Yesterday I attended the Mashed Libraries Unconference held in London.

There were around 25 participants in the event - mainly from the UK, although one had even come all the way from Germany (an ExLibris representative). Most people were library techy people, many from systems departments in academic libraries. There were also quite a few not so techy people like myself there though, and although some of the programming went way over my head, there was a lot to be learned and some interesting things that were not so difficult to achieve.

We started the day with some short presentations about mashups and APIs and what can be achieved.  We heard about Talis’s new APIs and the basic structure of how their systems work. Although I didn’t know all the coding, it was very interesting and certainly made me think about how data can be utilised by these systems to get interesting outputs such as holding information or book jackets.

The next talk was by Tony Hirst from Open University. Tony demonstrated Amazon Web Services which is an easy to use front end to play around with Amazon’s APIs. He then showed us Google Spreadsheets which can be used to import data such as a table on a HTML page, RSS or XML (I had no idea it had the ability to do this!). Combined with Amazon Web Services you can get some great data! He also demonstrated Yahoo Pipes which I have used before but only to combine multiple RSS feeds into one feed. He demonstrated using it to bring in delicious feeds and set conditions on what to include/exclude, as well as using LibraryThing’s ThingISBN and Amazon Web Services to bring in data about all versions of a book and display reviews from Amazon all from an ISBN. I haven’t used Yahoo Pipes for a while and there seems to be more options of how you can export data now, you can even use it to create iGoogle gadgets.

We also had talks from Ex Libris, OCLC and COPAC and it was interesting to hear the things they are up to at the moment. It seems many products are moving towards opening the use of APIs and promoting sharing of developments within the community.

We then had a break for an early lunch (we had fantastic catering throughout the day) and got to work on whatever inspired us. Many people decided to play around with Yahoo Pipes, but there were others who played around with APIs that had been made available to use on the day.

In the afternoon we had a presentation from Paul Bevan from the National Library of Wales (who co-authored the Library 2.0 conference paper I wrote). It was great to meet Paul and hear about experiences from a different type of library. Amazingly, 82% of the National Library of Wales’ visitors are online visitors so they recognised the need to develop the web side of things. A Web 2.0 Taskforce was established a few months ago with a remit to investigate Web 2.0 and inform the strategic review. Web 2.0 is now incorporated into their strategy and a number of developments are included to be investigated further. Their three main aims for the future are to share (relaxing rights where possible and providing support for reuse), collaborate (form partnerships, identify best practice and hold events), and innovate (take steps to an open infrastructure and improve engagement within Wales).

It was great to put more faces to names and share experiences, both techy and not so techy. I even got chatting to Dave Pattern about their 25 Things project (which I didn’t know was happening!), and he was kind enough to share some of their experiences with that.

A huge thanks to Owen Stephens for organising such a great event, I certainly hope there will be similar events in the future.

As mentioned in a previous post, I’m coming towards the end of the taught part of my librarianship course. I am going away (to Orlando!) a week today and my aim was to complete the Diploma before we go. I’m pleased to say I have achieved my aim (although I haven’t received confirmation that my assignment has been received yet which is a little worrying, hopefully it will have arrived today). I’m still waiting for results for three of my assignments but as long as I pass them I will have completed the Diploma.

I still have my dissertation to do to complete the Masters but I’m thinking of taking a study break to start thinking about what I’d really like to research. I imagine it will be something to do with new technologies in academic libraries, but I’d quite like to spend some time settling into my new job (which I start when I get back from holiday :)) before starting my dissertation and then hopefully I can do something which will be of value to my work.

During this time I’d also like to learn more about Photoshop (I’ve always wanted to learn Photoshop and still not got round to it so have borrowed Photoshop CS3: Classroom in a Book from the library which I’m hoping to work through when I get back from holiday. I’d like to do more work on the web too and am hoping to do a bit more playing around with Dreamweaver and maybe have a look at Drupal and Joomla as well as using Wordpress as a content management system. There’s loads of work-related projects which I’d like to do and I’m hoping I’ll be able to get involved in more when I start the new job so I think there’ll be enough to keep me busy!

I just hope I am able to find something to write my dissertation on that I’m really passionate about, is related to my work in some way, has value to the profession, and that someone is willing to supervise! I’m off to Internet Librarian International 2008 tomorrow so maybe I’ll get some inspiration there, I’m particularly looking forward to the sessions on the 23 Things scheme on Track B, I’d love to do a project based on 23 Things at work.

Well, the time has finally come - on Monday I had an interview for a professional librarian post and I was successful!

I’m also coming very close to completion of my Diploma (I’m going away at the end of this month and my aim is to complete my final assignment before I go) so hopefully soon I’ll be able to say with pride that I am a qualified librarian.

I’m so excited about starting a professional post, I can’t wait to be able to work more closely with academic schools to help support the students and further develop our services. I’m moving campuses but staying within the same organisation so I’ll still be able to continue work on my technology related projects. It’s a campus I hadn’t even been to before but it had a great atmosphere and I’m really looking forward to working there.

I also have some other exciting news - I’ve written a guest blog post for UK Web Focus about Library 2.0 Initiatives and Barriers which has been published on the blog today; please feel free to comment as I’ll be keeping an eye on the comments on there too. I have also contributed to a conference paper titled Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends which will be presented by Brian Kelly at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference later this month.

Everything is beginning to fall into place, I’m really enjoying the work that I’m doing and I’m glad that I’ll be able to further progress in my new post. I’m also really enjoying the blogging and am hoping to do more conference work too. It’s an exciting time to be a librarian and I’m really glad I decided to choose this career path.

As part of my study school week in Aberystwyth we had Dr. Jane Secker, Learning Technology Librarian (such a great job title!) at LSE, as a guest speaker to talk to us about the adventures of LASSIE (Libraries and Social Software in Education). I have been following the LASSIE project with interest since last summer when the initial literature review was published – for those that don’t know the project looked at social (Web 2.0) software such as online reading lists, social bookmarking, blogging and social networking, and specifically how they can be used to support distance learners. During the course of the project however, it became evident that these services can also benefit full-time and part-time students as many choose to study from home.

Jane’s talk was extremely interesting for both people like myself who are familiar with social software, and also with beginners who may not have even heard of the term before the talk. I’ve mentioned before that it surprises me how little Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 are discussed on my course, so it was great to have the talk – there was a lot more talk afterwards and I didn’t feel quite so strange talking about how great Library 2.0 initiatives can be!

I’ve included a copy of Jane’s slides below or you can listen to the talk alongside the slides here.

The LASSIE reports are all available on the project website (they are very practical in nature and make interesting reading). Jane has also published recent articles in both Program and ALISS Quarterly.

Something which I found particularly interesting was how valuable Jane had found the project blog and that although it was set up for the project she still regularly blogs there and finds it very useful – I can certainly relate with that, blogging has become part of my life now and I regularly find myself thinking “Oooh, I’ll write a blog post about that”.

Jane did mention that they were hoping to expand on the original LASSIE project and I certainly hope so, their practical approach to problems faces by academic libraries in the UK I’m sure will be of value to many other institutions.

Thanks to Jill Hurst-Wahl at Digitization 101, I was made aware that today is Blog Day 2008.

For those unfamiliar with Blog Day (and I’ll admit I was until Jill made me aware of it!), the idea is that bloggers all around the world find other interesting blogs and share them with their readers by making a post about them. Here are the instructions:

1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2008
3. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs
4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st)

Jill kindly posted about my blog and I’m posting about another 5 to spread the blog discovery.

I have tried to choose blogs which I think may interest readers of Joeyanne Libraryanne but broaden the horizons to include blogs outside librarianship. Having said that, my first blog to mention is another librarianship blog!

• Thoughts of a [wannabe] librarian - this is a new blog written by one of my fellow distance learners. It covers technology developments of interest to libraries but looking at things from a public library point of view rather than an academic library point of view.

As well as librarianship, I am interested in teaching and learning. From the age of 5 I wanted to be a teacher and although I have since changed my mind, one of the things I most enjoy at work are teaching sessions and producing support material.

• Blogging IT and EDucation - Blogging IT and EDucation is written by Emma Duke-Williams, a lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. She shares an interest in elearning and using technology to support education and posts some really interesting posts about new resources and developments which she thinks could be used to support teaching at University level. I enjoy hearing about things from an academic point of view and Emma’s blog is a great example of this.

• Oh, what a tangled web we weave - I posted recently about the Library 2.0 to Library 3D talk I went to; Oh, what a tangled web we weave is Kim’s blog. His primary interest is in webometrics but he is also interested in Web 2.0/Library 2.0 and Second Life. He is a lecturer in Finland and it is interesting to read his posts about the current and potential uses of technology to support learning.

As you may have guessed from my posts about Google Calendar, and ToodleDo and ToDo - productivity and anything to ease the process of getting things done is another interest of mine. My iPod Touch lives with me to help me organise my life. I enjoy reading LifeHacker, but I decided to find a new productivity blog to read (and recommend).

• Simple Productivity Blog - includes lots of great posts on general advice for improving productivity as well as reviews and recommendations of software, and tips on simplifying your life.

Just to show I’m not a complete technology geek, I thought I’d choose one of my favourite “fun” blogs as my last recommendation to check out.

• Stuff on my cat - as the proud owner of two kittens (if you’re interested there are photos here), I started subscribing to some cat related blogs a few months ago. Stuff on my cat is pretty self explanatory blog (yes it really is pictures of cats with stuff on them!) but has occasionally caused me to laugh out loud. Our kittens found fame earlier this year on I can has cheezburger so I keep an eye on that one too.

That brings an end to my 5 recommended blogs for Blog Day 2008, I hope you found them interesting and if you know of any other blogs you think I may be interested in please feel free to recommend them in the comments.

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.

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?

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.