are more successful when it comes to that one particular part or feature. That's true of practically everything in the world, ever. But as a whole, as a full piece of drama, or as a full application, it's great. Downton was well acted, well written, well produced, it was also luscious and sumptuous and funny and witty and socially acute and, well, there's never going to be another Mr Darcy moment (and really I just wanted the excuse to look for a photo). And because it was all of those things, and because it had the sainted, magnificent and superlative Maggie Smith in it, it didn't matter so much that its predecessors had surpassed it each of them individually. So that's my case for Evernote--its uniqueness, and subsequently its utility, lies not in its individual components or features, but in the way that they've been amalgamated into the same packaging. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, or something like that.

Hey, I did mention Jeeves and Wooster, so this is legitimately included, OK?!

“Just a beard with an idiot attached” (also known as #cpd23 Thing 8: Google Calendar)

2011-08-03T08:22:00.006+01:00

If you recognise the origin of the quotation in the title, congratulations. I am not wearing a hat, but if I were I would doff it. If not, let me enlighten you. It’s from one of my very, very favourite TV shows ever in the history of this here universe: Black Books. This was a comedy of unrivalled genius that aired between 2000 and 2004, created by Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan. It was about a wildly eccentric and foul-tempered bookshop owner, Bernard Black (played by Dylan Moran), who loved his books but hated his customers; his oldest and only friend, Fran (Tamsin Grieg), who spent her time looking for her cigarettes and devising increasingly mad excuses to have another drink; and Manny (Bill Bailey), Bernard’s long-suffering assistant, who was good with customers, helpful, gentle, and talented—and subsequently punished relentlessly by Bernard, just for the crime of existing.

If you think that this is a completely irrelevant way to begin a blog post summarising the virtues (or vices) of Google Calendar, then you’re right. But I have my reasons, poorly conceived though they may be. The most overwhelming reason is that Google Calendar isn’t exactly the most exciting or provocative Thing. It’s an online calendar—I’m not sure what else is there to say! It's hardly got a misleading name. Just like Black Books (the name of the shop). Though Bernard did apparently flirt with the idea of called the shop "World of Tights", but decided against it because "you know how stupid people are, you have to spell everything out". In fact, the only thing that's kept me from falling asleep during the process of writing this nonsense is the fact that I've been able to reacquaint myself with brilliant lines from Black Books like "The only thing that's going to bring me inner peace is a beard-seeking missile” and “I’m a prostitute robot from the future”, and “The older the wine, the gooder it is”, and “Bring me my lolly” and “Tumble dry our doilies”.

I’ve been using Google Calendar for about a year. When I first wrote about it last year, I compared it to a trip to Lakeland, claiming that it’d probably be remarkably useful if only I’d use it. Now that I do use it, I can’t decide if Google Calendar is something I find intrinsically useful, but kind of annoying; or intrinsically annoying, but kind of useful. And thinking of a way to express this led me directly to Black Books: because Google Calendar is the Manny to my Bernard Black.

Here I am.

Now will that do, or should I explain further? OK. Bewildered look noted, I’ll expand a bit.

“You there! Lord of the Rings”

Let’s begin with the obvious point of comparison. Looks and appearance. Manny’s dress sense is a bit gaudy, and he’s ridiculously precious about and proud of his hair and beard (as he once admits, he’s had it since he was nine). Now, Google Calendar may not have a beard, but as online calendars go, it’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write). It might even be described as glamorous and flamboyant, though obviously within the microcosm of the online calendar world. This is especially true if there are lots of calendars in it, with carefully selected and complementary hues. And it does kind of make it easier just to glance at it and see at a few feet away how much fun the next three hours will be. I’ve got calendars for work, my social life, when I should be studying (I ignore this), when I should be at the gym (I ignore this too), birthdays, and the Bolton Wanderers fixture list. But, anyway, I’m trying to highlight two points: one, you can colour-code your calendar; two, this occasionally looks OK.

“The pay’s not great, but the work is hard”

Manny is hard-working, uncomplaining, good at customer service, organised, helpful, knowledgeable. He’s an ideal employee. He runs the show with maximum hindrance from Bernard, whose strategies include raising the price of all the books by 1p just to annoy Manny and turning all his invoices for his impending tax return into a snazzy jacket. Google Calendar is similarly efficient, it’s useful, it works well, it does the job uncomplainingly. It tells me where I’m meant to be at any given minute, and it’s fairly easy to use and fairly flexible. But it’s hardly revolutionary. If it were ever excommunicated from the Internets then I would be stressed for a moment or two. It’s my version of the Little Book of Calm. But Manny once accidentally swallowed the Little Book of Calm and assimilated it to his being. And then his new practice of offering clichés about calmness to all and sundry led to him being a bit concussed and his clichés got a bit warped (“Add a dab of lavender to milk, leave town with an orange, and pretend you're laughing at it”). Which perhaps insinuates that the currently un-broken source of calmness, Google Calendar, will eventually collapse under the weight of its own dullness/efficiency and I’ll end up at work on a Sunday.

“I’ll co-write it…with myself!”
Google Calendar is shareable, collaborative, and so on—you can add calendars to yours and share yours with others. This is quite a handy feature, and I do genuinely value the calendar that tells me when my library books are due back. I’m not particularly interested in sharing my calendar though, as it’d completely ruin my long-term plan to construct an image for myself as an international woman of mystery. Instead of solving crime or whatever it is that I hope you think I do in my spare time, you’ll know that, for a fact, I am actually in a meeting about bibliographic records or buying Chomps at the local Co-op. It’s a bit like when Bernard and Manny decide to write a children’s book together, aimed at the under-five market. Bernard’s suggestion, which involves spousal death, Stalinist purges, private investigators and a lens grinder in Omsk, is adapted by Manny so that it ends up being a much nicer story about an elephant, a lost balloon and some lemonade. Fed up with Manny’s interference, Bernard decides to co-write the books with himself. This is sort of how I feel about Google Calendar—I’ll admit that it’s got some good ideas, but ultimately I’d rather ignore them.

“Don’t you dare use the word 'party' as a verb in this shop”

One of the problems I’ve got with Google Calendar is that I can’t get it to sync properly to my phone. It only syncs one calendar, so when I need to find out where I am or where I’m meant to be, the calendar on my phone often doesn’t know—you wouldn’t have this problem with a paper diary. To add insult to injury, it tells me that I’ve got “free time”. I’ve tried to fix this, but can’t figure out how. And I find it a bit irritating that Google Calendar clearly thinks I’m at a party, or lounging around at home watching Jeremy Kyle or back-to-back episodes of ER, wearing my Game of Thrones pyjamas and eating “scrambled egg, with a comb, from a shoe”, when actually I’m at work. Actually working. As Bernard once said of Manny, “everyday is another betrayal”.

So, in spite of its obvious purpose, its functionality, its pretty colours and the fact that it works and hasn’t broken, I just can’t bring myself to care that much about Google Calendar. It’s like Manny’s trial day at the bookshop—Bernard admits that although Manny “sold a lot of books” and “got on quite well with the customers”, he’s going to have to let him go because “it’s not that kind of operation”. Google Calendar’s good, no doubt, but Bernard summarises how I feel about it (and how he feels about Manny) when he says: “I don’t mean this in a bad way, but genetically, you are a cul-de-sac”.

If only Benedict Cumberbatch were CEO of CILIP (also known as #cpd23 Thing 7: Professional organisations and face-to-face networking)

2011-07-28T11:59:00.000+01:00

OK, then. Thing 7. There seem to be two bits to this Thing (professional organisations and face-to-face networking), so I'll take them one at a time. OK then. Ahem. At this particular moment, my head is hung as low as it will anatomically go without causing me lasting physical injury. My eyes are shiftily moving from side to side. I am Tiger Woods at that press conference. I am Dug, from Up, wearing the "cone of shame". Here goes, time to face the music (or something a bit less X-factory): I'm not a member of any professional organisations. Not CILIP, not SLA, not IFLA, not any of them. Not a one. Nada.

Here I am.

Uh oh. I do realise that this is a Very Bad Thing. Talk about fifteen minutes of shame. It isn't that I'm disillusioned. It isn't that any of these professional organisations (I'll admit, I'm really talking about CILIP here) have done something to hurt my feelings or have stamped on my toys or said mean things about Hugh Laurie. It isn't that I don't feel like I'd be welcome. It isn't that I think they don't represent me or my interests or my sector. It's just that, for me, and at the moment...what a lot of these organisations offer I can get elsewhere. Without having to stump up a load of cash for the pleasure.

They haven't, for example, criticised his music

Part of the reason for this is that I work for an institution in a city in which there are more librarians than pieces of string in this universe. You know the battle of Helm's Deep in The Two Towers? I'd totally put my money on Cambridge librarians beating the crap out of the orcs of Isengard, though not because we'd outwit them with our ways (not entirely sure that in-depth knowledge of Library of Congress subject headings would be a particularly effective weapon against Saruman's army, but you never know). Rather, we'd be victorious because we'd outnumber them tenfold. Even more importantly, many of these librarians in Cambridge are, like, WELL COOL. Cooler than Vanilla Ice at the height of his career, and with better taste in trousers. These librarians are bursting at their non-glittery pants' seams with good ideas and there are initiatives and things going on all over the place. There are training courses and more committees and steering groups than you could shake a stick at. Or anything else that you might want to shake, it's up to you. But what it means is that a lot of the stuff that CILIP provides, I can get on my own doorstep, for the time being. Without having to stump up a load of cash for the pleasure.

Just checking...no, they still haven't criticised his music

The problem is that I'm caught in this Bermuda triangle of non-membership. It's a combination of me being able to conveniently ignore my conscience, AND the fact that I've got a bit of Idle Jack syndrome, AND the fact that my memory is as bad as erm...Anyway, if I'm ever going to break out of this I'll need CILIP's help. They're going to have to send in their helicopter and throw down one of those monkey rope ladders to rescue me. Which means CILIP offering me some incentive to join that I will never be able to get anywhere else. Something I'll never be able to resist. Granted, the absolutely foolproof method, involving (the lovely) Annie Mauger stepping aside and letting Benedict Cumberbatch take over, is relatively unlikely. The second best option is to appeal to my sense of general melancholy if I ever feel that I'm being left out of something. If it's materialistic, though (like CILIP rocking up at any and all library gatherings with stacks of free gin and cupcakes for members, and Mr Bumble style glances at the non-members) then I think it'd be effective but it is really a bit overly divisive and cruel and passive aggressive.

He'd make a terrific librarian

No, it should be intellectual. CILIP should offer to its members entry into some cerebral conclave in which they are inculcated in the enigmatic ways and esoteric means of our profession. Like why literature and languages are separated in DDC. Or perhaps the truth about the Voynich manuscript, revealing that deeply ingrained in its allegedly unfathomable code is the answer to the question that we've all been asking: what is the true extent that RDA will have on cataloguing procedures? And, if I'm honest, it doesn't have to be library-related either. It could be about the meaning of life; the truth about the air speed velocity of a sparrow holding a coconut; what actually happened to Agatha Christie when she vanished for a few days; what actually happened to the Marie Celeste; why cheese is frankly just so delicious; what Inception was actually about; why, if Voldemort had the Elder Wand, he didn't create for himself a brand new nose; and what possessed Tom Hanks to make that awful film set in an airport. If CILIP, or any of the other organisations in the list, can do this; if it can offer me something that I genuinely can't get elsewhere (and I don't just mean selfishly, like a free gift, but also opportunities to get active or involved), and when the benefits of being a member outweigh the benefits of not being a member (like when I'm chartering, for example, in about forty years), then I'll happily and joyfully and willingly stump up a load of cash for the pleasure.

Seriously, where did she go?

Bethan also talks about face-to-face networking. As many others before me have said more eloquently, unless a networking event is being held in a pub, then I much prefer to do my networking in my Game of Thrones pyjamas in front of the telly. Walking into a room full of people you don't know is really flipping daunting. The Cambridge library mafia does mitigate this slightly, because we tend to travel in packs (not deliberately, just an inevitable by-product of our colossal numbers). I've long since talked myself out of being shy, but I do get nervous on occasion and wonder what on this fine and lush earth I could possibly have to say or contribute to these totally intellectual conversations about librarianisms (or knitting patterns). The trick is to see every 'out-of-depth' moment as a means to learn stuff and get 'back-in-depth'. And it does help that our profession is made up of uncommonly nice people who are always willing to help out and explain, once more, what a purl stitch is, and why it matters.

No, they really haven't criticised him

The relationship between face-to-face networking and online networking is, though, an interesting one. Unlike Voldemort and Harry Potter, I don't think it's the case that neither one can live while the other survives. They need each other. It strikes me that up-close-and-personal networking is borne often of connections that have first of all been made online. Because this initial contact means that you know someone's name and sector and interests and pet ownership status and knitting habits and favourite Monty Python film. Which is a great way to start a conversation. And then, by the same token, being able to add a face and accent and cardigan colour choice and preferred beverage and favourite Game of Thrones house and whether they agree that Grange Hill was vastly superior to Byker Grove to whatever they've provided in their online profile makes subsequent online networking abundantly more productive and exciting. Just perhaps not quite as exciting as it might be if Benedict Cumberbatch were CEO of CILIP.

PS Many, many apologies to Annie Mauger--who I think is wonderful! (And I am joking really about the Benedict Cumberbatch thing. Ish.)

The one with the silly analogy (also known as #cpd23 Thing 6: Online Networks)

2011-07-24T07:46:00.002+01:00

Online networks are omnipresent. They're everywhere. Springing up all over the flipping place whether we like it or not. There seem to be more online networks than branches of Starbucks worldwide. And they have this accompanying expectation--that you'll be on them. That you'll use them, and find them helpful. That you'll have countless connections and buddies and rhomboids and accomplices and co-defendants, or whatever it is they're called. The inescapable everywhereness of online networks reminds me of a similarly inescapable phenomenon, which began in the 1990s, lasted for ten years, and whose cultural hegemony is still manifested in the fact that it's on a television channel at every given moment of every given day. It's Friends, the sitcom. As central to the 1990s as Oasis vs Blur, the Tamagotchi, and hair mascara. And the delightful terminological overlap leaves me with no choice but to continue down this analogical route. So get yourself an oversized cup of coffee, a fountain and a coloured umbrella--this is going to last at least 20 minutes.

Rachel = Facebook
Initially popular and well-liked, but eventually kind of annoying, Rachel is Facebook. We might even go so far as to suggest that Rachel's nose job is the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg dropping the "The" from his original creation. The first Rachel we ever see, soaking wet and in a wedding dress, had one purpose and one aim: to marry a doctor. She lacks knowledge and purpose and common sense (trifle made with beef, anyone?). Eventually, though, she ends up doing all kinds of stuff and being all kinds of stuff, a real high-flyer with lots of facets to her personality. Eventually she has, if I can mix television programmes for a second and paraphrase Gene Hunt, "fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course". This seems to be Facebook's current plan: to be all things to all people.

I think Facebook still works best, professionally speaking, as a marketing tool and an announcement service. It isn't an efficient professional online network because, ultimately, people don't want to use it like that. They want to keep it as a (potentially silly) personal space. And they realise that while they can (to an extent) control their own content on Facebook, they can't control what others do. It's like the episode where Rachel is mortified by how Phoebe jogs. Facebook has shaken off its MySpaceness, but it has a way to go. I'd put it at about a Series 7 on the Friends scale. Which may well mean that it's only got three years left. And it certainly means that, at some point in the future, Facebook is going to initiate the must-have haircut of the 2010s.

Monica = LinkedIn
Fundamentally competitive, obsessively clean, LinkedIn is Monica. Both are efficient, purposeful, to the point, and focused. The kind of online networking you can do on LinkedIn is potentially incredibly productive and fruitful, as long as you use it in the right way. And therein, in that fundamental inflexibility, lies my dislike of both Monica and LinkedIn. Monica once said that rules "help control the fun", and I think LinkedIn would agree. There's a correct attitude towards it, a right way to optimise your profile, the perfect kind of photo to use, the proper groups to be a member of and the ideal connections to have. It's SO bossy. And though it's changing slightly in terms of appearance and functionality (the equivalent of Monica having several haircuts and boyfriends), at its core it seems to be pretty much immutable. Monica also pretty much stays the same throughout Friends' ten series. She doesn't mellow with age; she just keeps to the same level of fastidiousness and franticness and fussiness, and dare I say it, she stays consistently irritating all the way through.

And just as, if Monica was actually my friend, I'd be unbelievably and sorely tempted not to use coasters and make watermarks on her coffee table, just to rebel, for the same reason I'm also unbelievably and sorely tempted not to use LinkedIn in the right way. Both are pretty unforgiving too. Once a potential employer has witnessed your half-finished, neglected profile they will never ever ever ever hire you, apparently. You're as likely to get a decent massage from Monica as you are to get your imaginary potential future employer to forgive you for not having filled in your key skills, or something. Plus since I've written down this analogy, I've decided that I really don't trust LinkedIn. Because Monica, ultimately, chose Chandler over Tom Selleck. Which makes Monica an idiot. Fact.

Phoebe = LAT Network
Phoebe is one of those people whose company you probably wouldn't want until you really wanted her company. She's unique and a bit kooky. Her purpose and behaviour and style are all quite distinctive and inimitable. She's one of a kind. I think the same can be said for the LAT Network. It strikes me as something you won't need until you really need it; something you won't gain from until you start to gain from it; something that won't interest you until it really interests you. There's nothing else out there that's like it: it's a totally unique idea. And when it turns out that you do need it and are interested in it, it looks like a fabulous resource, and really helpful. Phoebe was herself a fabulous resource, and realy helpful. She knew how to break into cars, which engagement ring Chandler should choose, and she's a surrogate mum for her brother and his triplets. And if it turns out that LAT Network has a penchant for smelly cats and wants to rescue dead Christmas trees, all the better.

Chandler = LISNPN
Chandler was, by a million miles, my favourite Friends character. And LISNPN is possibly my favourite online network, though one I definitely don't use as much as I ought. I think that, initially, I was a bit confused about what LISNPN professed to do. The characters of Friends were similarly confused by what Chandler did for a living (it was actually something like data analysis, but Joey thought he was an accountant, and Rachel thought he was a "transponster"). The site's title, unfortunately, compounds this. For one thing, it's virtually unsayable. But more importantly, its emphasis on "new professionals" is problematic. It infers a need to having a particular status and, in actual fact, this status genuinely and honestly makes absolutely no difference at all to either membership or potential gain from the network. Could the first N in LISNPN be any more irrelevant? It's just a name, and Chandler Bing (or Miss Chonandler Bong as he's called in one episode) manages OK. But it does make the site a bit off-putting at first, just as people don't quite know what to make of Chandler at first because of the jokes and the wisecracks and the pointing out of people's lack of moustaches.

Aside from all this, though, Chandler is light-hearted and sociable and generous and kind, just like LISNPN. I really think it's a great resource. It's just a bit underused. But it has a great future ahead of it, and with our input it can really find its feet, leave Janice behind and shack up with Monica instead.

Joey = CILIP Communities
CILIP Communities is, genuinely, a brilliant idea. But I can't say that I'm massively convinced by its execution. It's sort of like when Joey has to come up with an alter ego for himself and it's invariably called Joey or Joseph. CILIP Communities continues the CILIP brand really well, but what's happening there is happening in other places too. And CILIP is in those other places (like Twitter and LinkedIn), doing a brilliant job and leading the way and making an incredibly valid contribution. And there are so many other people in those other places, and the noise they're making is loud. Perhaps CILIP communities is a bit like Joey's choice to become an actor. He's an actor not really because it's his vocation, but because he's qualified for practically nothing else (as his frequent forays into alternative money-raising activies demonstrate so conclusively). Acting is, then, an obvious choice. And if CILIP Communities didn't exist, I'm sure there'd be complaints about its lack of existence. There are glimmers of absolute success, the equivalents of Dr Drake Ramoray, and features which work brilliantly, like the blog landscape. I think it just needs to work on its virtual 'how you doin'?'.

Ross = Google+
Ross is a right old geek. He's a bit paranoid, a bit socially awkward, a bit cheap. He calls it "kar-aa-tay", and not karate. He likes dinosaurs and museums. But he's clever and sophisticated, with a PhD and a love of correct grammar, and there's lots of useful information tucked away in that head of his. Now I don't know much about Google+, so I can't go into much detail here, but it does seem to be very clever and sophisticated, and I'm sure it likes dinosaurs. It's the realm of the geek at the moment as well. In addition, Ross is known for the fact that he's been divorced practically thousands of times, and his willingness to commit (or join up) and then the subsequent breakdown of these marriages bodes well for Google+. Because his first marriage didn't work out, going the way of Google Buzz. His second marriage didn't either, going the way of Google Wave. But Ross and Rachel...well, I know there were hiccups, but that one's forever, right? Don't say otherwise or I might have an existential crisis. Which means that Google+ will not only last till the cows come home, but it might have a child with Facebook. (Horrific thought). And it means that, if at any point in the future you can't access Google+ for a while, you shouldn't worry. You're just "on a break".

OK. Phew. Another mammoth blog post. The thing about Friends is that inescapable and annoying as it may well be, it is genuinely entertaining, sometimes. It's the perfect thing to have on the telly while you eat your tea. And online networks can be irritating and soul-destroying, but they do work and they are useful. And the people you connect to on them, well, they'll be there for you...when the rain starts to fall, and so on.

Mirrors and spades (also known as #cpd23 Thing 5: Reflective Practice)

2011-07-19T13:47:00.007+01:00

The phrase 'reflective practice', I have to admit, makes me cringe and hunch and shrivel. It makes my face contort into a twitchy, weird grimace not dissimilar to my expression when I realise I'm accidentally watching Embarrassing Bodies on the telly and can't find the remote. But I'm told that reflective practice is one of those professionally valued skills, or something, and our profession seems to go in for it a lot. And because I value my career, I've decided that me and reflective practice need to get us some therapy. We need Gabriel Byrne, there's no two ways about it. Ideally, I guess, me and reflective practice would get on like a house on fire. We'd be the Brad and Angelina, or Ellen and Portia, or Marge and Homer of the professional skills world. But that's highly unlikely. So I'll settle for being able to talk about and think about reflective practice without my face going all pinchy.

To do that, I reckon me and reflective practice have got to work through our issues. We've got to figure out what it is about reflective practice that's ensuring good sales figures for Boots' own brand anti-wrinkle cream. So I'm going to get all meta and self-referential about this, and use this post on reflective practice to reflect on reflective practice itself. Got that? But I'm shuddering already, and I need something to calm me down. However, as I write this, it's only 12.38, and a Tuesday, and a gin is probably out of the question. Hang on.

Ah, that's better. Now where was I?

I've been thinking about this for, well, at least a minute, and trying to get a handle on the situation and I think I've got three problems with reflective practice.

Problem number 1
First, reflection automatically makes me think of mirrors. And mirrors automatically make me think of vanity. Perhaps I've been watching too much America's Next Top Model, but I'm having trouble disassociating the reflective bit from the posturing and posing and trying to win a Cover Girl contract that the young women on ANTM go in for. It all seems to me to be a little self-congratulatory and self-obsessed and conceited. At its very core, I know this isn't what reflective practice is all about. I know it's not about looking in the mirror and feeling terribly pleased with ourselves because we look like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. But I do know that often when we look in mirrors, we're simply just checking ourselves. We want to make sure that we've remembered to put our trousers on, don't have toothpaste on our foreheads and that our appearance won't make children cry, and little old ladies faint, and dogs bark manically, and bats flee into the air. It is undeniably self-centred, yes, but necessarily so, and it's good for the rest of society.

So I think I need to switch my focus. I need to start thinking of mirrors not merely as objects that inspire something on the scale between conceit and mild depression, but as objects that provide solutions. Such as looking in the mirror and realising that I've got more mascara on my face than my eyelashes and now resemble Papa Lazarou, and then using this experience to learn not to put my make-up on while doing a handstand. Or realising that the dark circles under my eyes are now bigger than the average chamber pot, and then deciding to get a good night's sleep at some stage in the future. Or realising that the Backstreet Boys t-shirt from 1997 I'm wearing probably isn't the most suitable attire for work, then changing into my 'Fire Up The Quattro' Gene Hunt one.

Problem number 1: solved. Time for a reward.

Problem number 2
My second problem, staying with the reflective bit and keeping this analogy going, is the mirrors themselves. When you look in mirrors, you don't get a true image. You get a distortion. The extent to which the reflection is distorted depends on the mirror--how dirty it is, whether it's on an angle or whether it's not so much a mirror as the back of a tablespoon. But it is an important point--when we reflect, how much of what we consider is unbiased? How much is accurate, and true, and undistorted? How often do we--precisely because we're not vain or self-congratulatory--consider ourselves unnecessarily negatively? Or underplay our own contribution? I don't think that I trust myself not to distort or misread or misjudge or miswrite whatever it is I'm meant to be reflecting on. I'm not going to completely make stuff up--it's not a Black Swan scenario--but chances are I'll be overly critical.

Perhaps this is the whole point. Perhaps practising the process of reaching a fair and balanced appraisal of something is central to the whole enterprise. And that means recognising the difference between a mirror that's had a recent date with some Windolene and a mirror that wouldn't be out of place in Enter the Dragon's house of mirrors. Maybe at its very best and its most superior, reflective practice is like a magic mirror. It's the mirror of Erised, and it tells us the deepest and darkest desires of our (professional library) hearts. Like a completely wicked job, or a CILIP chartership certificate, or something more imaginative. How about Hugh Laurie handing me a CILIP chartership certificate? Actually, I really shouldn't have pushed the mirror thing this far. Reflective practice seems a bit dull in comparison.

Problem number 2: solved (but only partly, and that's Hugh Laurie's fault).

Problem number 3
This is really concerned with the practice bit. I think it's all a bit too formal and too official, and that this is all very distracting. The very existence of reflective practice models, and the encouragement to write down this reflective practice process, is all a big diversion. 'Reflective practice', it seems to me, is just a fancy title for something that I think, and would hope, we all do anyway. We just call it learning from our mistakes, and trying not to screw things up, and planning and preparing, and evaluating what's happened. This isn't the preserve of the philosopher, of the Wittgensteins or Kierkegaards or Greg Houses among us. It's something that everyone does. To different extents, yes, and with different degrees of success, but it's still the same underlying idea. Reflective practice is, at best, just an umbrella term for all these processes. And at worst, it's a massive barrier to what we're doing naturally anyway.

I like what A.N. Whitehead said about this:

"It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them".

I know Whitehead is talking about what we are doing, and reflective practice is thinking about what we have done, but I still think his point is valid here. Reflective practice, the term, just makes me think about the fact that I'm thinking. It makes me evaluate and be bothered by how and what I'm thinking, and that distracts me from what I'm actually meant to be thinking about. I'd rather just believe that I can consider and analyse what's happened without it having to be a formal process or something that I have to be coaxed into doing or something that necessitates that a report is produced at the end of it. I don't think we necessarily need the added step in the process. And frankly, I don't think we've got the time for it. Personally speaking, I haven't yet seen the whole of Grey's Anatomy series 7, and my MSc fulfils all my procrastinatory needs, so I could definitely do without it.

I don't think I can solve Problem no. 3. But it does demonstrate to me that the whole crux of my issue with reflective practice all boils down to semantics. I get the process, and I think it's valuable and relevant, but I don't like all its baggage. It's not that I'm a member of the 'call a spade a spade' fan club. But if you do want to talk to me about spades, I'd much rather you broached the subject via Motorhead's The Ace of Spades. And please, please, I beg you, don't call it a "terrain depresser".

Avoiding information overload, with the help of Alan Rickman (also known as #cpd23 Thing 4: Current Awareness)

2011-07-15T11:07:00.002+01:00

Staying up to date with everything that's going on around us can be tough. I mean, really tough. Tougher than Mr T. It's like going round a Scalextric track at a hundred miles an hour and trying to read the road signs. And when you do manage to read them, they make as much sense as this Scalextric track analogy (mine, for example, barely reached 200 yards an hour, and there were no road signs, and the cars fell off every time they went round a corner). It can feel like you're wearing one of those body suits made from Velcro and someone's chucking dozens of tennis balls at you, all at once. A few are sticking, but most aren't, and you're starting to worry about bruises. What Twitter and RSS feeds and Google Reader do is to let you decide who's throwing the balls. They give you the chance to catch them, or dodge them altogether, or at least tense your muscles so there's a better chance of the Velcro working. They even let you take off the Velcro suit altogether, because fluorescent pink doesn't suit anyone, and just go down the pub.

Photo from drburtoni

Twitter
Let's begin, then, with Twitter, or as I like to call it, "the precious". I've been using Twitter for about 18 months now and I LOVE IT. I've just spent 18 seconds trying to come up with a way to articulate just how much I ardently admire and love Twitter, and well, this is the best I could come up with: Twitter is my Web 2.0 equivalent of Alan Rickman. And rather than just leaving that statement hanging in the air (though in a moment or two, you may wish that I had), I'll do the "let me count the ways" bit now.

First, I love that there are thousands of conversations going on at once. I love how potentially thrilling and manic Twitter is. And I understand that it can seem overwhelming because there are all these crossed narratives and concealed connections and bonkers terminology and in-jokes. It's like the start of Love Actually. You know, the bit at the airport, right at the beginning? At first, it makes no sense. You're confused about why they're in an airport, because surely no one these days can afford to fly anywhere at all. You're unnerved by Hugh Grant, not just because it's Hugh Grant, but also because he's apparently the Prime Minister, and although he was quite good on Question Time last week, that's some promotion. You can't work out where you know all the people from, and you're wondering if that man-child is the same guy as the whiny bloke off the BT adverts. The music is strange and seems out of place until you realise you're watching a Christmas film in the middle of July. Then, gradually, you pick it up. The twisted narratives come together and you see how the pieces slot in. You get a grip on all these multiple stories and you learn to follow them all. It just takes time. But, eventually, you're cheering for Hugh Grant and that lass off Eastenders, and you've stopped thinking that Andrew Lincoln was MUCH better in Teachers, and even though Alan Rickman's being quite mean and quite horrid, and you feel terribly sorry for Emma Thompson, you've got it, you're on the same page. The same page as Richard Curtis, yes, but the same page nonetheless.

Me and Alan have the same glasses. (That's a coincidence).

Once you've reached this particular page, Twitter becomes a great and meaningful way to communicate. This is the second thing I love about it. Twitter enables information to be spread, and rapidly. It's packed full of people curating the web. So you can connect with ideas and conversations when you want, and when Torchwood is on the telly, you can ignore them. And if you follow the right people, then Twitter becomes your safety net--you can guarantee you'll find out the big stories. Had Marianne Dashwood been on Twitter (although worryingly, I fear she is), she'd have definitely found out that Willoughby bloke was skint, because he'd have tweeted to complain about the extortionate British Gas prices, or something. And then Brandon could've swept in with a witty RT and a good pun, and that film might not have lasted so blinking long. Ultimately, I love Twitter because it's where I find out ALL THE GOSSIP. It's omniscient, but in a good Metatron-from-Dogma kind of way, rather than a Google+ kind of way.

This omniscience really stems from the fact that Twitter is full of procrastinating yet selfless people. I love that you can benefit from their knowledge, and their time-wasting. Ask a question on Twitter and all these clever and brilliant people are clamouring to answer it, and help you out. "What's the meaning of life?", or "Who played Hans Gruber in Die Hard?" or "Where am I?"--and they'll come to your assistance. It's a brilliant network. It's sweet. It's like Truly Madly Deeply but less deep and more Web 2.0 and in fewer than 140 characters.

Which brings me to my next point. I love the 140 character limit. It makes you creative. There's an insane pleasure in drafting and redrafting something to bring it in under the limit. There's an even more insane pleasure in writing a tweet that ends up at precisely 140 characters. It's short, and it's snappy, and packed full of imagination--and if you want to find out more, you can. The character limit is a useful, brilliant gimmick. And frankly, unless you're JK Rowling, 140 characters will usually do. JK Rowling only gets away with it in my eyes because she created Snape. Oh Snape. Lovely, lovely Snape.

That last point is an irrelevance and a tangent. But it reflects one of the biggest criticisms of Twitter, though one usually made by people who aren't on it: that there's some utter rubbish out there. That it's all about Kanye West tweeting that he had fish fingers and peas for his tea (I'm making this up, but let it be known once and for all that I am not interested in Kanye's preferred Birds Eye product). However, the rubbish you'll find on there can be avoided, and quite easily--it's why there's an Unfollow option. Sometimes, though, you've got to face a bit of nonsense to get something superb. Twitter's like Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. You could ignore it completely, fearful of ... well, Costner, but also the entire film. You could just not watch Sweeney Todd, or Galaxy Quest. But then you'd miss out on something. You'd miss out on Alan Rickman striding about, and making eyes at the screen, and looking pale and sullen, and speaking about things in his silky, red-winey voice. And that'd be such a waste.

RSS feeds
Moving on, then, to RSS feeds, which I also love, just not quite as much. And if Twitter is Alan Rickman, then RSS feeds are like Miss Moneypenny. They're the world's best and most brilliant secretary. They're efficient and enthusiastic and go far beyond the call of duty (though I'm not sure Moneypenny ever did that). They're kind of undervalued and kind of understated, uncomplainingly and unremittingly doing an excellent and useful job. I use Google Reader for all my feeds, and I've subscribed to approximately ONE BILLION of them (according to Jim-from-The-Apprentice's mental arithmetics), or in real numbers, 400. And can you imagine if I had to visit 400 sites a day to get information? Jeez. When would I have time to watch TV?

Lois Maxwell

400 sounds like a ridiculous number. But, actually, it's not too bad. For one thing, I know I haven't got a cat's chance in hell of reading all of them. Alan Rickman is as likely to replace Naomie Harris as Moneypenny in the forthcoming Bond film than I am to read even a tenth of what I subscribe to. What this has done is made me not precious at all about reading what I want and marking the rest as read. I've organised the feeds in Google Reader so they show up in specific folders, which I've named 'Interesting and/or cool library people' and 'Slightly more dull library people' (kidding) and 'Things to do with Hugh Laurie and Benedict Cumberbatch' (sadly, kidding, but that's not a bad idea). So it means that I can choose to read things about particular subjects whenever I want. It's not completely ideal, and I think it needs a bit of reassessment and reorganisation still, but it works for me at the moment, and it means that I can spend my time more wisely (like watching TV, for example, or reading, you know, whatever. Or jumping about).

I also like that RSS feeds are reliable--they barely ever break down or pack in. The website they're linked to might, but RSS feeds themselves have got to be one of the most robust Web 2.0 tools out there. They never miss a day of work, and they're dedicated and committed, just like Moneypenny. And the best thing of all is that if you push this analogy far enough, then I become M, and that's just cool.

Pushnote
Last but not least, then, Pushnote. I wasn't familiar with it aside from Stephen Fry's wailing and rending of garments to assert its value and utility. I've only had a quick look at it and I'm not convinced that it does anything that I need at the moment. I think it'll be more useful when it reaches critical mass, and I don't really fancy being a pioneer of the site. I couldn't really find many sites where there was much commentary either, so at the moment it seemed a bit ... blah.

On the fence. Photo from daeve.

But it's still quite new. It's embryonic, really, in Web 2.0 terms. So I reckon giving Pushnote the benefit of the doubt might be the way forward, for now. It might just be the equivalent of Robbie Williams rejoining Take That. When that happened, the response was a bit, erm, lukewarm. People asked what he was going to contribute. People said that it'd been done before. People suspected that he was just jumping on the money-spewing machine of Take That. But that was a year ago, and last week, I went to see Take That at Wembley and, well, Robbie is BACK. And he's brilliant. And suddenly, the decision to bring him back is understood and hugely vindicated. So I'm going to sit on the fence with Pushnote and hope that it does a Robbie and, in a year's time, Pushnote sings "Let Me Entertain You" at a concert and that it all works out in the end.

Phew. Long post. Hopefully if nothing else it's a potent argument in favour of the 140 character limit. I even tried to put in some relatively current cultural references! My work here is done. And what's that, you say? Another photo of Alan Rickman? Happy to oblige.

Why I don't like brands, and why it's all Hugh Laurie's fault (also known as #cpd23 Thing 3: personal brands)

2011-06-30T21:32:00.006+01:00

I'm going to be honest. I'm having a bit of trouble with this brand stuff. In the first place, when I hear the word "brand", I think of Russell Brand. Then Jo Brand. Neither thought pleases me. Then, in the second place, I think of poor little Bran Stark from Game of Thrones being chucked out off a window ledge for witnessing something that he shouldn't. And anyone who watched Game of Thrones knows that didn't end well. So the first major obstacle I face is how I should banish Sean Bean, albeit temporarily, from my thoughts, and this goes against my nature ENTIRELY.

Then when I actually do manage to focus on the notion of brands that Jo is talking about in her Thing 3 post, I can't quite shift my concept of brands away from the fact that I consider myself to be primarily a recipient of brands. I'm a consumer, not a creator. So the idea of making a brand, albeit one that's based on me, makes me want to rebel. It makes me want to run for the hills screaming incoherent things such as "I AM NOT A BOX OF ALPEN". Because I'm not. Nor can I be reduced to one. I don't even like Alpen. I am not a Cadbury's Dairy Milk, though I'll be frank, I've just eaten one. I do not resemble, in any way at all, Persil Liquitabs. And much as I would like to be a consumer of this brand at this particular moment, I am not Bombay Sapphire.

I know--I really do--that I'm missing the point a bit. But I hear brands, and I think of Tesco. And you add librarians and info pros to the mix, and the Tesco that I conjure up in my head is filled with librarians and info pros, perched on the shelves, and attached to these librarians and info pros are labels. These labels contain our prices and our ingredients, our E-numbers and our washing instructions. Some labels are self-imposed, some are tattooed on, and some are not. Importantly, some people have labels which make sense. They have logos, and USPs, and QR codes. They contain two of your five-a-day and they are not from concentrate. And when these labels make sense, the people to whom they are attached become the Kelloggs and the Mars and the Gordon's of the library and info pro world. (NB I'm not speaking about any individuals in particular here, but if you do think of yourself as the Gordon's of the library and info pro world, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK).

Some people, though, have labels that don't make sense. Their labels have glaring contradictions. They are dry clean only, but take twenty minutes to cook in the microwave. They contain bleach, but they're for children. And guinea pigs. Their packaging looks like it's been dreamed up by an Apprentice candidate, and their logo looks like a bit of HP sauce left on a plate.

And this is where the root of my first problem lies. To me, rightly or wrongly, these labels scream REDUCTION. Even the self-imposed ones that make perfect sense. And I don't want to have a tagline. I don't want to have a motto, even if my motto were "a Lannister always pays his debts" (sorry, going back to Game of Thrones, there). I don't want to be describable in any six words which aren't "Mrs Laurie". I don't want my entire life to be about my next job.

Not yet, anyway. Photo from Cayusa.

At the same time, it's clearly inescapable that my online presence will be reduced, whether I like it or not. By future employers that is. And because it'll be reduced, or mottoed, or taglined, or labelled, I understand that it'd be better if I were the one in control of how that was done. This is the reason that brands (or policies, or just general planning) becomes useful. It's about each individual doing their own reducing, so that someone else doesn't do it for them. But it still makes me uneasy.

Because of this, I guess I'm pretty fortunate that I have an uncommonly common name. Google just my name, and I appear once on the first page, for a CILIP thing I did. Quite frankly, that'll be on the CV which I hope my future employers will already have read before gearing up to look me up. Add "Cambridge", and you get my current job, and previous job, both already listed on the CV. Add "library", and my Twitter feed is there, towards the bottom of the page. However, add "Hugh Laurie", and it's pretty much ALL ME. Same goes for "Cumberbatch". This speaks volumes. It also suggests that if I did want to have some kind of consistent branding, then my business cards should look like this:

Or this:

Granted, neither of these are hugely professional, and OBVIOUSLY in real and proper life I wouldn't actually produce those. Well, maybe one just for me, but not to hand out to other people. But it's one of only three consistent threads across my online presences. There's Hugh Laurie, Bolton Wanderers, and gin. I use different pictures, and different usernames, and though my actual name is usually there, and the pictures I use are usually of me, there's no real consistency. I'm "Library Wanderer" because I was listening to a football match when I set up the blog. My Twitter username, "lemurph", is sort of half my name coupled with an old nickname (one of several nicknames, the rest of which are damningly uncomplimentary and offensive, both to me AND to Andy Serkis). I've tinkered about a bit with the backgrounds--I've made them blue (ish). For no reason. Very little of my online presence makes sense; very little is consistent. In this respect at least, my online presence reflects the content of that presence, which also tends to make no sense.

A clue as to one previous (undeserved) nickname

Should I care? Maybe. Though I don't genuinely believe that anything you could find out about me online would ever really count against me. I don't swear too often, I try not to be offensive, I don't criticise my job, or the people I work or have worked with. My online presence demonstrates that I have at least three photos where I've been able to crop out the bottle of gin: think about that for long enough, and it demonstrates an aptitude with Photoshop (OK, who am I kidding? Microsoft Paint). Thanks be to Michael Buerk that my online presence reflects me neither as a professional person or as a person person, because I'd be so one-dimensional, and such a caricature of myself, that I might as well swap cataloguing for vajazzling and try to get a job on The Only Way Is Essex.

I get brands. I really do. I think it's about control, and about perception, and I think those are important. It's about professionalism. And I know that no one is suggesting that professional is an antonym of personality, or friendliness. If having a brand is your thing, then go for it. It is clearly productive and useful and fruitful.

But my fear is this: that the kind of online brand which is productive and useful and fruitful is an online brand where I can't, or at least shouldn't, use photos of Cumberbatch to decorate my points. Where I can't generate loosely legitimate comparisons of Zotero to Gary Barlow, or of wikis to Goose from Top Gun, or of Dropbox to Dogtanian. It's an online brand where I can't mention Hugh Laurie in every third sentence. And frankly, that just ain't me.

The Perfect Blend (also known as #cpd23 Thing 2: Exploring other blogs)

2011-06-24T11:54:00.001+01:00

Now you’ve set off with your own blogging, it says, it’s time to meet the neighbours, it says. Let it be known that I, unashamedly, love Neighbours. The popular Australian soap, that is. Ever so influential during my formative years (approximately 4 to 23), Neighbours was the source of my first proper crush (Rick Alessi), the source of my first truly embarrassing crush (Toadfish); Neighbours taught me about love and sex and birth and death (not necessarily in that order). It taught me about friendship and coffee shops, about school journalism and explosions, about Angry Anderson and tubas and amnesia. It taught me that if I were ever to fall off a cliff, I should leave behind my glasses. It taught me about the most garish of wardrobes. While all my friends were learning the lyrics to Gangsta’s Paradise and wanting to become Cher from Clueless (they did not see these things as incongruous), I was worrying about the breakdown of Karl and Susan’s marriage, and wanting to become Cody Willis.

I don’t really think Thing 2 has much to do with Neighbours, the soap opera, but there is perhaps a little something of ‘crossing a threshold’ when you visit other people’s blogs. Which I’ve been doing a lot of over the past couple of days. I’ve tried to comment wherever I can find something useful--or at least, not simply congratulatory--to say, which I suppose is the equivalent of taking round a cold supper to your new neighbours over the road. I've been thrilled that people have commented on my blog posts so far, and have offered the cold supper back to me. What I’ve really enjoyed finding out about is how people have selected the blogs that they’re going to read. There seem to be a couple of trends:

The blogs of people they know or have met, which is wicked, because there’s no reason cpd23 shouldn’t be about cementing existing connections.
People in the same sector and/or a different sector that they’re particularly interested in, here, brilliantly, using the Delicious list and all its tags so lovingly and carefully added by the incomparable Katie and Emma--but also a fab tactic in itself.
People chosen simply at random, or based on the fact that they’ve got a good name.

These tactics all smack of excellent sense and intelligence, of which, alas, I have neither. I have, however, some rationale underpinning the selection of blogs I’ve been looking at recently. It’s not a good rationale. It is, in fact, a disastrously silly rationale. Ever so silly. Excessively stupid. I’ve chosen blogs from the Participants list on the cpd23 blog based on whether their blog name has any kind of tenuous connection with the (ex-)residents of Ramsay Street. Fortunately, so far, and for all concerned, no one that I’ve hazarded upon has demonstrated anything like the instability/insanity/ineptitude/murderous capacity of your average Ramsay Street resident. So welcome, WELCOME, to this slightly bonkers Erinsborough of cpd23.

Number 22
This was where, respectively, Daphne, the Alessis, the Carpenters and Starks, and the Robinsons have lived, along with hundreds and hundreds of other people. How eleven adults and four children managed to fit into what was essentially a two up-two down, I will never know. I’d hate to be the person working out who owed what on the gas bill. Number 22 was the house of conflict, of contrast--both in terms of its residents and its wallpaper. And I wanted to continue to the theme, by being just a little bit contrary in my selection of occupants. So the fact that none of the several billion residents has EVER been called George appealed to me, and that means that in my little cpd23 virtual Ramsay Street, I’d like number 22 to be occupied by a George (or more specifically, a Georgina) who has a very, very well-designed and frankly quite gorgeous blog here.

Number 24
At Number 24 lived the Ramsays and the Bishops! I’m ashamed to say that it took me many, many years to discover that it wasn’t a coincidence that the original Ramsay Street residents were called the Ramsays. But I won’t make that mistake again, and I'm going to assume that the people who have used "cpd23" somewhere in the blog title haven't done it by accident. It's an eminently sensible practice, I think, so here are a selection of those who did this: Bethan (whose lovely blog has made me want to use Tumblr) and Jackie (who works in an FE college in Cheshire, UK) and Verity (who works at the Bodleian in a job of which I am very, very envious).

Number 26
The Robinsons lived here, along with poor old Todd Landers and Jim Robinson and little Jason Donovan, and the murderous Martins, and pretty much my favourite ever human Neighbours character, Helen Daniels, whom I believed, for years, but quite wrongly, that I was named for. So I’d like number 26 to be occupied with some of the other Helens taking part in cpd23, and we have: Helen’s library blog (this Helen has some wicked goals set out in her Thing 1 post); Helen’s 23 things (this Helen has embedded some cool widgets into her blog), Helen’s learning maze (this Helen works in e-learning, rather than “proper” librarianship, so I think it’ll be extra interesting to read her perspectives on the Things).

Number 28
The Willises, but more importantly, the Kennedys. Susan and Karl were my surrogate parents during the evenings when I was at university. In the mornings it was Fern and Phil. Karl, a roguishly handsome unfaithful old doctor and, in real life, the lead singer of the thankfully unknown group, the Waiting Room (don't ask how I know about that); Susan, a wise old teacher, source of calm, thoughtful sagacity, mentor, mother, utter legend and NOT, as urban legend at my school would have it, the possessor of so many tattoos all over her arms that she always had to wear long sleeves on screen. So who else could represent the Kennedys in this virtual cpd23 Erinsborough but the brilliantly named blog, Rhythm and Knowledge, which I really recommend.

Number 30
Once again, more people have lived in this house during Neighbours’ 20-odd years on air than there are cpd23 participants. And that’s saying something (at the moment, 517!). Starting with crazy Pheobe, and ending up with Toadie, number 30 was the house of PARTYING. Of beer and barbies. The coolest house in Erinsborough. The house that secretly we’d all want to live in, but only if the alternatives were living in the shed at Harold’s allotment or in Darren Stark's car. So occupying number 30 is the Library Gossip Girls who sound pretty awesome to me, and both work at the Guildford College of Further and Higher Education.

Number 32
Mrs Mangel lived here. As well as Joe, and plain Jane. And my favourite ever non-human Neighbours character, Bouncer. Unfortunately, there appear to be no dogs so far taking part in cpd23. But I did stumble across a blog which had a photograph of a really gorgeous hound, from Heidi, here, and that kind of made my day.

Erinsborough High School
The obvious group of people to put in the school category is students, right? Even though practically no teaching EVER went on at Erinsborough High. I mean, did anyone apart from Libby ever actually take an exam? But far more hard-working and intelligent than any of the kids at Erinsborough High are all of our library school students, and here we have Laura, who is doing her MA at Sheffield, and Miss Scarlet who is at library school in Canada, and Lauren who’s studying at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Lassiters
Last but not least, it wouldn’t be right to get this far without a shout out to a couple of the members of the “management”, as it were, some of the people who are helping to organise cpd23, and we have: Niamh and Katie and Annie and Maria Giovanna and Erin... and so many others, a whole cast of brilliant, wonderful people. And similarly, I really couldn't write a whole blog post about Neighbours without mentioning you-know-who:

Hurrah! I love meeting the Neighbours! Altogether now:

Starting over (also known as Thing 1: blogs)

2011-06-21T20:52:00.001+01:00

Well, beginning in the most appropriate fashion ever (i.e. with a quotation from DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince), here we go again. As you may have gathered, I already had a blog; as you may also have gathered, I don’t blog very often. If you carry on reading, you’ll gather why: for the good of the universe, I don’t put my thoughts on the internets too often. But I am one of the organising team behind cpd23, though I can't possibly claim any credit for anything so far which has been in any way good about the whole thing, I thought I should set a good example. A good example of precisely WHAT NOT TO DO. Think of me as the Trinny and Susannah of cpd23. Actually, no, don't do that. That's weird. Forget I said that.

I have two proper reasons for taking part. First, we hear all the time about the importance of reflecting critically as part of our professional development. I buy into that, I really do, and I genuinely see why it's important and useful. It's just that I don't often bother. I think that, sometimes, being introspective can lead to not much else. But for the sake of cpd23, I'm going to try. And, actually, I think it'll be interesting to see whether what I think has changed much since I did Cam23 last summer. Whether, for example, I've become all mature and serious and dead grown up (doubt it); whether I've seen the light about LinkedIn (really doubt it); whether I understand what Slideshare actually is/does/etc. (getting there), whether I can be sensible, and write sensible things, without resorting to comparing Pushnote to Spandau Ballet's True, or Evernote to Lionel Richie's hair (don't hold your breath).

Pigs, flying, etc.

And then, second, is what happened yesterday. Yesterday I went to the New Professionals Conference in Manchester, and there I told a room full of brilliant, engaged, interesting and clever new professionals that they really ought to take part. No, really, they should. It was going to be fun, and useful, and practical, and brilliant. They were going to learn stuff, cool stuff. They were going to throw things against walls. They were going to get sun tans, and watch kids' TV. They were going to get connected to lots and lots of other brilliant, engaged, interesting and clever people. They were going to meet Sherlock Holmes.

I've got no idea at all if they were listening to me. But the truth is that...I was. I meant every word. So here's the crux of it: I'm taking part in cpd23 because I want to learn masses of stuff, make new connections, get new ideas, know more about our brilliant profession and get way more involved in it, get a sun tan, and meet Benedict Cumberbatch. Or Hugh Laurie. Or Sean Bean. If there's one thing I'm not, it's fussy.

Here's the presentation (see, I do kind of understand Slideshare), for those who were there yesterday and weren't listening, for those who weren't there and haven't been put off yet by this drivel, and for those who want to see a(nother) photo of Benedict Cumberbatch:

Let's talk about...CPD

2011-05-19T16:26:00.001+01:00

GUESS WHO'S BACK!

Against all the odds (and they were plenty), I somehow remembered my log-in details and password, and have just spent a moment hastily dusting down the blog and Dysoning it to within an inch of its life. And why am I back? Well, for one, it's absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the football season is practically over, and my team stayed up (really, nothing to do with that at all). Rather, the reason that I’ve returned is simple and important and frankly Very Cool Indeed. So simple, in fact, and so important and so cool, that the best way I can think of to introduce it is via the medium of the early 1990s pop tune. You know which one I mean. I'll give you a clue. Think of condiments.

OK, I’ll accept it, the last line needs a bit of work. But, if Salt ‘n’ Pepa has ever been used before to introduce a paragraph on continuing professional development, I’ll eat my proverbial.

So the reason I'm actually back to unleash my crazy ruminations is:

Isn't it pretty?

It's 23 Things for Professional Development, also known as #cpd23 on Twitter, also known as CPD 23 Things, or also known as whatever else you fancy calling it. I may refer to it as Brian for the next five months. It's inspired by all the other 23 Things frameworks that I'm sure you'll have heard about already. This blog was, in fact, set up as part of Cambridge’s awesome version of 23 Things. BUT, what makes CPD 23 Things different is that it's focusing on continuing professional development--you might've guessed that already, there've been some clues. It looks at a combination of social media stuff and more 'traditional' ways to get ahead in your career and...well, there's bags more info on the proper blog, so take a look. And it’s launching SOON. 20th June, to be precise. Put it in your calendar. And everyone working in any kind of library or information profession anywhere in the entire world is so, so, so so, SO welcome to take part, join in, or simply watch the whole thing unfold. We'd love you to take part, though. Personally speaking, wild horses couldn’t keep me away. Nor could raging bulls, talkative giraffes or disappointed pirahnas. Actually, who am I kidding? I’d be totally distracted by the giraffes.

Wanna chat?

So get ready, the countdown to 20th June begins here.

PS If anyone reading this is going to the New Professionals Conference, say hello! I'll be ~~wittering~~ speaking calmly and logically about this there too.

PPS Lottie's also blogged about CPD 23 Things here. In fact, I nicked her idea to do so myself. Thanks Lottie!

FaceBOOK. The clue is in the name.

2011-02-24T15:21:00.001Z

Proudly presenting...my very first Prezi. So hold onto your hats, and grab your motion sickness travel bands, we're in for a bumpy ride (bonus prize if you can tell me which Harry Potter film that's from)....

What's it about? I knew I was forgetting something. I'm too distracted by it whizzing about. It's about libraries being on facebook, and some hints 'n' tips, dos 'n' don'ts, problems, solutions, gems of wisdom (or not). It's a cynically positive perspective on libraries being on facebook.

Facebook for libraries on Prezi

Also see Ange's blog for better (i.e. chocolatier) stuff. Specifically, have a look at: "The *more than* social network", but hell, go mad, while you're there look at the rest of her prezis, read her entire blog. The girl's a legend.

113 is the magic number

2010-10-12T14:43:00.001+01:00

I've been dragged kicking and screaming out of my blogging retirement to say a few (clearly not literally!) words about the CUSU Societies Fair which took place on Tuesday and Wednesday last week. I was part of the supercool and dynamic (if I do say so myself) team of librarians who volunteered to wear jeans on a work day (which for me is a complete departure from my normally very smart appearance) and (wo)man the stall at Kelsey Kerridge Sports Club. Initially, volunteering to do anything at all during the busiest week of the year seemed to be an unambiguous sign that the men in white not only had my name on their list but had underlined it twice in red pen. However, as soon as I heard from Liam about the beanbag that he got for four quid at a car boot sale, I was hooked. And in fact it turned out to be not so mad a decision after all. Sure, I was a bit tired after two days of societies fair all morning and induction tours all afternoon, but in terms of my own mental and physical fitness I learned that: a) Lucozade is an efficient chaser to a pint of tea; b) pizza at regular intervals is more effective at keeping you going than Duracell; c) talking about libraries for hours on end IS really good fun, but also makes you appreciate your captive audience on induction tours. And this analysis totally leaves aside the fact that 5 and a half hours in a GYM more than fulfils my exercise quota for this month. Possibly even till Christmas.

Obviously not me

I joined the planning stages for the societies fair incredibly late, so can take no credit for all the decisions that had been made about the set, what was to be handed out, the banner, the tone, or anything like that. And I've been told--though I would never have thought it otherwise--that a trial-and-error approach had been taken. The plan was to see what worked, and what didn't, to see what was working elsewhere, and then to put all that assumed knowledge into next year's stall. But in fact, absolutely nothing didn't work--which isn't to say things can't be improved--but nothing whatsoever flunked completely.

And in fact there are so many positives to be taken from the whole two days. It shows, categorically and unmistakeably, what can be achieved if people put their heads together and give something a go. There's been a lot of that in Cambridge libraries this summer. That's not to say that the two days were a complete breeze: Emma can probably attest to that better than anyone. Even just a little bit of breeze would've been welcome on Tuesday when the room was approximately as hot as the belly of a volcano. If I'm going to be brutally honest, libraries weren't exactly the most compelling things being advertised on the day. Not when free socks are being handed out ten yards south and people dressed as pirates ahoy in the distance (the Sparrowists, the aim of whom is to make the world more 'piratey'). This meant that the first difficulty was getting people to actually come and talk to us. Some did seek us out, but most had to be accosted. This wasn't uncommon though--I took the opportunity to wander around for bit and could barely move without being rugby tackled by...the rugby team, flattered by minions from local branches of our favourite institution, the bank, or confronted by someone offering to teach me bobbin lace-making. So the second difficulty, once the attention of the ~~victim~~ student had been captured, or once it had dawned on him that his escape route was blocked, was giving him enough information about libraries in Cambridge before his attention span (roughly 30 seconds) cut out completely and the smell of pizza or the promise of a free pen put an end to any "serious" conversation. Nonetheless, some fantastic tactics emerged during the two days: from tricking the students into thinking that librarians are indeed conjurers of more than just catalogue records to perpetuating the rumour about what the UL really has in the tower; from promising better degrees to those who used their libraries to asking people what they knew about the number 113; and so on.

The cards went down a treat too--they were a great idea: simple, attractively designed, and most importantly, easy to flog. We must have been one of the only stalls there not asking people for a thousand personal details, and that was another bonus. The cards meant that we could offer the students something as they shuffled away towards the stand next door which was offering free cash or something, quietly screeching, 'just put it on your fridge, you might need it one day' which, in the context of the whole fair was about as useful as a five minute conversation. Short, sharp messages were required, and giving out the cards was as short and sharp as we could hope for. Needless to say, the fair--which at times resembled a combination of a Roman forum and the queue for the X Factor--didn't particularly lend itself to an indepth conversation. One thing that we realised though is that new students do quickly identify themselves with their College, and I know that the Trinity Hall students I spoke to were more willing to take a card because it was the Jerwood Library that was on it. So I think it's a great idea--as was suggested--to vary the images a bit more, and maybe to put a random fact about a Cambridge library on the back, just to give the student another incentive NOT to chuck it in the nearest bin. Another useful bit of information we gained in terms of volunteers present is that two was plenty and three definitely a crowd--at times there were just too many of us.

Arguably the finest library in Cambridge

It seemed to be a particularly successful couple of days, not just in terms of getting the message out there about the Libraries Gateway but also with regard to letting students know that librarians ARE approachable and happy to help them. The 'when you need us we'll be here to help you' message is an accurate one. And it WAS good fun, so I'd encourage other people to get involved. I'd absolutely go back next year, especially if I can wear a silly hat or dress as a pirate or at least don a stupid t-shirt. Whether or not I'll be welcomed back is another matter. But whatever the case, 113 IS the magic number.

Extra Credit!

2010-08-30T10:18:00.001+01:00

Finally, a Wordle! Swotty, I know! They're good fun and colourful, though I found that when I put the url of my blog into the box on the 'Create' page, it only used my most recent couple of blog posts. So this one's a copy-and-paste job of all the posts into the free text box. It took approximately as long as it takes to wait for 'that moment' in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, but I think it was worth it (though obviously not as worth it as...well, you know.)

But rather than break the habit of a lifetime, let me just be cynical for a moment here. Wordles can be a little bit misleading, I think, aside from the fact that the program didn't use all my blog posts. For one thing, just because something's been mentioned more doesn't make it more important. And also, the humanities student inside me is fighting to break away from the 'science' of the Wordle and to stamp my foot and insist that the perception of what's been prominent in something you've just read is way more important, and way more interesting, than a numerical calculation. So on that note, here's my perception of what's been most prominent in my blog--and what's been at the front of my mind as I've been writing it:

And on that note, toodle pip! But just for good measure, and because I'm cross that he didn't win an Emmy:

Thing 23: Do I detect some final thoughts?

2010-08-26T13:41:00.000+01:00

In the words of REM, it's the end of the world as we know it. The last post! And it's been emotional. Not emotional like when Madge died in Neighbours, or when Postman Pat got married, but you know what I mean. I've not yet managed to be brief in any of these posts and there's little point starting now, so let me rush through the things we've looked at and offer some final thoughts and another slightly bizarre set of analogies.

In first place, at the very top of the league, the major revelation of Cam23, is Zotero. Lovely, lovely Zotero. I'm still having minor heart palpitations and butterflies at the very thought. Zotero is definitely the Sherlock Holmes of the programme. It can do things you never knew you needed it to do. It can make connections and deductions and arrange information for you in numerous different ways. If my next assignment for my MSc wasn't on management I'd be looking forward to it, just for the chance to use Zotero a bit more. I'm also tremendously excited about future generations of Zotero because Sherlock Holmes gave birth (not literally) to House. It's all very thrilling. And yet, without Cam23, I may never have taken the time to explore it. My prejudice against Firefox may well have put me off completely. And Louis Armstrong wouldn't be singing about it being a wonderful world then.

In second place, there's Twitter, the Gene Hunt of Cam23. Fire up the Quattro! (Apologies to Crail for conflating her beloved with her most detested!) I can't quite explain why I like Twitter, I just know that I do. And I've tried to justify the Gene Hunt thing countless times to the genius housemates but my entirely reasonable explanations have fallen on deaf ears, and they continue to believe that I'm mad. I can't say why it/he is good, I just know that it's as true and as real as the sun rising in the east.

Does anyone understand?

Then there's things like Facebook, Google Reader, Google Docs, wikis, podcasts and Delicious. These are Morse, Frost, Rebus, Dalgleish, Ironside and Wallander. They're good, and some bits of them are really good. They occasionally overlap so it can be difficult to differentiate between them or determine which one you want to use, or watch. None of them are strictly necessary, though they all have a useful set of functions. It's completely a matter of taste, and choice.

Flickr is the CSI Miami or New York or the Criminal Minds of the Web 2.0 world. Or any of those numerous and terribly glamorous American TV programmes that the UK tries so desperately to emulate and fails catastrophically so many times. We usually end up with The Bill, or CSI: Sun Hill, or whatever it's called. Flickr undoubtedly fills an ostensible need, and this is especially the case as it goes hand-in-hand with creative commons licensing. It also has many die-hard fans, who can justify their opinions without too much trouble. But it occasionally becomes too big to handle (how many CSI offshoots are there now?! And how many results retrieved on Flickr?!), and sometimes what's on the surface is far better than what's beneath it.

Blogs and YouTube and LibraryThing are the Web 2.0 equivalents of Diagnosis Murder. Not that they'd be improved by having less Dick van Dyke! They're a bit of fun, and there's definitely nothing particularly wrong with any of them. The...erm, improbable... basis of Diagnosis Murder (ageing moustached medical doctor of uncertain skill solving crimes with his homicide detective son and another group of doctors who manage to get away without doing any doctoring at all) stretches the imagination just a little. You've got to be keen to invest your time in it, because you're not necessarily going to gain anything from it. Similarly, I don't quite see the benefit of investing time in YouTube and LibraryThing and blogs (writing them, not reading them!! And yes, I do realise how illogical that is), though once again, it's absolutely a matter of taste.

Google Calendar is Miss Marple and Doodle is Jessica Fletcher. They're both interfering busybodies who definitely mean well. They're trying to make me more organised and better prepared and they're trying to right wrongs and solve problems, but frankly I'm happier with a little bit of chaos. Having said that, I'm definitely coming round to the idea of Google Calendar, though I'm not sure why. Miss Marple would know. Sticking with Agatha Christie, Poirot is iGoogle. It's very suave and sophisticated, and iGoogle would benefit from a neatly trimmed moustache. However, I do get bored of glamorous young women losing their pearl necklaces. It's a bit of fun, and it has its uses and attractions, but underneath the surface I do find it fairly inconsequential.

Sadly, sharing bottom place are LinkedIn and Slideshare, the Web 2.0 equivalents of Inspectors Barnaby and Lewis. LinkedIn is uncommonly complex, just like Midsomer Murders. It all depends on the effort you're willing to put in, and as I've never understood an episode of Midsomer Murders and doubt that I ever will, I'll probably not bother with LinkedIn again. Slideshare is just like Lewis. It's OK, really, it is. But there's a lingering feeling that something utterly crucial is missing. Whether it's the Jag, or the white hair, the beer or the obsession with Wagner, or whether it's simply the ability to be able to listen to a presentation rather than just look at it, Lewis and Slideshare both suffer from being only half of a good thing.

So what have I learned? Cam23 has encouraged us to think and write critically about these tools, which has been incredibly useful. I'm totally against the wholesale or unthinking adoption of Web 2.0 in libraries. Just because it's available doesn't mean it should be used (Bolton Wanderers' Kevin Davies is another example of this, and it closely reflects my dog's opinion of the bath tub), and Cam23 has helped me to articulate why this is the case without seeming curmudgeonly. Professionally speaking, I remain completely unconvinced about the application of some of these tools to our library. It has, however, been really good to read alternative opinions, forcing me to consider how these tools might be used in other libraries, even if we don't plan to use them in ours. Reading other blogs has also made me appreciate the benefits and advantages of the sprawling Cambridge library system which, prior to this, I've always just thought was a bit mad. The Cam23 "community" mentioned by many finishers is marvellous and I hope it'll continue. There's also the influence of Cam23 to be seen in developments like the communication meeting, and the TeachMeet. Cam23 has achieved so much more than I thought it might. In the words of Take That, sort of, we can rule the world.

Sammy doesn't like to be clean

On a personal level, I don't think Cam23 has changed my habits particularly though it has made me strongly consider my consumption of rubbish TV (only consider, mind). I've adopted Google Reader on a far more comprehensive basis and, while at the Reflections stage of the programme a few months ago I said that I thought I'd give up on Google Reader pretty quickly once the programme was over, I now think it's here to stay. Blogging, however, is about to take a long walk off a short pier. The major exception is, of course, be still my heart, lovely Zotero, forever inextricably linked to Benedict Cumberbatch in my head.

Thanks to Sodahead for the image, and so long, blogging!

So all that remains is a couple of thank yous, hopefully avoiding Gywneth's level of hysteria. I'll try very hard. A big thank you to all those who have read and commented on my blog posts, you're all far too generous. Another big thank you to the genius housemates who have patiently put up with me wittering on about this for months and months. And finally a BIG thank you to the lovely and talented Cam23 organisers for setting up the programme, keeping us motivated, writing the brilliant Cam23 blog which is a super resource, and the promise of the free wine at the wrap party. Bring it on.

How else could I have ended it?

Thing 22: The Wiki Adder

2010-08-19T15:55:00.001+01:00

Lots of people, of whom I am extremely envious, have already reached the starry heights of Thing 22 and have said everything that I might ever have wanted to, far more eloquently and thoughtfully than I ever could (there are so many examples I could provide, but see here, and here, and here). So there I was, thinking about what I might write here that didn't completely plagiarise what I've already read, sipping a G&T and wondering if genius housemate would notice if I stole another piece of her amazing homemade carrot cake, and then it struck me. An interesting thought. More to the point, "An interesting thought. Make a note of it, Darling" (Lord Melchett, Captain Cook), which I thought to myself in my best Lord Melchett voice. "I've got a plan", I thought, "and it's so cunning you could brush your teeth with it" (Blackadder, Head). Wikis have a lot in common with one of my favourite TV shows, Blackadder.

Blackadder II: the best series

The assertion is that it's not the case that wikis and Blackadder are, as the man himself once said, "about as similar as two completely dissimilar things in a pod" (Dual and Duality). And then, despite realising that this idea was a bit crazy, I decided to go ahead with it, poured myself another G&T and committed myself to the mantra that "If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through" (Lord Melchett, Private Plane). So here are my top 5 reasons why wikis are like Blackadder, and why this makes them a Good Thing.

Totally spiffing TV, Blackadder Goes Forth

1. "I heard that it started when a bloke called Archie Duke shot an ostrich 'cos he was hungry" (Baldrick talking about the First World War, in Goodbyeeee).

The 'historical' basis of Blackadder could perhaps be described as a bit holey, though that would be kind. In fact, historically speaking, it's got more holes than a colander. I definitely learnt the hard way that Liz the First's nurse wasn't actually called Bernard, but that's another story for another time. Blackadder gets some things right (the start date of the First World War, for example), and some things wrong: his description of Oscar Wilde as "Big, bearded, bonking, butch Oscar - the terror of the ladies. 114 illegitimate children, world heavyweight boxing champion and author of the best-selling pamphlet 'Why I Like To Do It With Girls'." (Blackadder, Corporal Punishment.)

The major criticism of Wikipedia, the world's most famous wiki, is that it's full of errors. Not only those deliberately let out into the ether by our Cam23 head honcho, but also the time when some twisted genius swapped a really sensible word for the word 'cheese' in one entry. Like Marsh, I was pleased to hear from Lottie that there are strict rules about the quality and veracity of information. Thinking logically, I'd imagine that the increased traffic to a site with an obvious or deliberate error would alert Jimmy Wales and his crew to it. So I tend to trust whatever I read on Wikipedia as long as I'm using it to bolster my own knowledge, and it's the same with Blackadder. I wouldn't use it in an essay, but I like to believe that it encourages critical thinking.

2. "By Gum, this is interesting! I always loved history. The Battle of Hastings, Henry VIII and his six knives and all that!" (Lieutenant George, Goodbyeeee).

Lord Melchett, Series 4

One of the best things about Blackadder is that it traces members of the Blackadder dynasty throughout their history. Edmund begins as a rich idiot, and as the series progress, his cunning and intelligence increase as his wealth and social standing falters. It's linear, because it's chronological, but there are themes and trends which run cross-series. The characters, the actors, and even the storylines. For example, young Bob, the girl with whom Blackadder repeatedly falls in love.

The process of creating and editing a wiki can be quite a linear process. Because they tend to be text-based, you can depict the development of thought and map out the discussions as they occurred. In addition, lots of wiki programs save every version of a page, not just the latest one, so should you be so inclined or have a bit of spare time and no imagination, you can dig through the history of the pages and access old versions, and actually, this information might be useful for future projects. It's also good to be able to counter the fear of new users that they might accidentally delete everything (or to counter experienced users who spitefully delete everything)--there is often a back-up.

3. "'Yes, it is', not 'That it be'. You don't have to talk in that stupid voice to me. I'm not a tourist." (Blackadder, to the old crone, Bells).

Series 3

I dream of having the same control over my language as Blackadder does. His voice, his tone, his slightly snipey accent and that beautifully sarcastic, malevolent language so brilliantly captured. Both his vocabulary and his syntax are amazing. Isn't this marvellous: "I'm as poor as a church mouse, that's just had an enormous tax bill on the very day that his wife ran off with another mouse, taking all the cheese" (Amy and Amiability).

When work is collaboratively produced using a wiki, which makes this kind of co-editing so straightforward, it's logical to presume that the work is of a better quality at least some of the time. I'm taking the 'many heads make light work' route, rather than the 'too many cooks'. So not only do wikis potentially lead to more sophisticated style and content, but also the process of involvement and contribution can motivate people and ultimately make the project or document addressed in the wiki even better in real life. Hopefully not with the same consequences as when Field Marshal Haig attempted to "make another garguantuan effort to move his drinks cabinet six inches closer to Berlin" (Blackadder, Captain Cook).

4. "Baldrick, believe me: eternity in the company of Beelzebub, and all his hellish instruments of death, will be a picnic compared to five minutes with me... and this pencil... if we cannot replace this dictionary" (Blackadder, Ink and Incapability).

Very cunning. Series 2

This particular quotation is from an episode in Series 3. Prince George decides to become the patron of Samuel Johnson's new dictionary, because someone has told him that he has the "wit and intellect of a donkey" ("An absurd suggestion", says Blackadder, "unless it was a very stupid donkey"). As events unfold, Baldrick accidentally burns the only copy of the dictionary, and Blackadder has a weekend to replace it, despite thinking that "it's the most pointless book since How to Learn French was translated into French". Baldrick and George try to assist, but their efforts aren't particularly helpful (Blackadder: "Have you got C?" Baldrick: "Yes, C. Big blue wobbly thing that mermaids live in"). It all ends badly for Blackadder, as usual.

Being a TV show, and quite normal, the writers of Blackadder obviously don't delve into the intricacies of who would own the finished product. And I think one of the more profound things about wikis is that they can potentially elide all claims to authorship. Who owns the finished product? Is it the creator of the wiki, the collaborator who has contributed the most, or the owner of the software enabling the wiki? It's just a thought!

"Pretending" to be mad, Series 4

5. I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach... of a concrete elephant! (Queenie, Beer).

Honestly one of the best characters ever

No, I'm not going to compare the supposed sturdiness of Elizabeth I to a wiki. I just think it's a good quotation. In fact, my favourite exchange in Blackadder is from Series 4, Blackadder Goes Forth, where Blackadder meets Bob Parkhurst, a driver, who he immediately realises is a woman disguised as a man (though he doesn't quite pick up on this in Series 2!).

Blackadder: Let me put it another way, Bob. You are a girl. And you're a girl with as much talent for disguise as a giraffe in dark glasses trying to get into a Polar Bears Only golf club.
Bob: Oh sir! Please don't give me away. I just wanted to be like my brothers and join up. I want to see how a war is fought... so badly!
Blackadder: Well, you've come to the right place, Bob. A war hasn't been fought this badly since Olaf the Hairy, High Chief of all the Vikings accidentally ordered eighty thousand battle helmets with the horns on the inside.

Amazing, isn't it? And pretty word perfect, and it didn't take me long to find it. Nearly all of the quotations for this blog post haven't come from my own head, or an 'official' Blackadder website, but from wikis. Specifically, WikiQuote, and the quotations section on IMDB, all of which were contributed by users. This brings me to the best thing about wikis. Joint effort produces more information, and this isn't a Good Thing so much as a Great Thing. It's the sort of asset that makes the functionality and usefulness of wikis a complete no-brainer. The information contained in wikis can be so rich and varied and diverse. Wikis are not only really useful for joint projects and for organising things (though our forthcoming TeachMeet is a fine example of the advantage of using a wiki for this purpose), but they can be an extremely powerful resource of information and knowledge. Which makes me "as happy as a Frenchman who's invented a pair of self-removing trousers" (George, Ink and Incapability).

"Mad, blundering and incredibly handsome"

Last words given to Hugh Laurie. Typical.

Thing 21: Podcasting, or "Welcome to the Blair Witch Library"

2010-08-16T14:26:00.008+01:00

A really good podcast performs the same function as a really good episode of QI. They're educational (think A History of the World in 100 Objects versus the fact that the most popular boy's name in France in 1992 was Kevin--and people doubted that Dances With Wolves would have an impact on the world?!); they can be informative or thought-provoking (Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed versus Catherine de Medici's very unfamous topless dinner party); and the best ones are entertaining (think BBC's The Now Show versus the lovely Mr Fry's constant flirtations with Alan Davies).

Podcasts have structure, possibly subscriptions, and even more possibly a level of quality control. This can be imposed by the creator trying to make his or her podcast good, or imposed by the user downloading only from sources that they trust, like, pay for. Personally I rarely listen to anything not downloaded from BBC Radio 4 so the sound quality is good even if the content is rubbish. I use iTunes to organise my podcasts and it downloads them automatically and deletes them for me when I've listened to them. And because I put them on my iPod, they're portable--great for long journeys--so I can listen to them whenever I want. Again, a bit like QI--I strongly suspect that some form of contract was created which ensures that an episode of QI is broadcasting somewhere at every single second of the day.

Match made in heaven

There are rumours (like wot Andy said) that podcasts are in decline, but I disagree. By comparison, though, YouTube is definitely not in decline. It's the most popular video-sharing site in the world, still. Comparatively speaking, it isn't so much a once classy but now slightly overdone if still worth watching game show as much as a sort of Who Wants to be a Blankety Weakest Generation in the Wipeout Link of Fortune in the Wall (Or No Deal) presented by Larry Grayson and Hannibal Lecter. There's something for everyone, as Birdbrain said, and some bits of it are better than others. (Want to see something really dull?) There's less control, over both quality and content, and even though anyone with a microphone and a computer can create a podcast, it doesn't appear that the medium has yet become the free-for-all for which YouTube has rightly earned a reputation. Some people think that YouTube has changed the world. I don't know who these people are but I suspect that among them are some of the 100 million plus people who watched Susan Boyle attacking some Les Mis show tunes.

I listen to podcasts whenever I've got the time or a long train journey, and watch clips from YouTube whenever directed there by a friend's recommendation, but I've never contemplated creating either a podcast or video fit for YouTube. Frankly, unless that's the kind of thing you're "into", I can't imagine why you would. And while I'm certain that these forms of social media have been and would be incredibly useful for some libraries, the idea of using them to promote our library is one that I find vaguely laughable, for a couple of reasons:

First, quality control. Pretty much everyone who has ever in the history of the world written a blog post about this has said that if either a podcast or a video is going to be successful, it has to be good. Perhaps as sophisticated and intelligent as Stephen Fry; as interesting as Inception (so I've heard), and thrilling enough to get the Pointer Sisters worked up. What any video like this needs is to be as interesting as something that Professor Brian Cox says, and unfortunately many of them are about as interesting as what Professor Brian Cox sang. Problem #1 for our library. If I were involved (and with only two staff members, how could I be excluded?), I would actually want to do Blair Witch Library, thus sending quality straight down to the torture chamber. Or how about a rework of Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library in a Tarantino stylee? I can see it now: Margaret Rutherford-lookalike in a yellow leather catsuit using a combination of martial arts and village gossip to solve the problem of what to do when the self-service machine breaks down at the weekend. OK, we all know that wouldn't be acceptable. What is it Captain Mainwaring used to say? Realms of fantasy.

Doesn't seem too keen on the idea

On a serious note, I said in an earlier post that lots of social media tools require investment from us. Podcasts and YouTube, if we're creating them, are right at the top end of this. And so even I had the skills and could find inspiration from something other than films I saw in the 1990s, I can't honestly see the time required paying off. I'm not sure it's worth it. And especially seeing that very few of the librarians I've ever met would have the time to put in this kind of effort, the very idea seems to be doomed before it's begun (I hope the Judge's video proves me very wrong!)

Like he said

Second, impressions count. Again, this is specific to our library--it's not a general point. Being a College library, we don't have ridiculous numbers of users and our relationship with the students is carefully crafted. I don't doubt for a second that new students to the College would rather see an online video induction rather than pop into the library to meet us. Obviously, it's far easier for them, and there's less walking involved. But I think the fact that the students meet the staff, face-to-face, sets the tone for the rest of their time in College much better than a video ever could. Even if it was Librarians do Marilyn Manson or a remake of The Breakfast Club. Bigger libraries don't have the opportunity to meet all of their users. But it is undoubtedly an opportunity, and one I think we would miss if we provided an online induction video.

But for fear of being too negative, though it is totally unavoidable given the football score at the weekend, and for fear of getting to the end of the blog post without mentioning Hugh Laurie, here's one of my favourite YouTube clips:

Thing 20: A hospital drama based analysis of Google Docs

2010-08-11T21:51:00.017+01:00

Remember when George Clooney wasn't reliant on the Coen brothers for his pocket money? I'm talking about back in the day, mid-1990s, when he was in ER. He played Dr Doug Ross, a charming yet roguish stubbly heartthrob at County General Hospital, Chicago. Oh, I used to love ER. Past tense, not just because the doors of the emergency room are closed forever, leaving the infirm of Chicago literally dying on the streets, but because, towards the end, ER got a bit rubbish. It got too far-fetched, almost reaching Casualty-esque levels of hilarity and obfuscation and wackiness. The scriptwriters seemed to have mistaken themselves for Lewis Carroll. Clooney left, Carter got shot and became a druggie, and worst of all, poor old Mark Greene died. Not to mention the helicopter with Rocket Romano's name on it. Ironically, they killed ER. It all went too far. For proof, see YouTube clip:

This is very, very vaguely relevant, I promise, but bear with me for a couple more sentences. The thing is that Google Docs inevitably invites comparison with Microsoft Office. And galling and bizarre as it is to suggest that Google is the David to Microsoft's Goliath, when it comes to this kind of Office-y package, Microsoft seems to have the edge, especially with regard to economics and how ingrained it is in our collective consciousness. Both Microsoft and Google are inescapably and irritatingly omnipresent, but Microsoft has been annoying people for longer. But I think where Google Docs just has the edge over Microsoft Office is that it's less far along the unfortunate path trundled by ER. Microsoft Office is now ER Series 13. Too fancy, too complicated, too many icons and wotsits and twiglets and helicopters. My parents use Office 2007 and inform me weekly that you can put a watermark on a Word document. My response, always the same: good to know, parents, but never in my 26 years on earth have I contemplated the idea that I might put a watermark on something. In fact, I'm an avid supporter of the non-use of Microsoft Word watermarks. Sorry, digressing again.

Still digressing

What's more is that this comparison between Microsoft Office and Google Docs is becoming ever more relevant. When Office 2010 comes out, it's going to include more online features, including an updated version of SharePoint, which basically does the same thing as Google Docs (though according to this chap here, who has seen the new version in beta, it's not that good).

Google Docs is the equivalent of ER circa 1998, and that's why I love it. It's just a very little bit old school. It's hit its stride, and it's got 20+ million American viewers each week. The winning formula has been found and it's not wholly reliant on Clooney's face anymore. It's not overly convoluted. It's slick, and fast-paced, and ever so glamorous, but death by helicopter hasn't yet become an issue. It does the job, and well.

Old School ER, from sidereel

This is sort of why Google Docs is so wonderful. It does the job, and it keeps you hooked, but it's not perfect. It's fast and straightforward and lightweight. You don't need a BSc in typewriters to work out which 'Save' button to click. And you can use it just as a cloud-based word processor, saving yourself from adding attachments and emailing yourself every time you switch computers. But this is the tip of the iceberg. Google Docs does so much more. It's (potentially) amazingly collaborative--its editing and formatting functions, which are in real time, are fabulously useful. And you can chat with your co-editors in real time, if so inclined. Just like ER, there's the main story and then countless underplots and story arcs and running jokes. You can dip into an ER episode at any point of any series (up to Series 8 anyway, for taste's sake) and get something out of it even if you'd never seen the receptionist before and didn't get all the nuances. Google Docs is so easy to use that you don't need to worry about your skills decaying because of underuse. But what I really like is that Google Docs is useful and valuable even at its most basic level, or whatever level you choose to use it at. No commitment required. I'm not sure the same could be said for most of the rest of the things we've looked at, most of which have warranted some kind of personal investment: time, money, hair, skin elasticity, gin supplies, etc.

My only minor complaint is that the troops at Google are messing about with offline access. Until April this year, you could access Google Docs offline, but that's been scrapped, so to avoid the inevitable occurrence that your Wi-Fi will fail just when you need it, you have to faff about manually exporting information, uploading and downloading and so on. Apparently Google is working on a replacement service, and I think the sooner the better, please! More information here.

The truth is that I love Google Docs at the moment. And I'm sure at some stage in the future, in the name of development, the big brains at Google will do something to it and ruin it forever. Oh, the melodrama! They'll definitely adapt it, and make it scary and detailed and it'll soon lie far outside the range of my mediocre capabilities. But for the moral, and the morale, of the story, we need to look back to ER. After ER, there was Grey's Anatomy. After ER, there was House. Before ER, there was Casualty, less said the better. So the trajectory is going in the right direction, and if Google Docs follows the same path, then whatever succeeds it will, I'm sure, be just fine. Especially if it involves Hugh Laurie.

See what I mean?

PS Get it? Google Docs? Docs? OK, proper Dad joke. Sorry.

Thing 19: "Unbelievably Awesome Inspector Morse Woz Here" Marketing

2010-08-09T08:10:00.003+01:00

I grew up in a town in Lancashire called Bury, famous for mills and factories, for the reputation of its townsfolk's delectation in congealed pig's blood, by history aficionados for being the birthplace of Robert Peel, and by League 2 aficionados for its all-right-I-suppose football team, the Shakers. Bury also has a "world famous" market. Suspension of disbelief intact, all promotional materials preface the words 'Bury Market' with the astonishingly inaccurate description "world famous". Now, I've never met anyone from outside the North West who has heard of it, and I know at least eight people from Bury itself who haven't, so "world famous" appears to be a small exaggeration. A bit like it'd be a small exaggeration to claim that Schindler's List was the feel-good film of the 1990s.

The adjectival hyperbole doesn't tell you anything about the market, or give you a list of reasons to visit. What it does is elevate it in your mind. Heck, if Bob in Timbuktu and Barry in Llandudno have heard of it, it must be good. The 'strategy' works. They just about get away with it. Until you've visited it, of course. No, I'm kidding, it's a cracking market.

When libraries have similar marketing strategies, they don't get away with it. We don't like marketing, as Girl in the Moon said. We can't get away with not saying anything about the library apart from implicitly indicating that it exists. We might just about manage to perpetuate the image that libraries have books, tables and librarians. Go to the first Google entry for Cambridge Central Library, which is absolutely wonderful, and it gives you a list of opening times. Hardly breakthrough marketing there, and definitely not representative.

In an article in the Observer this week (here), the brilliant comedian David Mitchell remarks that honesty in advertising seems to be the new trend. He offers some hilarious 'alternative' marketing campaigns, my favourites being:

Pimm's: It may be unrelentingly sugary, but you can drink it outdoors without looking like a tramp

Bendicks Mints: Nobody would buy them to eat themselves, but they're easy to wrap and pricey enough to make a respectable present.

Perhaps it could be argued that our marketing of our libraries tends to be a bit honest. We stick with verifiable facts, leading us back into the 'stock, space, staff' strategy. Social media can perhaps help us to expand on this in a less toe-curling way than traditional methods. And of course the 3-S image is true, but only a teeny part of the picture. At the same time, I want to warn against overdependence on social media. It makes it so easy that we might forget to have a coherent offline strategy. We might treat all social media in the same way. We might adopt everything we have time for, but not use them critically. Social media should complement, not replace, our traditional marketing strategies, but these need more work anyway.

Much better strategy! From United Way of Western Connecticut

Let me explain more. Our library has a specific catchment group, with specific messages. We want to say to the grads that we've got tables and seats and that desk lamps have bulbs. Work in here, not at home, because we're always open and you may be less tempted to procrastinate by watching re-runs of Glee. And we want to say to the undergrads that we've got the books on your reading lists and you can borrow them and that we can show you how e-resources work and we can recommend reference management software to you (I'm still not over Zotero or Cumberbatch).

Unbelievably gratuitous

We might well be able to use social media to help us here. Twitter or RSS feeds to advertise new stock, an interesting blog, perhaps. But would the message stick? The best way to market the stock and the space is to get students into the library in the first place. The best advertisement for the library is the library itself. And this means that our induction tours have to be amazing--no pressure then! When it comes to footfall, bums on seats, circulation figures, etc., social media will always be the Sergeant Lewis to the actual building's Inspector Morse.

Our other messages are neither as readily evident nor as quantifiable nor as immediate. The most obvious example is the staff and our tacit knowledge. Because while saying 'we've got the 7th edition of Huczynski and Buchanan's Organizational Behaviour, so we do' is about as true as saying 'the library staff is nice and knowledgeable and willing to help you', the former is way more easier to prove. Social media can help us to get across the image that we're approachable, so it might be able to have more of an impact. But this brings with it concerns about how we use social media. I like our Facebook fan page, but the tone we adopt has to be appropriate, informal and friendly--and still with barriers. I'm with Crail that 'a real person is worth a thousand Facebook profiles', and again, the best advertisement for the library staff is probably the library staff itself.

I'm dubious about the pressure we might be tempted to put onto social media to do our marketing for us, because it's so easy to use. It can definitely help, but should be used with forethought. Wholesale adoption just won't do. On the other hand, perhaps our strategy could learn a few lessons from Bury Market. I'm thinking: "Internationally Renowned" Jerwood Library (where Inspector Morse studied. Yes he did. OK, no he didn't). What do you think? It's catchy, at least.

Worked in our library, so he did.

Thing 18: Zotero, my dear Watson

2010-08-04T18:57:00.006+01:00

A couple of nights ago, I settled down in front of the telly to have a tinker with Zotero. I hadn't been able to download it at work because I was afraid that the IT guys would find out I'd been tampering with the precious and would visit me en masse, a la the Sopranos, and I'd be left without any eyebrows. So there I was, G&T in one hand, delicious homemade lemon bar in t'other (made by genius housemate), Leon DVD about to begin (film selection for the evening made by other genius housemate). It wouldn't have taken a Holmesian level of deduction to realise that this evening could exceed my meagre expectations. But would Zotero spoil it? Would Zotero prove to be the Professor Moriarty to my Sherlock of a pleasant evening?

And I tell you: I almost did go to the foot of our stairs. More scandalous than the one in Bohemia, sort of, Zotero is responsible for my first positive reaction to something new included in the 23 Things so far. But for fear of being too overexcited about it, let's start with some negatives.

The Red-Headed League (1891): I'm no fan of Firefox. (Get it, foxes = red head. All right, I admit it, pretty loose connection!) They tried to make me use it but I said no, no, no. I use it at work and that is plenty. On my laptop, I use Chrome which I do like. Chrome is prettier: it's Benedict Cumberbatch and Firefox is Basil Rathbone. As you can run both simultaneously, and as Firefox is already downloaded onto my computer, I'll manage for now, but Mr Zotero, can I have a Chrome plug-in, thankyouplease?

Benedict Cumberbatch & Martin Freeman as Holmes & Watson

The Valley of Fear (1914): Andy's comment (here) about the robustness of a reference management package built into a web browser does bear a second thought, though I notice Andy got his fingers burned slightly for his very sensible observations. I used Endnote back in the day when I was a postgraduate student and it did feel sturdy, even if this was for no other reason than that there was a wee icon in the Start menu. Having said that, it's as likely that I'll accidentally let my computer fall from Reichenbach Falls, or set fire to it, or feed it to my dog (who is way too wimpy to be a hound of the Baskervilles), or just leave it on a train somewhere than that I'd get a virus which happened to wipe out just Firefox. Plus if syncing Zotero accounts cross-computer is a real possibility, then this might be mitigated totally! And if I did manage to send the computer to Laptop Hades, then I'm not sure I'd be bothered about my references in the big scheme of things. Not when my Ace of Base Greatest Hits iTunes download was imperilled.

Basil Rathbone & Nigel Bruce as Holmes & Watson

But now time for the good stuff.

A Case of Identity (1891): Zotero has clearly been built by researchers and bibliographers for researchers and bibliographers. It's obvious that it's been developed by people who know what they're doing, and a quick Kajagoogle search locates these clever people at the Centre for History and New Media at George Mason University in Washington DC. Zotero identifies and provides access to bibliographical data which it exports and translates from literally hundreds of different websites. Its coverage is pretty impressive. Plus you can also manually add sources, so you can create reference central, even including offline stuff. So it's a case of 'all details, even if they appear to be relevant or not' (The Adventure of the Copper Beaches). I like the way it looks: its iTunes-y interface is intuitive. And not to mention the drag-and-drop facility, tags, links and notes, collections building functions, and more. I could go on for hours. It works, and it works efficiently. The search facility is pretty hot too. Corporate doublespeak alert: it streamlines your reference management. It almost succeeds in making it fun. Almost. In the way that The Sound of Music is almost bursting with gritty realism.

The Adventure of the Illustrious Client (1924): The fact that it's in the actual browser (even if it is Firefox) is pretty special too. It improves efficacy, there's no copying and pasting, no faffing about adding bits of information, and you're referencing in real time, which makes you more efficient--or illustrious--too. One of the things I've always found tricky about referencing is that you have to interrupt your workflow to keep the references up to date, and I always lose my train of thought. Here, there's no need. I can reference with one hand, type with the other, and if I've got a straw in my G&T I can multitask very effectively.

Jeremy Brett as Holmes

The Adventure of the Final Problem (1893): The final problem, of course, being cost. And Zotero is free! Free! And it's not a shoddy version of something you'd pay for. Endnote, which I bought when I was a student, not only seemed to cost the earth but was complicated too. My skills of deduction were, alas, too weak to make it create the kinds of citations I wanted, and in the end I returned to the trusty index card emporium. Endnote is definitely not Mycroft in this analogy! Zotero seems to be pretty simple and the supporting documentation quite comprehensive. Plus it has 16 in-built citation styles, one of which is the preferred style for my MSc (APA 6th ed.) and which is about as complicated as flatpack furniture. So all in all, this is what the youth of today might call a Double Win. And did I mention that it was free?

Robert Downey Jr as Holmes

His Last Bow (1917): Would I recommend Zotero to our students? At the moment, probably not, because I couldn't do it confidently. If I've learned anything from Sherlock Holmes it's that 'it is a capital mistake to theorise before you have all the evidence' (A Study in Scarlet). But I'm definitely going to use it myself for my next assignment, and if it turns out that it is 'elementary', then maybe I could. My prediction though: that Zotero is going to be as good as I hope it will be. A Holmes, rather than a Watson, an Irene Adler, rather than a Mrs Hudson.

Roland Young & John Barrymore as Watson & Holmes

Thing 17: LinkedIn and the City

2010-08-01T13:52:00.001+01:00

My response to LinkedIn strongly resembled my response to Sex and the City. Both make my teeth hurt. Actually, let's be precise here: if I had the stamina or the willpower to stay on the website or watch the programme for more than the length of a T'Pau song, then they would make my teeth hurt. As it is, I've barely got past the four-minute mark with either of them, and if someone can run a mile in the time it takes me to get bored, that's saying something. I've got a very high tolerance for boring. I've sat through countless dire goalless draws at the Reebok Stadium. And I genuinely enjoy watching what most people would consider to be the apex of paint-drying vapidity: golf.

Many is the boring afternoon spent here

Both LinkedIn and Sex and the City inspire in me nothing other than apathy peppered with a pinch of minor antipathy. As a disclaimer, though it may be clear from the first paragraph, I have shown absolutely no commitment to either of them, so my response is very, very much based on a brief first impression. And here are my very loosely Sex and the City themed reasons for not being so fond of LinkedIn.

1. Carrie. The one that writes about her love life. The LinkedIn Google entry--have you seen it? It says "Relationships Matter". Seriously, are you kidding me? Relationships? I've had more meaningful relationships with the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special than I believe I would ever have via LinkedIn. It's this sort of platitude that makes me want to sit in a darkened room and listen to some Leonard Cohen.

2. Charlotte. The needy one. I do have a LinkedIn account, and about six months ago I deleted it, having realised that my opinions of LinkedIn were about as immutable as the laws of gravity or Pat Sharp's hairdo. On closing the account, the following message displayed: once the account is closed, a user will no longer have access to the account or the contact information. Excellent, I thought, that's just what I want. Despite this, LinkedIn still lovingly accepted my username and password when I tried it out. Grr. LinkedIn just can't accept that it's over.

3. Miranda. The dull, clever one. LinkedIn is, euphemistically speaking, challenged in the colour and verve stakes. I guess that fits in with its image as being 'grown up' networking, and I'm sure that there are many persuasive arguments as to why being the Times New Roman pt. 12 of Web 2.0 is appropriate and conduces with the aims and objectives of the site. After all, would you hire someone whose CV was in Comic Sans? On the other hand, I'm not convinced by any interpretation of 'grown up' which necessarily equates it with 'bland'. Come on LinkedIn, make the effort.

4. Samantha. The one that, erm... "networks" a lot. Now apparently, one of the grown up aims of LinkedIn is that it'll make me more visible and more connectable. It'll improve my ranking in the Google charts or whatever it's called. It'll help me to network and make connections and opportunities will subsequently be knocking at the door or flying through the window and I'll be able to get a better job or something. Fabulous--I might need a bigger salary to pay the dentist's fees. At the same time I can't shake off the feeling that networking like this is embarrassing, excruciating, vacuous and a bit lazy. I'm definitely not opposed to networking, but I think it's something that you have to be proactive about, and I'm not sure that I would be able to do that through LinkedIn. I'm not yet persuaded that a few facts copied and pasted from your CV is the best way to go about it. LinkedIn feels like a bit of a free ride.

L to R: Charlotte, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha. I'm ashamed of myself for knowing this.

Now according to last Thursday's business pages in the Telegraph (here), LinkedIn has over 70 million members and is valued at $2.26 billion. The first Sex and the City movie took $55.7 million at the box office in its opening weekend. Both of these are seriously impressive. And maybe the numbers don't lie, and maybe I'm missing something utterly revolutionary. But frankly, my dear, I'd rather not take the trouble to find out.

Far better way to spend your time?

Thing 16: Facebook, or would YOU invite Piers Morgan into your library?

2010-07-28T15:28:00.006+01:00

Brace yourselves, here comes a rant. Facebook is annoying, intrusive and unforgiving. It's rife with opportunities to embarrass and be embarrassed. It throws information at you that you neither want nor need. Especially when that information is of a ... sensitive nature, which some people I know seem very willing to publish. It's really confusing, and sorting privacy settings requires approximately the same amount of brain power as a PhD in astrophysics. It's responsible for all kinds of productivity deprivation and many an awkward situation. Facebook is Piers Morgan.

And yet, Facebook is like the uncle who always gets blind drunk at family parties, invades personal space, dances like a lunatic, and embarrasses everyone, but who still always gets invited. In spite of all the reasons I've just listed as to why I can't bear Facebook, I still use it, though the Piers Morgan comparison might well be the final nail in the coffin. I'm not an addict: I don't add photos or update my status or anything like that, mainly because I'd rather eat my own head than waste time doing so. But when my lovely little friends get married in exotic places (i.e. not Bolton) or have babies or graduate or get jobs, it's nice to send them a little note saying things like 'congratulations on having managed to avoid paying tax for so long' or 'gosh Edinburgh University's gone downhill a bit' or 'give over, someone married you?' or 'the baby is the spitting image of his dad, I bet you're relieved'. And my life would be slightly emptier if this opportunity wasn't there. So while I can't stand Facebook, I secretly love it. I do not, however, secretly love Piers Morgan. Just being clear about that. Absolutely not.

So as, on the whole, I use Facebook for personal, accusatory purposes and for keeping in contact with friends (though for some reason they tend not to contact me back), and because the blurring of personal and professional makes me 'as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot' (Gene Hunt), I wasn't massively keen on our library having a Facebook page. I didn't really see the point. I thought the students wouldn't be interested, and wouldn't join. I wasn't convinced that the library should be intruding on 'their' space. I was concerned about my privacy and their privacy: what could or should we do if we saw photos of our students getting up to something they shouldn't in the library? I thought it would have to be updated all the time and would be a complete hassle.

However, we agreed to give it a go, and one of the graduate support staff (who is saying some very interesting things on her Archive Live blog) set up the fan page. Together we developed it a bit, and put some information on there. All members of staff contribute to the page, and as we use the library's Facebook account, you can never tell who has written what, which protects our identities, and that's a good thing. For the same reason I wasn't sure whether I should become a 'fan' using my personal account, but I did anyway as I wanted to see how the information filtered through to fans. It's not particularly intrusive which is good. We don't have a policy about how often it should be updated, or what information should go on there, it's all quite ad hoc.

And I have to say, though I say it tentatively, I've been a little surprised about how successful it's been, though obviously we can't quantify that success. It barely takes any effort at all to keep it going. Having said that, it's not been revolutionary: the site doesn't have a massive amount of traffic (Facebook sends us statistics) and it hasn't made any difference at all as to how the library functions. The students aren't suddenly more knowledgeable about library procedure, more's the pity. But I'm not so worried about privacy anymore, nor about what we might say or how we might say it. And I'm persuaded that having another source of this information is only ever a Good Thing. Would the students use it to communicate with us? Not sure, but probably not, and I'm not certain I'd want them to. It's a channel of information, rather than a channel of communication. After all, even if Piers Morgan did turn up in your library, you wouldn't want him to say anything.

So let me conclude my thoughts on Facebook in the words of that veritable beacon of small-bottomed sagacity, Kylie Minogue: 'better the devil you know'.

And for extra credit, as the phrase goes:
Colin Higgins at St Catharine's wrote a great article on the use of Facebook in libraries. Unfortunately it was raped and pillaged by the editors of Update who published it in the January/Febrary 2010 edition and, if you're a CILIP member, you can access it here. It's still definitely worth a read. Alternatively, the article is also on Colin's Scribd page, and I absolutely recommend it if you'd like a more coherent and eloquent espousal of the issue than all this Piers Morgan nonsense.

Thing 15: LibraryThing again, this time with apologies to the author of 'Outwitting Squirrels'

2010-07-27T10:39:00.004+01:00

I love books. Choosing them, buying them, looking at them, and occasionally reading them. I've got more bookshelves than shoes, and they're ALL full. What's more is that the books I own are spread out all over the place, in various different houses, and I can't keep track of them. In the past I've considered using LibraryThing to monitor them, and even signed up to do this. And after 38 seconds of entering my books into LibraryThing, I stopped and did something--anything--else.

It's not laziness--OK, it's not just laziness, anyway. I absolutely, genuinely thought that LibraryThing would serve a purpose and be useful for me. And having played with LibraryThing a bit over the past few days, I can totally see why I came to that conclusion and signed up with all the eagerness of Lance Corporal Jones on seeing a bayonet. And I also know why I gave up faster than Dr Greg House can say 'everybody lies' or 'it's never lupus'.

LibraryThing is incredibly quick and easy to use--you type in the author's name or the book's title, or the ISBN, and up it pops, click it and Bob's your uncle. And it does look pretty once the titles are in there, especially if you're just looking at the covers. You can tag and review, review tags and tag reviews, and I love all that stuff. So, this week, I set up a LibraryThing account, because of course I can't remember all the details of my old one, and added some books. (And, as a disclaimer, I don't actually own any of these books, slapped wrists, which means no, I'm afraid you can't borrow Monk Habits for Everyday Use or How to Avoid Huge Ships. Sorry to disappoint).

And this brings me to another big bonus point for LibraryThing. It isn't half comprehensive. There's more than one edition of Outhouses of Alaska on there. You can find some useful stuff about the books you "own". Did you know that 46 people (including me, so actually 45) claim to have a copy of George Bush: Dark Prince of Love, and well over a hundred have Outwitting Squirrels? Fascinating. Some of the reviews are interesting too. There's one woman out there who adored the book If You Want Closure in your Relationship, Start with your Legs--it literally changed her life. And I've learned something from the reviews of Why Cats Paint: apparently a dead mouse is an 'installation', are you listening cat-lovers?

So why, if it's so great, better than sharing a bottle of gin with Viggo Mortensen (go easy, no one is saying that), haven't I bothered investing a bit of time (and it wouldn't take long) creating an extensive, comprehensive and all round gorgeous catalogue of all my lovely, lovely books? Because there must be something good on the telly at the moment. Or, the weather looks good, I'll go for a walk or a swim or a run, or all three, or I'll go to the pub, better yet. I'll do some reading on management strategy for my MSc (fascinating). I'll hoover, do the ironing, clean the fridge, take out the bins, and lick the kitchen floor clean. It's not even that I spend all day cataloguing and don't want to come home and do more, and as I said, it's not laziness. It's that, once the books are in the catalogue, what then? I really haven't got the time to faff about making online friends and bonding over the book Did David Hasselhoff end the Cold War? I'm really, really not interested in looking at reviews of books I already own, because I already own them; the transaction is done. I look at reviews before I buy, and I can find them on Amazon or in newspapers. And in any case, LibraryThing hasn't got any reviews of the book People Who Don't Know They're Dead, and Amazon has got two. Yes, two. I know. LibraryThing might be very, very, vaguely useful if I'm trying to decide what to read next: Mushrooms Demystified or Waterfowl Taxidermy? That's the bibliophile equivalent of Sophie's Choice. But what can LibraryThing tell me that the book itself can't?

For me, LibraryThing looks great, and as I've said countless times now, it's approximately as straightforward as Coronation Street is complex. If it floats your boat, and you've got time to add your books, good on you. Enjoy yourself. And if you need me, I'll be in the pub reading about how to outwit some squirrels.

Personally, though, I think this squirrel might have the edge.