Twitter; Tagging

Twitter

Although others are enthusiastic about Twitter and the possibilities it offers libraries in communicating with their readers, I have yet to be convinced. I don't find it particularly easy to use and much of what is posted seems to be trivial and of no great interest. I am sure there is a lot of useful information to be gleaned but there also seems to be a great deal of dross to wade through.

In terms of professional development I am sure that it can be a useful way of communicating with other librarians, receiving information from bodies like CILIP etc. It depends how necessary it is to you to have instant access to very brief pieces of information. However, I can see that as an alerting tool, it has its place. As for tweets directed at readers, and in this case I'm considering the users of a Faculty library in Cambridge, I am not sure that such a library has sufficient interesting information to communicate to its readers. For example, the article by Sarah Milstein recommends posting once a day - I think we would be struggling to find enough relevant material to post that often. And it still seems to me that the CamTools pages tailored specifically to the needs of different user groups is a more useful way of communicating with the majority of our readers.

Tagging

Not much to say about tagging - I expect it will prove useful and, as all librarians know, when new subject areas arise, the old terminology doesn't fit any more. Tagging will help to overcome that problem. Every area of knowledge has its jargon with which enthusiasts are familiar and incorporating this as tags will help in accessing relevant information.

Doodle and Google Calendar

Not much to say about Doodle or Google Calendar. Both seem very straightforward to use and their advantages are fairly self-evident. As I only very occasionally need to attend meetings either at work or outside, I doubt I shall make much use of these. I've read the blog, Libraries and Google Calendar, and it seems that the uses suggested are already taken care of as far as this Faculty Library is concerned, either by our CamTools sites for individual user groups or by the alerts automatically sent out by Voyager. I can see its usefulness to a large library, particularly a public library where there are a lot of different activities, but for a comparatively small faculty library its uses are much more limited.

Blogging

Positive aspects of blogging - obviously, ease of communication, which is particularly useful in a system such as the Univ. Cambridge where there are so many fairly small libraries. It could help library staff in the separate libraries feel more feel more connected to the system as a whole and less isolated. It's a potentially valuable means of exchanging ideas and generating new ones, and generally contributing to professional development of library staff.

However, it can be time-consuming and people can get carried away with the fun aspect of - something that's very unlikely to happen to me! It's good that people enjoy blogging but in the end it's important to keep at the forefront of your mind the question, ' How will blogging ultimately improve service to readers?' It's a matter of deciding how much time to devote to it and where it falls in the list of work priorities.

iGoogle and RSS feeds

Creating the iGoogle page was a useful learning experience. As regards the gadgets, I decided to add a mixture of those that are related to my particular work interests and others that are connected to outside concerns. At work I am interested in children's literature, partly because students on a range of courses in the Faculty of Education make good use of our collection of children's books and partly because I enjoy reading children's literature myself and like to keep up to date with new books, authors and illustrators. Information supplied by such gadgets should feed into my professional knowledge and it's something we might usefully show students with an iGoogle account. At the Faculty of Education we produce a termly newsletter and have recently decided to include news items about significant developments in the field of education, so being able to add the BBC Education website to the iGoogle page will probably also be useful. As for my outside interests, I've added gadgets related to current affairs and human rights issues. I'll monitor all of the above to see how relevant they prove to be to be.

I can see that, for some libraries, RSS feeds would be a very useful way of communicating with students, especially in the ways outlined in ' 10 ways libraries can use RSS' but at the Faculty of Education we have created CamTools pages for academic staff and almost all of our different groups of students, and these deliver specially tailored information relevant to each user group. CamTools does not rely on students deciding to subscribe to an RSS feed or not and has proved to be a very effective way of communicating with them.

Although our Library serves the needs of undergraduates who tend to be young, we also have a large number of mature students studying on a part-time basis and they are much less at ease with using computers; some even struggle with using Newton and even more so with electronic sources of information, such as databases. They already have a lot of claims on their time and I am not sure they would have the inclination, energy or time to devote to setting up an iGoogle account, let alone RSS feeds, especially when CamTools already supplies much of what they need.

Cam23 - what I hope to get out of it

My previous experience of Web 2.0 is limited. I have read about it and attended the occasional talk - it's not something that interests me a great deal, but I feel I ought to be aware of how it will impact upon library work and what potential opportunities it opens up, particularly how it will utimately benefit library users. However, as I'm coming to the end of my career and will probably retire in a few years' time, I feel somewhat distanced from the whole exercise. For me it's an opportunity to raise my awareness of developments which are already, or likely to be, of importance to library work, but it's probably unlikely that such developments will radically affect my own work . As for social media, I have only limited experience of this - it may be interesting to find out more.