YouTube

This week's Things have been fun. I'm familiar with YouTube more for entertainment than for education (who can ever forget the classic 'March of the Librarians'?), so it was useful to see what videos were being posted by universities, from straight forward lectures from MIT to more highly produced films from Cambridge (they ought to lose that noisy introduction) to the very useful, 'How to Read a Library of Congress callnumber'. I hadn't considered this resource for getting information on practical things--like certain hardware questions etc. I won't be uploading films any time soon, but I'm glad to be more aware of 'educational' content out there.

Podcasts

The podcast 'thing' was easy, although I haven't yet listened to any of the podcast feeds to which I subscribed. I can see this would be a good way to keep up with periodic podcasts that one didn't want to miss. It was also worth seeing how much is already available via University podcasts. I'll have to go back to that website sometime and see whether there is information available on which podcasts are the most frequently downloaded.

Delicious and useful

Several of the weekly tasks up to this point had seemed just that, tasks to complete just to get the experience and get on with the familiarization. This week's task on Delicious and tagging was both informative and, I think, will be something I actually use in the future (on the other hand, the digital camera is already back up in the loft). Like most librarians, I use several computers in the course of the day and also have three at home. It's great to have bookmarks readily available and be able to tag them for retrieval. Whether the 'social' side of the tagging will be useful depends on the amount of time at my disposal. I could see using this feature with a particular class or study group. I also would like to use tagging instead of folders to organize and retrieve all my Word and Excel files at work. I'll have to look into this, surely multiple entry points would be a much more efficient way of locating files than trying to figure out which folder I put them in or using the slow and awkward search facility available on Office.

Photos at a dash

Only week four and I'm already stuggling to find time for 23 Things (trouble is that it comes on top of 101 Other Things). I'm glad that I did however, since Thing 7 and 8 encouraged me to find our digital camera and take some pictures that were not medieval documents. Although I hadn't read any of the instructions and the software disc had been lost in the loft, I managed to take a couple of photos and upload them to my PC. Editing with picnik was fun, though the options are limited. Since we have editing software on our work PCs, I'm not sure how useful this will be, but it was certainly straightforward.
Has anyone else found a solution to the problem of having to print out each week's instructions in order to follow them?

Virtual clippings?

I spent some time this week browsing through different types of blogs and feeds. In addition to a selection of colleagues from the 23 Things Group (and I'm very impressed with the care given to layout, images etc on people's blog pages), I've also linked up to several blogs from special collections sections in research libraries (in addition to the Bodleian CSB blog which I already follow). It should be useful to see how these institutions use blogs, incorporating images, involving researchers and patrons etc. I've also included potentially useful links to 'professional' bloggers like Phil Bradley. I still need to do more work on how to display the feeds so that my reader page doesn't have that depressing resemblence to long rows of new emails waiting attention.