Thing 13

Thing 13 - LibraryThing

I'm a librarian, but I'm also a bookworm, and so this is probably the single Thing I've been most looking forward to. I used a basic LibraryThing app on Facebook for a short while a few years ago to show friends what I was reading, but I had never had my own LibraryThing account. I thought it would be nice to be able to add a LibraryThing widget to my blog, so I set about doing that.

Registration was not only easy, but even pleasant. It's a nice touch that the code required 'to verify your humanity' (I can think of a few people who would fail that test...) has to be entered from the cover of a book:

Being the kind of geek who keeps a reading diary, I know everything I've read for the past several years. It was the work of no more than a few minutes to add all the books I've read this year to my account, using Amazon.co.uk as my search source. Then I played around with the formatting of the widget available to Blogger until I found something that suited me. And so on this blog you should now be able to see something like this at the side:

This morning I logged on to find that on the basis of the books I'd listed I had been invited by another user to a group called BBC Radio 3 Listeners, which I duly joined. I'm still very much on the nursery slopes with LibraryThing, but I think it is likely to become a regular haunt.

As far as using LibraryThing for libraries is concerned, it seems to be a nice optional extra but not essential. I don't know how easy (or desirable) it is to incorporate aspects of LibraryThing into a library catalogue. Looking at two Oxbridge libraries that use LibraryThing, one has not been updated for three years, while the other is updated every week or so with new additions. It requires someone to put the effort in, and it may be hard to monitor just how much library users get out of it. As my colleague Anna points out to me, we already have our own more mercenary way of notifying users of new books - via the Amazon Store on our library website, where we advertise new books by Fellows and graduates of King's College in the hope that kindly visitors will buy them.

Thing 12

Thing 12 - Bookmarking tools

If it's not too lazy of me, I'll restrict myself to using Delicious for Thing 12, rather than all three suggested websites. My brother is staying with me this week, and we are quite busy getting up to mischief in the evenings, so I haven't got much time to explore the Things outside work.

First things first. The idea of social bookmarking is a smart one, both because it enables you to share favourite websites with others and because it lets you access your own bookmarks yourself (keeping them private, if you want) from any internet computer. So much more convenient than having to configure umpteen web browsers on as many different computers.

I have a little experience of Delicious already, albeit essentially second-hand. My colleague Anna has created a Delicious account for users of King's College Library, both patrons and library staff. This account groups together links to useful websites - ebooks, publishers, other libraries, cataloguing guidelines, and so on - and has recently begun to incorporate a number of useful online texts for the use of students of the Pembroke-King's Programme, which runs every summer for eight weeks. Anyway, the point is that I am already conscious of some of the advantages social bookmarking possesses for libraries.

You call that delicious? This is delicious!

When you hear the name Delicious you probably imagine something exciting and extravagant (Cologne's Schokoladenmuseum, for instance - of which more later, I am sure), but aesthetically, the website is ever so slightly austere - elegantly minimal, you might say - and the notion of sharing links is perhaps more techie than sexy. That said, there's no reason why it can't be both - texy, if you will - and any reservations about its appearance are easily overcome when its functionality becomes apparent.

Setting up my own account was simple enough, though I couldn't install the Firefox add-on as it was not compatible with my current browser, Firefox 5.0, which was released in June. Presumably this issue will be resolved sooner rather than later, but for the moment I used the bookmarklet, which lives on my newly enabled bookmarks toolbar.

I decided to assemble a collection of bookmarks related to music, whether websites I visit regularly or pages of interest I bookmarked myself months ago with the intention of exploring further at some point. Eventually the list began to look a little unwieldy, which is where the tagging system became useful.

Tags help you to isolate similar sites from within a group of bookmarks, which is arguably a better arrangement than the way web browsers organise bookmarks: within folders, each bookmark with its own fixed place. Multiple tagging can make it easier to find a particular bookmark, and allows you to place any single bookmark in any number of separate disciplines. In Firefox at home, I have separate folders for blogs and music, but where do I bookmark a blog about music? I don't have to worry about that with Delicious.

Another thing I like is the simplicity of changing your settings so that links open in another tab or window as a default. I've come to realise that I'm quite tyrannical about this sort of thing. The 'house style' of this blog, if it's not too pretentious to write of such a thing, is that links to pages within the blog open in the same window, while links to external sites open in a different window. If you suffer from a similar neurosis, here is how to change your settings on Delicious:

• Click 'Display options' at the top of your list of bookmarks
• Choose 'View advanced options'
• Choose to open bookmarks in 'new window'

There is one problem I know I am not the first person to have identified, which is that you can't include spaces within tags. That can be awkward if, for example, one of your intended tags is someone's name. I wanted to tag the singer Peter Pears in one of my bookmarks. Clearly if I tag his two names individually, clicking one tag will produce results about several Peters, while the other will produce results mainly about fruit.

Pears: created the role of Albert Herring in 1947

So what is the solution? Using a hyphen or a full stop or an underscore to break up the names? In the end I just ran them together as PeterPears, and repeated that formatting in other tags, but as there is no standardisation there is no guarantee of finding other people's bookmarks on the same subject when you click the tag. Perhaps something for the Delicious bods to think about.

Thing 11

Thing 11 - Reflection week

I'm on holiday this week. Sorry not to meet everyone yesterday, but we have plenty of time.

But wait! Surely my commitment to Cam23 is not so great that I am sacrificing valuable time exploring the fascinating byways of German Gothic architecture to write this drivel? Well, no. I've written this in anticipation of reflection week, and am taking this opportunity to try out Blogger's 'scheduled post' option. If I come back next week to discover it's not worked, like those desperate occasions in my youth when I would return home to find the video timer had gone wrong, I will be royally miffed.

Kölner Dom at night. Image from Wikimedia Commons

I presume this is the occasion to think about what we have liked and not liked about the course so far, whether there are things (or Things) we have particularly responded to, and how we want to progress.

By and large, this has been a very enjoyable month. The thing I have liked most of all has been the chance it has provided for me to get in touch with other librarians in Cambridge. That isn't something that I've been in the habit of doing since I started working here five years ago. Of course, I see my colleagues, and very charming people they are too, but apart from occasional meetings with staff from other colleges, and the libraries@cambridge conference each year, that's about all the socialising I do.

I think it's important to keep up with people's blogs and post comments as often as possible, just to maintain momentum. I have been trying to be proactive about this. It's very encouraging to receive comments and tweets from other people doing the programme, especially if you don't know them personally. I'm fairly good at keeping track of what other people are posting, but the problem of starting to follow lots of blogs all at once is that it takes a while before you start to remember who's who. If I haven't commented on your blog yet, it is not (necessarily) a personal affront. I may easily get around to it in the coming weeks.

As for the things themselves, they've been a mixed bag but mainly good. You don't get much time to try them out before reporting back, but Cam23 has to move at this kind of pace. iGoogle has not become a regular haunt of mine, and I suspect Google Calendar and Pushnote won't either, but I really like blogging, screenshots and RSS (as I already did), and can see that screencasts, Doodle and Google Docs are likely to be the perfect tools to use when the necessity presents itself.

I'm not quite into the swing of Twitter. I do get it, having used it for a couple of years already in a non-professional (I may say very non-professional) capacity, but I'm not sure exactly what kind of tone I want to pitch. Part of me would like to be posting very worthy stuff about new technologies and projects all the time, but I don't think I could realistically maintain the pretence. My mind is simply too trivial to be continually occupied with thoughts of professional development, and so what I have tweeted so far has been essentially light-hearted, if by and large library-related. I sort of hope that taking part in Cam23 will somehow mould me into a more professional (or at least more professionally aware) person. I know, not desperately likely, but perhaps it will have at least some effect on how I approach my work.

I am now compelled to go and shove some things in a suitcase, but I shall see you anon. Have a lovely week.

Thing 10

Thing 10 - Pushnote and Evernote

I conform to Ned Potter's ingenious library stereotypometer infographic in only a small number of ways. I don't listen to Adam and Joe, I don't drink gin, I don't knit and I don't wear a cardigan, but at least I can say I'm a leftie (in handedness and politicalness).

There are a few things, though, that bring out my generally dormant illiberal side, and the culture of commenting is one of them. In the old days, we the public kept quiet. The BBC told us what was going on and we accepted it. We were happy then. The rise of the internet has seen the media become democratised. Presenters of current affairs programmes ask us for our opinions, the more banal the better, and all online news websites offer a comments facility.

There must be something in the comments section of news websites and blogs that appeals to the meanest of human instincts. I have trained myself not to scroll down too far when reading any article for fear of happening on something that will cause me to abandon all faith in humanity. The anonymity that the internet provides means that people can be freer with their opinions than they would be in person, safe in the knowledge that they will not be held to account for whatever poisonous trash they write. (You may be familiar with Godwin's Law.) Just last month, Shaun Usher, who runs the superb and popular Letters of Note blog, disabled its comments facility because he was having to spend so much time removing insults posted by trolls. His feelings on the matter are entirely comprehensible.

I love the internet as a place for discussion. Discussion is good. I use Twitter and message boards and blogs to exchange ideas and opinions. Nevertheless, I can't escape the perhaps reprehensible feeling that the democratisation of media has meant the enfranchisement of idiots. They were always among us, but we were able to avoid them. Now they infest the places we thought were safest. The words of Kent Brockman come back to haunt us: 'I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy simply doesn't work.'

A man ahead of his time

All of this is a prelude to my saying that the central idea of Pushnote, that one can comment on any webpage without having to register to use the website, is ever so slightly repulsive to me, and I confess that my first explorations of Pushnote have not even suggested to me, let alone convinced me, that it is something I might want to use in the future.

Creating an account was simple enough; finding friends was next to impossible. It told me to follow Stephen Fry, which I did more through force of habit than anything else. How to find other people I knew? (The short answer is that probably nobody I know is even on Pushnote, it's such a minority interest.) I had hoped to be able to find people who are Facebook or Twitter friends, but how to do that was a mystery. It doesn't help that the Pushnote FAQ are out of date. They instruct you to click 'Add Friends' from the homepage, when there is no such button. There is a 'Find people' button, which lets you search Gmail contacts (of which I have none) or look for people by name. I searched for a few names in case I recognised anybody, but in vain. So far, so frustrating.

You can probably tell where this is going, but let's plod on. I installed Pushnote for Firefox and hied my way to the BBC website, which is one of the ones I visit most regularly. What might I find there when I clicked the little star in the corner? Well, the most recent comments included:

• always my first site of the day
• Possibly the best site for any information on the web. . .almost!
• One of the best websites for news, sport, entertainment
• Best news site on the web
• great for everything so useful
• Best website ever.

It's not the commenters' fault that what they write is so tedious. It's just that Pushnote has the same handicap as Twitter (love Twitter though I do) - there's only so much you can say of interest in 140 characters. Plus I know all this already. Might a visit to a site I never use be more enlightening? I visited Bing.com, where I discovered the following:

• Bing is kack!
• I saw the movie Unknown yesterday and when running a search they used bing. I understand they probably got payed to use it but I was like "who the hell uses bing".
• Not a bing fan. And sick of the constant advertising of it on Gossip Girl.

I hear you, brother. But there are only six comments on Bing in total, and this is one of the 25 most visited websites worldwide. At the moment, I can't see Pushnote having any great application simply because its reach is so pitiful. If it takes off, like Twitter has, perhaps its value will become apparent. As it is, even Pushnote's chief proponent, Stephen Fry, has only ranked five sites in the last six months. I really don't think it's got legs.

After this dispiriting experience, I wasn't really inclined to try Evernote. My first action on loading the website was to check to see what Pushnote users thought about it, but of course nobody has either posted a comment or rated it. But I am turning into a loyal and conscientious Cam23er, so plunged in.

The auspices were good. Any site that uses the following image in its 'Getting Started' section is OK by me.

"I understand more than you'll ... never know."

The real task was working out just what Evernote is. My assessment is that it's a sort of online clipboard for you to gather together things that you're working on or that interest you, and it might be especially useful if you want to access things from multiple computers. An advantage is that you don't need to download the desktop client to access your files (which might be a problem at work), you can do it all online.

I experimented with making notes, copying images into notes (I found a nice sketch online purporting to be of the young Franz Schubert, though if it is, which I doubt, then he's doing a very passable impression of Ronan Keating), and saving text as a note using the Firefox web clipper add-on. Evernote also has a cute elephant as its logo.

Picture of Schu / A Different Bert (delete as appropriate)

Perhaps it's just a reaction against Pushnote, but on first impression I really rather like Evernote, at least as a toy. Whether I will end up favouring it over other ways of doing the same thing, I can't tell. But unlike Pushnote, I will at least be exploring it further. No matter what.