Lost Luggage

(Tip before I start - read the BBC article before you read the Clay Shirky essay - it then makes [a bit] more sense)




Lots of food for thought for an avid cataloguer like myself. Clearly the world is changing and the world of cataloguing is changing too. First, we had the move from card catalogues to the OPAC, and the introduction of the extremely useful keyword search option. Personally, I still find being able to use a range of search options from keyword to browsing something very specific (like author) very useful and in fact the more options there are the better really. But in terms of online material and the ability to dispense with standardised categorisation altogether, this is quite an innovation.

I found Shirky's comments useful in describing some of the philosophy behind how we go about classifying the world - both in the past and now. I think for librarians it is a very unsettling thought to think that there are no shelves on the web and indeed no books. I rather think that the librarians which Girl in the Moon sourced for us from 1947 would be horrified by this concept. I have to admit, that my instinct is always to want to classify correctly. The idea of tagging my blog using words which are anything less than 'accurate' does seem to go against something deep within me. As I was reading Shirky talking about the difference between people into movies, film and cinema, I found it difficult to constrain myself from crying out 'but they are the same thing! and surely I would want to find them all together!'


I have to admit that as Shirky's article went on, the more lost I became. I do recognise his overall point that simply imposing a philosophy of arranging the information of yesteryear will not work when it comes to the internet. But I just don't feel qualified to comment on whether tagging is 'better' as a concept than using standardised terms. I have always felt that the more options we have of searching for information the better, as no one system ever seems to be flawless. So for example if tagging is able to provide people with a another complimentary approach to searching an OPAC, this can only be good. The Ann Arbor District Library example is certainly incorporating user tags, but only alongside the 'traditional' system.


There are simply some things I don't understand, so I'm going to end with some questions. If anyone out there would like to answer any of them for me, I would love to read your comments.


1) How does a Google search actually work? How does it retrieve webpages of interest?


2) If tagging is an effective way of retrieving information, is this simply down to the sheer volume of information and web pages on the internet and the likelihood that somebody somewhere will use the same language as me? What if people become a little too individual?


3) What about the person who wants to find information on movies but searches under cinema? How does a tagging approach help them?


4) Have I just seriously lost the plot?

Shameless Publicity

I thought with all this blogging going on, it was about time I drew people's attention to the lovely Tyndale New Books Blog which has been up and running for the past few months. Most librarians I meet in Cambridge do not know very much about Tyndale House Library, so if you are interested in the scholarly world of biblical studies and want to keep up to date with our new acquisitions, then this is the place to look (updated every month). Or else simply check out the general website.

Twitter in more than 140 characters #cam23

Initial thoughts...

I've been trying to give Twitter a chance, but the love affair has been slow to get off the ground. I've made an initial post, chosen a few people to follow and this morning I am trying to review it all. I added Twitter to my iGoogle page to begin with which was really useful because it showed me th

at I can actually isolate all the replies to my post. I have subsequently realised that I can do the same on the full version but is called @UlverstonBoy (my Twitter name), not 'replies', which isn't quite so obvious but I now see the logic!

Verdict...

I've been using Twitter for a little while now, but have failed to really get into it. What can I say? I don't like the overall look - for a concept which sells itself on its pure simplicity, I don't find it all that simple to use. I have ended up following several tweeters, but it seems to only ever be a few who actually write anything giving the distinct feel of an inbox which has overload

on junk. I find the word limit of 140 characters ends up producing statements which are never as useful as they could be and which are hard to read because they are predominantly made up of urls, people's bizarre Twitter identities and other random letters, especially when something is a 'retweet'. So the overall experience is not very pleasing. I also find that the sheer volume of Twitter conversations going on, is a little too much to follow - unless I were to spend 24 hours out of my day monitoring them. I admit that I've found some posts useful in terms of directing me to articles and interesting discussions, but there must be so many more which I have missed (due to a lack of time) giving an overall unbalanced feel to my use.

Still, I can't help thinking that there must be more to it than I have been able to discover in a short space of time. Can so many twitterers really be wrong? I am glad that I have dipped my toe in the water, but not exactly dying to come back, throw my clothes off and dive in (at the moment). In terms of libraries, I do see the value of being involved, because clearly people out there are involved and are deriving a lot of information from it. I think on the whole library tweets need to be focused, 'less' being definitely better than 'more' - for fear of swamping people with too much trivia.

New Addition To My Lovely Blog

I thought I would just point out that I have added a rather lovely floral feature to my blog (the yellow flowers). This is a picture from my in-laws' garden, taken last summer when playing around with a new camera. Since looking at other people's blogs, I have decided to customise my own and no doubt this won't be the last change I'll make. Well I've got to make it feel like home. For the sake of livening things up a bit, here is another:

Thing 6 - (I've got to come up with something less predictable I know)

Yet again I find another thing which I've brushed with in the past without fully understanding, now makes a whole lot more sense, having investigated it for just a couple of minutes. It's terrible, but I now realise that my work use google calendar to keep a track of everyone's diaries, but I hadn't understood how to sign up. The truth is I've never really kept much of a diary, as I tend to reckon on having a good memory. However, I am recognising more and more that they do have benefits and being linked in with other people's diaries is certainly useful. I guess the busier people are, the more useful the google calendar is. In terms of libraries and their users, the feature could be beneficial, but I think libraries would often want to present their events or news in a much more slimmed down format, such as tweeting or a facebook post.

Thing 5

Having never heard of Doodle, I was intrigued to give it a go. The nearest I've come to this would be emailed invites with various automatic responses such as yes, no, maybe etc. I wasn't too sure what I was creating until the very end, but then the penny dropped and now I can see how doodle might be very useful for arranging events. I've certainly experienced the frustration of trying to get a group together and merely generating a load of confusing emails. Definitely worth discovering.

Thing 4

Right, I now get to compare my blogging efforts with all those other fellow pilgrims on the Cam 23 journey. But who to examine first? Running my eye down the list on the left-hand side of the Cam 23 blog, suddenly makes me realise how eye catching my blog title might need to be if I'm ever going to be read! I immediately see that I could choose to go for the fairly innocuous ---'s 23 Things, or else I could try the rather crytic Girl in the Moon. Intrigued, I plumped for for MysteriousLane - well it had to be worth a try? Having read the blog, I thought it would only be polite to leave a comment. Next, I spy Impressions of a new(ish) librarian and jump in to see whether it is the new(ish) librarian I met at the Cam 23 launch - ok, so no. But the page was a very pretty shade of dusky pink and has made me think about a possible makeover here on Blog of the Year. Checking through several other blogs, I notice Today the Glass is Half Empty. Could this be a pessimistic librarian? I'm greeted by a post about Thing 6 (which shows I have some catching up to do) and a few comments I would not exactly describe as happy. I hope my own ramblings certainly live up to my own blog name.

Anyway, I could go on with my comments, but I'll conclude with some points of application.

1) Reading blogs can certainly be fairly addictive and time consuming, but I think I prefer reading about people I definitely know. Thanks to all of you out there who have been brave enough to reveal your identities - I'm not quite there yet! Strangely, I am reminded of the fact that not too long ago anonymity was quite common among the authors of many a significant work, now highly prized by our libraries today.

2) Being used to facebook, I am wondering how different that is as a concept to blogging. Obviously blog posts tend to be longer, but still it is way of sharing news, commenting on others' posts etc.

3) Most people are a bit further on than me with the 23 things - I am trying to keep up, honest!

Well the World Cup is in full flow, it's England vs USA, so what a perfect opportunity to catch up on my Cam 23 blogging!

Things 1&2

I enjoyed exploring iGoogle, a handy way of organising links to some key internet resources. It took me a little while to delete all the things iGoogle had helpfully put on my page before I got going, but then I was well away adding 'stuff' left right and centre. For some reason it took me ages to decide on the background theme (and in fact as it changes every so often, I do prefer some of the pictures I've had to the Sydney Opera House as it happens) The only problem is that there is only so much you can put on the main home page before it becomes cluttered and unmanageable. Obviously sub-pages such as 'Library stuff' can help to break this down and I've included my Cam23 newsfeed in my 'Library stuff'. I've discovered a few RSS feeds and added them to my iGoogle page, although unfortunately I haven't found a way of adding the English Faculty's one (any suggestions would be welcome!)

I've managed to do my screen shot too, so here is my iGoogle page pictured directly above. I'm working on a Mac, so I had to find my own instructions when capturing this (courtesy of Google). The Cam 23 team might want to bear this in mind for future instructions on the blog.

First Blog Post

Wow. My first ever blog post! I signed up for Cam23 because it sounded like a really good way to catch up on the main recent developments in 2.0 technology and would be a good excuse to play around with some of these features with a certain amount of purpose. Before I started, I had used facebook (a lot - mainly for sharing photos), had got about as far as creating an account on twitter and have used youtube quite a bit (though not to post anything of my own). So finally I get to explore a number of the other things I've heard about, but perhaps never had quite the opportunity to take a closer look at. I enjoyed creating the igoogle page last week and press on with each new thing as it comes (although unbelievably I'm finding it quite hard to actually find an hour each week from my fairly hectic life).