The Winning Post!!!

Now, my tip for a little each way flutter on this Saturday's Grand National is Dream Alliance (not pictured above - that's a flat racer.), the horse that was bred on a Welsh allotment. An amazing story, read it here:-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/other_sports/horse_racing/8433158.stm

But I digress :)

Whoopee do! I did it! The Amazon voucher is *mine*

First of all, *huge* & grateful thanks to the lovely 23 Things help team & all my techno-savvy young colleagues who have so patiently steered me through any difficulties I've encountered - and there have been many :)

I have really, really enjoyed doing this. I've discovered loads of new things, & feel that I've massively improved my technical abilities. I think the most difficult thing to do was creating my I-Google page but, as I've gone on, I've got way more confident with up-loading, down-loading & feeling more sure about exploring new applications. There were points, during a wildly busy term, when I really didn't think I'd be able to complete some tasks but the thought of that voucher kept me going :)

I really like I-Google & Blogger & could play with Flickr for hours (note to self - restraint in all things:))
I've radically changed my view of Del.ici.ous & am using it, so the lesson there is perhaps to go back to some applications that I haven't got on with or found easy to use & reassess my initial view.
I do think, though, that my continued use of applications is going to be very much geared to being able to have them as gadgets on my I-Google page because it works well in the context of busy reading rooms not to have to keep logging in and out of applications & having to change screens.

Generally, though, I'm delighted to have mastered so much & to have explored Web 2.0.
I feel much more confident technically & am delighted that, at last, I know what this stuff actually *is*.

All in all, a great experience that I'm glad I did.

Happy Easter - almost there- yaaay!!!!

Yaay!!! Almost there. I've been on my Easter hols. so Happy Easter y'all. Hope you had a good one with loads of chocolate eggs.
I've had a Del.icio.us widget on I-Google for a while & it was primarily responsible for changing my view of Del'icio.us *completely*. I use it for saving all of my lovely articles from Le Figaro as it's the only saving device that Figaro's site will accept.

I've downloaded a Flickr photostream of some lovely flowers for you to enjoy on gloomy days when the daffodils are wet. I could see a photostream being a great tool for libraries to eg. show some pix of forthcoming exhibitions or exciting new building improvements, but I prefer pretty flowers:)

Bit of a short Blog this one, but I'm grimly determined to finish now - the Amazon voucher is in my sights!

I Thunked about ThinkFreeOffice

A Recipe for Butterfly Cakes


Preparation Time
30 minutes

Cooking Time
25 minutes

Makes
18

Ingredients

* 250g butter, at room temperature
* 330g (1 1/2 cups) caster sugar
* 2 tsp vanilla essence
* 4 eggs, at room temperature
* 450g (3 cups) self-raising flour, sifted
* 250ml (1 cup) milk
* 100g (1/2 cup) raw caster sugar
* 80ml (1/3 cup) water
* 125g unsalted butter, at room temperature
* 315g (1 cup) raspberry jam


Method

Preheat oven to 180°C.

You will need 18 paper cup-cake cases.


Beat the butter, sugar and vanilla essence in a large bowl until very pale and creamy. Add the eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition, until combined. Use a large metal spoon to gently fold in half the flour alternately with half the milk, until well combined. Repeat with remaining flour and milk.


Spoon the mixture evenly into the paper cases. Bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centres comes out clean. Place on a wire rack to cool.


Meanwhile, combine sugar and water in a saucepan, and stir over medium-low heat until the sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and set aside for 20 minutes to cool to room temperature. Use an electric beater to beat the butter in a small bowl until white and creamy. Add the sugar syrup in a thin, steady stream and beat until well combined.


Use a sharp knife to cut a shallow V-shaped piece out of the top of each cake, about 1.5cm deep, leaving a 2cm-wide edge. Cut the piece of cake in half crossways to form 2 semicircles. Fill centre of each cake with 21/2 tsp of raspberry jam. Arrange 2 semicircles of cake in jam. Place mock cream into a clean piping bag fitted with a 1.5cm diameter fluted nozzle and pipe down centre between the "wings" on each cake.

Enjoy.

Which is more than I did ThinkFreeOffice. Lord above!! It's so *slow* & *clunky*.
I loaded up a macaroni cheese recipe from "My Documents" & shared it with another 23 Thinger but decided that life is too short & am returning forthwith to Google Document.

Google Document builds spreadsheets for you from your questionaire answers - I'm in *love*

Goggling at GoogleDoc.

Intuitive & easy to use. I've shared a document & made a Form





And I also made a Presentation






Scarily, I remember corporate mainframes *&* dumb terminals. When I first started working on-line the mainframe inhabited its own *floor* of the building - does this make me a candidate for display in a museum? :) (Don't answer that:))

Just a Quickie Wiki

Did some OULS hunting on the Oxford Web 2.0 Wiki & edited this article from OULS to Bodleian Libraries. very easy to do & I liked using my Twitter access rather than having to gain *yet another* usename/password.

Wicked Wiki

I've had a look at the Oxford web 2.0 wiki & it's interesting to see what's on there, particularly which social networks Oxford libraries are maintaining a presence on. Haven't seen a page that I would want to edit yet but will carry on exploring.

I'm already a fan of Wikipedia & it's one of the gadgets that I've put on my I-Google page. I find it particularly useful for interpreting internet slang for example "lol" or "Rickrolling". It's thanks to Wikipedia that I know that "Rickrolling" is a "viral internet meme" :) It's important to always remember that Wikipedia is user created & I would not use a Wikipedia entry as a source for anything I was writing without verifying the information elsewhere. I appreciate that there have been some awful examples of false entries but, interestingly, the current "scandal" concerning the French president & his wife is alleged to have been started by a young journalist who was interested to see whether he could create a news story by starting a rumour on *Twitter* - so there you go. Having worked in newspapers for years I have tattooed on my heart the number one rule for all research - *check your sources*

Above, you can see (tho you'll probably need a magnifying glass:)) a Wikipedia page for the novelist & short story writer Liam O'Flaherty. I've just added 3 further book titles to the information.

The Blue Fox by Sjón

The Blue Fox by Sjón, translated by Victoria Cribb - Times Online

This is *absolutely* the best book I've read this year (yes I know it's only March) so I'm sharing it with you but also demonstrating the joys of picking something up in Twitter & then saving it to my Delicious list on I-Google (that's the link above to the book review in The Times) - ooo00, I've *really* revised my ideas about Delicious - *loving* it now :)

Tweet Tweet

I already had a Twitter account so I could follow Yoko Ono - as you do - but hadn't used it very much. Have found it to be radically improved since I used it last, in fact I think it's great. Best thing is that the posted links work now, they were very unreliable before. Still exploring finding Tweets to follow, which still seems a bit obscure. A bit unsure about hashtags as yet
I've had a lovely time customizing my background so have included a screenshot for your delight. I've tweeted to #ox23 & I've gained a follower, I've also Retweeted a lovely Yoko Ono quote.
A definite plus, meaning that I will use Twitter a lot more than previously, is having the Twitter gadget on my I-Google page meaning I can see updates without having to log into a website.
Now off to find lots of other exciting Tweets to follow & to start a conversation.

Springtime pic. & Delicious hits the spot !

Here are some sunny spring flowers because I've gone on too long on this blog without a picture.
Also, I hearby confess that..... *I've decided I quite like Delicious* !!! Having found the Delicious tool for I-Google & discovering that Delicious is one of the few article savers that "Le Figaro's" website will accept, I can now have all my lovely Paris articles to hand whenever I need a bit of cheering up :) "Les toutes dernières boutiques gourmandes de Paris" does it for me everytime :)

Here's the link, beware, it'll make you hungry :)

http://www.lefigaro.fr/sortir-paris/2009/12/09/03013-20091209ARTFIG00004-les-toutes-dernieres-boutiques-gourmandes-de-paris-.php

Linking with LinkedIn

I've joined LinkedIn & had a good look at it. I was alarmed to discover that, unless you actively make your profile private, everything you put on this site can be Googled. I am very wary of placing personal information on the Web & I would have liked to have had it made very clear at joining that this would be the case unless I actively disabled the function.
LinkedIn is obviously a networking tool for professionals, very oriented towards the United States, & not something that I would use myself. I didn't find it particularly easy to navigate but I can see that the networking groups would be useful for librarians working at the level where world exchange of ideas is necessary & useful eg. the groups concerned with developing E-books.
It would seem to me that the audiences for this & Facebook are very different & that LinkedIn is aimed very much at professional to professional contact rather than aiming for a user audience.
My view as we go on with "23 Things" is that the multiplicity of inofrmation exchange points is ultimately self-defeating. Either you keep every single link valid & up to date or you lose users of links which aren't kept current & you then move into the realm of where on earth the time comes from to do all this updating.
Even scribbling this Blog during the busiest weeks of term has been difficult enough for me.
Also, it seems to me (from the little I know) that information provision is moving more & more towards "Apps" on portable devices (eg. I-phones) & that libraries should be moving more towards creating & providing their own "Apps".
Case in point: were there to be bad weather & a need to inform users of altered opening times, posting a message to, for example, a Bodleian "App." rather than to Delicious, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, E-mails, Web-site etc. etc. would seem to be the simplest, most straightforward thing to do.

Facial expressions, happy or sad?

I really don't like Facebook. I did have an account & got so fed up with the whittering & triva- frankly, I don't *care* if you're doing the ironing- coupled with the weird e-mails I started getting from people claiming to be "followers" that I de-activated it. Big plus about this week's "Thing" is that I can do it without having to rejoin.
I've been very good & looked solemnly at good library sites on Facebook - & very nice some of them are (Folger Shakespeare Library, New York Public Library)& thought hard about a plus for a library presence.
My feeling is that Facebook is too much of a social site for serious library presences. Excellent as the above mentioned are, the profiles should be available on the library web-site without having to go through the Facebook channel to find them. Also, "fan" figures suggest that the percentage of people following the Facebook profiles are not high.
Folger Shakespeare Library only has 2038 "Fans", Yale University Library 1,225 & New York Public Library 12,621. These may seem like a lot but these are American sites of very high profile libraries & I would expect figures to be much higher.
In an Oxford context, the student number figures for 2008 were 19,002 full time & 1,328 part time undergraduates & post-graduates. There are currently only 172 "fans" of the Bodleian Centre for the Study of the Book & 176 "fans" of the Bodleian Law Library pages on Facebook.
So, yes to Facebook as a great tool for people to keep in touch with loved ones worldwide, a big fat *no* to updates about your life every 10 seconds (hello to a nameless relative of mine :)) and no to Facebook as a primary engagement tool with library users. Too much work for too little return when resources could be aimed at developing a really stunning library website.

At the movies

Amazingly, I had not only heard of but had actually *used* YouTube, almost a first for me with "23 Things". For everybody's delectation & delight I have shared the link for "Ninja Librarian" - always guaranteed to cheer you up on a rainy day.
Here comes the moan, & you all know what it is by now..... why is there so much *rubbish* to wade through, where is YouTube Scholar? Tho, I suppose "Ninja Librarian" probably wouldn't qualify :)
Lots of possibilities here for educating readers, "How to ..." in multiple languages would be great.
If you're all *very* lucky I will share great steeplechasing moments of our times at a later point.......:)

Pod, Pod, Podding Away

Podcasts this week - nice 'n' easy. bit problematic using an earpiece in the middle of a busy reading room but I concealed it discreetly under my hair :)

Just used BBC Podcasts, which was very straight-forward, & listened to an interesting piece in which Peter Jackson discussed his film of "The Lovely Bones".

I can see the potential of podcasting for getting readers informed, especially if they can download to an MP3 or I-Player & take the cast away to listen to & adsorb at leisure.

Might have to be pretty strict about earphones if there was to be a lot of usage in the reading rooms tho.

Delicious is giving me indigestion :(

Well, I've done Thing 10, I added the History Faculty library & DevouredByVegans to my network & I forwarded a bookmark to DevouredbyVegans. I've also added my Delicious bookmark link to my IGoogle toolbar & had a good root around in the Delicious searches.....but......I cannot love Delicious. It doesn't look friendly, it's hard to navigate & seems to be very dependent on the quality of tag being created. As ever (here it comes, the moan I've moaned from day one of "23 Things") there is so much *rubbish* to negotiate.
I could see that I would use it occassionally to tag an interesting on-line article which had a Delicious button but, otherwise, not. Also, there are *so many* of these tagging things out there Dig, Twitter, Facebook etc. etc. where do you stop?
Finally, if there is a Delicious lover out there who can convince me that behind that ugly face is something truly lovable, let me know; though I'll warn you, I'll take a *lot* of convincing :)

Not tasting too nice at the moment

Well, Delicious week. Can't say I'm too keen at the moment, However, I've made my account, saved some bookmarks & given them tags. here's a screenshot:-

Will wait until I've done some more but I'm not too clear on why or when I would use Delicious. I've had a look at the History Faculty & can see the use for flagging up things of interest for readers. I'm assuming that a library user would check Delicious as well as a library's own website; & I do wonder about keeping a library's profile current on all of these different things.

Hopefully, Delicious will taste sweeter with further exploration.

Furry Friend gets Picnikd

Furry Friend, originally uploaded by Al's Pix2010.

And here he is after - aaaah!!!!

Again, I found Picnik to be very easy to use & great for making a good picture out of a not hugely wonderful one - I didn't dare move the camera closer in case he ran away :)

Before the Picnik

Furry Friend, originally uploaded by Al's Pix2010.

Here's my little furry friend before he was Picnik'd

Flickring to life

I've created a Photostream,
here's the screenshot.

I've joined the 23 Things Flickr group & uploaded a photo to it.
I've also put my Photostream pictures into sets & I've "Geotagged" a picture.
Flickr is very easy to use & it would be great to see some Oxford library Photostreams - "Oxford's prettiest libraries" perhaps?
I can see the potential for flagging up collections & highlighting progress. (the Bod. bookstore at Swindon as it grows?)
This has been the task I've felt most comfortable with thus far or, maybe, I'm *evolving* :)

Thing 7

Boars Hill , originally uploaded by Al's Pix2010.

Eeeek!!! I'm in Flickr & have just managed to create direct access to my Blog (I think). So here's the first picture I managed to upload to Flickr.
Blimey, this is like learning to walk !!

Things 5 & 6

Now, fellow "23ers", please don't laugh. I had noticed those orange RSS feed buttons on lots of web pages & studiously ignored them because *I* thought they were links to noisy audio files ("R" for *radio*!) , which do not go down well with readers in the hallowed silence of the Bod's reading rooms. Got that well wrong didn't I?
Anyway, now I know what they are, I have subscribed to 6.
Early thoughts?
Lots of rubbish (as ever) to wade through if you search using Google Blog Search. Example, a search for "Virago" (as in Virago publishing)found good stuff like "Verity's Virago Venture" but also brought up an alarming thing called "Chesty Virago" which I would *not* recommend to the easily startled!:)
I am now going to start playing with my feeds (quietly ;)).

Help for commenting problems

I'd been having trouble commenting. Well, in fact, I was failing miserably to comment at all, so contacted the lovely "23 Things" help team. Jane Rawson (officially designated as having the patience of a saint:) ) sent the following replies which I thought might help other folk having difficulty.
The root of my woes, I discovered, was that I was using Explorer when I needed to be using Firefox. Here's Jane's helpful advice on this bit :-

"When you open up your internet from your desktop, is the icon you click on a blue "e" (Internet Explorer)or a red swooshy type thing (Firefox)? You should hopefully have both programs installed on your machine. If you're using Internet Explorer (with the blue 'e') then just close the program, and double-click on the Firefox icon (red swoosh) instead.

If you don't have both icons on your desktop, then open up your start menu (click on the start button on the toolbar in the bottom left of your screen) and look in your program list where hopefully they will both be listed."

My next problem was that I couldn't work out how to make my IGoogle page appear as my homepage on Firefox. Here's what to do:-

"You'll need to set iGoogle as your homepage on Firefox to make it show when you open it up. To do this, go to the 'Tools' menu and click on 'options'. In the box that opens, click on the 'General' tab. Type https://www.google.com/ig in the location box and click OK. You will probably need to sign in to iGoogle the first time, because Firefox doesn't 'know' you yet like Internet Explorer did, but you can ask it to remember you on sign-in for next time."

Yaay! I'm now commenting like a mad thing! Thanks Jane.

Thoughts on Blogs

Well, I've been blogging for all of 2 days now & having a look at other people's blogs both within "23 Things" & on the web. There is some really good stuff out there & I can see the potential for library use. Looking at the British Library's blogs you can really see how the Bodleian could use them to introduce collections & departments & encourage exploration of the academic tools we have on offer.

Here's the BL link for anybody interested:

http://www.bl.uk/blogs/index.html

Looking at other "23ers" blogs I have seen several people have said that they've had blogs in the past & then given them up, & I could see this being an issue if they're used to promote exploration of the library & then not kept up to date. It doesn't seem hugely realistic to expect very busy subject & specialist librarians to keep numerous blogs up to date & one wonders how much willingness there would be to let ordinary staffers get involved & help out.

So, yes I've enjoyed blogging, yes I can see it has huge potential for libraries but I think that there would have to be a big cultural shift in working practices if we were to embrace blogs as a primary information tool.

Things 1 & 2

Well, let's start by confessing that I didn't have a clue that Google & I-Google were different things ! I've decided that I like I-Google but you have to wade through an awful lot of rubbish to find Gadgets that are useful (although I did succumb to "Poke the Penguin" & a recipe page!)

I'd love to show you all a lovely screenshot of my I-Google page, which I've successfully saved to "My Pictures" but I'm not having a lot of luck finding the Image icon.

Also, dear writers of instructions for "23 Things", *please* assume *total* ignorance on the part of the older & woollier of us taking part. Stuff like the following is totally incomprehensible to the uninitiated :- "...Now open an image editing program (Paint will do!)...." - you *what* :) Though you'll gather that I puzzled it out eventually :)

Ooh! Proof that we're a community! A fellow "23er" has just shown me the (alright, obvious!) Image icon !!!

Yaay!!! I've uploaded my image :)

My first blog

Hello! Well, here we go. Being somewhat longer in the tooth, I suspect, than most folk taking part this is all alarmingly new to me. Why am I doing this? 1/Amazon voucher - I respond better to chocolate biscuits but a voucher will do :) 2/ So that I can understand what the merry heck all this stuff *is*.
Blimey, since last week I've embraced I-Google, discovered I have a Twitter account (goodness knows *how*, I have no recollection of *ever* creating one!) &, this morning, I have created a URL - not *entirely* sure what one of these *is* but I'm sure all will be revealed.
Moan number one (& I'm sure there'll be plenty) following instructions on screen is a tad wearing on the eyes of the more mature!
What do I hope to gain? The ability to look as if I know what my readers are talking about when they mention this stuff :)