"Now to scape the serpent's tongue"

[With apologies to Girl in the Moon for nicking her thread, but it was too hard to resist]

Ah, it's been a long 12 weeks, and Miss Crail is feeling the burn ...

Unfortunately, no Damascene moments to report yet. Need time to digest, cogitate, and possibly regurge. This will be a long-term thingy. The old Delicious account is positively STUFFED with things to follow up later.

Anyway, can I have an aegrotat without having devised a marketing plan of stunning innovation and ingenuity? I need that certificate, not only because it will look nice on the wall next to ‘Choosing and using ladders’ [it was an uphill struggle, but I did it] and the barely-legible quill-pen-on-lambskin ALA, but to point out to the academic who has been walking behind my desk, eyeing my screen, flaring his nostrils and adjusting his trousers disapprovingly. Never mind the champagne and canapes, though the opportunity to swish around in a lovely polyester gown over a too-tight grey suit, and fling that tassel across the mortar board, was once a pleasing vision.

Cam23 has proved useful to me in these ways:

* Most importantly, immersion in Cam23 has meant I simply haven’t had time for cataloguing, dusting, heaving bloody great bound journals along the shelves to try to create a few inches of space. Heh heh. More next summer please.

* Quite a few of us work solo in libraries, and thus often feel left out of the information loop. I only know a couple of people on the program, that’s how isolated I am. The nun-like sequestration is amplified if you are a library assistant. Information gets out in patchy ways - some colleagues will be unaware of an important resource or development, whilst others will have missed hearing about something else. This is worrying as well as being annoying. If you are missing out, your users are missing out too. I was intending to use as illustration the fliers I saw in the UL about the testing of the search facility available ‘from this autumn', and Aidan only having heard ‘rumours’ about what sound like pretty important changes, but not having been informed myself - But I was cut off at the pass this morning by Ed Chamberlain’s message. Heck, I'm going to say it anyway. Communication from above is patchy. OK, that has little to do with Cam23. However, although Cam 23 is less about resources than about media, it has helped enormously to see what others in the Cambridge system have been up to, and in suggesting what should best be considered [As well, of course, as seeing how other libraries are using these tools, often in the most innovative ways]. I don’t feel so much as if I’m on Pluto [or more aptly perhaps, in Upminster - you know, beyond Barking]

* It has been absolutely fascinating to hear others’ opinions, the strong reactions both positive and negative, in interesting combinations, and to benefit from the views of the already-experienced. Conversely, others’ postings have reassured me that I’m not the only person in Cambridge who feels like they are not quaffing the champagne and guffawing loudly at the geeks’ party. What has been a revelation is that most of these Web 2.0 tools are genuinely easy to install and use, as well as being free. That’s my kind of tool. My ‘Well-I-won’t-understand-that’ barrier has been broken down by Cam23. For the less-than-confident, the idiot-proof instructions given by the team each week have been spot on .

* Some of the tools have already made my life so much easier. As a tricomputerate person, how did I live without Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google Documents, all the ‘stuff’ parked in iGoogle? All Googlecentric ... but who flippin' cares? I can see how tools such as these aid communication with colleagues, but not really for MY library users, ditto Doodle. Facebook for libraries - Have had the necessary info parked there for a year, but I honestly don’t think a dialogue is going to happen, ditto blogs. Flickr, YouTube, LibraryThing etc - Nice toys, not for work. If I want a phote of the, um, gothic splendour of the Plant Scis Library, I'll do it myself. I’m glad I’ve been forced to consider Zotero, and angry with myself for not doing it sooner. It will certainly be recommended to PhD students, as will Delicious continue to be, and I’ll also use the latter to park links to sites I’ve recommended to them and not just for me. Twitter - well, to use it properly you need to be checking it constantly and following up leads, or you’re cast adrift; and if you have time to do that at work then you’re lucky. A lot of the tools we’ve covered would be extremely useful for public libraries or for large academic libraries [RSS feeds, podcasts, wikis etc] but not necessarily for small departmental libraries with a captive audience. I have so many more options to consider now when attempting to update my own, er, expertise. In the past, I’d never have considered SlideShare but there are some useful presentations out there. Blogs ditto, mainlining Phil Bradley and 'them clever people'.

* If Cam23 has achieved only one thing with the recalcitrant Crail, it has forced one to finally work out how to drop RSS feeds into web pages as a way of updating the ones I don’t have access to.

As to what I will use to engage others, this will require some thought. The Passion & the Fury brought to my attention the dog distracted by squirrels which is kind of how I am. 'Wow! That’s good' [do it for a week] 'Wow! thats good' etc. The ether is littered with my little dumps. So I for one NEED to step back and think before diving in.

I don’t think the Infosphere is yet at the level of development where we can push out info, and all the people who need to receive it will do so, same as researchers should not rely wholly on feeds to get their bib and research updates. If you are a Twitter junkie [and quite a few Cam23ettes have said they think this is a medium they will be using] then you are likely to get a constant stream, ergo it is not the ideal medium for punting out library info, likely to be most people's 'yeah-right-check-that-later' [with added '-and-then-completely-forget-about-it'] category. If I need to get out information to exactly the right group of people, then a targeted generic e-mail is still the best option. The Mongoose's description of a conference with several levels of attention required, for different information sources, sounds like hell to me, let alone for the poor speaker who has to keep control of it all. And it's frankly rude to be tweeting to others when your little face should be tilted attentively upward. Worse than snoring loudly. Plus, are we really saying we are genuinely capable of processing multiple streams of information simultaneously? And that all that stuff about teevee/the internet/Google making us stupid was totally wrong?

Social media - the idea of tending more towards the informal is good, given the apparent continuing stuffy image of library staff. Getting out of one’s rut and trying new methods is good. Feedback, interaction, collaboration, all good. But we must be careful that it is not just the same message in a new-toy medium. The reminder that students’ learning styles are changing and differ from person to person anyway is a bit worrying, as that means not just different platforms but different methods/content. But as Chris and others have said, these things must be kept up to date and interesting. Normally, if you don’t have anything to say it is best to keep quiet, but that looks bad on Facebook or blog pages. It is certainly time for Miss Crail to be killed off [after a brief but ruinously expensive sojourn drying out in St Joan's Institution for Aged Librarians, Gasworks Ave, Mablethorpe]. Facebook does at least allow some static information, but that is essentially duplicating a website, where necessary information must still remain, because most people will still look there for opening hours etc.

Right, enough already, exit stage left to the sounds of Rickie Lee Jones and ‘Last chance Texaco’, and head for the chaise longue and a well deserved Tanqueray with digestives to dunk [God, that makes a mess]. Perhaps even wee little toke on the Departmental Hookah whilst illicitly reclining in the Academics' Bagnio.

Oh, and I think I used the wrong graphic at the beginning. I meant, of course, to use this: