Let’s start a petition …

Meanwhile in our library: it’s revision time:

Happily, feeling special and loved, I skidded over to miss Crail’s  – wheely shopper laden with goodies for that very, very special lady …

Outside Miss Crail's boudoire

… I was of course unspeakably happy to be the one to bestow her prize … She was equally pleased to see me …

I was overjoyed to be there, she was pleased to see me I could tell

… Miss Crail has since written in her blog, a reliable account of what occurred earlier today. It does us both credit…

Thanks

Nothing left to say but: more pictures later …

Infographic by the Pay Per Click Blog

I like things about context.

So now in the context of posting anything that I’ve written myself to slideshare, I haven’t so far due to my not having produced anything worth uploading.

Oh, and I tried prezi, had a look at the echo chamber thing even though Miss Crail wisely warned against it. All I got was a blank screen. I waited, and waited and … nothing but a canvas of white surrounded by a tastefully gradiented and blurred frame border, with subtle “all the cool kids have’em” rounded corners. And you know what? From the title I thought it was a brilliant example of post-modern irony 2.0. Turns out I was wrong and the victim of a slight glitch. tried again later and, oh my goodness: if you have aging eyes, or generally bad eyes and are prone to migraines (possibly also motion sickness) keep well away from it, no good can come of it.

OK, am going to be very good and circumspect about all this and end now. Must save myself for reflection. I’ve got a feeling that may be a lengthy one.

An abandonned child: Delboy

Why the neglect? Seems to have some good bookmarks. Truth is I found something I like better. A couple of somethings. One is portable apps. As the name suggests it is a means of carrying your favourite applications about on a memory stick. One of the apps I have is Firefox – so I carry my bookmarks, as well as my zotero and readitlater files, pretty much all the time. There’s loads of apps you can download, well worth having if you’re traveling about and having to do presentations without being too sure what kind of set-up you’ll be given. Of course you do have to remember to take your memory stick with you. So portable apps is one thing I found I liked better than delicious and the other, I’ve aready mentioned is readitlater. A little firefox plug in – now available on iphones and android phones – fully synchronisable which allows you to quickly tick things you want to read later or bookmark.

The picture below shows it next to delicious.

readitlater and delicious

Perhaps the reason I like better is that it’s smaller, neater, cleaner I would say. Why should I open a web page just to access a bookmark? Hasty apologies if there is a way to do this now in delicious. There’s minimum branding in readitlater too. The tagging is really simple too. In the screen shot readitlater is an expandable toolbar but I generally have it as a pop-up.

And that’s  delicious done. I’m sure I could talk about the benefits of sharing my bookmarks with the rest of the world or just our library users. One of the problems with that is the separation of public professional and private professional functions, for me there is a real line between the two as well as an overlap. The solution would then be to create two sets of bookmarks, or three, four, five …

P.S. The passion & the fury is ISTP – The Mechanics. Not at all what the passion & fury’s writer was when she took the test.

Volcano overlooking hypersaline lagoons in which flamingoes are feeding - Atacama Desert, Chile. Photo by John Simmons, © The Geological Society of London www.geolsoc.org.uk

or  the British Geological Survey’s National Archive of Geological Photographs GeoScenic

Icebergs in Fjallsarlon, Iceland. From British Geological Survey, P603292

Or I’ll ask people in the department if they have what I’m looking for. Or even DSpace.

So, have I found a reason to use Flickr in my library? We created a library tour (static and in flash) several years ago, so I’d say the boat has sailed on that option. Will people (library users even) go to Flickr to find images of the library? Do I need it to find images? I might do a quick search but frankly it wouldn’t be my first port of call.

Still in the spirit of things here we have our Flickr account.

Having said all the above, I have to praise Creative Commons licensing, I use CC a lot, mostly for music but often also for graphic images, illustrations which I’ll alter to suit my needs (using Gimp & Inkscape of course).

Meanwhile, here’s a gratuitous picture of a kitten

Kitten. Tags. Worry

perhaps it’s a little too soon to start talking about 3.0, but I do think there are some common points between tagging and the semantic web idea. I’ve been reading quite a bit about the semantic web and looking at FOAF, and rdf (wiki or w3c) and ontologies and frankly while I may admire the idea I just don’t see how the structure can be put into action (is that the correct term?). Anyway, you can see parts of it beginning to emerge in things like microformats (or this primer). If you want to try see how they work and you use Firefox as your browser you can install the Operator add-on – but in case you can’t be bothered here are some screenshots:

Operator is a toolbar which will pick up any mircoformats which have been written into the html of a web page

Microformats available are contacts, tagspaces and resources

The next picture shows what you can do with the information, first, Contacts

The export is an electronic business card in vcf format

Second, a look at the tagspaces

tagspaces menu gives you a number of options that you may click on

I’ve probably gone off message a little. Much like Celine on thingblog I feel I can’t NOT read all the blogs, I know I don’t have to, but I feel I must. That to say that I haven’t read (m)any posts on tagging other than the intro on the cam23 blog. So other than in the semantic web sense I can’t say I’ve thought much about tagging, sometimes I’ve found it useful; I have (yet another) Firefox add-on read it later and tag most of my entries in it, but when I was trying out delicious about 3 years ago I found tagging the entries more than a chore/bore. I’m using tags on this blog evidently, but I’m not so sure it would be of any use in searching. I’m relying more on people using the link in the tags if they want to see what else I may have written with that same tag.

As with all these things I think we’re driven by context, are we looking to user or colleague centered applications? One thing that is being highlighted for me anyway through a more rigorous trial and use of some of these technologies, is that there is a considerable forking of the ‘road’ between what we do to help those that use our libraries and what we do, which tools we use,  for ourselves as professionals. Of course the latter will influence how effective we are in providing best service to the former, our users.

this has been like pulling teeth – mostly dealing with typos. Now to spend the next three hours working out why the video hasn’t embedded.

I need a laugh now – actually a good illustration of the power of design