So we've finished the, ahem, 23 things programme and out last task is to take a reflective look back at the programme.
Highlight: getting a few comments on my blog!
Lowlight: at point getting 3 things behind and feeling the book token slipping from my grasp.
Favourite: Although twitter is my favourite of all the technologies as it's like having a big ole archival party going on at my computer every day, the most useful new technology has definitely been making a website with google apps, which I didn't know you could do and will definitely use in the future.
leas favourite: Technorati and Rollyo. They required way too much input for too little output, in my opinion. They didn't integrate with any other sites that I was using and generally seemed a bit detached from the rest of the web and thus not so useful.
I've enjoyed the 23 things programme and it's been good to know that the university considers learning how to use these tools to be part of our job. Certainly I shall keep experimenting with web 2.0 - I've just joined tumblr to try to learn how that works and whether it could work better from archives services than flickr does.
So thank you, and good night!
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Thing #14: Create a podcast (again)
Thing #14 said we had to "create an audio or video file – a 3 to 5 minute introduction to yourself.". I've chosen to use a snippet of an oral history interview that I've conducted in my role here at the University, because I think it's the best introduction I can give to my job.
Firstly, because I speak very little in it and let the interviewee do the talking. This is the hardest thing about doing an oral history interview! It also shows the difference between an archivist and a historian or an archivist and a curator - we let the past speak for itself, be that through living people or through old documents.
Secondly, because it conveys some of the wonderful surprises I have in my job. In oral history interviews you never know what the interviewee is going to say. This interview had been fairly routine for half an hour and then he told me two anecdotes about Rag Week in the 1950s that I wasn't expecting and really add to our knowledge and understanding of the Polytechnic, as well as giving me a good laugh. Similarly a box of papers can look really dull and then turn up some absolute gems. In the last year I've found handwritten letters from Quintin Hogg, photographs of women fencers from the 1920s and correspondence arguing about the cost of typewriters. All of tremendous value to our researchers.
Thirdly, and lastly, because there is no point in having archives if no-one knows they're there. When our website is revamped we hope to include snippets from our oral history interviews online. The collections are already open to the public but we need to show them then riches within them. So this is a technique I hope to be using then so now seemed like a good time to practice it!
This should hopefully take you to the file on my University google docs page: podcast . It's not quite 3 minutes but it is very funny, so I hope that counts.
Firstly, because I speak very little in it and let the interviewee do the talking. This is the hardest thing about doing an oral history interview! It also shows the difference between an archivist and a historian or an archivist and a curator - we let the past speak for itself, be that through living people or through old documents.
Secondly, because it conveys some of the wonderful surprises I have in my job. In oral history interviews you never know what the interviewee is going to say. This interview had been fairly routine for half an hour and then he told me two anecdotes about Rag Week in the 1950s that I wasn't expecting and really add to our knowledge and understanding of the Polytechnic, as well as giving me a good laugh. Similarly a box of papers can look really dull and then turn up some absolute gems. In the last year I've found handwritten letters from Quintin Hogg, photographs of women fencers from the 1920s and correspondence arguing about the cost of typewriters. All of tremendous value to our researchers.
Thirdly, and lastly, because there is no point in having archives if no-one knows they're there. When our website is revamped we hope to include snippets from our oral history interviews online. The collections are already open to the public but we need to show them then riches within them. So this is a technique I hope to be using then so now seemed like a good time to practice it!
This should hopefully take you to the file on my University google docs page: podcast . It's not quite 3 minutes but it is very funny, so I hope that counts.
Thing #15: Social media – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
ah, the easy Thing! As a digital native (I'm a bit too old to fall into the usual definition of this term but as my dad works in IT, I grew up around computers), I'm already on all three of these sites.
The 'Thing' asked us to get started on these sites (too late), learn more about what we can do on them, and consider their usefulness.
Facebook: I use facebook only for connecting with people who are my friends in the real world - and so I only have about 30 friends on there. I might sometimes cross-post amusing links between there and twitter, but generally I keep the two separate. People on twitter don't want to hear about my cat, people on facebook don't want to hear about my job.
Twitter: I've been on twitter pretty much since I started at Westminster, having come from working at a bank where web access was very much locked down. In that time (18 months) I've gained (and kept) 600 followers, which I'm pretty pleased with. The vast majority of these are other archivists, from the UK, Germany and North America. It took me a while to find my voice on twitter but now I use it very much as I would to talk to a colleague in the office - sharing interesting enquiries, tasks I'm doing, amusing items from the archive and professional news. So that it doesn't sound like an archivist robot is tweeting, I do mention things from my personal life, like gigs or theatre performances I'm going to, but try to keep it to a roughly 80/20 professional/personal mix. Twitter has been very useful for keeping me plugged into the professional world and for networking. I attended a conference recently in canada and already knew about half a dozen people there from twitter, and met up with another archivist who lived there but wasn't at the conference. I've had lots of help with german translations I'm doing for the archive, and in return have helped a german archive with translating their webpages into english.
LinkedIn: I'm on LinkedIn, and have been for some time, but haven't really done much with it other than join, and add people I know. I can see that for people with other jobs, such as a consultant or freelancer, it could be a very useful tool but I struggle to apply it in my own line of work. Ultimately I see it as having my CV online but not much more.
So I would say that I think social media is very useful in both a personal and professional capacities, but for me it works best when you keep the two separate, and have a very clear idea of what you're using them for.
The 'Thing' asked us to get started on these sites (too late), learn more about what we can do on them, and consider their usefulness.
Facebook: I use facebook only for connecting with people who are my friends in the real world - and so I only have about 30 friends on there. I might sometimes cross-post amusing links between there and twitter, but generally I keep the two separate. People on twitter don't want to hear about my cat, people on facebook don't want to hear about my job.
Twitter: I've been on twitter pretty much since I started at Westminster, having come from working at a bank where web access was very much locked down. In that time (18 months) I've gained (and kept) 600 followers, which I'm pretty pleased with. The vast majority of these are other archivists, from the UK, Germany and North America. It took me a while to find my voice on twitter but now I use it very much as I would to talk to a colleague in the office - sharing interesting enquiries, tasks I'm doing, amusing items from the archive and professional news. So that it doesn't sound like an archivist robot is tweeting, I do mention things from my personal life, like gigs or theatre performances I'm going to, but try to keep it to a roughly 80/20 professional/personal mix. Twitter has been very useful for keeping me plugged into the professional world and for networking. I attended a conference recently in canada and already knew about half a dozen people there from twitter, and met up with another archivist who lived there but wasn't at the conference. I've had lots of help with german translations I'm doing for the archive, and in return have helped a german archive with translating their webpages into english.
LinkedIn: I'm on LinkedIn, and have been for some time, but haven't really done much with it other than join, and add people I know. I can see that for people with other jobs, such as a consultant or freelancer, it could be a very useful tool but I struggle to apply it in my own line of work. Ultimately I see it as having my CV online but not much more.
So I would say that I think social media is very useful in both a personal and professional capacities, but for me it works best when you keep the two separate, and have a very clear idea of what you're using them for.
Thing #14: Create a podcast
I'm coming back to this one, bear with me while I get the necessary technology sorted.
Monday, August 8, 2011
ICA- SUV conference notes - where have they gone?
If you're looking for my notes from the ICA-SUV conference I attended in Edmonton July 2011, these have now moved to a new blog at http://archivesnotes.blogspot.com/
Monday, June 6, 2011
Thing #13 Create your own website using Google apps
Well, Thing #13 has taken me nearly a month as work has been so frantic but I'm finally on it and ta-da:
https://sites.google.com/a/staff.westminster.ac.uk/anna-s-23-things-site/home
I present my website on the subject of the Polytechnic Chalets in Luzern. The website should be visible publically to anyone who has the link so please let me know if it doesn't work.
As instructed I've created a home page, added two pages below, embedded a video, news and a widget. And all together it took me about half an hour!
Prior to this task, I wasn't awar of the possibility of creating mini websites in Google and I have to say I'm impressed. It reminds me of ye older Geocities websites, but infinitely more user-friendly.
I can definitely see a use for this in a work environment. We have recently been redesigning our web-pages and I mocked it all up in Word to send to the web team. It would have been a lot easier to create a little draft site in google and send them the link to that, and I shall definitely use this for proposed future micro-sites.
It would also be a great way of sharing information and images in a structured, hierarchical way, without clogging up people's inboxes.
So, bigs thumbs up for google sites.
https://sites.google.com/a/staff.westminster.ac.uk/anna-s-23-things-site/home
I present my website on the subject of the Polytechnic Chalets in Luzern. The website should be visible publically to anyone who has the link so please let me know if it doesn't work.
As instructed I've created a home page, added two pages below, embedded a video, news and a widget. And all together it took me about half an hour!
Prior to this task, I wasn't awar of the possibility of creating mini websites in Google and I have to say I'm impressed. It reminds me of ye older Geocities websites, but infinitely more user-friendly.
I can definitely see a use for this in a work environment. We have recently been redesigning our web-pages and I mocked it all up in Word to send to the web team. It would have been a lot easier to create a little draft site in google and send them the link to that, and I shall definitely use this for proposed future micro-sites.
It would also be a great way of sharing information and images in a structured, hierarchical way, without clogging up people's inboxes.
So, bigs thumbs up for google sites.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Thing #12: Online applications
Thing #12 is using Googledocs, which we have access to within the University at present (although whether the changes later with the roll out of Alfresco remains to be seen).
Googledocs is something I have used extensively in my personal professional life because I've moved between organisations relatively frequently, so I upload work I want to take with me (presentations, conference papers, articles I've downloaded, manuals I've written). Many of these I refer back to surprisingly often - a class I taught for the London Consortium became the basis of a talk I gave for ARLIS, ( now being turned into a book chapter) as well as the starting point for a session for Visual Culture students here at Westminster. I might change the archive examples I use within them but the general message usually remains the same.
However I use googledocs seldomly in my day-to-day work here at westminster because we have other document and information sharing within our department (L drive, shared email inbox, as well as all the databases stored on CALM). I mostly use the googledocs for our monthly reports, and then only when my line manager in on holiday and I am doing them in her absence.
The archive did create a RAID log on googledocs associated with our digitisation project, because we were involving IT colleagues in the tendering process. Looking back at this RAID log I realise we completely failed to update it when we completed the tasks involved because it ultimately only affected the two (now three) members of the archive team and well, we knew we'd completed those tasks. We probably should have a been a bit more conscientious about doing this though, as a way of keeping track of our project.
Googledocs is something I have used extensively in my personal professional life because I've moved between organisations relatively frequently, so I upload work I want to take with me (presentations, conference papers, articles I've downloaded, manuals I've written). Many of these I refer back to surprisingly often - a class I taught for the London Consortium became the basis of a talk I gave for ARLIS, ( now being turned into a book chapter) as well as the starting point for a session for Visual Culture students here at Westminster. I might change the archive examples I use within them but the general message usually remains the same.
However I use googledocs seldomly in my day-to-day work here at westminster because we have other document and information sharing within our department (L drive, shared email inbox, as well as all the databases stored on CALM). I mostly use the googledocs for our monthly reports, and then only when my line manager in on holiday and I am doing them in her absence.
The archive did create a RAID log on googledocs associated with our digitisation project, because we were involving IT colleagues in the tendering process. Looking back at this RAID log I realise we completely failed to update it when we completed the tasks involved because it ultimately only affected the two (now three) members of the archive team and well, we knew we'd completed those tasks. We probably should have a been a bit more conscientious about doing this though, as a way of keeping track of our project.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Thing #11: Technorati
So thing #11 is the blog directory Technorati. I started look at this some weeks ago but it took a while to go through their setting up process and so I've only now had a chance to write up my experience with it.
Technorati is another tool that was new to me through the 23 Things programme. It's a directory and search engine for blogs. I wouldn't have known what it was just from looking at the site - there seemed to be very little 'who are we and what do we do' content and rather a lot of advertisements.
First: browsing. Technorati has categories that you can browse through to find relevant blogs but most of these weren't useful to me from a professional perspective. Instead I did a search across blog descriptions for 'archives' and 'archivist'. It brought up a few I was unaware of [such as Alone In The Archives], a few I knew, and a few that sounded like they might have been interesting but no longer existed. Such is the internet.
Interestingly, unless I just couldn't find it, there didn't seem to be a way to 'favourite' or 'like' a blog within Technorati which surprised me as I'm so used to this functionality now in other Web 2.0 applications. It would have been useful to see what blogs had been liked by other bloggers who were interested in the same areas as me (i.e. archives). It also meant there's not a great deal of need to get back to Technorati regularly as once you've found the blogs that interest you, you need to save them to your own internet books/favourites anyway.
Secondly: adding myself to technorati. This proved to be a rather labyrinthine procedure involving posting a code and then having the code verified and so on and so forth. After about a week I got my confirmation though and this blog is now included.
Technorati rates blogs with an authority score from 1-1000. It rated mine as 68 which was the second highest in a search for 'archivist'. The Rating is derived from 'linking behaviour' so presumably because I put a lot of links in my pists usually, I get a high rating. For comparison, Archives Next which I would say is pretty much the centre of the archives world online, certainly for web 2.0, gets 74. That's not to say that I'm great, that's just to say their authority scoring leaves a little something to be desired.
So ultimately: an interesting way to find new blogs but not a tool you'd need to look at very often. But obviously if you came here via Technorati do say hi so I know if it's working [cue deafening silence, no doubt!].
Technorati is another tool that was new to me through the 23 Things programme. It's a directory and search engine for blogs. I wouldn't have known what it was just from looking at the site - there seemed to be very little 'who are we and what do we do' content and rather a lot of advertisements.
First: browsing. Technorati has categories that you can browse through to find relevant blogs but most of these weren't useful to me from a professional perspective. Instead I did a search across blog descriptions for 'archives' and 'archivist'. It brought up a few I was unaware of [such as Alone In The Archives], a few I knew, and a few that sounded like they might have been interesting but no longer existed. Such is the internet.
Interestingly, unless I just couldn't find it, there didn't seem to be a way to 'favourite' or 'like' a blog within Technorati which surprised me as I'm so used to this functionality now in other Web 2.0 applications. It would have been useful to see what blogs had been liked by other bloggers who were interested in the same areas as me (i.e. archives). It also meant there's not a great deal of need to get back to Technorati regularly as once you've found the blogs that interest you, you need to save them to your own internet books/favourites anyway.
Secondly: adding myself to technorati. This proved to be a rather labyrinthine procedure involving posting a code and then having the code verified and so on and so forth. After about a week I got my confirmation though and this blog is now included.
Technorati rates blogs with an authority score from 1-1000. It rated mine as 68 which was the second highest in a search for 'archivist'. The Rating is derived from 'linking behaviour' so presumably because I put a lot of links in my pists usually, I get a high rating. For comparison, Archives Next which I would say is pretty much the centre of the archives world online, certainly for web 2.0, gets 74. That's not to say that I'm great, that's just to say their authority scoring leaves a little something to be desired.
So ultimately: an interesting way to find new blogs but not a tool you'd need to look at very often. But obviously if you came here via Technorati do say hi so I know if it's working [cue deafening silence, no doubt!].
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Thing #10: Tagging and Folksonomies
So Thing #10 takes us to delicious. I was a little surprised as I thought it had been announced that delicious was being withdrawn last year. Well, I was correct in as much as this had been wodiely reported, but it turned out yahoo were selling the service, not shutting it down. So that's ok. Onwards we go...
I used delicious before, when it has lots of punctuation in its name, as one of my first forays in web 2.0. However I have forgotten which email account I used and so find I have to sign up afresh. I am an obsessive bookmarker, and haul the same set of bookmarks around from computer to computer, always backing up the export file at least once a month, so you'd think something like this would be ideal for me.
I start by uploading said html export file, which it does very easily. And then it says it's had an error and can't display my bookmarks. And then it finds them again. the panic I feel, even knowing they're safely stored on my PC anyway, reminds me that this isn't a service I can use as a back-up, because I have no control over it.
I also discover that I've somehow set all my bookmarks to private on uploading them. Luckily I manage to use the bulk edit funcation to change this, 100 at a time.
The challenge instructs us to contribute some links and tags of our own to delicious. As I am an archivist, all my bookmarks were stored in a hierarchical folder structure anyway, and the names of these folders have appeared as tags against the relevant bookmarks. They're not very revealing though ('sewing' 'cats' 'new york' etc). For the sake of this task, I concentrate on the bookmarks in my archives folder. I instantly struggle with making two word tags (flickr uses quotation marks, delicious seems to use underscores). Some of the links I have to look up to find out what interested me on the page (such as this from the Times Higher Ee, which turns out to be regarding the National Fairground Archive).
Archival theory insists on each item being assigned one place in the hierarchy so tagging starts to feel almost anarchistic to me. For example, I have the International Jazz and Popular Music Archives in Eisenach in the category of Archives in my bookmarks. I also have separate folders for Jazz and German and Germany, which cover respectively - albums I might like to buy, german language resources and travel information. To contribute effectively to delicious, this link needs to be tagged with all of those, but it will actually confuse my own use of the links if I tag it as, says, german, and it then pops up when I'm searching my links to help with my homework. Yes it is to do with all those things, but not for me.
One way of recreating myinsane mildly obsessive folder structure within delicious would be to use the bundle feature. This allows me to take groups of tags and make them into 'bundle' with a new name. Effectively, ensuring that all links that are now or ever will be tagged with those words would appear in the über-tag/bundle. I can certainly see the benefits of this in adding future links, although all my imported links already have the folder names in their tags so they don't need it.
The other element of delicious that was highlighted under Thing #10 was its social aspect i.e. seeing who else has bookmarked what you have bookmarked, and then looking through their links. It was this side of delicious that I explored before after attending a workshop on web 2.0 as it enables you to see who has bookmarked your site and how they have tagged it. (Disappointingly, no-one on delicious has bookmarked the University of Westminster Archives homepage). I looked at some of the people who had tagged some of the same professional websites as me though, and then followed through some of their links tagged 'archives' and it certainly is a useful resource in terms of finding new blogs and articles to read. Oh for more time to do so!
Verdict on delicious then: doesn't arrange my bookmarks the way I would like them, but useful for exploring other people's links.
Bookmark this on Delicious
I used delicious before, when it has lots of punctuation in its name, as one of my first forays in web 2.0. However I have forgotten which email account I used and so find I have to sign up afresh. I am an obsessive bookmarker, and haul the same set of bookmarks around from computer to computer, always backing up the export file at least once a month, so you'd think something like this would be ideal for me.
I start by uploading said html export file, which it does very easily. And then it says it's had an error and can't display my bookmarks. And then it finds them again. the panic I feel, even knowing they're safely stored on my PC anyway, reminds me that this isn't a service I can use as a back-up, because I have no control over it.
I also discover that I've somehow set all my bookmarks to private on uploading them. Luckily I manage to use the bulk edit funcation to change this, 100 at a time.
The challenge instructs us to contribute some links and tags of our own to delicious. As I am an archivist, all my bookmarks were stored in a hierarchical folder structure anyway, and the names of these folders have appeared as tags against the relevant bookmarks. They're not very revealing though ('sewing' 'cats' 'new york' etc). For the sake of this task, I concentrate on the bookmarks in my archives folder. I instantly struggle with making two word tags (flickr uses quotation marks, delicious seems to use underscores). Some of the links I have to look up to find out what interested me on the page (such as this from the Times Higher Ee, which turns out to be regarding the National Fairground Archive).
Archival theory insists on each item being assigned one place in the hierarchy so tagging starts to feel almost anarchistic to me. For example, I have the International Jazz and Popular Music Archives in Eisenach in the category of Archives in my bookmarks. I also have separate folders for Jazz and German and Germany, which cover respectively - albums I might like to buy, german language resources and travel information. To contribute effectively to delicious, this link needs to be tagged with all of those, but it will actually confuse my own use of the links if I tag it as, says, german, and it then pops up when I'm searching my links to help with my homework. Yes it is to do with all those things, but not for me.
One way of recreating my
The other element of delicious that was highlighted under Thing #10 was its social aspect i.e. seeing who else has bookmarked what you have bookmarked, and then looking through their links. It was this side of delicious that I explored before after attending a workshop on web 2.0 as it enables you to see who has bookmarked your site and how they have tagged it. (Disappointingly, no-one on delicious has bookmarked the University of Westminster Archives homepage). I looked at some of the people who had tagged some of the same professional websites as me though, and then followed through some of their links tagged 'archives' and it certainly is a useful resource in terms of finding new blogs and articles to read. Oh for more time to do so!
Verdict on delicious then: doesn't arrange my bookmarks the way I would like them, but useful for exploring other people's links.
Bookmark this on Delicious
Monday, February 21, 2011
Thing #9: Rollyo
So task number 9 is to create our own search engine using a tool that is new to me, Rollyo. Using this tool, you can choose a list of websites you want to search across and save them for you and anyone to use (if you choose the public option).
I chose to create a list of archival blogs that I could search across, if I had a professional query. The search can be found here: http://rollyo.com/annamcnally/archival/
I found creating the search initially quite easy, although when it came to saving it, I initially thought the website had wiped it and taken me back to the first page. It was only after I tried to do it again that I realised it had saved it the first time!
I've also struggled with working out how to put it into my blog as a widget, as some of the other 23 Things participants seem to have managed to! But it is Monday...
Overall then: I can certainly see ways in which this might be a useful tool, if I remember to use it. For example, a quick search on 'twitter' using my search engine brought up a variety of interesting blog posts on how archives and museums are using it.
I chose to create a list of archival blogs that I could search across, if I had a professional query. The search can be found here: http://rollyo.com/annamcnally/archival/
I found creating the search initially quite easy, although when it came to saving it, I initially thought the website had wiped it and taken me back to the first page. It was only after I tried to do it again that I realised it had saved it the first time!
I've also struggled with working out how to put it into my blog as a widget, as some of the other 23 Things participants seem to have managed to! But it is Monday...
Overall then: I can certainly see ways in which this might be a useful tool, if I remember to use it. For example, a quick search on 'twitter' using my search engine brought up a variety of interesting blog posts on how archives and museums are using it.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Thing #8 LibraryThing
In an attempt to keep up, I am moving straight on to Thing #8, which is LibraryThing. I signed up for an account this many many years ago and then gave up with it because it was too much like hard work. In the interim I have been using the BookTracker app on facebook, which works well for me. Although there are a vareity of different apps on facebook doing similar things, I chose this one because one of my friends was using it, so it makes it easier for us to compare. For me, the main virtue is keeping track of what books I've read as the vast majority come from Camden Libraries and so I don't have anything tangible afterwards to remind me. I also like publicising when I've finished a book on my profile, as it often leads to conversations with friends about it [full disclosure: most of my friends are librarians/archivists!].
Returning to LibraryThing after some years away, I was struck by how much it looked exactly like it did when I first registered way back. This is obviously the direct opposite of Facebook, where if you blink they've changed your profile for no apparent reason. Obviously I couldn't remember any of my login details so I created a new account and was surprised to discover that this was the *only* website in the whole world that let you do so without registering your email address!
I then needed to import some books. Unfortunately there was no easy way to do this from the records I'd been keeping on booktracker, so in the interest of 23Things, I dutifully copied and pasted the titles of my last 2 years worth of reading in. After eventually working out how to search on amazon.co.uk and amazon.de (there are so many catalogues you can search on via LibraryThing that it's a little overwhelming), I managed to upload 21 books before remembering why I'd given up on this last time.
Looking round on the LibraryThing website, they suggest you buy a barcode scanner to enter your books. This suggests a level of dedication I just don't have to making lists of my books online. I can see how this website might work for some people but for me it duplicates a lot of effort I have made elsewhere with amazon wishlists, the aforementioned Booktracker app etc. I think it would take a lot of book-inputting before the books it recommends me stop being obvious (you've read Roberto Bolano's 2666! Why not read another book by Roberto Bolano?!).
LibraryThing is very much the last.fm of books, and if reading is really your passion then it's worth investing time in. Although the books it recommended me were a bit obvious, there were some interesting looking titles being added by the 50 people whose libraries were most similar to mine. However unlike last.fm there is no easy way of uploading your reading history, without purchasing a scanner (and a train ticket to Canterbury, in my case). If I wanted more book recommendations then I think I would use LibraryThing but as it is I have 300 titles on my amazon wishlist that I have no idea when I'm going to find the time to read.
Verdict: useful website, but not for me.
Returning to LibraryThing after some years away, I was struck by how much it looked exactly like it did when I first registered way back. This is obviously the direct opposite of Facebook, where if you blink they've changed your profile for no apparent reason. Obviously I couldn't remember any of my login details so I created a new account and was surprised to discover that this was the *only* website in the whole world that let you do so without registering your email address!
I then needed to import some books. Unfortunately there was no easy way to do this from the records I'd been keeping on booktracker, so in the interest of 23Things, I dutifully copied and pasted the titles of my last 2 years worth of reading in. After eventually working out how to search on amazon.co.uk and amazon.de (there are so many catalogues you can search on via LibraryThing that it's a little overwhelming), I managed to upload 21 books before remembering why I'd given up on this last time.
Looking round on the LibraryThing website, they suggest you buy a barcode scanner to enter your books. This suggests a level of dedication I just don't have to making lists of my books online. I can see how this website might work for some people but for me it duplicates a lot of effort I have made elsewhere with amazon wishlists, the aforementioned Booktracker app etc. I think it would take a lot of book-inputting before the books it recommends me stop being obvious (you've read Roberto Bolano's 2666! Why not read another book by Roberto Bolano?!).
LibraryThing is very much the last.fm of books, and if reading is really your passion then it's worth investing time in. Although the books it recommended me were a bit obvious, there were some interesting looking titles being added by the 50 people whose libraries were most similar to mine. However unlike last.fm there is no easy way of uploading your reading history, without purchasing a scanner (and a train ticket to Canterbury, in my case). If I wanted more book recommendations then I think I would use LibraryThing but as it is I have 300 titles on my amazon wishlist that I have no idea when I'm going to find the time to read.
Verdict: useful website, but not for me.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Thing #7 Tag Clouds
So here, late as usual, and prompted by the posting of Thing #8, we have an exploration of Wordle.
Wordle makes pictures from words. You can type in words, paste in text or link to a blog and it will create a cloud of words, with the size based on the frequency that you use those words.
The challenge was to think up words that relate to our experience of 23 Things so far. I did this and ended up with a pretty lame wordle:
So instead I used the option to post in the feed for this blog and got:
oooh, much better! I think it's positive how many times I have mentioned students, but also shows that I am clearly obsessed with Flickr to an unhealthy degree.
The most obvious use of Wordle is for Powerpoint presentations, as an opening screen to give audience members an idea of what you're going to be talking about. I can imagine that a year or so down the line everyone and his uncle might be doing that, but for now it still looks quite new and fresh. I have a few presentations coming up and I think I will probably use a Wordle in those, by pasting in my talk notes.
I also tried to use Tagxedo, but got the message that my computer required a more up-to-date version of Silverlight and, as this PC has already died once recently, I didn't think it wise to push it any further.
so, verdict on Wordle - success! I like this one!
Wordle makes pictures from words. You can type in words, paste in text or link to a blog and it will create a cloud of words, with the size based on the frequency that you use those words.
The challenge was to think up words that relate to our experience of 23 Things so far. I did this and ended up with a pretty lame wordle:
So instead I used the option to post in the feed for this blog and got:
oooh, much better! I think it's positive how many times I have mentioned students, but also shows that I am clearly obsessed with Flickr to an unhealthy degree.
The most obvious use of Wordle is for Powerpoint presentations, as an opening screen to give audience members an idea of what you're going to be talking about. I can imagine that a year or so down the line everyone and his uncle might be doing that, but for now it still looks quite new and fresh. I have a few presentations coming up and I think I will probably use a Wordle in those, by pasting in my talk notes.
I also tried to use Tagxedo, but got the message that my computer required a more up-to-date version of Silverlight and, as this PC has already died once recently, I didn't think it wise to push it any further.
so, verdict on Wordle - success! I like this one!
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