It's all in the presentation

Powerpoint (or Keynote for Mac users) is really nifty, it's even helped win an Oscar whilst raising awareness of climate change with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I would argue for the usefulness of being able to access slides after presentations, perhaps after a user education session in a library, as I would do during my degree. Most lecturers used Powerpoint and then posted their presentations on our VLE. These ranged from the very useful (bibliographies and quotes) to the useless if you weren't actually in the lecture theatre variety - one lecturer used to illustrate points about Victorian literature with Lolcats, generally with no captions, you just had to be there. And unless you wanted to write an essay on Lolcats, you really couldn't skip those lectures. Although actually I would love to write an essay on Lolcats, but not if it meant failing my degree. Even without Lolcats, Slides that included lots of information or references were incredibly helpful for revision: so yay for slides!

As a free way to share presentations Slideshare feels easy to use and there is a lot of library related stuff out there. It depends on how the slides are designed again though whether it is worth looking at presentations without sound - this epic presentation on Social Networks from Paul Adams of Google is a brilliant example of how  slides alone can be understood if the information is presented in the right way.

The Real Life Social Network v2

View more documents from Paul Adams.

But as Helen points out it might be better if people posted presentations with sound when the slides don't explain everything, but that is more complicated - as a simple way of getting a resource out there Slideshare does exactly what it says on the URL.  

And to make up for the mammoth presentation above, here are some easy on the eye library pics.

Beautiful Libraries in the World

View more presentations from Paulo Izidoro.

Visual distraction

Flickr is the kind of thing that I can accidentally spend hours on - I get slightly addicted to looking up places I know, or events I've been to. I like the fact that it almost acts as a visual Twitter, although not quite so up the moment, getting many different perspectives on large events if people are kind enough to upload pictures and then tag them. You can find such specific images on there - you can see my childhood home in the distance here for example:

With thanks to orangeaurochs.

There were even some images of paternoster lifts. My department at university had to be reached by a paternoster, which always used to break down on essay deadline days. There are a surprising number of lift-fanciers out there posting (working) paternoster videos on YouTube. I was pleased to see on Flickr that the one in Sheffield has similar technical problems to 'my' paternoster.

With thanks to iwouldstay.

Saying all this, however, I do think there are better ways of sharing pictures without the collective, social, elements of Flickr. I know Facebook has been mentioned by a lot of Cam23 people as the most effective way of sharing photos online, and I do certainly use this to upload photos of people who are also on Facebook. I prefer Photobucket or Picasa though if I want to show albums - with less of the community/tagging available on Flickr - to people without Facebook accounts or that contain pictures of no interest to my Facebook friends.

Where Flickr becomes invaluable to libraries though is in the simple copyright rules of the Creative Commons agreement. I hadn't come across the Creative Commons element of Flickr before and it is really useful to have such a large source of copyright friendly images - I can imagine when doing presentations, user education or library marketing materials in the future it will be a really handy resource.

You have been tagged

I was really interested reading Clay Shirky's piece about tagging and classification as I'll be learning classification on my LIS Masters next year and I so it was interesting reading a discussion about it.

Firstly I would say tagging (in the Shirky sense, used on Flickr) is something I feel is definitely useful - the internet is anarchic and user defined - tags reflect this. And like the internet tagging can be both brilliant and awful because of this anarchy. Looking at the tag cloud on Flickr for example

it's easy to see what people like taking photos of: weddings, parties and beaches, often using Nikon or Canon cameras. The tags become more useful when searching - a picture taken with a Canon camera of a wedding held on the beach for example would be the ultimate 'average' Flickr photo!

I don't quite see why Shirky is so determined to put this kind of organic tagging in opposition to more traditional library classification systems however - they are both categorising things but in different ways, and for different purposes. Library classification systems for physical libraries are there to make searching and
browsing easier - just as tags do on the internet. I would argue both types of classification - rigid and fluid - have their place.

I had flashbacks to the literary theory module in my degree and semiotics - words and definitions are difficult to pin down - different words can have different connotations to different people. Tagging reflects this:  if you're looking for something not recognised in more structured systems then a user defined tag allows flexibility. This multitude of meaning can also be incredibly problematic and frustrating if you want to find something specific quickly within a structure - this is why classification systems developed! I don't see any reason why the two approaches can't co-exist in organising information. Just like I feel I can quote Wikipedia and defend traditional classification systems!

What is the point of Twitter?

Well there is no way I'm going to be able to answer that one in a single blog post, but as this is a question I always get asked about Twitter I thought I should at least try - at least so I have a good answer next time it happens!

I love the collective feeling of Twitter - although this unfortunately can mean the Fail Whale makes an appearance more regularly than one would like, especially during the World Cup.

Twitter is a place where people share major news stories, and therefore sometimes where we first hear of major events, as this article from India Knight in the Sunday Times about the death of Michael Jackson and the Twittersphere illustrates.  I followed election night on Twitter which was fascinating: from the culty number one trending topic of 'Long Legged Cleggy Weggy' from the comedy show Russell Howard's Good News to more serious comment on the results coming in to the standard of political debate offered on TV - on Twitter I could get a running commentary as well as a lot of humour and irreverence.

This was why I initially got into Twitter - but I have become more and more impressed about the uses for library networking in the last few weeks. #hashtags make it really easy to follow things like #cam23. Following librarians means I hear about important library news stories instantly - such as the KPMG report which suggested cuts in professional staff in public libraries among other things - and can follow the reactions of librarians. This is a really invaluable learning tool for someone at the beginning of their career like myself. I can now get an idea of what's being said at conferences without actually attending - I followed Tweets from the CILIP New Professionals Conference 2010 from other graduate trainees who were there: a brilliant way to get ideas and information immediately and from miles away. I feel Twitter keeps me better informed and part of a larger community of librarians which is fantastic, and unavailable anywhere but Twitter. 

Collective jokes and news, sharing information and being part of a network of librarians - this is the point of Twitter for me!

Google Calendar

I am big fan of online calendars for work - shared calendars which allow different staff members' annual leave or meetings to display without lots of date copying makes life so much easier. In my current role we have a shared calendar within the library,  which can be accessed online, on which staff meetings, leave, or library wide events such as computer upgrades are noted. The Mozilla Thunderbird calendar has similar functions to the Google version including colour coding and reminders (see below).

I did have a play around with Google calendar for 23 things specifically and although I had a few issues with its usability, which I know is because I regularly use an almost identical system so I'm trying to do things the Mozilla way rather than the Google way, if I was using Google all the time I'd soon get used to it.

In terms of use for libraries: having a free resource to create sharable calendars could clearly be useful although at the moment in our library I can't see many applications for it as we have our own internal version.