Annabel Mc's 23 Thingy experience

A few less hairs... but here's Thingy 23

2009-06-09T10:05:00.006+01:00

For some reason the two last thingy's were the hardest hurdle for me. Overall I enjoyed doing the 23 things programme, but you definitely need to be kept motivated on the journey. If I was left to my own devices I don't think I would have finished all the 23 things, but going to the lunchtime talks and even the journals club yesterday motivated me to finish, sometimes you just need a bit guilt! I definitely see a place for blogs, wikis, rss feeds in the library. Also tagging, though not technorati which I hated! I can see a place for it, even in my own line of work looking at the tags that students use would help me with coming up with terminology for links on the library website. Some of the 23 things are just for personal use I think and definitely for a certain type of personality, I of the hermit nature they probably don't suit. I would definitely be more that willing to participate in another online programme. Thanks Lindsay Karen and Helena

Thingy 22!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2009-06-08T14:35:00.007+01:00

This is me trying to make a zoho document public 23 Things, Annabelmc's experience found it a bit difficult to get the link into the blog, ending up having to edit the html slightly from what I got in zoho. That is probably my only criticism of zoho writer. I have used google docs before so decided to give zoho writer a shot. Both products are very good for document sharing and editing and from looking at zoho writer briefly it seems to offer alot of extra features, google docs probably does as well now. Zoho writer is in beta and you are allowed store as many documents as you want but this may change when it is out of testing so this is something to consider.

We use sharepoint in the library at the moment to share documents and the only advantage of it over the other two is that it is secure and ITD look after the backup. However this is in my option the only advantage of sharepoint, as I find it awkward to use and not at all user friendly. The other two free products are much nicer to use and I would be a far happier annabel if I could use them instead of sharepoint sometimes, but thems the drawbacks in life I suppose!

Just realised I forgot about Google Maps, so had to go back in and edit the post, what's happening to me! As a product Google Maps are great, though to be honest I hardly ever use them, me and maps don't go hand in hand. However I did one day spend ages trying to find my own house in annacotty, self obsessed or what! There are probably loads of other features on Google maps and if you are a map person you would probably love them.

Thingy 21

2009-05-20T13:54:00.002+01:00

I am not a gamer and I can imagine if I ever tried to play a serious online game I would be useless, my hand eye coordination is pretty bad in real life to say the least. I tried to send a penguin to space online once, but he ended up belly flopping into the water, hopefully he was happier there!. Gaming is a very interesting topic and I found the lunchtime talk great. I can see how a whole generation of people who are gamers in their social lives will learn certain skills that I certainly don't have. However I don't believe at the moment there is any place for gaming in libraries, again I think it is crossing the boundary between education and social life. Also to design a really good educational game you would need to bring in some one who really knew what they were doing. I can imagine students don't really want to play a game to learn something, it would be better if the learning was something they didn't realise they were learning like the hand eye coordination, I am sure that could be expressed in far fancier language but hopefully you get my drift!

Thingy 20

2009-05-11T12:42:00.003+01:00

Twitter not for me I'm afraid. My life is too boring to constantly update people on what I am doing, something like Twitter would just make me depressed as I would start to feel I should be doing more with my life. I registered, sent one message to Sinead, who is sitting beside me, logged off, never to return to Twitter again! I would rather leave people with the illusion that I lead a very exotic lifestyle

Nearing the end of the road, thingy 19

2009-05-08T16:03:00.003+01:00

You can't run. skip or jump these days, without someone being able to throw a message at you in some sort of format before we know it we will be getting personalised messages over the radio and TV. In saying that, I was going to set up an instant messaging service for the library, using meebo. I had the code for the little box and all. However the problem is time, if you are going to offer an instant messaging service in the library, someone would have to be instantly sitting there to answer the message, while you could limit the instant messaging hours, it would be hard for anyone to sacrifice the time. Instant messaging is handy in a social context, only realised recently they offer a type of instant messaging service on facebook if two friends are on line at the same time. Then again you could always text, phone, or email the person, I suppose the advantage of instant messaging is that is what it is, instant!

Thingy 18

2009-05-08T15:46:00.003+01:00

I have had a facebook account for a while now, I had never used it for work just for social stuff. I don't really see a place for social networking sites and academic libraries, I could see library staff setting up a social network amongst themselves but not with users. To me it is a bit like the library wanted to have a presence in a pub, when students are doing social things, I doubt they ever think of the library. However I am not really a social network type of person, I lost interest in facebook fairly quickly even as a social place, so maybe it is just me. The one thing I really dislike about facebook are all the applications, you seem to have to download an application for everything. Someone recommended Ning as a good network for work colleagues and that doesn't seem to have as many applications.

Number 17 thingy

2009-05-06T19:42:00.003+01:00

I am excited about downloading my first audio book, except you seem to have to pay for them all. When I am not feeling so tight, I am definitely going to download one. I heard a lady from South Dublin libraries speak at a library seminar about the audio books that they had introduced into their public libraries, I have to say she was a brilliant speaker and was really enthusiastic about the whole process, so looking forward to day UL gets a few.

I'd have a fair bit of involvement in the electronic books that we get here in the library, generally in terms of access problems. Electronic books are handy for academic study but I don't think I would enjoy reading my own books online. Also ebooks don't look so nice, I always dreamt of having loads of lovely book shelves in my house, doesn't matter if I never read any of the books, they look good! Superficial or what!

Thingy 16 and counting down!

2009-05-06T19:36:00.002+01:00

Luv the podcasting! I have never downloaded a podcast onto my iPod, but I have listened to them on my computer. Dead handy if you want to hear something that was on a radio programme. I'm sure some lecturers do podcasts of their lectures, students are so lucky these days!

Thingy 15, a near escape!

2009-05-06T17:21:00.003+01:00

Just cheated on this and followed what Sinead Justine and Claire did, like the voki site, good fun. Near escape though, I published the voki link on the library news website, thankfully I realised my mistake in seconds, bit of a panic though, convinced a million users were looking at the library blog at that exact second, wishful thinking me thinks

My 14th Thingy experience and this one is making me hungry

2009-05-01T12:18:00.002+01:00

Plenty of cookies in the digital hub! I'd luv if cookie monster came to UL accompanied by the Swedish Chef, wishful thinking me thinks.

I have hardly ever used YouTube, i.e. I never really gone into the site itself, only really look at it when people send links around. Definitely could be used in a library context, for orientation videos and stuff, in fact we could all go mad uploading videos. Though if I find photos of myself hard to look at it, don't think I could face videos.

My 13th 23 Thingy Experience

2009-04-24T15:34:00.003+01:00

My spelling is getting so bad now, that I have given up trying to spell all the numbers of the Thingy's if that makes sense.

This week was all about wikis, I have to say it took me ages to get into this one. I did try to set up a Wiki using PBwiki, but that was before Claire's talk and initially I could not think of anything useful to use my Wiki for. I was thinking of putting design ideas for the library into a Wiki, not design on the building but design features we use electronically like the colours of the logos etc. However I am not really sure how useful this Wiki would be to anyone but myself but maybe I might come back to it someday. I found Claire's talk really good, it definitely made me understand Wiki's a bit more, and I think the cataloguing wiki is brilliant. Its a great idea to put a manual up electronically and the fact that is can be edited by others is really useful. I am also attending the LNSS training course on portals, anyone who is attending the course has to sign up to a wiki. Initially I couldn't see why but today the course trainer has asked us to update the wiki with feedback on what we would like to get out of the course. I would never have thought of using a wiki in this way, so it is all very interesting!

My twelfth 23 Thingy Experience

2009-04-03T12:01:00.003+01:00

This was all about technorati, which I hated to be honest. The online help that comes with the site, is useless, not user friendly at all. It took me forwever to put a technorati tag under one of my posts (see post on my tenth experience) this is only optional, but it was killing me that I couldn't figure it out! It turned out that I had to join technorati and claim my blog in order for it to work. Technorati is a list of blogs essentially, but I can't really see any huge advantage to using it. If they made the site a bit more user friendly that might help. They do have a thing called a watchlist, which you could add your blog to, and they will contact you if your blog every gets mentions. I could see the advantage of that option, but this is the only positive I found about this site.

My eleventh 23 Thingy Experience

2009-04-03T10:15:00.003+01:00

I just had a look at delicious, personally I am not sure I would use it day to day for my own bookmarks. However I can see how it could be used in a library environment, for example I tagged the library website and the library catalogue and I found it interesting to see who else had tagged these sites, not that many but a few had. If you encouraged users to use delicious it could help in terms of statistics and finding out how many people use your site. Also encouraging users to add tags to various library resources, would give you an insight into how users described these resources and the kind of keywords they would use, therefore giving you an insight into terminology that could be used on the library website. Definitely a useful resource but not sure yet if I would use it daily.

Technorati

2009-04-01T12:57:00.000+01:00

Technorati Profile

My tenth 23 Thingy Experience

2009-03-27T16:01:00.005Z

I wasn't totally sure what I was suppose to do in this experience i.e. exploring Web 2.0 awards list. I had a look down the awards list, one entry that is listed under the category "questions & advice" is Yahoo answers, I seem to often find the answer to what I am looking for in this particular site, there are probably loads of sites out there that do the same thing, however in this site people rate the answer as useful or not useful, which is very helpful when you are looking for advice.

I am not too sure if I was suppose to look at a site in the awards list, or review sites about the awards list! So hopefully the above is of some relevance

Technorati Tag: LNSS

My ninth 23 Thingy Experience

2009-03-27T15:57:00.002Z

I had a quick look at Google books, I found the interface a bit boring and couldn't really find any books of interest, though I didn't look very hard. I can see the relevance of uploading books into Google book search as I suppose that it where must people start their searching these days, but it does seem like Google is taking over the world!

My eighth 23 Thingy Experience - Now that I have learned to count properly

2009-03-27T15:42:00.003Z

I really liked Library Thing, I had never heard of it before. I think what I like most is that it recommends books to you based on what you have read. I always like to read a good book, but often find it very difficult to pick a book when I go to a book shop, and end up buying the one with the nicest cover! For that reason this is one of the 23 things I will definitely use again. http://www.librarything.com/catalog/annabel_mc

My Third 23 Thingy Experience

2009-03-20T14:52:00.000Z

This is actually technically my 5, 6 and 7 thingy experience, I have just been counting it wrong. This experience was all to do flickr and photo stuff. Creating an account in flickr is easy, but the rest was not as easy for me, I think it is more time consuming that anything. I had a look at mappr, flickr color pickr and montagr, but when I couldn't figure out what to do straight away, I exited these resources fairly quickly. That is one problem I find with web 2.0 technology, if it doesn't happen instantly I tend to lose patience. I did use the map tool in flickr which was easy I was able to add the "Tombs of Kings" picture to the location paphos, cyprus on the map. I also had a look at the trading card maker, jigsaw maker and image generator and found all those easy to use (results are below!).

It does show you the amazing things you can do with photos. I have no doubt that I will use some of these resources again, when I have loads of time to play around with them!

My mosaic jigsaw & star studded floor!

2009-03-20T14:25:00.001Z

My mosaic jigsaw, originally uploaded by annabel_mc.

This is a picture of a mosaic floor (jigsaw style!) using the jigsaw maker in big huge labs.com, the first image is the same image but decorated with stars using the image generator

Me in my garden...I wish!

2009-03-20T12:40:00.001Z

My creation, originally uploaded by annabel_mc.

Just trying the trading card thingy!

Tomb of the Kings

2009-03-20T12:12:00.001Z

Tomb of the Kings, originally uploaded by annabel_mc.

This is me trying to get use to Flickr. I have never used it before, but I can imagine that it might become slightly addictive. Getting set up in Flickr is easy enough, however Jane's talk helped alot yesterday, about finding out all the detail. This is a photo of my trip to cyprus, getting to Cyprus was slightly more traumatic than setting up a flickr account, so that was a relief!

Flickr

2009-03-20T12:04:00.001Z

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

My Second 23 Thingy Experience

2009-03-11T09:49:00.000Z

I started my RSS Feed adventure by registering with bloglines, but then quickly decided to just stick with a google feed reader, as I already had an account. If I had read Karen's post properly I would have known that! Setting up a feed reader is easy and a feed reader is very handy, as you can keep yourself up to date with things that interest you, without having to go visit the relevant website every time or clogging up your email. So I am now subscribed to Irish Times Breaking news, as I am obsesssed with checking the web version of the Irish Times, I am also stalking one or two colleagues on their 23 experience, and keeping myself updated on the UL Library Blog (even though I update it alot of the time, but you never know when a sneaky post can get in there)!

My First 23 Thingy Experience

2009-03-03T09:03:00.000Z

I have updated a blog before, but contrary to popular belief I have never created a blog before, the famous library blog was created by another fabulous UL library staff member! So this is really my very first original blog.