Nanny dearest

Facebook, oh god, where do I start? Or, more appropriately - Don't start me! Well, I am going to start, from a negative point of view, and hope that by the end of the week I've had the Damascene moment....
Set up personal and [2] library pages about a year ago, after it was clear from the User ed@Cambridge meeting that we libraries really should have a presence. Fine, bunged a few bits and bobs on, left it, with vague intentions of creating a fabulous page ... eventually [Yes, yes, I do know that's not the right attitude].
To one's complete astonishment, these totally naff pages attracted friends and fans. Now, there were some jolly nice young Turkish [guessing by the names] gentlemen who expressed admiration, and we've had some lovely absolutely-library-related activities in the Crail Memorial Library Moshpit [see photo] but ....what the heck got these complete strangers to these pages, let alone bother to say they liked them ????

Because of Facebook's perhaps necessary nannyish attitude, it is very fiddly finding things, adding things, generally keeping a handle. There's a Facebook Group for past Genetics Department members, in preparation for some upcoming celebrations. Reasonable function, right? But of course a lot of non-department members have added themselves to the Group, which makes invitations etc difficult, and not the one-click option Facebook claims. A Group would seem to be a good place to add photos of past events - again, good idea, right? Well, no, because in a Group you cannot organise them in folders [yes, this is true - there's even a petition on Facebook 'Implement photo albums in Groups' which they ignore] which as you can imagine soon makes a hell of a mess. Moreover, photos I haven't taken are represented as mine.
Nanny Facebook won't even let you add favourite books it doesn't like the look of or is too stupid to recognise. I didn't think saying I was reading 'War and Peace' in Russian was unacceptable - even if untrue - but Facebook did. Well, that's lost me a lot of potential friends, now. It let me say I liked 'procrastinating', but not 'dissembling'. Didn't spot the other lies, though, did it, huh? More seriously, why can't I be innocently silly, when Faceboook vigorously defends the right of 1,320 people to avow 'Raoul Moat is a Legend'? Furthermore, Facebook doesn't prevent me seeing splashed on my home page, without even seeking it out, what 17-year old Crail Minor and her friends are up to, in stuff-of-nightmares detail [...and I do mean detail].
And would someone perLEASE enlighten me as to what Phil Bradley is on about when he claims Facebook is an efficient and trustworthy tailored-information provider? Why is Facebook's weasling around in personal activities and preferences more acceptable than Google doing it? The thing that really puts me off Facebook [and Twitter], is the muscling-in on what was a perfectly acceptable social medium by business and other interests, on which another rant later.

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

Slideshare - The jury's out [...in fact they've run away]

Still forcing myself to try to sit on the fence about Slideshare and not jump off on the wrong side. This post has been festering as a much-rejigged draft for many days, because I feel like I'm swimming against the tide and just being old-womanish, same as with Twitter. I'm trying to like the actuality [as opposed to the altruistic idea] ... but I don't. One problem is that queasy feeling engendered by burglarizing other people's stuff. Huge fun though Flickr is, I feel uncomfortable about using images from it, CC or not [somehow Google Images feels a bit less like theft, maybe because of the type of images I'm after: Joan, Joan and more Joan]. But the discomfort racks up considerably with Slideshare, because whereas a photographer might conceivably have just pointed and clicked, that certainly ain't the case with a Ppt presentation. To knock up a decent one requires considerable reflection.
Rummaging around, it isn't difficult to find useful resources. For example:

• an exhaustive [over 200 slides!] comparison of RSS aggregators at http://www.slideshare.net/travelinlibrarian/integrating-rss-into-your-web-site
  
• a fuller explanation of Mendeley than you get from the program producers themselves, at http://www.slideshare.net/umhealthscienceslibraries/mendeley-presentation-061809


• Andy Priestner's Beyond Google http://www.slideshare.net/priestcam/beyond-google-premium-resources-for-your-research-presentation is one great way of engaging students' interests
  
• ... ad infinitum really - anything you want to know the basics of, eg Second Life in libraries - http://www.slideshare.net/sirexkat/flying-librarians-of-oz-whats-all-the-fuss-about-second-life-and-whats-it-got-to-do-with-libraries
  

[None of these actually embedded for reasons implied above]

But then the more I poked about in Slideshare the more ratty I got, as it seems to be populated with a lot of marketing tools [and there will no doubt be a Crail rant about social media being invaded by marketing mavens at some point], and some very odd material whose purpose is completely opaque, vanity publishing probably. Looking at teaching materials, it isn't hard to spot scans from books, and probably-not-technically-legal images, so it starts to get a bit ill-advised. Some people seem to have got completely carried away and uploaded things that clearly aren't presentations, eg research papers, so it all starts to look unfocused and rag-baggy. It is tempting to include some jaw-dropping examples of this side of the coin, but I'd like to celebrate my 30th birthday [again].
Perhaps I'll just remind everyone of General McChrystal's 'When we understand the Powerpoint , we'll have won the war' joke instead - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html
So, we're being invited to plunder these offerings without being clear on their integrity. It's a bit like 'Teach yourself via Google' without applying proper evaluation. In fact probably worse. Of course, most people wouldn't dream of operating that way - but Slideshare is encouraging people to do so. Aidan advises caution on this score too in his blog. And the NY Times article does make some pertinent points about the way Powerpoint forces us to 'bulletize' [oh dear] information - could be a good thing, could be bad.
It's hard understanding why the creator of a presentation would put it on a public-access aggregator instead of their own institution's resource [oh, wait, I do know, it's one of the tenets of Web 2.0], where it could still be free-access, but tied to the 'brand' or, as Revelation 23 puts it, where it was born. I would be uncomfortable about even recommending something clearly created by someone else, let alone dropping it into a website - by the most generous interpretation, it looks lazy. I agree with Librarianintraining that having something available for those who don't like, or cannot attend face to face training would be useful - though again at the place of birth, not on Slideshare. Aside from all that, I don't tend to use Powerpoint, marvellous program though it is, at least in the library context. It's great as an aide memoire, but less so as a teaching tool [old-maidism again, since that's what students ask for].
So, much as I admire the altruism of people who put their resources up there, and the energy and commitment of people like Phil Bradley to educate us on so many platforms, Slideshare as a resource in toto has an unfortunate whiff of unwholesomeness and untrustworthiness about it. Start digging, and there's a need to get out the hand sanitiser and the odor neutraliser. And possibly the Shake'n'vac - do they still make that?

Mmmm, Delicious ... Now where was I?

[Image : Encore perdue: Hommage a Brassai, par Fifi Derangee]

Ah, yes, have to confess to using Delicious for some time now for somewhat unorthodox reasons. It is absolutely invaluable for those awful moments in user ed when, having gone off at a bit of a tangent, the path has completely disappeared [no, one doesn't use Powerpoint, but that's another blog...]; or one has got so impatient with the browser that one has clicked several too many times and frozen the whole lot; or one has carefully set up a lot of tabs, only to hit 'close all' by mistake [gin, alas, does blur the vision occasionally]. Bit of covering banter, invitation to partake of more biscuits, and no-one will be any the wiser. It's simple, it's portable, thus ideal for those of us continually on the tramp.

Even better, Delicious is also useful as a parking lot for all those 'must have a look at that ... eventually' things. Thanks to Cam23 there are now lots of extra pages of links with that useful tag 'to-do' and a helpful note telling me why I need to look at it. NOT like the teetering 'pending' pile on the [real] desk which eventually falls over and can then justifiably be moved to the floor permanently temporarily [housemaid's knee]. Seriously, Delicious has proved perfect on this occasion, because so many blogs have contained or pointed to useful stuff that needs to be returned to and thought about a bit more later. Can't do it ALL now. And can't remember ANYTHING these days.

And I'm certainly intending to use Delicious to flag up to students some of the things they might profitably consider for searching and for organising ... just as long as it could be completely separate from all those embarrassing 'to-do' items....

Because Connotea is used for some courses for access to reading material, have tried that too, and feel obliged to recommend it to students as an alternative, but Delicious is easier to use. And we luuurve easy. Besides, 'Delicious' has that whiff of Soho - if not Meard Street, then Old Compton Street [could be a patisserie, could be an upmarket sex shop] whereas Connotea - well, it just doesn't send you off into a reverie, does it? [If it does, do let me know]

Flickr as archive : The drug's don't work

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.

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