Thing 22 Mobile Things

I certainly agree with the point made about using mobile counterparts because of convenience. When i used to blog news more frequently, i found more time to do it on the blogger app and via twitter. Just the other day i explained to my partner that i didn't bring my camera to the ballet because i wanted to put our picture up on Facebook as a way of saying we were there and damn it with the quality.

As i explained in a previous post about instagram, my phone although smart, is very silly about things such as being able to store messages and other things on the massive memory card instead of saving them to the limited phone storage meaning that sometimes my phone registers as having no space when i delete a ton of things. Therefore mobile app downloads dont really happen for me, but i will have a look at the google store and see whats on offer in the areas that might be useful; meetings, presentations, libraries.

That said, i'll used the app version of  Office suite, or at least the basic package, is rather useless outside of reading documents and pdf - it has no edit or create features that i could find. That said, there are mobile versions of apps that i've used that i've found very useful (email, facebook, blogger) albeit with limitations (no way at seeing junk emails, no way of editing checkins etc once posted, no minimise to move between the internet and blog post).

I'm sure the apps mentioned could be useful in the future, if you had the time to use them frequently. For example, one of the first things i thought of with Gum is that you could scan the barcode of books in the library and users would know you had it if they were looking at it in a bookstore. As i've said on previous occassions, with these things, its a matter of prioritizing what areas you need more modern imput and working continually on that.  Beacons also sound interesting but as with a lot of these types of things, patrons need to have to be tuned into the item in question - in this case bluetooth. Bluetooth is something i myself only turn on if i'm sending or receiving something from a friend or family member. But that's just me, so they definitely could be of use.

One app i already have that would serve some of the functions mentioned in previous posts about images is snapchat. It's popular enough for students to more than likely already have it and as i have it, its a quick and easy way to keep students interested in the going-on at the library. It's temporary nature has both pros and cons though.

The temporary nature of the photos may line up a bit with instagram's disabling of the 'save photo' function which i imagine may help with issues to do with labelling your images with creative commons as for the main part, images show up for a few seconds and cannot be saved. Obviously more sophisticated phones can screencap the snapchat, but on average even if they did it would not be a problem. Its also an app that you don't need to buy and there's no real issues of storage space as the pictures disappear. 

It does mean that your notifications and updates arent available for ever, so that picture you took of a new item or opening hours will dissappear and the information may go too quickly for patrons to read in time. Patrons who do not look at your snapchat every day may miss things. But i myself and many others do look at them every day, as these types of things become a bit addictive. As i said before, a lot of young people do use snapchat already so this might be a good way of updating your patrons about your library and could be beneficial is used correctly. 

If i were to consider this going forward i would use it for the following things; updating students on new titles, any temporary changes to the opening hours, added features to the already available electronic resources,  the library itself and its facilities. The temporary nature of the photos may be a selling point for encouraging patrons to appear in the images. It could also be a way of updating students on the current space available in the library, meaning that part-timers can check before they leave the house how busy the library is that day. Also libraries that have more events may find it a useful way of demonstrating the events that happened. It could be away of connecting the departments within the college by allowing each department to take over the snapchat for the day, talking about the types of things they do each day and introducing students to staff and services available. On that note, it might also be a way for the wider library-interested community to get a feel for what the librarian does.

The downside is that, like most social media, this is something that needs to worked on daily to keep snapchat users interested and its not always possible to find something to post about every day. But it is quick enough to take a picture and write a short amount of text so with a bit of creativity, it could work well.

Thing 21 - Infographics

Now that i think about it, reports that i wrote for advocacy at work may have popped off the page just a bit more may have worked better as an infograph. Given my boss' limited time it may have been useful. However, infographs may not cover all bases and works better for figures than facts and the purpose of a infograph seems to condense information whereas a qualitative argument is also important in expressing what library hours mean to students, not to mention leaving in all the information would make it over long and undo this purpose. I will test out an infograph on a report i wrote recently regarding opening hours and see if it works well. 

I decided to pick easel.ly because i think pdf's would be more useful for printing purposes and the name was catchy. It useful that you can sign up with google.

It's important in this infograph to hone in on the highest figures, students responses and financial benefits.

It's probably a bit cluttered but was trying to get as much important information across in the below infographic

Thing 20: presentations

Presentations are scary. I avoided them where possible in uni, only doing a few here and there and accidentally, though gleefully, missing a group one in  my GDIP LIS.

This week i had to give a presentation to students on the electronic resources available to Business students, but figured a live demo would be better, especially since it was on short notice. But I will do up the slides i would have done up if i'd had more that a few minutes to give the demo. Perhaps i can put a few more points on the resources and make it available to students?

My presentation probably aligns most with the first category, the exposition, as i will be presenting the facts about the resources and giving a basic how-to guide. My audience are final year business students so its tailored to their resources and whether the resources cover the three employment paths: management, marketing and finance. In my research i found out that our limited resources arent really tailored towards the finance aspect, so this i will need to break to them gently and provide alternatives. They will be at the beginning of their thesis research journey, and some of them are foreign exchange, so i will need to cater to different levels of familiarity with the resources.

The point made about knowing your subject is something i felt very fearful of in my actual demo - i'd have a general idea how to work the resources but be a bit rusty on legitimate searching as i havent got queries in awhile and wouldn't be that well up on business topics. Obviously i used my limited time before i was due to give the demo looking at a few more general topics but with recently cut hours it was hard to spend any real time on it, so i muddled through the few search suggestions i got unexpectedly.

My story will be as follows.Introduction to myself and library. How to login to the portal through which you access the resources mentioning that they should have received an email by now, if not email on handout. Then go through each resource, one-two slides per resource with space for questions at the end. This handout mentioned is something i did prepare for students this week so it will make up some of my story. This means I have a fair idea what will be going into the resources part of the story. I know from experience what types of questions and concerns the students have, so this should help the slideshow construction.

I will more than likely stick to PowerPoint, as i own it, and the work Microsoft Office is 2013 so it's a quite updated version i can use during quieter times. I was however interested in learning about Prezi, Google slides and slideshare. Thankfully i've learned from experience that messing around with schemes and fonts and images just wastes time so i know the best idea is always to go for a clear font (such as Times New Roman) and style, keeping accessibility in mind. My images will only be screencaps, which i have some prepared already so nothing to worry about there. The plan is to simplify the resources for students, so paragraphs of words on the page would be counter-productive anyway- therefore i will be constructing clear simple bullet points.

As soon as i've constructed the slides i will screen cap some of them here.

i've removed the email addresses for privacy

and a closing slide

Thing 19: The legal side of things

It is interesting that i got to this topic today when only yesterday i was catching up on my ILN (International Librarian Network) topics since my email app went bust and copyright was the topic i was discussing with my partner. 

What i said i will repeat here: considering my profession as an academic librarian i have scandalously little knowledge on the current national rules on copyright except the usual 'no photocopying more than 5% of a text' and referencing in an essay. I would know a bit about attribution and creative commons from my college essay writing days and choosing images to use in posters advertising our services and rules, but other than that i'm fairly behind, particularly with regards to stuff that is not open access. I volunteer now and again with the DOAJ so my knowledge of what constitutes open access is improving but its the other side of the copyright field i know little about. In my conversation with my partner he discussed his frustration about pharmaceutical companies claiming intellectual ownership of indiginous knowledge and I mentioned how my understanding about just how free a stock image is expanded in relation to that No campaign poster earlier this year.

Created by Christina Hardison for opensource.com

I didnt know that legend suggests copyright law originated among monks and i can certainly understand that copyright was first brought into law to protect the author. I can understand that continuing today. But what i cannot understand is that a certain amount of journal publishers can have such a hold over research and its dissemination to the point that sometimes it costs so much more for a researcher to have their work freely available and still respected. Also this idea that works of a ridiculous age are the property of a writers family- surely they should be making their own living and not desperately hanging on to the rights of their deceased family members efforts so that big companies can give them lots of money to make a movie - yes the movie company shouldnt be able to make so much money off the work of others but when did art become about who made money and who didnt? In my own view, education should not be something for the privileged, but for the masses. Maybe this is a bit idealistic but most librarians are librarians for a love of literacy and imparting knowledge, particularly to the disadvantaged. 

I am certainly glad there are additional provisions WIPO has made for libraries, although the document is a few pages long so i will go have a read and comment some more later.

Creative commons is something i have a bit of knowledge about from volunteering with DOAJ as mentioned above so i think i will take the second task to complete. However the content of the first task has given me lots to think about - particularly in terms of who anything i create at work belongs to.

sourced from Academic Revolution Remixed's Flikr

To be included in the Directory of Open Access Journals there are a few important requirements - people need to be able to read all content of the journal ("Is the full text of the articles available online? The options selected must be available on the site for download by a user.")  and they need to have access to the copyright information ("Check that a statement about the journal’s Open Access Policy is stated clearly on the web site") which is  fairly usable creative commons and has to be embedded in the article.
This is a useful resource for information professionals as it offers another source, both for our own research and aiding the research of our patrons as electronic resources and journals in general are quite expensive. In the few applications i've processed so far, a few have even had low or no Article Processing charges which although it is less popular, it means that this research at least could be entered easily, an incentive for academics to have their articles freely available. The website also encourages a digital archiving policy meaning that older work is also available freely. Another important requirement for being included is that the journal have a full editorial board and be peer reviewed, increasing the quality of the content. The editors scan for plagiarism also.

The website is fairly easy to use and is searchable at article level. Once you search, you can filter results by journal licence, which means that you know which will be easier to reference, re-use etc. There is also a browse function which devides sources by, thankfully, the library of congress subject classifications which means finding the right content easier. The whole website has an embedded link to more information about the creative commons licence of each work.

Thing 18: Communicating through photographs

I love communicating through pictures. I'm the type of person who loves leaving a picture with no caption and having people guess whats going on. Or, embarrasingly, loves announcing a dramatic hair style change by not telling anybody about it beforehand and then posting a 'look at me' type picture. I used to not be so hipster and petty. I used to hate pictures of myself. But then, you see i got a taste of people caring where I went, what i wore and who i went with when hanging with some unashamedly camp fellows. It's eased off a bit in recent months, but for awhile (and snapchat is partially to blame) I got a lil bit obsessed with photographing everything i was eating, every place i was and every cute animal i saw. It just became habit. I think my phone not being able to handle the update to Snapchat saved my soul just a little bit.

But i've gone a bit off topic. I've used Flickr a bit, mainly in an observational way but i've never used Instgram (you don't want to know the un-pc alternative name i have for it, though this particular group that should be offended named it). I have however used pictures to communicate whats new in the library, primarily new books, and i added some pictures of the library to our own page after our previous librarian left because i felt it needed more colour. Therefore i can understand how Flikr might be useful to tell the library story - i have no problem with people saving pictures which i understand as the only benefit of Instagram except filters, though i'm willing to give both a go.

Flikr is something i can across, like most things, through fandom, where other fans had posted film set images or fan art. It also somewhere I used recently to look at pictures of a marathon i was very proud my sister took part in. I didn't know that it could search for creative commons pictures so i now realise one particular advantage of using it in our field, particularly with regard to reference questions we might get about copyright free images. It is also, as i've said in previous posts about images, a good way of sharing event pictures and its useful that a group of people can post the same place. Who would ever need more than a terrabyte of storage! At least not for quite awhile! Tagging and gathering images into topics is a good tool - though people may vary in their wording - so maybe only use our own Library field standards if possible? Then the interactive nature of the site allows users to add their own tags thus broadening the findability. I certainly agree that photographing fragile items is a good idea - much like leave no trace with nature, you can take a memory of the item for more to see without exposure to more people.

It's hard not to get sidetracked with all the groups and topics and albums and chatrooms (oh and the metadata!) but i finally got to the task at hand. I thought the NLI photostream was a good place to look for a photograph, particularly since i love old photos and they saw in their Flikr commons statement that none of the photos have copyright only attribution. I scanned it abit until i found the photo below. It reminded me of myself posing with a friend of mine - me awkward and my friend posing like a pro. It was only after i saved it i realised something crazy - the awkward guy has the same surname as me! Major General Ennis on the left. I kind of want to find out if we're related now, and the NLI is a good place to start.....

Instagram is something, ever by its name, that gives me the feeling of a hipster app trying to be cool and cultured by using something like anything ending in gram. It also throws up associations of selfies, ridic filters and apple products, but i have decided to approach everything with an open mind. But then i realised you need to download the mobile app for it to work. My phone doesnt have that kind of space, no matter how much i delete - will i be failed on not competing this task? Would that be fair as not everyone has a smart phone?

I guess i'll enquire and find out - returning to this task at a later date. I have enjoyed looking at New York Public library account - those book covers connecting with the people behind - never gets old.

I think instagram is a bit flashy for our library, though it might help connect with the younger undergrads and i've yet to really look at it. Flikr would work for us because there's lots of embedding features and you dont need an account to view the images. I think we could use it to regain that student updating service we lost with a more awkward Moodle website  - on the old website it was designed with a front page that was useful for posting information and updates as well as a more useable library page but with the new website there seems to be more restriction on who views what version of the front page and its harder to work out how to post things there. Also our institutions marketing team has taken over other roles as late so cant spend as much time updating about the instiution as a whole on the institution twitter.

A flikr account could be useful for posting images of new items in our collection, promoting services and displaying those posters i like making that we cant put on the  wall in the new building because of new paint etc.

Thing 17 - Reflective Practice

self awareness, description, critical analysis, synthesis and evaluation

Thrown in the deep-end in my most recent position, self-reflection is something that may be useful. When i started the job it seemed straightforward; everything new i had to do was in a manual my predecessor gave me. But as time moved forward, the job and it's needs evolved to include roles i had no frame or reference for, nor any real guide. Piecing together material was all i could do. Or was it?

Reflecting on the process told me that when under pressure to do a task i never did before without help made me feel stressed; beyond belief. Keeping it to myself , ie separating it from home life made me feel worse, and i needed to vent my frustrations. But i also learnt from evaluating my response, that too much of this venting caused me to get further down.

The new role in question is diploma coordinator. So theres a lot involved; registering students, dealing with their queries and liaising with the lecturer.

So i learnt for the experience that i need to a) spend time getting to know where relevant materials can be found. I need to put aside time to look, calmly through these and decipher what might be useful going forward and not get too bogged down in the vast collection of old material from previous role-holders.
b) asking for help, even from those who may not have done the specific job but may have similar experience within the instiution in enrollment and admissions work. Get their guidance but dont expect them to do the work for you. Learn by doing but write down what they suggest and what works and what doesnt.
c) I needed also to be less hard on myself for not responding to students immediately regarding this new role but its better to take a bit of time with it and give them an acceptable solution rather that updating them a few times on progress. 

These findings about the situation, analysis of what i did that worked and what that didnt and what else i can do is something i can do in my job in the future. That and realise i am not super-human and that i can sometimes say no to people. The key thing i have learned is i need to time-manage better in these situations and prioritise, setting time aside for each thing i need to do rather than trying to answer emails while doing these tasks and thus getting so bogged down in 'i have all this to do and only this time to do it' and therefore getting nothing done efficiently. 

Thing 16: Collaboration Tools

Collaboration is indeed a huge part of advocacy - collaboration with other staff in your job, collaborating with decision-makers to gain their liking and creating a mutually beneficial relationship, collaborating with others in the field for ideas and support when things get tough.

For the most part i use only email, excel and social media to collaborate - email at work to share marketing ideas, service information and support, email with my ILN (international librarian network) partner to gain an insight to how others might approach it. But I definitely understand that broadening my outlook will help in future collaboration. In a way our institution's use of a staff drive is similar how to many use Google drive. Anything we share at work, excel sheets of student information, posters promoting library's services, general information, organising meetings, we share via this staff drive and/or email . 

Microsoft Word is something i collaborated on exam paper formatting with aswell, which could have been shared using google drive if we weren't set up on Outlook and hotmail. 

 I know many people use Google drive to share college work and/or readings however legally that may be. Google Drive is something I probably would use if i was collaborating outside our institution or outside working hours. I'm pretty sure I used in during my GDIP LIS on group work and we were encouraged to use wiki's and instant messaging tools. We will eventually be doing library induction for our students (we fell behind on the formalities with a premises move, same as i fell behind on the course) and i reckon google slides might be useful even though i usually use powerpoint.

Looking through Google Docs myself, i realised i had used my account to share an embarrassing video way back when and i had used to when the DOAJ share their guidelines with us volunteer editors. The document templates seem somewhat useful so i may use the cv one in future. It is also useful that you can edit a document while using google hangouts. Now that i think of it, i participated in a doodle poll that someone else had set up. This tool may be useful in finding time in everyone's busy schedules at work. As things change we definitely need to meet more frequently to touch base.

When approaching the task for this thing i thought my browser had again changed the language. Let me explain; my Google chrome seems to like to change the language frequently despite how much i change it back to English. It has currently settled on French, a language i can sort of understand from my basic grasp garnered in secondary school and i use my own netbook so infrequently i havent bothered to change it yet :P.

Upon reading further down (rather than investigating, i guess weekend laziness) i found out it's Latin. This could be interesting! I have an odd fascination with learning Latin; some connection to posh private schooling and magic, i guess. 

Interesting when i tried to translate the first few paragraphs (Google Translate) only some of it translated  and very poor english:

“It's time for members across the country…. darts of fear, or soccer pure ...Performance of life,  poverty or hate. But we ought to load...great is the fear, that the main group, takes life….there was a competition, consectetur, neither with the arrows, is effected in the gate of the sapien. Great for the vehicles the same….In the refinancing. It's the element of the earth is not elit ….s not the members, through a pulvinar...and the course of the Moors, and….Smartphones….poverty, my real estate. But in front of a free,....Until nibh eros, arrows, and that photography, that, at the price of the game. ...functional advantage Reserved. Employment in silence, by the Class twist our marriage,...or expensive, and the advantage of, wind, but pure. …..In fact, never invest in targeted hate….Also a soft bed this...bananas which, in the arrows from the author at. But with their arrows…..bananas, innovative poverty-free layer. This innovative no laughter…..the earth,...emperature whom there was not before.

the Moors, but the game...advantage of the ends of the jaws of temperature. Nutella ….that strong and the gate….important layer. In diameter than the disease….pain, but blandit players and sorted by. In order to ...fear, of needs, from the thermal one…. at the court of a great keyboard,..such as soccer the earth across the country."

Google Drive is a useful tool indeed, learned a lot from other collaborators.