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Well, as I'm in my first professional post I'm starting the process of chartership with CILIP. I've stumped up my £50 to register, and now have 6 months to compose and submit my chartership plan. It's still not fully formed as yet, but one of my aims will be to maintain my knowledge and awareness of new technologies (something which I try to do anyway, but it's nice to acknowledge and record). One such technology is no doubt Google Wave, and as my invitation arrived a couple of weeks ago I thought I'd record my first thoughts.

First up, who thought Google Wave was a social networking tool? Well, me, for one, but it turns out I was wrong. When you've added someone to your list of contacts they're not prompted to add you. It's more like an email system with a contacts list. In fact, if you watch any of Google's explanations of 'what Wave is' then you'll find they're pretty keen to tell you it's like email too. It took me a while to work out what Google meant here, but I think what they mean is it's like a step forward from Gmail... I haven't been able to see the links between Wave and Outlook without going via Gmail myself.

There's various information out there on the web. Most people I've spoken to have been directed towards and immediately put off the 120 minute launch video. Like me, you may be relieved to discover there's an 8 minute Google Wave video that isn't directed towards developers. This is a pretty good overview of what Google would like Wave to do, but it isn't yet a guide to what it does. Currently, for me, it's been a bunch of email conversations in which I discuss what on earth Wave is, and one big public collaboratively edited conversation in which even librarians are struggling to organise themselves into alphabetical order while everything goes slowly.

So, do I like it? Well, currently that's an emphatic 'no', but if you'd asked me about Twitter when I first signed up I might have said the same thing. I think, and this isn't the most original thought on Wave I've had, that it lacks critical mass. If Google really are developing something to replace email then it needs to be available to everyone. What's the point in trying to arrange a barbeque through Wave if only two people I know have invites? Furthermore, half the functions Google would like it to have they're kind of waiting for someone to develop (that's what the 120 minute video's about). It's interesting to see what it does currently, but I think I'm going to have to withhold judgement until the critical mass of people and apps is reached. If it ever is.

Note: tenuous photographic connection: Google Wave / sea. Taken on holiday at Gower this year.

Labels: chartership, professional development, Web 2.0

There was an interesting conversation happening on Twitter this week about whether or not to charter. I understand completely that many people feel rather disenfranchised from CILIP, and don't feel like they get their money's worth from the organisation. Chartership, similarly, is an aid to professional development, but not the only way to expand ones knowledge and self-awareness (and I'm sure there are some who (whisper it) cannot be bothered... although I've never met any self-proclaimed non-bother-ers).

My background is in psychology, and there a completely different conversation is happening: whether the unchartered should even be allowed to call themselves psychologists. It is understandable that people are more worried about ensuring a certain level of training from someone playing with their minds than someone fetching them a book. As Joeyanne Libraryanne pointed out the equivalent conversation in librarianship is whether a qualification is needed at all. However, isn't the whole point of calling us a profession to point out that librarians do more than just fetch books? I really hope we do, as I get bored of fetching books quite quickly.

For me, CILIP membership and chartership is a complete no-brainer. I have been indoctrinated somewhere along the line to believe that professional organisations are a good thing and CILIP does seem to have given back to me for everything I've put in. I'm a CILIP blogger, which has given me incentive to keep on blogging, I've been sponsored to attend the Mashed Library Conference via CILIP, and I'm a member of the CDG Yorkshire and Humberside committee where I've helped organise events which gave me experience and information. I even read the Gazette and Update on the train. Oh yes, I'm one of those.

For me, the process of chartership is the unimportant part of the equation. I've not gone through it, and the stories I've heard indicate that it may not be the most well-developed programme in the world. But idealistically, the idea of chartership is important to me. If librarians really are a profession - if there's some benefit to shared training and continuing professional development - then we need to have a chartership process to reflect and validate our professional activities. My thinly veiled opinion is that there is a benefit. Now, how do we make that benefit more evident, CILIP?

Note: photograph shows view across the lake, University Park, University of Nottingham.

Labels: chartership, CILIP, professional development, Web 2.0

As well as commenting on the more formal learning I took from Mash Oop North, explored in my blog posts on the opening sessions I also wanted to take time to comment more generally on the unconference.

I was funded to attend Mashed Library by CILIP Yorkshire and Humberside - I'm writing a report for their newsletter in 'payment' and because I was travelling from Nottingham rather than Sheffield, where I study, they generously offered to put me up in a hotel before the event to allow me to avoid a super-early start.

I'm really glad I got to go to the event early as the Monday night getting-to-know-you meal and drinks were invaluable in finding my feet and getting to know some delegates beforehand. I commented on my previous posts that Twitter was useful in following ideas being generated and discussed elsewhere in the event itself, but the pre-show was great in that I got to meet up with people who I knew from Twitter beforehand. It was great to put people to IDs / pictures of faces, and I found a few more interesting people to follow as well. I've always tended to arrive at events like this on the day, and I think I might actually arrive early wherever possible in the future, as it really helped me settle in.

The conference was brilliantly organised: not only were we asked to indicate our own experience and interests beforehand, but we also got to vote on pizza toppings for the lunch, and influence which of the opening sessions ran parallel to each other. I missed the Yahoo! Pipes session, as it ran opposite one my choices, but fellow-Twitterer @spiky7 and I had a play with it in the afternoon and created an exciting tool for stalking conference organiser Dave Pattern. Unfortunately we had to edit out his #mashlib09 tweets as they overwhelmed the timeline!

If you're interested in learning more about Mashed Library then it's well worth visiting the Mash Oop North blog, where there should be further updates on the event. Next year's event will take place in Birmingham, entitled Middle Mash, and I'd recommend attending if you can find a place - this year's sold out with speed!

Note: the picture shows the Ikea rat on display at the Rat and Ratchet, which we called into on Monday night. I have the exact same toy rat, so he made me feel right at home.

Labels: conferences, library tech, mashlib09, professional development, Web 2.0

The second session I attended at Mash Oop North was by Brendan Dawes who "does things with data" as he described it, creating playful and interactive visualisations. The major message, for me, in his talk, was how much more creative we could be with the way we represent data in libraries. The OPAC tends to be quite serious and workmanlike, and, sure, usability is important. But what about encouraging playful and creative exploration of information? Maybe libraries need to learn a lesson from Donald Norman's Emotional Design where he realised that his focus on usability in his earlier works could divert attention from the kind of design which we fall in love with. There's a more obvious place for playfulness in public than academic libraries, but a more ludic approach might be a good way to engage students and encourage them to explore library services in the early stages of their university careers.

The final formal session of the day was perhaps the most practically useful for me, a whistlestop tour through applications by Mike Ellis. He particularly focused on applications which could be used to 'scrape' data from webpages which aren't formally set up for data sharing through RSS feeds or APIs. I must admit to getting a little lost in this session, joined by a few others in the Twitter chat, but Mike came to the rescue by putting all the information down in a blog post on scraping, scripting and hacking which I'll definitely be revisiting.

The nice thing about being at a techie conference was that lots of people were using Twitter, and so I got to experience bits and pieces of the other talks by following along on the #mashlib09 hashtag on my borrowed-for-the-day iPod Touch. More on Twitter to follow in my other thoughts on the conference.

Note: photo features obligatory white-blood-cell-in-transit-to-conference shot. The white blood cell team did quite well at fending off conference lurgy.

Labels: conferences, library tech, mashlib09, professional development, Web 2.0

This week I attended the Mashed Libraries event Mash Oop North. This is an unconference (informal conference) event looking at the use of mash-ups in libraries. I've put together a few posts on the day, and in the first two I'm concentrating on the opening sessions, as these were the most information-rich parts of the event.

My first opening session was Dave Pattern and Iman Moradi talking about "Making data work harder". The simplest way to sum Dave's section up was that it was about libraries doing an Amazon - harnessing library usage data to enhance the user experience. There were lots of great examples of how this could enhance user activities. I was also provoked to wonder whether there were opportunities for libraries to go beyond some of these more commercial models of data to create more library-specific data usage. Free provision of resources which adds a whole new angle to features like book suggestion, and there's some aspects of library usage – such as renewals and repeat borrowing of books – which don't feature in the commercial sphere.

Dave's thoughts were followed by a section from Iman about design in libraries. I had a brief chat with Iman later in the day about ethnography in libraries, and his comments about how libraries might capture information about using the library from students before they leave – almost a form of student-focused knowledge management – were thought-provoking. It resonated with some of the intentions of my dissertation, although my work is focused on harnessing that knowledge for institutional rather than community learning.

Note: Picture shows the deluge Mashed Library was treated to at lunchtime. The misty effect in the background is genuinely caused by sheer weight of water.

Labels: conferences, library tech, mashlib09, professional development, Web 2.0

This blog's been a little bit quiet recently as I've not been feeling too good: for some reason one of my symptoms has been weird vision when looking at screens (I can see them but my eyes are a bit weirded out by long exposure) hence the lack of updates!

Lots has been going on, however. The best news is that I've received a funded place at Mashed Libraries 2009. This is one of those fancy unconference things looking at mash-ups within the library field. I'm really excited about attending. I don't have much experience in any kind of library technologies: the shot on the right shows the nearest I got to library tech in my last job, a new computer to access our old-fashioned LMS. However my enthusiasm for social networking, my love of playing with random software and the bits of my PhD involving representing and supporting homework through lots of different technologies should be pretty relevant.

On top of this I've been recruited to work on an HEA funded synthesis of research alongside members of CILASS, the University of Sheffield's centre for Inquiry Based Learning over the summer. Should be interesting and a way of keeping up my research skills and giving me something other than my dissertation to think about over the next few months.

Other than those exciting pieces of news, the most thrilling thing in my life has been the gradual erosion of my coursework deadlines. At the time of writing I've only got two more pieces I need to get done, and hopefully things will keep ticking along. In fact, I've got some editing awaiting as I speak, so off I go!

Labels: jobs, library tech, MA, mashlib09, professional development, Web 2.0

Well, I had an excellent time following #cilip2 on Twitter today (see my previous post for details). It's rather disorienting participating in a physically located session remotely through the medium of 140 character micro blogs, but it worked quite well, with the Twitterers in the room primarily communicating with the goal of explaining to us remote participants. In fact, it was much easier to understand what was happening than tracking a conference on Twitter usually is, as the posts were designed for an outside audience: you can check them out on this summary of the #cilip2 conversation. The major difficulty in following the session was the multiple conversations going on amongst those of us tweeting remotely!

The main point that I took away from the session was the idea, covered by both Phil Bradley and Brian Kelly, that CILIP needs to become more open to experimentation, and less afraid of failure. Having a static website with tightly controlled arenas for interaction is symbolic of the need to control communication and present a formal front, whereas Web 2.0 offers CILIP the opportunity to experiment, and learn from its members in an engaged and flexible manner. A good lesson for any organisation to learn, regardless of technology. I hope this translates into some plans for action on CILIP's part, or at least features heavily in their new communication strategy.

Aside from being part of a fascinating event I also picked up a few new skills participating. The suggestion that there might be Skype (although technical problems meant there wasn't) inspired me into having a play with Skype, which I haven't used before, but which seemed fairly straightforward. I also used a widget to feed relevant tweets into a page on this site so I can share the event easily with others, and I'm sure I'll use that system again. I may not have made the progress on my coursework I would have liked, but I think I achieved a lot today.

Labels: CILIP, Web 2.0

Today is the CILIP Open Council Session discussing how CILIP can use Web2.o to "engage better with the LIS community". Twitter is buzzing with discussion of the best way to follow the session and I've already been added to the Twitter lists of a handful of librarians I've encountered through the #cilip2 tag which is being used to label posts relating to the event (and added some too!). Some Twitterers will be commenting live from the event, and others of us are just waiting to see what happens!

If you're not a user of Twitter, it's still perfectly possible to follow along the discussion. I've put up a widget at http://www.chuukaku.com/monitter.html which updates automatically and provides an easy way to follow the conversation without having to use any Twitter-related applications - should be relatively easy to share as well. Alternatively, you'll be able to access an archive of Twitter posts on Twitter Search (this prompts you to update when new Tweets come in) or can use the Monitter or Twitterfall web applications which update in real time, although you'll have to manually add the #cilip2 tag yourself (my webpage's widget is provided by Monitter).

Labels: CILIP, Web 2.0

As part of the Educational Informatics module I'm taking this semester we're exploring the educational possibilities of Second Life. One of the lecturers within the department, Sheila Webber, has extensive experience in using Second Life for education - as documented in Sheila Yoshikawa's SL blog and so she's been showing us around. The picture on the right is Katie Marville, my alter ego, standing in my house in the village set up for the module.

I actually signed up for Second Life independently sometime around the end of last year; I'd heard a reasonable amount about librarians using it and wanted to have a try. The picture on the left shows my somewhat blockier original appearance. My background is very much as a Second Life cynic. I play a lot of computer games and so am very aware that the look and feel of the basic features Second Life offers are rather past their sell by date, and as someone with a background in usability I'm pretty appalled by its interface. I've always held that putting an island into Second Life, while potentially an excellent marketing technique, is unlikely to get you anywhere.

However, this course has changed my mind a little. I still find the interface frustrating and the world a little glitchy. I'm beginning to find clothing and adjusting my avatar more and more compelling, though, and now I'm working out where things are (through blogs and in-world groups) I don't feel quite as disoriented. Furthermore, I can see how educators find the ability to create and manipulate the world so useful; it's genuinely possible to build educational and attractive environments. The gamer in me still wishes someone would create a second Second Life, though, and it's worth considering that I grew up in the 8 bit era - I hate to think what young gaming literate audiences will make of it in a couple of years.

Labels: MA, Web 2.0

I'm a little late to this conversation, but have been distracted by essays and illness. However, I've been following recent discussions about CILP's presence on Web 2.0 with interest. For anyone who's managed to miss the debate it's worth referring to CILIP's Chief Executive blog, which caused the intital controversy, Phil Bradley's comments, which capture its flaws quite thoroughly, and the ensuing CILIP responses.

Part of my views are fairly predictable. I think it would be fantastic for CILIP to get involved in these arenas. I've recently started a Twitter account associated with my blog (although I did have a different presence on Twitter before) and have been involved in several librarian communities on Facebook, Livejournal etc. I'm therefore highly engaged with and enthusiastic about these forms of communication, but oddly enough I think my opinions are more sympathetic towards CILIP than many.

As a librarianship student I am aware my coursemates have very mixed feelings about CILIP, and some really don't see the point. Making a greater effort to engage new professionals through tools they already use can only help address this, and I think CILIP could benefit hugely from stepping up its game on this front.

On the other hand I think it's worth observing that CILIP can be pretty good at encouraging involvement. This blog is part of the CILIP blog landscape, and I was both pleased and surprised to be contacted to take part at such an early stage in my career. Someone somewhere had got the message that I was keen to become engaged in the community. Compared to other professional organisations I've joined I think this shows a level of interest in new forms of communication and member involvement that is often much closer to zero.

I almost feel CILIP is suffering from having such an on-the-ball community to serve... but what a lucky position for a professional body! I wish the other professional bodies I've participated in were in the position to complain about a community that was too engaged and too passionate! The message to CILIP is that they need to take advantage of this opportunity, but I don't think that's passed them by. Let's hope they seize the day - or at least create an official Facebook group...

Photograph taken at the University of Leicester's David Wilson Library. I love the implication that there are non-Information Librarians!

Labels: CILIP, Web 2.0

First things first: I've started a Twitter account associated with this blog. You can find me at www.twitter.com/katie_fraser and please do feel free to add me if you have a Twitter account. As it's brand new everything's looking rather sparse, but I've set up this blog to feed in and hopefully it will look more active soon.

Aside from the growing realisation that the amount of coursework in my second semester may well be infinite, things are going well Librarianship-wise. I've been moving a bit further with my dissertation project on Sheffield University's Information Commons and I'm enthusiastic about the opportunity to work with leading practioners and to follow my interests in learning / technologies / spaces into the library field. I submit my initial project proposal at the end of this week, and should have more news soon. In addition I'm launching into some of my coursework - in fact, today I'm supposed to be starting my evidence-based briefing paper on Virtual Research Environments, so I'd better stop being Web 2.0 and start being scholarly. Although the next essay is on Web 2.0 in Education - can I call this research?

Today's photograph was captured at Nottingham Station during one of my early morning trips to Sheffield. The signs had broken down and were going through an immensely entertaining reboot process. I love it when technology accidentally lets us behind the curtain in these ways.

Labels: MA, Web 2.0, website