Crail is risen from the dead!

Well, there I was, mid-day and still in the Wincyette pyjamas and the [slightly soiled] Terylene housecoat, just settling down in readiness for 'Loose Women' with a pink Sobranie and a schooner* of sweet sherry [*well, all right, I use the commode pot], when Matron announced I had a visitor.

In came Passion & the Fury, somewhat red-faced from the exertion of cycling to Mablethorpe, demanding, if you please, something from the mini-bar. Quickly hid the 'schooner' under the chair, and pointed out that only tea was allowed for visitors. She grudgingly accepted the remaining hard-centres from the previous visitor's Milk Tray box, and then whipped out various items from her wheely-shopper. Some rather lovely blue balloons, some M&S choccies [soft centres, thank the lord], a puzzling plastic thing that said 'More than words', and a statue of a nude man, no less! 'What am I supposed to do with THAT?' I demanded, getting tetchy since by now she was keeping me from lunch, and I'd selected Sausage Surprise and Spotted Dick too. Next thing I know, out comes the camera, lots of flashes, and some unflattering images will no doubt soon be circulating the internet. I deny it all. The Max Factor Compact and Trowelette were still in my shopping bag too.

'You've won a prize', she told me. 'The VD Award, aka Most Effusive Verbal Diarrhoea'. Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather, had I not been semi-recumbent already, having consulted the 'schooner' every time her back was turned whilst rummaging in her shopper [fuchsia leopard-print - I ask you].

Anyway, many, many thanks to all you kind people who for some reason [I'm not dead, and I'm not rich] voted for mon blog. Totally undeserved as I just blurted out a load of crap, whereas some wrote carefully-crafted and immaculately-presented near-opuses [?opi?]. Didn't even think I'd passed the course, let alone got a risque ornament for the mantelpiece. Didn't attend the partaaay as the bus pass only works for local buses [and as you can imagine, the locality of Mablethorpe has little to recommend it]. Plus, of course, because I had offended so many people with thoughtless comments that it seemed unwise to attend. Have only apologised personally to a couple of people, but again I apologise unreservedly to anyone to whom I caused offense.

Here's a phote of a contrite moi post-trowelette [Passion & Fury had of course swanned off to the Bricklayer's Arms by then with her Instamatic]. Sincere thanks to everyone, and please know I am genuinely touched [in both senses of the word] and grateful to you all. Thanks too to Passion & the Fury, for coming all that way, after having been on her knees scrubbing dubious stains from the carpet until 1 am after the paartaaay, and having a terrible time trying to persuade reluctant cab-drivers to take tired & emotional attendees home, when they couldn't even remember where home was ['I don't care if they are librarians, love, I'm telling you I wouldn't take Her Majesty herself to Buckingham Palace in that state'].

And now I've GOT to go. Strip Bingo, with a possible prize of a bottle of Malibu, and then the Gay Gordons at Darby and Joan. Six Joans to every Darby, so there's always a bit of an unseemly scrum.

"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:

Time, or the lack of it...

Ah, yes, LibraryThing. Getting in a bit of a panic, Thursday evening, the 'Crossroads' 140-DVD megaset still only 25% watched ... and no homework done. Beginning to wish I was flippin' Tithonus, ergo must be going mad. Quickly added a few of the vast Crail collection of homemaking manuals to LibraryThing [after the embarrassing discovery YET AGAIN that there was a pre-existing account, dormant and erased from memory], then hit a hiatus. Where in the Library [spoken a la Celia Johnson in 'Brief Encounter'] have the Fanny Cradock masterpieces gone? ... Then gave up.

Workwise, anything remotely related to cataloguing starts an attack of the guilts, as well as an agitated grab for the gin. Having to assign shelf locations to books I don't even have in front of me, Victorian and Edwardian books with helpful titles like 'My country garden' and 'Waftings of a wanderer', and LibraryThing is usually lined up on the tabs along with Google books, OpenLibrary [which I like playing with to see which phrase it comes up with when it hasn't got details of a book - Good grief? Shucky darn? Cor blimey?], Botanicus, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Internet Archive, the cataloguing resorts of the desperate. Using LibraryThing for books that few individuals or libraries still own [but probably lots of thrift stores and Oxfam Shops do ... and the Plant Sciences Library at Cambridge] has made me think more than once 'I really ought to add some of the stuff we have here to this. There must be bibliophiles out there who really do want to know about 'Daffodils I have loved''. That isn't a joke, more a pathetic attempt not to face up to the knowledge that the Plant Sciences Library could make a useful contribution to LibraryThing. But GAWD, we are talking Augean Stables. Where's Rumplestiltskin when you need him? Oops, wrong story. But there's no point in doing this on a professional level unless it's done properly. And once again I'm a bit concerned about all these little ... deposits ... I'm excreting on the web.

On a personal level, LibraryThing is a lovely resource, a wonderful community for proper bibliophiles, people who actually make it to book clubs every week and bring lemon drizzle cake and home-made gooseberry wine with them. LibraryThing has that sort of, I don't know, warm feeling about it. Just the sort of thing a mentally-anal but physically-middenlike person like me would enjoy doing and benefit from. And let's face it, you cannot get much more anal than a field for entering start and end reading dates. It's comforting to know that however schlocky the paperback owned, there appear to be hundreds of other people out there who not only own it, but have earnestly reviewed it. If I had plenty of time I would have enormous fun participating. But who on earth has? [Helpful comments about time speeding up as one gets older not required, thank you] Dare to allow oneself a breather from catching up with others' blogs [abandoned for a couple of days not because it is a chore, but because thought is required, and more avenues are opened up by all those clever people who do the tasks properly] and Google reader admonishes sternly that 'more than 180 items' are available for contemplation. Dash to the Hommage a Huysmans minibar. Hmmm, Wincarnis or Sanatogen?

Anyway, excuses over, got to gird up the loins [and we'll be needing something with reinforced whatebone or possibly steel plates] for next week's can of worms, Facebook, and the cherry bomb Phil Bradley has dropped http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2010/06/google-facebook-faceoff.html Sometimes that boy needs his legs smacked.

Euphemia Dorcas Crail Upper IV H : Half Term Report

Somewhat surprisingly, Crail has worked moderately hard these last few weeks, with varying degrees of success. Crail has responded reasonably well to being prompted to explore things she should have explored of her own volition. She has found the detailed instructions given in the classroom most conducive to her own somewhat sheep-like learning style.
Google Calendar telling her nicely by e-mail that she has the day off etc, and the realisation that she could have the same, tabbed, iGoogle home page [instead of the previous three different ones on different computers] has helped her time management considerably, although e-mails reminding her of PE classes have unfortunately not elicited any response.
She has enjoyed blogging but needs to be more concise and less irascible in her comments. She has found the blogs of other pupils most useful and entertaining, and has populated her Delicious account with numerous leads to be followed up next half term.
She appears to have found the tagging exercise helpful, but has still to learn the discipline and self-control of cataloguing as a necessary component of her education.
She spent far too much time on non-productive activities on Flickr, and has yet to submit her report on Slideshare.
She unfortunately failed miserably on the Twitter assignment, and must complete her detention for failing to come up to expectations on this before the term finishes. The detention task is to tweet 100 times in 100 ways 'I love Twitter really & I am just about to go to bed after a nice cup of tasty and very reasonably priced Tanqueray gin Good night everybody' [140 characters nota bene].
She is still working on her term project - dropping RSS feeds of blogs into web pages, which she has found more difficult than she expected. She needs to persevere and apply herself to this more diligently, and refrain from calling computers names entirely inappropriate for the learning environment.
Crail has pledged to work harder in the next few weeks, but sadly we have heard that promise on numerous previous occasions.
General comment: Could try [a bloody sight] harder.
Mildred Pierce, Form Mistress
St Vitus' Academy [Motto: Apropos Nullae, Carpe Ginevram]

Marks so far:
iGoogle, Google calendar: A
Delicious: A
RSS feeds: A-
Blogging: A-
Flickr: B
Doodle: B
Tagging: B
Slideshare: C
Twitter: Fail
PE: Crail has not attended a single lesson this term and therefore has no mark

The Systematic Randomisation of Chaos

Ah, that's a much nicer title than the slight shuffle that would more aptly describe the discussions around Thing 8 - The Randomised Systematisation of Chaos.

Thanks for providing a couple of though-provoking reads for this task. Reading the outlines and quotes from Andrew Keen's book had me agreeing with almost every point made, but we just have to accept that we can all be contributors now. Trouble is, as he has said and Miss Crail has demonstrated, a lot of us like the sound of our own voices, and we're no longer just singing in the shower. Perhaps at some time in the future there will be a way to polarise the valuable and the permanent from the ephemeral. And anyway, in 50 years time there will be social history PhD students wading through all the blogs about towel folding, the photos of wannabe Bizarre Vixens, the unintelligible tweets, and making something serious out of it. Now, would the cultural landscape have changed '..and not for the better' without the intoxicating possibilities of the internet? More people watch 'Britain's got talent' than 'Panorama'.

But he does reinforce an argument made by a lot of us when talking to students - about Google pushing forward the popular and not the most useful. One hopes the polarisation that sort-of currently exists can be maintained : Wikipedia if we want to know where the heck the Christmas Islands are, and something else more appropriate for serious information-gathering. Perhaps we, er, information professionals, should stop being snobbish about it?

Anyway, then we get to tagging, looking at our posts and maybe adding more. I've begun the task, but there's a nagging voice saying 'Yes, there's a bit about that, but should it really retrieve on a search?' It might all get a bit Penelope, a bit anal. Miss Crail might have sat through hours of this at library school, but it's still hard to do it well. It's maybe the worst bit of that already I'll-do-that-tomorrow task, cataloguing [said in downward intonation]. There are books sitting on the groaning cataloguing-pending shelf, awaiting some kind soul in the RLUK system to produce a record Miss Crail can nick, but at some point the realisation comes that no-one else is going to buy 'The epidynamics of the phyloevolution of metagenobolocomics' [£180 for 200 pages...HOW much?!] and the bullet is going to have to be bitten. What is the parent subject? What are the issues? What the heck is this book about? In what circumstances does this nugget of useful information need to be retrieved? 'Give me the thesaurus' we beg in vain. Ah, sod it, we type 'genetics' in line 650, and reward ourselves with a cup of tea and a Park Drive, a cloud of guilt forming with the smoke, in the knowledge that somewhere out there, there might be a person who would benefit from Chapter 3. 'The epistemology of normative values within systemization' [A grateful nod to Write your own academic sentence = Great resource!] Oh the burdens of librarianship, never mind the Passion and the Fury of it all!

OK, so good tagging for appropriate retrieval requires maybe just as much thinking as serious cataloguing. Not happy about that realisation.

Wouldn't it be interesting to get different people, 16-year-old Jordanfan, 16-year-old geek, man-on-the-bus, primary school teacher, 2nd-year university student, locked-in-a-back-room-for-16-years cataloguer, &c, to see how they tag the same piece? They might not have a single tag in common, but they are tagging for their own audience, so isn't that good....?

All this means Miss Crail has had a HELL of a time attempting to enhance the tags of previous blogs. The more you think about this, the harder it gets. Seriously - this is AWFUL, and the only way I can cope with these deep dilemmas is ... to be silly.



'Christina! Bring me the axe!'

Thingy 5

Yes, well, Doodle is easy! Suspiciously so. But, nice, we like the immediate traffic-light visual clarity of the replies [So clever to have ice cream colours, which dear Gok Wan has told us are sooooo this season]. And anyway, we cannot cope with too many complications or enhancements. Some of us like to use technology up to the level of expediency and not beyond. Heavens! We have enough to cope with already.

Unfortunately Miss Crail does not attend an awful lot of meetings [thank god] and certainly doesn't need to schedule them. But we are loving the clever ways others are using the tool, who is left-handed, who is old [well, that one was naughty], and as to scheduling a date with the wife - inspired.

Now, tell me, is it considered pretentious to use Doodle to schedule lunch with mates, or even one's tea break?

Ah, Joan - all we want to be...........