Yes, this is where it all fell apart, and the fey skipping about had to stop.
It just so happens than an Important Personage had asked Miss Crail to kindly place some photos in an album, in Facebook. Some time this year would be nice. Sounds easy, sounds logical, but it turned out not to be, for a silly technical reason, and it's to do with the personal/professional split. Right, bit of an experiment - Flickr and Facebook, compare and contrast. No, Flickr cannot do exactly what is needed either, also related to the personal/professional split.
Thus yesterday was Meltdown Wednesday and not just for the heat and the football. Unhappily, toys-out-of-the-pram time coincided with some very young French interns hanging around in the library waiting for Pack Leader to show. Never mind, even if they are too afraid ever to set foot in a library in England for the rest of their lives, they will have learned some useful vocabulary. Sad to confess, Miss Crail scuttled past bleating 'Sorry! Sorry!' when she should have declaimed magnificently 'Ha! So you were wrong about the English and their bloody sang froid!'
Back to the point - sort of - Tried the help pages, the web in general, and even rushed out to the Public Library and come staggering back under a toweing pile of 'Facebook for Dummies' 'How to do everything with Facebook' et al. [Questions: How come, since these books are called 'How to do everything....' there are so many of them? And where's the chapter on 'Household chores'?] I can hear it - 'Books!!? Oh for goodness sake!'
Yes, it was time to call upon ... why didn't I think of it before? ... A Real Person!
Now, this could have been done on Twitter, but imagine all the football ... excrescences ... that would have to be ploughed through for anyone to find the question, and me to find the answer. So - the old ones are sometimes the best - a plea on ucam-lib-discuss, which the Twitterati would probably dismiss as down there with Wells Fargo. Within 10 minutes several lovely helpful people had replied, and none of that exhausting sifting and translating business. 140 characters would have been a bit of a challenge too. Sincere thanks are due to all of them, even though none could solve the problem, because what was asked to be done - can't! But those people certainly made Miss Crail feel a lot less stupid.
Thursday, 24 June 2010
Flickr as resource : Walking on sunshine
[Image: Fifi Derangee] Flickr is a playground where you can run amok for days, poking and prying, getting lost, having a whale of a time. Sat entranced by the National Library of Scotland photos - what a marvellous idea to have put them on Flickr, not necessarily the obvious first choice of location for a serious research resource.
And teeny bit naughty though Idlethink may have been, what a magnificent, beautiful, seductive set of photes Bookporn is. Doesn't it prove that, despite airy waves of the hand and declarations of 'Oh it's all on the web these days' there are still people out there who love books, and bookshops, dusty old ones too. Even more shock horror, there are people who appear to love libraries. Isn't that a happy thought?
And come ON, have we ever seen that grim dark UL corridor looking so gorgeous? I say fling down the gauntlet, and send Idlethink up to South Wing Floor 6, and let's see it turned into a golden palace.
As an artiste manquee, the concept of having a free exhibition space and possible publicity seems great, but ... allowing other people to effectively nick it...? That takes some getting used to. If it's crap I don't want anyone to see it; and if it's good - it's MINE!! As Uncle Bryn might say, 'Now let me get this straight. You mean I can poke around in your portfolio, and then help myself? Well, the things you can do these days!'
Flickr is almost as good as Disneyland ... And somewhere in there could be the Holy Grail - a colleague you don't much like in very ill-judged swimwear. They could very well feature on Facebook too, but they're harder to dig up, and there it feels like they're watching you watching them. Ah, now, if only I could find something to illustrate THAT
Tuesday, 22 June 2010
Thing 8 part 1: What the....?
Right well this one will be going on to Flickr when I've done a spot of Photoshopping and thought of a more pretentious title. Working title 'Crail Minor's Bedroom as a Metaphor for Information Obesity'. She's going to kill me.
Monday, 21 June 2010
How I learned to stop worrying and embrace Gaga
Here we all are, worrying about how to market our library services. And here we all are, well some of us, fretting about user ed next term ... Problem solved, the answer was right under our noses, thanks to the Passion and the Fury!
Bet some of us were thinking of using 'Librarians do Gaga', hmmmmm? What a brilliant lead in, actually gives us some hooks.
Anyway, people, we can ditch the Twitter, the RSS feeds, the FaceBook pages, it's all redundant. Miss Crail has had a vision.
Knock 'em dead in user ed!
Start the vid, right? Start talking earnestly about how there will be a 2-hour session with a test at the end... Then OFF come the tweeds [I'm thinking Buck's Fizz .... And obviously one must plan to wear clean and moderately supportive underwear], ON goes the white wig, and then ... we start to mime and do the moves.
Imagine their little faces!
Doesn't matter if we're crap, in fact crapper the better. Doesn't matter if we collapse in a drunken heap part way through [and god knows, most of us will need a few gins beforehand] - so much the better! I'm serious.
Kevin Spacey. American Beauty. That perfect line -
'Something tells me you'll remember me this time'
....Oh oh uh-oh-woh, oh oh uh-oh-woh....
[Apologies to those who don't get the Buck's Fizz reference. Eurovision Song Contest, 1981. Britain's finest contribution to that famed pantheon of the Arts. Say no more. And sorry there are no more appropriate pictures. Flickr's not quite apposite here. But probably best you use your imagination anyway.........]
Bet some of us were thinking of using 'Librarians do Gaga', hmmmmm? What a brilliant lead in, actually gives us some hooks.
Anyway, people, we can ditch the Twitter, the RSS feeds, the FaceBook pages, it's all redundant. Miss Crail has had a vision.
Knock 'em dead in user ed!
Start the vid, right? Start talking earnestly about how there will be a 2-hour session with a test at the end... Then OFF come the tweeds [I'm thinking Buck's Fizz .... And obviously one must plan to wear clean and moderately supportive underwear], ON goes the white wig, and then ... we start to mime and do the moves.
Imagine their little faces!
Doesn't matter if we're crap, in fact crapper the better. Doesn't matter if we collapse in a drunken heap part way through [and god knows, most of us will need a few gins beforehand] - so much the better! I'm serious.
Kevin Spacey. American Beauty. That perfect line -
'Something tells me you'll remember me this time'
....Oh oh uh-oh-woh, oh oh uh-oh-woh....
[Apologies to those who don't get the Buck's Fizz reference. Eurovision Song Contest, 1981. Britain's finest contribution to that famed pantheon of the Arts. Say no more. And sorry there are no more appropriate pictures. Flickr's not quite apposite here. But probably best you use your imagination anyway.........]
Saturday, 19 June 2010
Aversion therapy - Or, Thing 7 re-re-re-revisited [again]
Right then, I resolve, spurred on by Aidan's convincing and well-presented reasons why I should embrace Twitter, I'm going to conquer this irrational aversion. He promises no mentions of breakfast et al. Library Wanderer says I'll find 'less rubbish than you think'. And Andy Priestner has already warned me its not just about being off the Cool Wall - my ability to keep up in my job will be compromised. So once again, much in the spirit of 'And now I'm going to clean the toilet', I have a little rummage around in ... I was going to say 'the cess-pit', but I won't.
It is Saturday morning, 9.30 am, and I decide to visit a well-respected much-followed-by-librarians blog, where one might find the serious, meaty stuff. The zeitgeist before it is even zeitgeist, and most definitely not about people who are thinking of maybe going out later to get a newspaper.
What do I find? I was going to post a screen-shot, it was so ... shocking. With the identifying areas blocked out of course. I've genned up on the law of libel in the past ... but that's another story. Word picture instead. 31 tweets in the last 12 hours, all of them ... deposited ... within 3 hours. Three of them relate to possibly useful online resources [in response to other tweets, mind]. The rest are about this person's private life [including bedroom arrangements and that s/he is about to make a cup of tea] ... or football. Well, how was I to know there was a football game on? OK, fair do's, this person is a fan. Irrational but it's a free country. Sort of. Understandable perhaps that s/he is half-watching the game, half furiously tweeting [If England were in a nailbiting final - oh per-LEASE - would they still be doing that?] Of course not everyone will share the same bizarre and frankly almost socially unacceptable personal interests, but there may be a niche audience somewhere. But - does anyone care that s/he is about to have a cup of tea? Didn't dare scroll down in case bowel movements were described. Not even a mother - not even a Jewish mother - would care about the cup of tea. ... Might about the bowel movements though, come to think of it.
So, I did try, and I did go to one of the most respected tweeters. I keep opening the same old wound because I do so want to be one of the cool people, the tweetoscenti, absorbing the gently falling rays of information outside a Shoreditch pub, conducting a clever conversation and tweeting at the same time all about it. I WANT someone to Take me to the River and to Let Twitter into my Life.
Sorry Aidan and Andy, but whilst you separated your reasons for using Twitter as basically (a) professional and (b) personal interests, the recipient of even a moderate and not-too-taxing number of supposedly all-professionally-aligned bunch of tweets has to do a frankly onerous amount of editing. Like wading through Google results, only 1000 times worse, no refining the query. It is making us work. The football, the kitchen, the bedroom, and for all I know the toilet, are there. In my face. In fairness I am forced to mention that the person under fire [sorry, scrutiny] did warn in one tweet that there will be useful tweets in the day and personal ones at night.
And now I'm going to make a cup of tea, gunpowder and mint, brewed for 4 1/2 minutes exactly in a silver teapot, plus one rich tea and two chocolate digestives on a doily, which does make them taste better, and then I'm going to settle down with 'The People's Friend'. Tell you what happens in 'Daisy's new romance' later. Oh, and you probably need to know that there's a definite twinge in my right thumb and I think I might be getting a cold.
Just one more thing. Cilip tweets? Why would I want tweets about a cleaning product?
It is Saturday morning, 9.30 am, and I decide to visit a well-respected much-followed-by-librarians blog, where one might find the serious, meaty stuff. The zeitgeist before it is even zeitgeist, and most definitely not about people who are thinking of maybe going out later to get a newspaper.
What do I find? I was going to post a screen-shot, it was so ... shocking. With the identifying areas blocked out of course. I've genned up on the law of libel in the past ... but that's another story. Word picture instead. 31 tweets in the last 12 hours, all of them ... deposited ... within 3 hours. Three of them relate to possibly useful online resources [in response to other tweets, mind]. The rest are about this person's private life [including bedroom arrangements and that s/he is about to make a cup of tea] ... or football. Well, how was I to know there was a football game on? OK, fair do's, this person is a fan. Irrational but it's a free country. Sort of. Understandable perhaps that s/he is half-watching the game, half furiously tweeting [If England were in a nailbiting final - oh per-LEASE - would they still be doing that?] Of course not everyone will share the same bizarre and frankly almost socially unacceptable personal interests, but there may be a niche audience somewhere. But - does anyone care that s/he is about to have a cup of tea? Didn't dare scroll down in case bowel movements were described. Not even a mother - not even a Jewish mother - would care about the cup of tea. ... Might about the bowel movements though, come to think of it.
So, I did try, and I did go to one of the most respected tweeters. I keep opening the same old wound because I do so want to be one of the cool people, the tweetoscenti, absorbing the gently falling rays of information outside a Shoreditch pub, conducting a clever conversation and tweeting at the same time all about it. I WANT someone to Take me to the River and to Let Twitter into my Life.
Sorry Aidan and Andy, but whilst you separated your reasons for using Twitter as basically (a) professional and (b) personal interests, the recipient of even a moderate and not-too-taxing number of supposedly all-professionally-aligned bunch of tweets has to do a frankly onerous amount of editing. Like wading through Google results, only 1000 times worse, no refining the query. It is making us work. The football, the kitchen, the bedroom, and for all I know the toilet, are there. In my face. In fairness I am forced to mention that the person under fire [sorry, scrutiny] did warn in one tweet that there will be useful tweets in the day and personal ones at night.
And now I'm going to make a cup of tea, gunpowder and mint, brewed for 4 1/2 minutes exactly in a silver teapot, plus one rich tea and two chocolate digestives on a doily, which does make them taste better, and then I'm going to settle down with 'The People's Friend'. Tell you what happens in 'Daisy's new romance' later. Oh, and you probably need to know that there's a definite twinge in my right thumb and I think I might be getting a cold.
Just one more thing. Cilip tweets? Why would I want tweets about a cleaning product?
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
Gentleman's Third?
Never, ever, think 'Oh I seem to be catching up with things [or Things]'. Because then comes the stern dictat that we must blog about everything, and we mustn't say 'Done that'.
Oh here we go, Crail hasn't done her English homework and is in detention again 'In Henry IV Part II, the linguistic construction of hegemonistic praxis functions as the conceptual frame for the discourse of power. Discuss, with examples. In French.'
Right, haven't blogged about Thing 2. Have done it, because the instructions made it easy. NOW I have to try to construct one myself, unpicking XML, not 'hit this button'. Bit of fun. Watch this space. Well, don't, and don't hold your breath.
Thing 4. What the heck do I say? OF COURSE I've done it or Miss Crail wouldn't be listed up there. And yes, I have read and responded to other blogs, a great and naughty pleasure when thanks to Thing 8, I now have to revise all the subject headings for all 45,019,237 books in the Crail Empire [possibly a slight exaggeration], the sun is actually shining, and the Kings College May Ball looks as if it has DODGEMS. I'd just poured myself a gin and tonic too, from the library art installation 'Hommage a Huysmans', and lit a Passing Cloud.
Other Cam23ers' blogs are fantastic, funny, erudite, thought-provoking, and Sarah's YouTube compilation makes us all look clever. I know some people have complained about the lack of flexibility of the templates, but as someone who has wasted months sweating over the design of webpages, and then resorted to templates in despair, I can only say, that even the least design-savvy of us can knock up something reasonable, so thanks for that.
There, done it, will that do?
Oh here we go, Crail hasn't done her English homework and is in detention again 'In Henry IV Part II, the linguistic construction of hegemonistic praxis functions as the conceptual frame for the discourse of power. Discuss, with examples. In French.'
Right, haven't blogged about Thing 2. Have done it, because the instructions made it easy. NOW I have to try to construct one myself, unpicking XML, not 'hit this button'. Bit of fun. Watch this space. Well, don't, and don't hold your breath.
Thing 4. What the heck do I say? OF COURSE I've done it or Miss Crail wouldn't be listed up there. And yes, I have read and responded to other blogs, a great and naughty pleasure when thanks to Thing 8, I now have to revise all the subject headings for all 45,019,237 books in the Crail Empire [possibly a slight exaggeration], the sun is actually shining, and the Kings College May Ball looks as if it has DODGEMS. I'd just poured myself a gin and tonic too, from the library art installation 'Hommage a Huysmans', and lit a Passing Cloud.
Other Cam23ers' blogs are fantastic, funny, erudite, thought-provoking, and Sarah's YouTube compilation makes us all look clever. I know some people have complained about the lack of flexibility of the templates, but as someone who has wasted months sweating over the design of webpages, and then resorted to templates in despair, I can only say, that even the least design-savvy of us can knock up something reasonable, so thanks for that.
There, done it, will that do?
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!'
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!'
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