I’ve received confirmation that I will be attending Internet Librarian International 2008! I won’t be attending the full conference but will be there on Friday 17th as I’m particularly interested in the Information Literacy track.

I’ve always really wanted to go to ILI, particularly with it being held in the UK, so I’m really pleased that I’m able to go this year. It’s the 10th Anniversary too, as recently blogged about by Brian Kelly (who unfortunately isn’t able to attend this year).

I’m sure I’ll be blogging about my experience (hopefully on my new Acer Aspire One if I can find one soon!) and I’m hoping it will give me some useful information and ideas we can adopt to improve our information literacy and e-learning practices at work.

Is anyone else going? Let me know if so, it would be great to meet others from the library blogging world whilst I’m there.

Over the summer we have been debating the issues around Academic Library Blogging which I thought I would share. I’m also hoping the post and any comments may help consolidate my ideas also as I keep changing my mind about what should be the purpose and content of our blogs!

Currently we have an Electronic Resources blog (which is linked from our website but I think is primarily aimed at library staff), other specific project blogs (mainly hosted on internal software and password protected), communication blogs (again, password protected) and 5 subject blogs. The subject blogs have been set up by their corresponding subject librarians and contain a variety of content from Learning Centre updates (such as changes to opening hours etc.) to useful subject resources the subject librarian has come across online. The frequency of posts varies; some average around one post a week, others one post a month or less.

At the beginning of the summer break (seems like yesterday but was actually almost 4 months ago!), we decided it might be a nice idea to combine some of the subject blogs which cover similar subject areas (e.g. the Science areas and the Engineering areas). This would mean less duplication of posts and the ability to share resources which may be useful across different subject areas. So I found out about how we could use categories within WordPress to create different RSS feeds for the different subjects within one blog, set up a rough blog, and imported the content of each of the blogs.

I then started thinking about how the majority of people are likely to use our blogs. From looking at the stats on Feedburner (we use this to allow users to subscribe by e-mail), it seems that more people use the e-mail subscription than the RSS subscription. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to set up e-mail subscriptions for each category feed, and I was also concerned about how confusing it would make it for the user if they had to work out which subject to subscribe to and whether they wanted RSS feed or e-mail. We would end up with about 10 different subscription options which really isn’t ideal. Although it would be great to get people using RSS feeds (this is something I would really like to encourage, particularly with our staff and researchers to help them keep up-to-date in their area of interest), in reality this is not going to happen in the short-term.

As well as the practical issues, we were a little concerned about how the blog would be managed with so many administrators and whether we would need to agree to a style of writing and a recommended post frequency (we didn’t want to see hundreds of posts on one subject and only one or two for another). There were also concerns that those physically visiting the blog may find it very confusing. My main concern when considering things like this is always that it makes sense from a user point of view and I just wasn’t convinced that this would. If we had all subjects on board and everyone was familiar with RSS feeds and using categories to filter posts on the blog, it may work, but for now I’m not convinced.

Despite us deciding against the joint blog for now, it was a very useful exercise as it really made me think about the purpose of our blogs. In my mind there are two primary reasons for the blogs as they stand at the moment:

1. To disseminate information about Learning Centres - events, new services, opening hours, news etc.
2. To share information and recommended resources relating to subjects

I would also like to encourage discussion on the blogs but this is something we haven’t managed to achieve yet so they are primarily one-way communication channels (commenting is available but not widely used).

In my mind, I think there is definitely a need for both these applications, but I’m not sure they should necessarily be combined. I think in the future I’d like to see a departmental blog to keep all users notified about Learning Centres (a sort of “newsy” type blog), with additional subject blogs as necessary. This would eradicate most of the duplicate posting as the subject blogs could stay focused purely on the subject material and not the general information. It would also mean that students (and staff) across all schools would be able to subscribe to the Learning Centre blog whereas currently we only offer it to certain schools depending on the librarians, their familiarity with the technology and their willingness to blog.

How has anyone else decided to approach blogging in academic libraries? Do you have an ingenious solution which I haven’t thought about? Please let me know in the comments if so.

Whilst we’re on the topic of library blogging, I wanted to share a brilliant quote from Phil Bradley recently on the LIS-Bloggers mailing list:

If you can’t think of what to write, then not only should you not have a weblog, you shouldn’t have a library or a job. Your library or information centre should be fascinating – what new resources do you have? What are members of staff doing? What plans have you for the future? What about administrative details, like changing opening hours? Any interesting queries that you’ve had? What about the resources that you find on the net that would be helpful for your users? What about a site of the week, resource of the month, client of the year? What about photographs of interesting collections, or covers of new books? Surely it’s not a question of what to write about, but more a problem of what NOT to write about?

This certainly gave me food for thought, as I’ve often heard staff wonder what they can blog about and worrying that they might set up a blog and then not know what to post about. I’ll be remembering to bear all these uses in mind next time someone says they don’t know what they can blog about, thanks Phil!

Just a short post to share a great article passed on to me by a web designer friend.

William Hicks (no relation to the comedian as far as I know!), a web designer and librarian at the University of North Texas outlines how useful libraries can be, even for those who work almost entirely on the web.

He includes some great real-life examples of when a library might be able to help you with your work and why it could benefit you to visit your local academic (or public) library. Obviously, this is aimed at an American audience but I’m sure many readers of Digital Web magazine will be UK based so I hope they will realise the same applies in the UK. I particularly like his summary:

I hope I have demonstrated that libraries may be worth returning to if they don’t currently receive any of your attention. Many large institutions have nothing but their patron’s, and often society’s, best interests at heart.

We have a few regular visitors at our academic library; some who come to use our PCs, others who come to browse our collections or ask for our help with an enquiry. Some of my most interesting enquiries have been from visitors who are particularly passionate about their research area which is great.

I am often found complaining about how people don’t realise how valuable their library can be to them, but I’m such a hypocrite in two ways; firstly, I never really realised it myself until I worked in libraries and secondly, I’m not doing anything to change these ideas. I know it may be quite a big task but maybe I should be doing more small things to make people realise just how useful their local academic library can be in this age of information. Certainly got me thinking anyway, how can we promote our services and change the public opinion of libraries?

A couple of weeks ago I attended a very interesting talk given by Kim Holmberg, a PhD student from Finland who is supervised by one of our lecturers at Wolverhampton. The talk was part of a series by the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group.

Kim’s background is in information science and webometrics but he also has an interest in Library 2.0 and what he calls Library 3D (libraries in Second Life and similar).

The talk introduced the concept of Library 2.0 which was great to see as I’m sure some of the people present had probably never heard of it. Kim tended to focus on public libraries but it was great that someone not from a typical library background was so enthusiastic about the participatory potential of Library 2.0.

He then went on to talk about Second Life and how libraries could use Second Life. I’ve embedded a copy of his slideshow for anyone interested:

Coincidentally, earlier that day I had been involved in a discussion about Second Life and thought it might be time to at least join up and see it for myself. So many talks I’ve attended recently have mentioned or demonstrated Second Life and up until very recently, I still hadn’t had a go myself. I’m off work this week so decided to take the plunge and have a look around.

It took me a shocking amount of time to decide upon a surname but in the end I settled for Joeyanne Quandry. If anyone is in Second Life please feel free to add me, I’m not sure if and how I will use Second Life yet but I’ll certainly be giving it a try so please add me so I have a friend to talk to!

I had a look at Talis Cybrary place and searched for the CILIP area but couldn’t find it. I did visit Sheila Webber’s (Sheila Yoshikawa in Second Life) InfoLit iSchool space and added her as a friend but unfortunately there was no one there when I visited. I’ll have to try to go along to the next Information Literacy event they have.

My feelings so far are that it could be a different way to do things and make them a bit more fun, but until we get the majority of people using Second Life and feeling comfortable with it I think it’s difficult to achieve things. Potentially a different avenue to explore though, I know there are quite a few academics who are really enthusiastic and I can definitely see the benefit for distance learners like myself (I wonder if Aberystwyth will set up an area for it’s Information Studies distance learners in the future?).

Is anyone aware of academic libraries in the UK currently using Second Life? I know John Kirriemuir has researched academic use of Second Life in the UK on behalf of Eduserv, his final report is on my “to read” list. His Ariadne article is interesting, I’ll have to check out some of the places mentioned in the article next time I explore Second Life. Any other places I should visit?

Thanks to a post by Nicole Engard, I have added the Facebook Blog Networks application to my Facebook page and registered ownership of Joeyanne Libraryanne.

Facebook Blog Networks is a way to display on your Facebook profile which blogs you own, author and read so that others can find interesting blogs. It also means that each blog registered on there has it’s own page where the feed is displayed (once you have enough fans!), and where readers have the opportunity to review and leave comments about the blog as you can see in the screenshot below (click for larger image, select All Sizes and then Original)

If you do add the application on Facebook (or already have it) please add my blog to the list of those you read. It would be nice to see if any Joeyanne Libraryanne readers are on Facebook.

One of my interests in Web 2.0 technology is using tools to improve productivity. It’s the reason I love RSS feeds so much, I’m a fan of anything that can help save time or improve productivity in both my working life and life on general. When I bought my iPod Touch in December I was keen to integrate that to help increase my productivity which it did to an extent but it had the distinct disadvantage of requiring wifi to do most things. The release of the iPod Touch software 2.0 and the App Store has changed all that though…

To-do lists using ToodleDo and Todo

I’ve always been a fan of the good old to-do list and although I’m not a GTD advocate (mainly as I don’t know too much about it!) I do enjoy finding out about new GTD tools. ToodleDo has been a firm favourite of mine for a while now, I’ve tried the popular Remember the Milk but I personally prefer the simplicity of ToodleDo. I have it embedded in my Pageflakes homepage so as soon as I load my browser at either work or home I see my to-do list. It’s particularly useful at work but I do also use it to help me organise my home life and studying too. I was also using the slim version of ToodleDo on my iPod (see screenshot) which was great when I was at home or work and therefore had wifi access, but I was unable to use it when out and about as it was all online.

ToodleDo Slim

Luckily, that has now changed thanks to Appigo’s Todo application (NB: site seems to be down at the moment but it has worked for me in the past). The main page of my Todo app currently looks like the image below with details of my lists and the number of tasks in each (as an aside, you may have noticed I am loving the ability to take screenshots from my iPod!).

Screenshot of the main page of my Todo app

When you go view the All list it lists all of your tasks in order of due date. I’d like to see different ordering of tasks (e.g. priority as it also uses priorities when you set the task), and Appigo are hoping to add this in a future release.

It synchronises with my ToodleDo account which means I can now update the list on my iPod whilst I’m away from the Internet, and then sync when I get back. I can also use the web version still and then update my iPod at the end of the working day. It might sound like such a simple thing but this really has helped me in the way I work, particularly as I often spend my time on the bus in the morning planning my day. Another neat feature (purely aesthetic but it makes it look nicer!) is that you can choose a different way of marking tasks complete. In the screenshot below you can see I’ve opted for a pretty boring blue tick with faded task at the moment but there are lots of different options available (including a DONE stamp across the task which is quite satisfying to look at!).

Screenshot of my current list of tasks for Study

The ToodleDo team and the Appigo team are both great at listening to user feedback and acting on it too, so I really do recommend them both if you work using to-do lists and want to access it on the web or on an iPhone/iPod Touch.

Blogging using the WordPress iPhone app

The other thing I tend to do on the bus is jot down ideas for blog posts or even write whole posts. As a get around for no Internet I had been writing them as e-mails (you can write without Internet access), saving them as drafts, and then sending them when I got home. Then I’d have to jump on the PC, copy the text, paste it into WordPress, and add any links and images I needed. So I was delighted to hear that WordPress were releasing an iPhone app and I have been eagerly awaiting it’s release. It’s finally here, and it’s great (I wrote most of this blog post on it). At the moment it’s tricky to add in links or formatting as the HTML tags are on the third keyboard on the iPhone, but for just getting the text down and working offline it’s great. You can then add it to the drafts folder and edit it on the PC. It could do with more functionality (e.g. links, ability to adminstrate comments etc.) but I’m sure that will come in the future.

Other productivity tools

Those are the main things I use with my iPod (in addition to Microsoft Exchange which I use for email and calendar) but on the web I also use:

• PageFlakes homepage as mentioned earlier
• Google Calendar (I use this at work to promote sessions as mentioned in an earlier blog post)
• del.icio.us to store useful bookmarks
• Bloglines (I currently use the Beta version) as my RSS feed reader, which also has an iPhone optimised version but although it looks pretty is very basic so I don’t tend to use it often

I’ve also dabbled with online document creators such as Google Docs, Zoho, Buzzword and Blist (there are probably more of these I have forgotten!).

I’m always keen to try new tools, are there any other useful productivity tools you love which I haven’t mentioned? How do you manage your time and organise your work?

I upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.6 last night - extra features in the latest WordPress include version history (could be useful for me as I tend to write a few drafts before publishing my longer posts), press this (a bookmarklet you can use to blog about websites etc.), picture captions, theme previews, and Google Gears support.

Upgrading is always a scary experience as I’m terrified I’ll lose my content (I didn’t actually do it myself this time, Chris helped me). Although all seemed fine initially, I soon realised that the front page was working but the individual posts weren’t showing (the message “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria” was displayed).

After a bit of investigating (i.e. Googling!) this morning, we found it is a known bug affecting anyone whose permalink includes index.php. Thankfully, the solution is simple. Details are given on the WordPress website but basically the easiest way to solve it is to add values into the category and tag fields in the permalink options page (the values can simply be the words category and tag). That should hopefully fix it, it did for me.

Apologies to anyone trying to view posts last night, but it should be back to normal now.

As a regular user of RSS feeds (I currently subscribe to over 150 feeds and check them daily), I am keen to encourage others to use them.

We have started trying to encourage students to use an RSS reader to keep up-to-date via our information skills sessions and I would like to try to promote them to researchers and academic staff also. There are a number of useful academic blogs as well as news feeds and feeds for new items in journals.

I was therefore delighted to see Joe Hilton and Roddy MacLeod’s article in the latest edition of SCONUL Focus detailing their ticTOCs project.

Taken from the ticTOCs website:

The ticTOCs Project is piloting a free service where researchers, academics and anyone else can keep up-to-date with scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs)

What a great service! ticTOCs currently has 7,742 journal Tables of Contents which users can sign up to receive updates of in their ticTOCs account. Ideally I’d like to see everyone familiar with RSS feeds and using RSS readers but for those who only want to use it for journals ticTOCs is an ideally starting point. Let’s hope it raises the profile of receiving feeds to keep researchers up-to-date.

Visit mashed library

There have been a number of library related unconference recently, in the USA, Canada and Australia to my knowledge. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, an unconference is basically an informal conference with a broad theme which is driven by the delegates. I’ve always thought these events seemed like a great idea so I was very excited when Owen Stephens suggested on his blog that maybe we should have an unconference event for mashed libraries in the UK. As you can see from the number of responses he got in the comments, it seems there are quite a few people interested in such an event, and so Owen has set up a ning page to collaborate ideas and try to get things organised.

If you are interested in attending or helping organise the event, please join and pass the link to anyone else you think might be interested. You don’t need to be highly technical to be involved (I’m certainly not a coding expert!); anyone with an interest in library technologies is welcome.

I’m really excited about this so I hope there are enough people interested to make it a really useful event.

On Wednesday I attended a CoFHE event at the Open University in Milton Keynes.

The event was titled “The Terrible 2.0s? Web 2.0 without tears” and covered a variety of Web 2.0 topics such as podcasting, blogging, wikis and social software in general.

The keynote speaker was Peter Godwin, who started the event with a talk on Information Literacy and the Google Generation. Peter’s presentation was very interesting with lots of thought-provoking points made about today’s students (like those made in the CIBER report earlier this year). The main theme emerging from the talk was how today’s students are visual learners who like to learn in small chunks. Like Peter admitted though, doesn’t that describe a lot of us? Definitely something to think about when I’m next preparing material on “boring” (Peter’s words not mine!) topics such as Information Literacy though! He also included one of me favourite YouTube videos, A Vision of Students Today, which it was great to see again. Here it is for anyone that hasn’t yet seen it, really made me think when I first saw it:

I’ve previously written about Peter’s book which he co-edited with Jo Parker, Information Literacy Meets Library 2.0, but just to highlight it again, it really is a very interesting read for anyone involved in teaching information literacy skills.

The next talk was by Jane Knight and Steve Burholt from Oxford Brookes. They shared their experiences of podcasting for libraries from both a librarian and a techy point of view. I found this approach very interesting, it was good to hear about the practical experience for the librarian but was very refreshing to also hear from the techy side. I think it made a lot of us in the room (including myself) realise how much effort is needed to successfully implement a regular podcast for the library. The enthusiasm of the group from Oxford Brookes is certainly to be commended! You can view a copy of the slides for the presentation here.

We then had a break for lunch, which was a great opportunity for networking. I had a number of interesting conversations with other people at the event, mainly discussing new technologies and examples of good practice, as well as the inevitable hurdles people are encountering when trying to implement these new Web 2.0 technologies.

After lunch we had a session on social software by Christian Cooper, a lecturer from Thames Valley University who favours a social constructivist approach to teaching and learning. He discussed educational uses of social software including group critiques (particularly useful for Art and Design students), reflective journals and collaborative learning. The main content of his presentation concentrated on the use of blogging as a tool for learning by encouraging students to use it as a reflective journal of their learning experiences. You can view a copy of the presentation here.

Following a short CoFHE AGM, we then had the opportunity to have a guided tour of the Open University library, and explore the DigiLab, a room within the library for all OU staff and researchers to use to encourage them to explore new technologies and think about how they can apply these technologies to learning.

The DigiLab visit was my personal highlight of the day. Keren Mills, Digital Services Development Officer, gave us a brief introduction to the room and the main purposes of it before taking us to have a look. The room contains different areas of new technologies - it has an area for gaming (including a Wii, Xbox and Playstation2 amongst others), a PC area (for both gaming and advanced software packages), a Mac area (for podcasting, video editing etc.), and a mobile learning area (with PDAs and Smartphones). There are also a number of publications for general interest (I’d be in heaven in there with all the geeky magazines!), as well as copies of reports demonstrating how the technologies can be used (e.g. there was a report on mobile learning and some factsheets for anyone who is new to the area). The room is designed to be a creative space and is very informal in nature, it has comfy chairs and even Lego, plasticine and pipe cleaners to encourage creativity! What I particularly liked about the space was that it is open whenever the library is open and anyone is free to use the facilities whenever they want to. When we first went into the room, there was a group gathered around the Macs and PCs discussing their project on Second Life and it was great to see academics and researchers really embracing the new technologies and thinking about ways to use them to improve learning. The room is still in its infancy and Keren says there are still some concerns from staff that trying these new gadgets is just playing rather than working. I think for the majority of people that have visited the lab though, it is clear that it is an educational space and I hope more academics will take the opportunity to visit it and use the technologies. OU is a pioneer in this sort of thing, but I really hope we see similar schemes being set up in other Universities.

At the end of the day I had a brief tour of the Open University library, which I hadn’t realised had only quite recently been opened for students and the general public (when I say recent, I’m talking years not months, but I’d always naively assumed that all academic libraries were mainly used by students). I was surprised at how relatively small the stock area of the library is, but I hadn’t realised that OU don’t offer a postal lending scheme so the stock they have is only really for academic staff and local students. I can see why they don’t have a postal loan scheme as I’m sure it would be a logistical nightmare, as well as very expensive. Aberystwyth currently offer this for their distance learning students (I’ve never used it though to be perfectly honest!) but then they don’t have anywhere near the student numbers of the OU studying from a distance. It really highlights the importance of schemes such as the SCONUL Access scheme to allow students to borrow or at least use the material at their local libraries, and also the importance of providing access to e-books and e-journals so that OU students can access material from home. The OU Information Helpdesk is in the staff office too, as all their enquiries are taken by phone, e-mail or online chat. It was very interesting to see an academic library which supports a totally different user base to the traditional academic library. I think we were all a little bit envious of not having to deal with group study room bookings and various other annoying things, but I’m sure there are the fair share of problems working with student from such a distance!

All in all it was a very enjoyable day with a good mix of sessions and great networking opportunities. I also happened to meet fellow blogger Clari who works at the Open University, it was nice to meet her in real life.