Re-Offender

The word wiki always reminds me of that Will Smith song: Wild Wild West. The song is good, but the film is bad.



My experience of wikis is pretty extensive as I’ve used them in practically every job I’ve had, except for my paper round, retail jobs and when I processed cheques for a bank. My typing skills come from that job, but it felt like I was working in a stereotypical movie office with the cubicles, alienation and looking at the back of someone’s head all the time, only without Steve Carell, less people going berserk and no water cooler moments. We even had a David Brent-alike boss, a Mackenzie Crook weirdo and an office romance.

Anyway, each of my workplaces used wikis in different ways. I’m going to have to remember them chronologically, which may also highlight how the use of wikis progressed. When I first left university, I had a temporary job doing data entry at the police station. I managed to make myself indispensable which lead me to become an admin assistant. I helped out in all different departments, had my own paper round and everything. I also got to meet criminals, process stop and search forms, see the things they seize/save in the property office including the armoury, cycle and drugs store, experience the darker side of life and discover that policemen are only human which is actually quite scary, unsurprising and altered the way I looked at life. The wiki was used so we could all access the databases, update the website and share documents. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had; the people, the varied work and the atmosphere of the place was so gratifying. I had real job satisfaction, which I know I'll never have on the same level again. Cambridge 2000

My next position was as a content editor for a hotel reservations company. There was a wiki as part of the website, which included a content editing section and a customer review section. We used the former to publish our hotel descriptions, edit profiles and process change requests, sending the proposed text to each other and to the hotels themselves. The latter we used to translate customer reviews into different languages, alter mistakes, though never changing the score or text of the actual review, and deleting any obscene remarks. I could tell you some stories, not as dramatic as the ones from the police station though, but I'm sworn to secrecy.

Lastly, I was a researcher. Here's where I worked, a lovely location, but not a lovely job:

eddiemcfish

Now we didn’t use a wiki in that place, but we should’ve done as it would’ve made our jobs so much easier. It would’ve meant less work, less misunderstandings and a more efficient system. We received a lot of similar research requests and there wasn’t a search function in place showing what we’d already done; it meant hunting through folders which we often gave up on. There were also several requests from different people for the same project; the lack of communication was soul-destroying. A wiki would not only have meant less emails shooting around the office, but also have made it a more sociable and nicer environment. That’s one of the reasons why I left that place; there was a very intense sense of isolation, even within our small team, let alone the wider office. People even sent each other emails and instant messages, even when they were sitting next to each other. It really got to me and I felt like a deaf mute by the end! Idiotically, I changed jobs at the height of the financial crisis, I don't know how I got away with that; it could've gone horribly wrong.

That leads me to now. In our library, there is a wiki on our website; our internet portal where you can access our eBook library, electronic resources, book sale list, guides and tutorials, as well as lots of other information. The wiki ensures the whole team can update the website, add files and post announcements. The entire Judge Business School uses the platform and each course has its own website and therefore wiki. We are actually changing this platform soon to use Microsoft’s SharePoint software, thanks to a lot of hard work from our superb IT team, which means everything will be integrated, searchable and hopefully lead to better interdepartmental communication within the whole building. That last photo is mine

Flowers in the window

I feel very optimistic today and a Manic Street Preachers song is on my mp3 player, So Why So Sad, how ironic. It came on gradually, but it's built up so much that I now feel like dancing in the rain, going around hugging everyone and grinning so far from ear to ear, that I want to pass it on like Joker from Batman, without the fatal consequences of course. The main reason for my contentment is we've had stress management course today. I feel very relaxed, positive and in control. The Manic Street Preachers may be superb, especially You Stole the Sun from my Heart (I've hunted the song out on my mp3 player as the mere mention of it makes me want to listen to it), but the happiest song that always comes to my mind is Flowers in the Window by Travis. The story behind the writing of it is hilarious if not quite as happy; it features alcohol, drunk band members and a lonely Fran Healy. I'm thinking of it at the moment as I've just been on Youtube, enforced I might add by Cam23:



It may sum up my mood, act as shameless plugging for my favourite band and let me dwell on the 90's (again), but it also describes Youtube, look at the lyrics:

Wow look at you now
Flowers in the window
It's such a lovely day
And I'm glad you feel the same
Cause to stand up, out in the crowd
You are one in a million

Yes the single was actually released in 2003, but I'm trying not to be so pedantic; it's a symptom of stress for one and it's also just really annoying. The song lyrics are ironic when I think about them, because you are only one in a million on Youtube. All these people, all these videos, all these flowers in windows, it's overwhelming, but mostly overwhelmingly positive. These people simply want to connect. Although if you do become infamous because of it, like that poor lightsaber kid, it can be a curse as much as a promotional tool. Youtube is for watercoolers, a way of watching music videos, old comedy sketches and Jackass type antics. It's also a medium for indulging nostalgia, schadenfreude and fetishes. I've always been annoyed you can't download videos off of Youtube, but I've never had a blog I can embed them into before, this is brilliant!

Okay, this is why I don't go on Youtube. I clicked on a few of the Cam23 video links and then spent the next half an hour simply watching the suggestions that appear on the right-hand side. I barely watched the Lady Gaga video, was it intentionally that awful? Whose idea was that? And who thought to put it on Youtube? Americans have no shame. I found myself watching videos of Captain Kirk saying he should've been a librarian, Matthew Broderick singing a terrible librarian song and a Monty Python gorilla librarian sketch. The best one I found was the Cookie Monster in the library video, which someone's posted before. Sorry, I couldn't remember who.



I managed to refrain from delving into a Sesame Street nostalgia trip, somehow, even though I came across videos of my favourite character the Count. I managed to keep from looking up Muppets snippets as well, though I do have the Phenomenon video on my mp3 player.

Youtube may be separate from podcasts, but they are part of the same family; related but on the surface they seem to have totally different parents. Youtube is the equivalent of Bart Simpson, the "do what I feel like" kid: reckless, attention-seeking and brazen. Whereas podcasts are like Lisa Simpson: practical, informative and helpful with occasional moments of childishness. I am not speaking from experience as I have never watched or created a podcast, but I have been associated with them. The film magazines I avidly read advertise them; their writers always make them when they go to awards ceremonies, ComicCon and when they have something important to divulge. Podcasts are part of the Cambridge Film Festival, or they were when I did reviews for it, and I know my community radio station used to do them before they went bust as well. The station is back up and running now though, see. I'm afraid I refuse to use a Mac, iPods or iTunes or any Apple products on principle; I feel the same way about Apple as I do about facebook and Tesco. My views can be read here. There was a great recent episode of Futurama satirising web 2.0, Apple and the iPhone, or the eyephone as they called it:
I will definitely use Google docs, particularly when I do my presentation for TeachMeet. We've used it before at work for distributing timetables. I like the drawing function, but Paint is so much easier to use. I've just remembered, last Christmas, my brother set up a Google doc: a spreadsheet with each of our present lists on it. It was fantastic! We listed the things we wanted, their RRP, website links and everything. Then he added a column that was kept hidden where we put our names against the things that we wanted to get for each other so we didn't end up with two of the same thing. It worked really well and no one cheated and peeked, at least I didn't...

I've been very lax on the Calvin and Hobbes department and it's a particularly good one today.

More than us

I used to hate doing bibliographies when I was at university, mostly because I’m totally disorganised and had to hunt out the books I referenced again as I had inadvertently missed out an important piece of information. My university also deducted points if we didn’t use the correct citation style which I feel is a bit pedantic, but there you go. So I reckon students have it too easy now, using software that not only builds the list of references for you, but also converts it into whichever style you want. I have used Zotero before, but not for a while, and I’d forgotten how much easier it is to use than EndNote, thank goodness! Plus it’s free. I attended the Zotero training session that Andy talks about in his blog post and the student who led it was most convincing. It has a lot of good features including the sharing option which would be fantastic for reading lists. Also, every month our library has a journal club, it’s similar to a book club and we take an hour to discuss an article on an element of librarianship one of us has chosen. It ensures we stay involved in the library profession, get together as a team and keep up-to-date with new events, innovations and information. I’m getting better about speaking up as well now. So Zotero will help us build a library of relevant articles we can dip into. However EndNote is still better if a little more complicated; EndNote Web doesn't have all the features of the complete EndNote. I see it as a companion piece along with Zotero, something you can use when you don't have the full software, like having a snack when you don't have time for a meal. Photo by Matt [the esoteric introvert]

I promised Kirsty that I would write about how libraries can use social networking sites; I deliberately didn’t come to a conclusion in my facebook post as I feel that it is an intensely subjective issue and there will never be a universal opinion. We discussed exactly this issue in our most recent journals club, that’s why I’ve held off writing about it until now. We couldn’t come up with a definitive answer on how to use facebook, but we all agreed that students don’t want to be ’friends’ with their library and they certainly don’t want to be sociable with their librarians. Therefore I’ve chosen it as the web 2.0 tool I’m going to use for marketing. The main reason for this is that I don’t think you can use facebook in any other way. There are one or two exceptions though. I helped a student extensively with a project and he found me on facebook. I accepted his request, just to see what he’s about and found that he’d been up to the same tricks with everyone. Needless to say I quickly deleted him again. It felt as wrong for me as it would for most students. I didn’t want to see his holiday photos, or find out what he got up to at the weekend, nor was I interested in who his other ‘friends’ were. So instead of using it as a social platform, it should be another point of contact, just like the portal to our databases, our Twitter account and the main library page. On our facebook profile there are links to our information resources, photos and our library induction video which we’re excitingly refilming for the new influx of students, but most of our friends are other libraries and colleagues. We now combine our status updates with our tweets using Hootsuite. However the problem is maintenance; ‘stale’ profiles where there hasn’t been much activity for a while are quickly forgotten. It is difficult, as well as time-consuming, to sustain the freshness.
(By me) The only lake in Scotland, Lake of Menteith, Trossachs

More than us was the first Travis track to be played on Eastenders, that’s when they knew they’d made it. It also refers to the world of social networking; the tendency when using facebook is to make it all about yourself, despite the fact that you’re supposed to be socialising with people all over the world. However in the case of marketing, it is surely the whole point.

Driftwood

This is the one I was dreading, the social networking site. I see it as not so much a time-waster, but as a hungry ravager of time, a ruthless agent of procrastination and a depressing symbol of how we now socialise more virtually than we do literally. I am on facebook in spite of myself, and only because I ashamedly gave into peer pressure in the same way I gave in and got a mobile phone, a MySpace page and then a facebook page. Interestingly, Word just recognised MySpace and corrected the capitalisation, but it doesn’t like facebook and wants to separate it into two words... That said there are some nice touches such as setting the language to English (pirate) to make it less boring. If you haven’t done already, try it, it’s awesome; your profile becomes your cap’n’s log, your wall becomes your plank, events become grog fests, news becomes booty and friends become mateys and hearties. There are also some cool ideas such as when you decline someone’s friend request it sends them to the depths, searching is scouring and you don't delete you throw it overboard.

I started on MySpace, and I’m going to regret owning up to this, through a rumour that they were making a sequel/prequel/reimagining of Free Willy (a childhood favourite) with the late great Steve Irwin’s precocious daughter Bindi. I was looking through the forum on IMDb and found out that the star of the original films, Jason James Richter, has a MySpace page as he’s now a bit of a rock star. So wanting to check him out, I signed up. I don’t know what made me do it, but I sent him an email and we have kept up sporadic communication since, bonding over our love of philosophy, the Scottish band Travis and obviously films. Then somehow old school friends found me, which made me build a snazzy profile page and start doing all the quizzes and I was hooked. So when facebook started and everyone abandoned MySpace, I migrated over.

Well that’s my potted history, so onto the future of facebook, and I’m not talking about the film: The Social Network directed by David Fincher of all people and starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield (the new Spider-Man) and Justin Timberlake?! I’m talking about the future of facebook for me. As I said before I find it boring now, at first I searched out people, even doing positive things like confronting my old school bully of 8 years (distinctly unsatisfying as she hasn’t changed and gave me no “closure”), reconnecting with my old best friend of 8 years (wonderful as we put a lot of water under the bridge) and contacting an old crush who I fancied for also 8 years (he’s still as crushable as ever). What is it about that number? I joined groups such as “I judge you when you use poor grammar”, “I will go out of my way to step on a leaf that looks particularly crunchy”, “Firefly is better than Star Wars because sound cannot travel in space”, “Sydney Bristow would dominate Jack Bauer AND Chuck Norris” and old school networks. I also contributed to the “addicted to...” sites and forums set up by fans of my favourite films and TV series such as the much maligned, underappreciated and misapprehended Alias. I posted lots and lots and lots of photos. And then what?

I rarely go on facebook nowadays and I’m looking for an excuse to do so again. That’s why I’ve named this post after one of my favourite Travis songs, as I feel I’ve washed up on the shores of indifference and want to get back out on the open ocean of enthusiasm again. Not sure that metaphor worked, but you get my drift. :-) Plus it fits with the pirate theme I seem to have going on. We already have a library account with 153 “friends” where we post status updates when new books, tutorials and guides are published, as well as important news. I will look into other Cambridge libraries and the like once I’m on the Cambridge network; I was part of my old university network before. Alex Ristea

The one thing I despise about facebook, apart from the way it was created, its creator (loved that Cambridge trounced the Winklevoss twins in the 2010 boat race) and the way it’s become all dominant, pervasive and omnipresent (I don’t like Tesco for the same reasons), is once you’re on facebook, you’re on, there’s no way of deleting your account. It’s scary that facebook users are now so many that they have become akin to the third most populated country in the world. You also get sent emails if you don’t use it for ages or have hardly anything on there; my brother’s experienced this.

As for LinkedIn, one social networking site is enough. I can see if you were thinking of progressing professionally it would be useful, gathering contacts and the such like, it just isn’t for me. Plus I prefer to do that sort of thing in person. I have used the website before, in my previous job as a researcher for an offshoot of EEDA called East of England International; I had to find email addresses for contacts at companies, the marketing director for example, and I went on LinkedIn when I couldn’t find them on their official websites or on databases. I was doing the business development managers’ jobs for them basically. So it has its uses. I guess with social networking sites, you just have to utilise them productively, rather than poking people, playing games and peering into other peoples’ lives. It’s just so tempting though...

Love will come through

When I first saw LibraryThing I immediately thought of Flixster, which is a similar website, but for films. I have a humongous list of films on there, all with reviews and a star rating:

However I'm over a year's behind on that so I don't see myself doing any better with LibraryThing, especially as I don't think it's as good as Flixster, either the main website or the Facebook application. LibraryThing's layout is simplistic in style, complicated in structure and frankly unattractive; if you're anything like me or your book collection is like mine, it will take you a while to build up your list of books, so you're gonna have to want to spend the time on the website. I would have to do a lot of customising to get my profile and homepage the way I need them. The search function is overly convoluted; basically you have to do two searches, one using the LibraryThing search and the other often limited to the website chosen to import from. Downloading the book profiles from elsewhere is necessary, I chose Amazon due to the pretty pictures, but it causes problems; it timed out several times while searching. The zeitgeist tab is useful, but not obvious enough, I only found it just as I was about to give up; it should be the first port of call. That might've been my fault though... Anyway, that's enough of a rant. Here is my LibraryThing list:
It's taken up with all my Alias spin-off books at the moment, mainly as they're the only ones I know I definitely have, but also to promote my favourite TV series. Everyone should check it out and for those who know nothing about it, you can't go wrong with a sci-fi spy show with a spectacular female role model as the heroine. If that isn't enough, it was created by J. J. Abrams who's the genius behind Lost, Mission Impossible 3 and the new Star Trek.
The season one cast, makes me all nostalgic. Yes, that is Bradley Cooper at the... back to the point. The other problem with LibraryThing is that most people don't know what books they have; film reviewing is a lot easier, I should know I've written film reviews for websites, for the Cambridge Film Festival and reviewed films on community radio. My books are scattered across two houses and five separate rooms: my bedroom and living room, and my old bedroom, the computer room and the loft at my parent's house. Problematic. Then there is the subject of editions, which edition of Jane Eyre do I have? Short of going to my bookshelf and digging out the ISBN, I won't know. It's partly my fault as I'm a perfectionist, I suppose most people would choose the first one on the list rather than the exact one. In my eyes, that defeats the object. Or is that we build a library of books that we've read but don't own? which would be frankly ridiculous. So in that case, the only application I can see for it, is on a professional basis. Which is the reason why we're looking at it. However, Cambridge already has a list of all the books in our libraries; the Newton catalogue makes LibraryThing superfluous if not for the reviews, which we can go to Amazon for anyway. I gather it can recommend books either from your list, or from individual books, but I'm always a bit wary about that as what factors are being used for the recommendations? Of those libraries that do use LibraryThing already, the Central Science library lists only 95 books out of how many? And of those libraries that have integrated it into their catalogues, almost all of them are in the US. There's literally a handful in the UK and another few in Ireland. I feel I'm missing the point on this one. Here's a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon:

Tied to the 90’s

Harpagornis ~away~

A young library assistant (well she’s the youngest in the department) was walking around in her own little world, not seeing the reality of her profession, not particularly knowing where she was going and not really that bothered about it to be perfectly honest. That is until she found a wise group of Cambridge librarians who led her down a new path, one that led to enlightenment as to the ways of the world, one that opened up new possibilities and one where she was not alone in her journey. It made her realise that appearances, age and even gender can be misleading. She may have been at the right age to latch onto all the new technology as it came in: CD’s, the internet, DVD’s, mp3’s, chip and pin, digital radio and HDTV, but it doesn’t mean that she welcomed it. She misses the old Commodore 64, rewinding VHS tapes, recording the Sunday chart show onto cassette (timing it just right so she misses the waffle but not the start of the song), CD players where you can only listen to one album at a time and TV’s with dials instead of controllers (she even remembers a black and white TV). She was the last one to get a mobile in her group of friends, vowing to only use it in emergencies (we all know how that one ends), and she still hasn’t bought a new one, she was the last one on facebook and Twitter and the last to discover the joys of eBay and Amazon. jurvetson

This is a cautionary tale about someone who got complacent, who stopped exploring because they felt they knew all they needed to know and who, in doing so, became naive, stubborn and buried their head in the shifting sands of technology. In this age where we’re all literally connected, supposedly sociable over online networks and where we can speak to and see anyone, anywhere and at any time using webcams, she felt the growing dissension, realising that talking to people over the internet, whether it be posting on peoples’ walls on facebook, Twittering to the ether or via online forums, isn’t any substitute for face-to-face contact. She misses not being able to contact someone and having to live with that uncertainty, she misses answering the phone without knowing who it is and she even misses using phone boxes. Mostly, she misses trust. The internet has made everyone paranoid about privacy, we can check up on people whenever we like as we all have mobile phones, facebook pages and email addresses and everyone is going overboard (pun intended) about the piracy of music, TV and films.

Despite this new path, this cynicism about technology has remained; her overactive imagination has painted a dark picture of a dystopian future where gadgets, the web and robots have taken over everything. The fact that she cannot remember how she survived without computers, the internet and mobile phones only makes it worse. Whatever anyone thinks, she is old enough to remember that time. Nevertheless, that has now been tempered by her following in the wake of that wise group of librarians. She may have at least heard of if not used most of the things she discovered while on her Cam23 journey, but she had never realised their potential before. She has experienced how having a page where she can see lots of websites at once can prevent procrastination. She is enjoying sending and reading the twittering in the ether. She has started to see the benefits of having access to a whole library of beautiful images at your fingertips (it appeals to her sense of beauty, love of humanity’s quirks and her hoarding instinct). The best thing about this path? The journey hasn’t finished yet and it never will.

Tom Rydquist

Why does it always rain on me?

I'm getting really behind on my blog posts and it's getting me down; I don't like playing catch up. My work is like a steady shower at the moment. You know the type, the insidious drizzle that doesn't seem to be that heavy, but then you find yourself soaked through. It gets down your neck, moisturises the skin so it's baby soft, which is nice, and then leaves you looking like a drowned rat. I'm only mentioning this for two reasons, so I can use that particular Travis song as the title and also because my workload will compound on the time I can spend on my analysis of Slideshare and Delicious.

for every action

I can see how it would be useful, in a similar way to why Flickr is useful, but I would only use it for ideas as, unless I find something that perfectly encapsulates what I want to say, I would create my own Powerpoint. It would be so tempting to just use one, so from experience I would try to avoid using Slideshare. However we could put all our library presentations on there for convenience's sake. I found this funny and interesting presentation about "taking library services outside the library walls" which is something our library is going to try.

Library on Location: taking library services outside the library walls

View more presentations from Deborah Fitchett.

Wow, it worked! Clever.

Our library already uses Delicious for our own use, for free websites outside our library databases and for students. I like my own bookmarks within my web browser at work and at home, but it is a good way of sharing your favourite websites with people and you can create different lists for different groups, themes and customised ones for certain people. You can also describe each website which is nifty. I didn't know that you can keep tabs on how many people are using and saving the sites though. I don't think I'd use Delicious outside the workplace as the websites I use I tend to remember anyway so unless I have an attack of amnesia, I don't need it. However one of my colleagues has just spent a lot of time organising a Delicious list of all the relevant free websites that are available which has been incredible useful. Well done and here is their blog.