Thing 20

Still waiting for my collaborator to get this far . . .

Thing 23 - Rosy's Wordle

Thing 23

Phew, made it!
So, to evaluate.
Some of the things are great gadgets and I'm glad I've found out about them - Doodle's really good. Zotero and Delicious seem to have a lot to offer. My iGoogle page is useful and now I know what to do with RSS feeds.
Seeing the social networking stuff has been interesting, too. There has been discussion about the Darwin Correspondence Project having a presence in this area; but it seems to me that if you want to do this you have to do it properly. Running a Facebook page is a commitment - nobody's interested if you haven't posted anything for three months.
So - definite possibilities, but like most things it takes hard work to be really successful.

Things 3 & 4

This is the proof of the pudding, I suppose. I can certainly see it value as a means of assessing students' involvement with a course of teaching.

Thing 22

Since our project has increased its staff numbers and has now acquired a third office about as far from the existing two offices as it is possible to be unless it was up the tower, I can see that wikis could be very useful to organise and plan without lots of telephone calls and emails.

Thing 21

I haven't made a podcast myself, but there are several on the Darwin Correspondence Project's website.
There's one about the dramatisation of the correspondence - called 'Re:Design' - at

http://mediaplayer.group.cam.ac.uk/component/option,com_mediadb/task,play/idstr,CU-CSF-PC07-05_DarwinCorrespondence/vv,-2/Itemid,57

There are also interviews about Darwin and his relevance today which can be accessed from this web page

http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/commentary

Like a lot of things, the more effort is put in, the better the final product.

Thing 20

This seems to me to be a good idea for collaborative working, but I haven't had much luck getting my collaborator up to speed on this! So I'm waiting to see what happens when someone else starts to add to the item I've created.

Thing 19

The articles about the differenct libraries were most interesting - especially the Orkney one, as we have used the library services there. It's easy to appreciate how, in such an isolated community, social networking such as Facebook or Twitter can make people feel more involved. As for marketing the project I work for, this would have to be discussed with the rest of the project staff.

Thing 18

Zotero has been recommended by a colleague, so I've been keen to give it a try. After a brief experiment it seems easy to use and I shall be pleased to use it for real. With its little icon in the bottom right of the screen I may not forget its existence! In fact, it seems such a good idea that I have myself recommended it to my student children. Creating a bibliography can be such a tedious task that anything that improves speed and accuracy is useful.

A few comments

Google diary: I notice the UL is running two diaries which you can find on its home page. The Google diary in the 'Library toolkit' suggests that the Spies exhibition is still running.
Facebook - if an organisation has a Facebook page, then really it needs to be active - something appearing at least every week. The Cambridge Libraries page hasn't had anything added to it since 3 May. That makes it easy to forget about. It seems to me that the Orkney Libraries on line presence is successful because library staff are busy putting things on it.
LinkedIn - the Darwin project is being pestered by someone who wants to be linked to it. But the darwin Project isn't LinkedIn.

Thing 17

LinkedIn. I have found this several times while researching people on the internet, and it was interesting to see the whole of it, rather than the little bits I'd come across before. Usually I'm researching dead people, so I discount any hits in Limekiln. It seems so like Facebook that I'm not in a hurry to create a page for myself: these pages need to be looked after and in the end it all takes time.

Thing 16

As a Facebooker I felt that at least I was up to speed on this one, though I hadn't realised quite how much library stuff is available. Does this mean that Facebooking in work time may become more acceptable?! However finding things using Facebook seems relatively slow compared with Google.

Things 14 & 15

I like the look of this! I had a go at listing our book collection some years ago, but I haven't kept it up to date. The only thing I'd need would be time.

Thing 13: reflection

I've certainly expanded my experience of internet things, and I doubt I wd have bothered. I can see that most people sort out a few ways of managing things on the internet that suit them and then don't try new things. So my knowledge has definitely increased (if not my skills). I certainly feel more confident - at least I've had a look at these things and know more about them. As for recommendations - I'm encouraging people to use Doodle, the meeting planner. But it will probably take a while before others are prepared to accept my recommendations.

Thing 12

Finally got round to having a good look at Delicious. Found the Fox Talbot letters project:
http://www.foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/
In its section on 'Project methodology' it says
"Some elements of the approach to the work of another of Talbot's contemporaries, that of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press), have been adopted. However, this excellent work follows conventions established for literary manuscripts that are unnecessarily complex for the Talbot letters."
From a quick investigation, it doesn't seem as if CD gets even a passing reference in Fox Talbot's correspondence, nor Fox Talbot in CD's (just a reference in a footnote about daguerrotypes).
And a site selling CD on the Beagle t-shirts
http://www.thebeagleproject.com/

Delicious is tempting, but I haven't signed up for an account yet: having to create an account with Yahoo! has put me off for the time being. More accounts, more passwords: I need to think this over.

Thing 11

Some interesting things here! When looking at Andy Priestner's presentation about the Cadbury collection, I found a fascinating slideshow about floating churches in New York, with some surreal images:

http://www.slideshare.net/SeamensChurch/the-floating-church-of-the-seamens-church-institute-presentation-962477

This was a self-contained item, whereas Andy Priestner's was a more stylish version of odd-words-on-catalogue-cards aide-memoire. Perhaps it came with sound, though (my computer doesn't do sound). Otherwise, it didn't seem to me to do much. Oops. got to log off now.

Thing 10

This was interesting! I found a whole series of photos of a small exhibition I put together last year for the Whipple Museum, "all rights reserved". Just as well I took a photo of it myself when I installed it, I suppose. Checked out all the CD letters, but no new ones. Found a couple of images to download. Hmm, not bad - though I would be extremely wary of using images from this site, unless I was sure the photographer hadn't infringed permissions.

Thing 9

Flickr was interesting - I always like looking at good photographs. I searched on "Charles Darwin" and found a few interesting things, though no previously unknown letters even after 35 pages. Still, there was a page from CD's botanical specimen book about a rust disease in wheat in South America: John Stevens Henslow had used this when he published an article in \Gardener's Chronicle\ 28 Sep. 1844 p. 659, but Duncan Porter (\Bulletin of the British Museum of Natural History (hist. ser.)\ 14(2): 145-223) described it in 1986 as missing. Apparently the photo was taken at the New York Academy of Sciences. And there's a photo of Charles Lyell's \Principles of geology\ annotated by CD that apparently was photographed here. However, I don't know what cd be done to stop people taking photographs in the building, unless people had to go through the same procedures that they use at airports.

Thing 7

Have to admit I'm not at all sympathetic to Twitter. I got Twittered out a year or so ago by a work colleague who Twittered incessantly on Facebook. Personally I prefer a bit of coffeetime chat!
Anyway, I've set up the account & we'll see what happens. I feel I need to be wary of things that can be seen as time-wasters.

Thing 8

Aaagh! What was Thing 7?
Well, I can see the point about tagging, and as I'm not a librarian I have no investment in classification systems. Anyway, I've tagged my blogs (lightly) and I'll see what happens. Knowing me, I'll forget my own tagging ideas and invent some more each time I do it, which will no doubt lead to a relatively inefficient system.

Things 5 & 6

Thing 5 - the meeting scheduler on Doodle - worked a treat; though in a department of 6 or 7 people who are in adjacent offices it's probably easier to discuss such arrangements over coffee!
The Google calendar seems good: so long as I remember to update it, it shd be very effective. At first I think I set up 10 minute email reminders for every diary entry, including my holiday: but I \think\ I've been able to switch that off now.
Some one sent round a very complicated email to a long list of people trying to coordinate a meeting on one of five dates: I did feel that a Doodle would have been much simpler. Though perhaps it wasn't my most tactful move to point this out!
In the end I felt the diary was perhaps just too much trouble. These things work best if you don't spend most of your working day trying to organise them: they should just take a few minutes of your time.

Things 1 & 2

After what seemed like a lot of effort, I managed to create the iGoogle page. I'm sure the instructions were really simple, but obviously not simple enough for me. Sigh. Anyway, mine looks like this.
I'm sure I've done this before . . . well, after several false starts, here we are. Our own website, a countdown to my holiday, the time in our other office in Harvard, the weather here just in case I can't be bothered to look out of the window, my favourite blog, the Victorian clerk's diary I'm following (although the RSS feed on this seems to have come unplugged). The COPAC box is on a tab, too. It will probably be some time before I can decide whether I will find this more useful than my present arrangements. Some of the boxes seem rather larger than their usefulness - like the clocks box.

First blog 31 May 2010

I seem to have wasted far too much time on this so far, but I have at last succeeded in getting here. Why is it that even the simplest instructions seem to be open to multiple interpretations? At the moment I'm not very well-informed about any of this, so 23 things can only improve the situation. The only 'social media' I use is Facebook, which I've found very useful for keeping in touch with my children when they've been abroad, especially for sharing photographs. Though when it comes to sharing information, it can provide more than a parent really wants to know about their offspring's social activities.