Showing posts with label productivity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label productivity. Show all posts

Sunday, July 21, 2013

I'm changing my topic

I was over on the ANZ 23 Mobile Things blog, the social reading post, and I noticed that Jodie had written in the comment section:

Has anyone got a staff, shared RSS aggregation tool at their workplace where you all share the same blogs/news sources? I have regularly thought about setting this up but never seem to get around to it. Would be keen to hear if anyone has done it, and how it’s working. Does it encourage a culture of professional reading and engagement?
The way we share knowledge at work could be so much better. Our team of librarians is spread out over 5 states, and if we want to share something interesting that we've seen on the net, we send an email out to everyone about it. Email and picking up the phone are our options. Problem is, I want to share stuff all the time but I'm pretty sure no one wants to get 20 emails a day about things that I've read, no matter how interesting they are. And then there's the duplication issue - chances are that my colleagues have spent time searching for the same things I have and read them. Time could be saved by having a shared platform for reading. I considered Feedly, but what I really want to share is individual pages rather than subscribe to an RSS feed. So perhaps Delicious would be better?


The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. If we had just the one account, we could all add content as we wanted, tag it for future reference and ease of searching, comment on articles, interact with comments and with no fear about bothering each other with emails... Perhaps we would need an email once a week to highlight content, direct people to the Delicious site and encourage its use. So this is my new challenge topic.

Hey, just noticed that this is my 50th post!
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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Great presentation


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Tuesday, July 16, 2013

My challenge

My challenge is to identify a social tool, a web service or a new idea gleamed from my professional reading that I think will take off in FY14, and give a 3 minute presentation on it to my colleagues. I've been thinking of so many different things for this challenge (inspired by 23 mobile things and my tweet stream mostly!) such as infographics, MOOCs, Google hangouts, coding for beginners, etc. I want to feature something that is perhaps new to my colleagues and that could have a direct impact on our work.

I'm choosing Twitter for this challenge, but not for the usual reasons of networking with a fellow librarians and keeping up with emerging trends ... although these are of course huge reasons for signing up. I'm going to be focusing on the benefits of following the tweets of library vendors, aggregators, government departments and so on. Because our college is focussed so narrowly on one subject area we can easily follow organisations that are related to just this field, plus those who provide our resources. This kind of information usually arrives in our inboxes as email newsletters, but for those who want an alternative, well, there's this. Here are some tweets that I've picked out from my stream in the past couple of months. They feature

  • Upgrade alerts to products we use such as Mendeley and Discovery Search
  • Info about relevant new journals, ebooks and apps
  • Free training and PD opportunities
  • Links to relevant resources that could be useful additions to our Libguides 

Warning: Very long list of embedded tweets follows!



















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Sunday, June 23, 2013

24. Time...

Wow, I just realised that I haven't written a blog post since last Wednesday, and I've been rather inactive on Twitter. But I have been very productive in other areas!

1. I finished another novel by Ruth Ozeki (My year of meat) - my new favourite author. Why has she only written three books...? Only one left to read and then I have to wait for her to write another one. Well, they are worth waiting for. In the meantime I'm going to read someone who I've been meaning to read for a while now and I've just been reminded about - David Mitchell. Loved Cloud Atlas the movie, but I'm not going to read the book again. Time to read some of his other works. Looking forward to it already.

2. Progress made on the interior design of my apartment. Original art hung on the walls, display boxes fixed for my kokeshi collection, and I even bought a bookshelf for my tiny collection of physical books. I really don't like having things half-finished, and that applies to everything in my life. I like to get things done!

 
 3. I'm keeping up with my online course (appropriately titled Swimming in the Information Ocean) and also the ANZ 23 Mobile Things and enjoying them both too. Looking forward to starting the next thing, a MOOC called New Librarianship Master Class, run by R. David Lankas, the creator of the Atlas of New Librarianship. When I catalogued this book when it first came out I was intrigued but also a bit lost as to how to go about reading it. Now I'll have some guidance and a whole bunch of librarians reading it along with me : )

4. I've negotiated to move from part-time to full-time at my library, and I'm giving up the cataloguing job. I'm really excited about that because finally I can put all my energies into one place. Having two part-time jobs was draining.

But having a little break from blogging and Twitter was energising and productive. I will do it more often ; )
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Sunday, May 12, 2013

Master Your Mac

I've got this book out, it's due back tomorrow. I would really like to return it with at least the first chapter's info tightly lodged in my brain. The chapter is called The best shortcuts (and how to make your own) in the book Master Your Mac by Matt Cone (2013). I love the idea of keyboard shortcuts and I know most of the basic ones, but there are so many more!

In my job I get a lot of students plopping their laptop or tablet on the reference desk and asking for help with all sorts of things, from finding articles in our databases, to importing PDFs into Mendeley, to formatting their Word document... all sorts of things. I need to know how to troubleshoot on a pretty wide range of devices and operating systems, and actually I quite enjoy doing it. Things change fast though, and I'm often learning on the go (Windows 8 ... um...). I've decided the next step in my learning is widening my knowledge of keyboard shortcuts! Starting with Mac, and also Gmail (this infographic has been all over the Internet lately, I stumbled on it through good old Twitter).

The one thing that around 95% of the students have in common when they come to see me for help is that they don't have a lot of time. They're in a rush and they want an answer fast. Keyboard shortcuts come in super-handy (and always impress the students too!). Something a student asked me recently is how to do a screenshot on a mac. Here are a few good shortcuts I found for that from this website.

Use Command-Shift-3 to take a screen shot of whatever is on the screen, save as a file on the desktop
Use Command-Shift-4 to select an area, take a screen shot of it, save as a file on the desktop

Use Command-Control-Shift-3 to take a screenshot and save to the clipboard
Use Command-Control-Shift-4 to select an area, take a screen shot of it, save to the clipboard

As I've been writing this post I've come to the realisation that I can't remember more than a few new keyboard shortcuts at a time. I have to go off and practice a bit before I get carried away!

So, back to the book I was supposed to be getting these shortcuts from... I tried out a couple of their suggestions and they didn't work! I ended up using Google to find out how to do them. I'm still not the master of my Mac, but I'm making progress.
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