Silliness, persistance and creativity

Today at work my colleagues and I are starting Week 2 of the 23 Mobile Things course, and the Thing is mobile photos. When I did the course the first time around I hadn't used my phone a lot for photos, but now I reckon I know what I'm talking about, having become an avid user of my phone camera for selfies, Instagram, and blogging and besides that, I really love photo editing apps and putting photos through various apps before publishing them. The silly glasses were added with the Photo Editor- app, and the filter and border were added in PicLab and Instagram. I'm also running the business Instagram page for my sister's lovely cafe in the Perth Hills, which made me realise how big Instagram is, and how it can be used to engage and attract customers. This week I read an interesting article on how university libraries can leverage the power of Instagram, although I don't really see a huge place for it in my library, apart from putting a slideshow gallery of promotional photos on our website. There are people getting really creative with their user communities with this type of social media, and it's so great to see.

Today I got frustrated at work trying to use the new LibGuides2 Beta platform. It seems to keep doing buggy things and I'm trying to work with code that is above my current level of understanding. Lucky there's no rush for the upgrade and I've got a bit of time on my hands now that all of the students are studying for their exams. I heard somewhere that coding requires persistance, and creativity. I'm thinking, sure, the persistance phase is going to go into years before the creative part can start! There will be more to come on my coding adventures...

3. Mobile mind mapping

This week in my swimming (in the information ocean) course, we're getting started on individual topics with a bit of mind mapping. I have to admit, this technique never really worked for me... I always work by jotting down notes either on lined paper, or much more commonly on word processing software, then reading over them again and again, adding bits and pieces here and there as I think of them. One of the most inconvenient things about mind maps for me is running out of space and not having room to expand my thoughts. But one of the things I want to try again, since I have the opportunity, is seeing if I can think less linearly, and create a wider range of ideas, by following the easy steps available from Litemind.com

It also occurred to me that I could see what apps are available for mind mapping on mobile devices, since I'm also right into the 23 mobile things course at the moment. I've downloaded an iPhone app called Simple Mind and I'm going to attempt to mind map the topic Emerging and evolving technology (in libraries) – mobile platforms. I doubt I'll be able to do some of the things in the recommendations section above (use drawings copiously?) but we'll see. I'll publish my creation in a later post!

Google - a love hate relationship

One of my Tweeps recently replied to a comment I made about searching for images that are not restricted by copyright:

@stokesrenee You can also search Google images by CC licence (advanced search screen, usage rights at bottom) #anz23mthings
— mel (@melchivers) May 19, 2013

So I learned something new about Google. I'm always learning new things about Google, and I'm always damn impressed. I don't necessarily want to be though. I know Google is a company whose customers are advertisers (not searchers!) and whose business is the collection of data (big data!), supplied for free by searchers. That means we searchers are Google's product. Google is selling us to advertisers and making a giant pile of money out of us. But who can do without Google these days? They supply such a good search product, so I will continue to supply them with my data.

Librarians are not in competition with Google - we use Google as much if not more than the average person! There are some great points here from The Wikiman. I like how he says "all we can do is help people use it better". For universities, Google is a great complement to their subscribed databases and book holdings. BUT it is no substitute for them.

This interesting article, published by The Association of College and Research Libraries has some awesome ideas about running courses in how students (who we know use Google for research) can use Google more effectively. I'd love to teach one of these courses at my college as part of an information literacy program.

Google is also starting to get in to the MOOC market. A post on their research blog describes how they have created an open source learning platform called course builder that allows anyone with something to teach to create a course. They have developed their own course called Mapping with Google to promote the features of their course builder (and their new look Google Maps). I've signed up for the course (hm... overextending myself?) - here's a preview. It also fits in nicely with this week's 23 mobile things topic - maps.

What is this GEOCACHING thing?

I've been hearing this word geocaching a bit lately and I've finally decided to find out what it's all about, prompted once again by anz23mobilethings. I started out by watching this:



It's kind of a treasure hunt for geeks, using a GPS (your smart phone should have GPS capability). So now I understand the basics, I've signed up at geochaching.com and I'm just learning a little more before I venture out to try find something.

Each geocache that is hidden is given a difficulty and terrain rating between 1 and 5, 1 being the easiest and the recommended starting point. There are 4 different sizes of cache, and they could look like anything. A regular or large sized cache is probably a good size to start with.

I've just downloaded the Geocaching app onto my iPhone. The free version lets you access three geocaches near your current location. After that you have to fork out $9.99 for the premium app. The app is pretty basic. It is giving me 3 near-by locations where caches are hidden, and they are all between 40 and 400 metres from where I'm sitting! Unfortunately they are all also 'tiny' (actually the size of a mint tin) but I guess they have to be in the middle of a city. I had a look at the location map on the website - man, this game is popular! There are so many, even in the Aussie outback.

I just went out to look for the closest one, creatively named Cache Wars V - the Cache Strikes Back, and sadly couldn't find it... maybe it had been cleaned away as rubbish. Pretty sure I looked like an idiot too, looking at my iPhone and then in various office-building flower beds. I sent my technician out to look for the next one on her break, but she came back empty-handed too. I think this brings me to the end of my geocaching adventure.

Does this have potential for libraries? Well I really love what the British Library did - or rather what a couple of geocachers who also love libraries (and math, it seems) got permission to do in the BL. As for my library, it's not open to the public, so there isn't a lot of potential there, and the same goes for the Foursquare app, although I'm quite enjoying it for my personal use - the hidden cafe gems it suggests, and the special offers!

Have you tried geocaching? Did you find anything? Would you pay for the premium app?

Learning Email

So it's 4:10 on a Thursday afternoon and I've finally cleared my email inbox for the day, 20 minutes before hometime. Before I started working in a library I never associated email with work. Somehow I managed to avoid work email for a fair chunk of my life, working as an ESL teacher. That was all about face-to-face communication, and it's still what I prefer. However. Reality got in the way and now half of my work team is distributed over 5 states, and email is the normal mode of communication.

Emailing for work involves treading carefully and thinking about your message from the point of view of the receiver. I've made mistakes in the past, gotten into trouble because of poor email etiquette, but it's something that has to be learned and after that there are no more excuses! Some things to avoid, especially when emailing busy people in Con's post here.

I'm very happy if I can deal with all of my emails in a day, sort them into their correct folders and have an empty inbox ready for the new day. It happens... occasionally.

I remember being a university student in 1994 and thinking that email was so clunky! There were 2 computers in the campus library that were dedicated to email (black screen, green letters - remember?), and about 12 computers for searching the databases. Using them for browsing the internet was frowned upon. It was funny, but the only other people I knew then who used email were my fellow students and my lecturers, who checked it occasionally. What do you write in an email to people you see everyday? And frustrating to que at the email computers to check your inbox and find nothing!

Now of course there's no need to check your inbox to see if there's anything new - your mobile will just tell you. When cloud-based email came along I was keen to get onboard, as I spent a lot of my twenties travelling and keeping in touch with friends and family by email. Picture the travellers' internet cafe. I transitioned through a couple of creatively named hotmail addresses before getting into Gmail early and was able to choose to use my own simple name (with no numbers!) @gmail.com. By the end of my second degree I was happily emailing attachments to myself as a way of saving them in the cloud.

Thinking about email on the go in a work context, I could access my work emails through webmail from home, but I don't want to...

At our library we use automated email messages to communicate with patrons about items due, holds available and I also use it a fair bit for reference work, as many of our students are studying online, externally. They definitely appreciate being contacted by email for these purposes. The mobile library site we're developing at the moment will make it super-easy for students to contact a librarian via email - we'll have a menu tab for the purpose that will link right into their mobile email account. This is a really exciting development for us!

OK, I'm off to check out the Mailbox app, as suggested by Bailey's Bus.

Instagram, or, Showing Off

This Pinterest board photography apps page is just chock-full of good stuff - thanks again 23 mobile things! After following a link to a page about 10 interesting ways to use Instagram for your library, I was inspired to do some showing off...

#1 Show off your books

Instagram in combination with a library Twitter post would be perfect for showing off our new books as, sadly, we don't really have much space for a new book display.

#2 Show off your events and services

A bit boring, but could be effective? At least the message is clear!

#3 Go behind the scenes, or, above the scenes

#4 Show off your patrons (patron photos)

I know this isn't what is meant by showing off your patron photos... but as this is all theoretical at the moment...

#5 Give a sneak peek

Big book sale coming! Start getting excited!

#6 Share your office (or, Library Technician in her natural habitat)

#7 Take your patrons with you

Didn't have anything for this one, so here's how we're using QR codes instead :)

#8 Introduce your librarians

Hi!

#9 Show off your library space, or, your remaining print journals with 2 skeletons in the background

#10 Turn print marketing materials into digital ones

Lesson learned - Instagram doesn't connect nicely with Blogger. The best blog platform to connect with Instagram is Tumblr, for sure. On a pc there is very little you can do with Instagram. It's truly a mobile tool. Other sharing tools that Instagram works nicely with are Facebook, Email, Flickr, Twitter and Foursquare. For this post I had to use screenshots, too time-consuming :(

I use a pc or laptop to write my blog and that is a conscious choice because I want to take time and whenever possible, go into a bit of depth. Phones are not ideal for that - yet! But check out this awesome movie that I spotted on YouTube. Reality? Not yet, but who knows in the future...


I'll finish with a comment about why I use the Blogger platform. I've had a personal blog on the Blogger platform since 2003 that I've updated regularly and had a lot of fun with. I like to play with the HTML code for my blog, change the code around and learn it. I've got a long way to go with code though, and HTML is definately no longer the flavour of the month as far as code goes. But it's easy and I like it.

Found a great document here called "Is your library ready for a social media librarian?'

Lurk, Broadcast, Create, Engage

There's lots of stuff floating around the Interwebs at the moment about engagement with social media.

Like this Stages of PLN adoption infographic and article, written a few years ago but still provoking discussion.

Abigail asked, which stage are you at?

Great visual diagram of #PLN (Personal Learning Network) stages. #anz23mthings peeps which stage are you at? flickr.com/photos/jutecht…
— Abigail Willemse (@ajwillemse91) May 13, 2013

OK, so I've definatley been through the stages of immersion (twice...) and evaluation (including irrational frustration that some of my key people are not on Twitter). I think I'm possibly going through the know it all stage again right now with the 23 Mobile Things course. I love the perspective stage, leaving it all behind to enjoy a wireless holiday (gone is that jittery addiced feeling!). And finally balance. A worthy goal. I tried a bit of balance yesterday. After realising that I'd been connected and connecting online all day, I read a book in the evening. But why did by mind keep sneakily returning to my mobile and my Twitter feed? I didn't allow myself to check it, but whatever happened to the days that I could immerse myself in a book and not be distracted by ANYTHING?

One way I've decided to combat this addictive feeling, apart from consciously choosing to switch off when it's sensible to do so, is to be less of a lurker / broadcaster and more of a creater / engager. It forces me to slow down and choose what to respond to, which is whatever moves me to do so. I've been a terrible lurker in the past. But I'm determined to change. Here's my list:

1. Use my blog to reflect on what moves me
2. Post comments on others' blogs
3. Converse more, broadcast less on Twitter and Instagram

Another thing I liked recently was this post on the Forbes website. Jessica's post was called How to be Interesting but I would re-title it Being the Best You Can Be (sounds less like you're tyring to please someone, doesn't it?) or even Things to Consider When Blogging. She's got 10 points, each with a cute little infographic. One of them was "embrace your innate weirdness" - apparently that's what makes us as indiviuals interesting.

My favourite blogs to follow are the ones that have a little bit of personal / strange content as well as lots of professional content. Now to implement that in my own blog...

23 mobile things - Instagram

23 Mobile Thing 2: Instagram - I've had it for a long time but rarely used it, and not at all for social or work purposes. I only thought about the cool editing effects that could be created! Too much editing is not always a good thing though - I'm pretty sick of washed out-looking sixties-style photos... 

I would agree 100% with the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. We are visual beings. We recognise and respond to pictures so much faster than to text (I think I remember learning that in psych at uni...). I read Kim's great introductory post on taking a photo with a mobile device, but when I got to the thinking points none of them jumped out as relevant for my library. So it was with curiosity that I watched the short movie Bond University produced about how they used their Instagram account to 'highlight the library as an integral part of the student experience'.

It got me thinking, could we use Instagram for example to take awesome photos of the library and integrate them into our marketing materials to promote the 'student experience'? Could we use Instagram to take photos to promote our database of the month, our new books, our friendly staff? Could we run some sort of competition? Would there be a chance that the managers would approve any of it? 

Next step - to have a look at Flickr (I've joined the anz 23 mthings Flickr pool) and Snapchat in more depth.

23 mobile things - Twitter

Mobiles and libraries - topics occupying my mind a lot at work lately! So it's great timing that the Australia and NZ 23 Mobile Things has come along. I'm planning to examine one thing each week for the next 23 weeks, and to reflect on it here.

The first thing is Twitter, and I'll start with a history of my use. At first I was uninterested. I had a look when it started to take off and thought it was full of inane, uninteresting 140 character tweets about boring details of people's personal lives. People I didn't know. But then I started a serious-sounding subject at Curtin University called Information Management Technology and my lecturer Kathryn Greenhill set  learning how to use Twitter as our first assignment, so I was forced to take a closer look.

Actually, I'm glad I did. As an external student (I started the course while living in Japan) I found I had an instant network of people who were interested in libraries and information just like I was, and posted not just comments, but also questions, answers, links to library news, blogposts and reports and all sorts of other things. I started to see the value in it.

I was using Twitter at the exact time of the massive earthquake in Japan that resulted in the deaths of thousands of people and the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima. I felt the earthquake, rushed outside until it subsided, then went back in and tweeted it. Less that a minute after the earthquake, my fellow students in Australia had heard the news. When other types of communication failed in the aftermath, Twitter was used by people to contact relatives and friends, and for emergency services to direct people, especially foreigners, to safety.

wow, I felt an earthquake and then read about it here on twitter... that was scary, my apartment was swaying!! #imt111
— Renee Stokes (@stokesrenee) March 11, 2011

Now I use Twitter pretty much every day to see what's new and to feel connected to the library world. I have to admit that I lurk more than I post, and more often than not that's a retweet. One of my new year's resolutions was actually to tweet more! After exploring Twitter again as part of 23 Mobile Things  I've starting using lists to filter my Twitter stream.

The academic / health library I work at doesn't use social media (yet!). I'm informally gathering ideas on what kind of things libraries tweet about. There's a good list on the 23 Mobile Things blog, most of which I think would be relevant for my library.