#blog12daysxmas Post 10 #anz23mthings Thing 8 Calendars

On the tenth day of Christmas I got back to #anz23mthings!   Yes, I am going to finish this in January.  No stopping me!

Thing 8's theme is Calendars. I have tried various online calendars over the years: Outlook on my home computer as a standalone, Lotusnotes at work, Outlook at work, work calendar synced with work phone, work calendar sending invites to me on home calendar and so it goes on.

I did try Google calendar a few years ago (and know plenty who use it) but I think the key thing was that my work calendar which was critical was on Lotusnotes and then Outlook.  So Google calendar was only ever going to be a duplication for me. Finally I got to a stage when I abandoned my personal Outlook calendar and just used my work Outlook which synced with my work phone for all personal and work commitments. Of course, that led to some loss of data in terms of personal appointments (eg recurring ones) and contacts when I left that POW.

These days I am pretty happy using the native calendar interface on my iPhone. Via iCloud this syncs across various iThings.  It also allows me to add calendars from other sources eg Google, Yahoo, as well as iCal.  It also syncs with my Facebook invitations and events.  And now there is also an iCloud sync with my desktop Outlook so I have even started using that calendar again.

#blog12daysxmas Post 8 #anz23mthings Thing 7 Communicate: Google+Hangout and Skype

This topic's theme is Communicate! And we are asked to look at Skype and Google+ Hangout. I've had a Skype account for a while and I have used it mainly for communicating with overseas friends or with family and friends in Australia when I am out of Australia. However, I really do find email, Twitter and Facebook often a very good way for virtually instant communication. So I do tend to use those mostly. On Facebook you can easily do group discussions and I have found these very useful for many group discussions, be they with friends, family or colleagues.

I have also had a Google+ account since beta days but I must say I still don't use it very much.  In the early days I remember thinking that the Hangout was one of the best things about Google+, and experimenting with a couple of people. I can see from the use that it has been put to for discussions about the #anz23mthings that it is really beneficial.

I can see great opportunities in libraries for various things with all of these sites. Really anywhere you would like to have some face to face discussion. That could be with staff in various locations or with the community either in groups or singly. In terms of local history, I can see advantages with both Skype and Google+ for recording oral history and for group discussions about local history topics. Often people enquiring about local things will come from interstate or overseas and these tools could be used to great advantage.

Another tool that is worth considering is Facetime now that so many people of all ages have iPads and use them regularly. The photo above shows it being used in Virginia Beach, Virginia on two iPads which allowed the two people in Virgina Beach as well as the person in Amsterdam on one iPad and the person on the other iPad in New York City all to communicate!

Since my diagnosis with breast cancer I have been part of an international online breast cancer support group. The group has a face to face gathering once a year in North America whence the majority of people come. For a number of years, as part of this gathering, I have organized an international chat. It is really for any members who are in either in North America or the rest of the world and who would like to participate whilst not being physically present, so it is strictly speaking an online chat session on the program. We have experimented with a number of ways of doing this - successfully and unsuccessfully. We have an online chatroom on our website and that has been a constant for a number of years.

But in 2012 for the first time we trialled Facetime. You can see Jax in Amsterdam on my iPad participating in this photo opportunity in San Diego, California in 2012. In 2013 in Virginia Beach, Virginia, we used Skype, the BClist chatroom and also Facetime as seen in the photo at the head of this post. We had a couple of laptops set up for Skype and for the chatroom, as well as a few iPads for Facetime. People used what they felt comfortable with, or swapped around. We had talked about a Google+ Hangout but it didn't come off. The reasons were complicated (and involved illness and death) and don't need to be gone into here.

But when the BCList has its 2014 Gathering in Akron, Ohio this year, I certainly hope that we can get a Google+ Hangout organized.

#61 Library Apps on and for Facebook

I'm one librarian who thinks that Facebook is great. I've done the "library" search before and become fans of library pages, and I've also checked Boroondara. From that search I reached a lot of library staff as well as staff in other Council departments.

We have a City of Boroondara Library Service page and have had it for a while. Today we had 56 fans and the reality is that we haven't really advertised it anywhere. These people have just found us by word of mouth. Well, hey that's what Facebook is all about: social networking. Some people aren't aware that there are profiles (for individuals), groups, and pages on Facebook and these all have different standard components and different applications that can be added. On pages, you can monitor your usage, the demographics of fans etc.

On the City of Boroondara Library Service Facebook page, we have general info about the library service and links to our website, bebo site and blog. We have a couple of FBML applications which currently talk about Chinese computer classes and links to our catalogue on Bookjetty. We feed our blog into the site and through Notes we also feed in the Boroondara Town Hall Gallery blog. We have loaded photos, we have Artshare which loads random works of art from selected galleries and museums and we have a recipe of the day from Epicurious.

We have Worldcat and we are just waiting for our vendor to finalize a link to libraries on our system. We have a series of maps giving our locations - this is done using Google maps. And we have the standard discussion board and wall. But most importantly we use the events function to advertise all of our library events. Come and visit us on Facebook! Tell us what you think.

#60 Facebook!

Facebook, well where do I start? I am absolutely addicted to Facebook and don't need to join up or do any of the suggested tasks ;>). I first came across Facebook in the 23 Things at #19 Web 2.0 Awards where we could choose our own thing. I chose to look at MySpace and Facebook and because it was Australian election day I looked around at Kevin 07 and my local member Lindsay Tanner's presence on both sites.

It took me a while to really get into Facebook but now I am addicted and get into it daily. I have 118 friends as I write and they increase regularly as different parts of my life get connected. I feed my blogs into Facebook, and my Twitter updates my status. I have set up a City of Boroondara page and we are gradually getting fans - 46 as of today. We feed the library blog into this Facebook and I have just linked the Town Hall Gallery in via the notes section as well. We mainly use it to promote our events and they are regularly updated by a team of library staff.

I use Facebook to communicate with friends and family both locally and overseas and have managed to catch up with some people I was quite out of contact with. My friends vary substantially in age and generation, and cover all aspects of my life. The majority of people who are my friends are people that I actually know physically but I have also linked up people I only know virtually or only have linked up with through Facebook. Yep, I love Facebook! I think that it is a fantastic example of community engagement and social networking. And that is what libraries are all about!

#56 Smilebox - smile in a box?

Smilebox was fun and easy to join up. It provides a large number of templates for slideshows, ecards, scrapbooks, postcards and photobooks. Like many of these programs, there is a basic free version and a tempting one with frills that costs. You did have to install the program on your PC and from what I could see execute it every time you logged in.

I signed up and was quite spooked to discover a swag of my recently uploaded photos displaying along the side panel. I tried a few designs and had a bit of trouble with landscape versus portrait as the photos weren't very easily manipulable if they were portrait and the templates mainly wanted landscape. Finally, as funerals were on my mind, I did a floatings photos tribute to Elizabeth Moisidis. I emailed it to myself, I loaded a link to it on my Facebook profile and here it is below in my blog. It was quite slow to load up the link from Facebook and I also found that with Jamie's one included on the Learning 2.1 blog. This may be to do with the speed of my connection?

Smilebox is fun and useful and something that we could have loaded on our public PCs. I wonder if it would be worthwhile having a Click goes the library session on a number of these photograph tools? I could see it as something that could be quite useful to prepare a presentation of someone's life for a funeral or retirement event, and Jamie's example showed that it could also be useful for local or family history.

Make a postcard - it's easy!

#55 Slideshare - Presentations online!

Slideshare claims to be the Youtube of Powerpoint and it certainly does provide a great community of online presentations. You can upload presentations and search and view presentations (without joining up) or you can join up for free and set up an account. I had viewed presentations there before but I hadn't actually joined up.

So as part of the work for #55 I joined up and loaded up a few fairly banal presentations. They did seem to lose some definition in the conversion to Slideshare format, but I suppose that is not really surprising as conversion always seems to lead to some change. I was able to share these slide-shows publicly or with my friends or not at all. So I chose to make some private and some public. You tag the presentations to allow for searching. You also deal with copyright through Creative commons. There are also a number of communities e.g Web 2.0, Second life, Web 2.0 tools for effective teaching.

As I was researching my ill-fated VALA talk on Facebook and public libraries while I was experimenting with Slideshare, I did a search on Facebook and came up with a number of useful presentations. When I had completed my presentation I loaded it up on Slideshare so that I could, er, share it with the other presenter and the person chairing the meeting. That worked well except that it seemed to truncate some of the urls in my presentation. As the others didn't comment and one of them uploaded a link, I need to discover if this is a Firefox issue. I'll check out my Slideshare account at work on IE and see if the urls are truncated there. The other advantage of having the presentation on Slideshare is that you can present from there so long as internet access is available, thus obviating the need for uploading the presentation onto the PC in use or bringing along a PC.

I have already found uses for Slideshare in my work, in terms of searching for presentations I would like to read and also in uploading a presentation of my own that I wanted to share. In the lead up to the VALA talk there were several enquiries about where the presentations would be available, and I was able to reply that mine was available on Slideshare and to suggest that VALA set up a Slideshare account where they could either load presentations given at their meetings or at least fave them.

As I found it a useful presentation, I am uploading here Laurie M Bridges Facebook 101 for librarians (2008). Uploading was easy as any presentation that is freely available has a code for embedding. You can also share to Facebook, reddit and all the normal suspects. So I also tried sharing it on Facebook where a link was posted on my profile to the presentation and its url. This is a great tool.

| View | Upload your own

#51 Libraries and the social web a hot topic

Libraries and the social web is certainly a hot topic. If for example you do a browse through Facebook pages (ie not personal profiles but organizational pages) you will get over 500 hits with the word library in the name! There are also groups on Facebook which are library-based.

It was interesting to run through Jessica Hupp's 25 useful social networking tools for librarians and to realize that, whilst I don't use all of them, there were very few that I was not aware of. I took the opportunity to look at a few that I wasn't aware of: LinkedIn (a site for linking professionals), TeacherTube (a YouTube for teachers), Footnote (a history site which is very US based), Community Walk (a mapping tool for history talks etc), and DaftDoggy. Of these, Community Walk was one that I felt could be useful for family and local history and I made a mental note to go back and try it.

If I think about the City of Boroondara Library Service in relation to the tools mentioned and how we are using them. I do think that we are starting to get somewhere. We made a decision to set up profiles/pages on Facebook, Bebo (not mentioned here but very big in the UK), and MySpace in an effort to cover most bases in terms of age groups. The Facebook has been up and running for a while and the challenge there seems to be to work out ways of linking the page into other applications, Web 2.0 or otherwise, as it seems very different from how you do it on a personal profile. We have just set up Bebo, and MySpace is still a work in progress. We have been focussing in these sites on general information and news about the library service and particularly in promoting events. The next stage needs to be putting the links on the website, and adding applications that will encourage interaction such as reviewing.

Number three is Ning and at Boroondara we have three nings: a general staff ning, a training ning for learning 2.1 and an embryonic local history one focussing on Hawthorn's history. I belong to a number of other nings as do a number of Boroondara staff. With nings, I am coming to the conclusion that they are great for staff but I am not sure that they provide the tool I want for community interaction, hence the stagnation of the Hawthorn history ning.

Four is blogging. The City of Boroondara Library Service has had a staff blog for some time, though a limited number of people use it and we have found that more seem to be attracted to the nings. We have also finally got a library blog developed for the public and this is fed into our Facebook page and hopefully the link will be on the website soon. The Town Gallery and Art Nerds blogs are linked now, so hopefully ours will be soon. At present we only have the one library blog that covers the whole spectrum of library services, though we will probably develop a local history specific one. Outside work I have been working on a blog for the Collingwood Historical Society and this one is integrated in the website. I have also set up another blog, From the news desk, which enables me to post clippings relating to books and libraries to the blog and thence to the Facebook page.

Meebo is five and we have done some experimentation about using this for enquiry in wikis; it could be installed on the blog(s), Facebook, Bebo, on wikis and hopefully in Spydus on the "no hits" page. Before that can be achieved however work will need to be done with the organization about the ability to load such tools on the Council network.

Twittering is number seven: a number of staff Twitter, follow each other's tweets, have links from blogs to Twitter, links from Facebook etc. We have been following some libraries and their Twittering and will shortly set up a library Twitter account which in the first instance will be linked to the library blogs via Twitterfeed. This is another way of getting out into people's spaces.

We have an embryonic Flickr account for the City of Boroondara Library Service (tool 8) and need to do some serious work loading images on to it. Whilst we are using Wetpaint as the platform and not PBwiki as favoured by tool 13, we do have two experimental wikis, one general one and another specifically relating to the Hotels of Boroondara.

Many of the other tools mentioned in the list (or related ones) are used by City of Boroondara Library Service staff, either in their work or play. It is certainly an exciting time to be working in public libraries with all these possibilities for interacting with our users.

#46 Updates!

Thing 46 is a chance to review the changes made with a number of Things since they were first written up almost a year before this task #46. As the Victorian public libraries Learning 2.0 was happening about the time or just before these updates were being written up, I didn't find that there was all that much that was new for me here. The Things that were updated and/or commented upon were #3 Blogger, #5 Flickr, #8 Bloglines, #9 RSS feeds, #10 Generator, #11 LibraryThing, #12 Rollyo, #13 De.licio.us and #14 Technorati. However, it is useful to have these updates for when we want to roll out the original 23 things to the next group of staff.

Interestingly the majority of these are ones that I still use daily or at least on a regular basis and many the ones that Michael Stephens talked about in his talk last week. These have all become pretty mainstream now, it appears. It's hard to believe it, but it is really so. Tempus fugit.

I was interested in Flickr's partnership with Picnik which I must have passed over (though it should have come up in the Picnik thing), and the fact that LibraryThing offer a facility to scan titles not on their database. That sounds good to me as I find it very frustrating not being able to add new items in Bookjetty (they say next release....). It was also interesting to see the comment about the role of Facebook in social cataloguing. I guess I had noticed it with the various books and reading applications but I hadn't really thought it out.

#37 Music to our ears

Task 37 is about expanding musical horizons by using online radio stations where the user tells the station what they like listening to. We were given two options, Pandora or LastFM. Fortunately Fiona had done this task before me, so I knew that Pandora wasn't available in Australia, so that left me with LastFM. You can join up and listen, select music, link it together in albums, and then embed the link to your blog or to other social networking sites - I used Facebook.

I focussed on folk music, though there did seem to be some classical music there as well. Judy Small was unknown, but Martyn Wyndham Read and A.L. Lloyd already had "stations" and I uploaded them to the side bar of my blog, though I later put them in this post as my sidebar seems to be getting widgeted-out.








I could also have contributed information about these artists to LastFM as neither of them had any, taken part in discussions, found friends with similar tastes, journalled and found out about nad posted events. I could also have uploaded a software link that would have enabled LastFM to track what I was playing and link to my profile, what they call "scrobbling".

This is an interesting concept in social networking based on musical tastes and again the assumption that one wants to link to other tools such as blogs and Facebook. I can't see a great deal of use for this in terms of family and local history but it is obviously yet another tool that could be of use to publicize events. This seems to work something like Facebook events and there were certainly events in Melbourne.

#36 Dressing up your photos

Xmas Xena
Originally uploaded by Hecuba's Story

This task is looking at sites which will allow you to play around with photos - crop, resize, recolour, fix red eye and add features. We were given a couple of options Picnik, Fauxto now called Splashup, Pixenate and Snapfish as well as some other less well-known ones.

I chose to sign up with Picnik and found it very easy to use, though I did keep on getting tantalized by the Premium components which I would have for US$24.95 a year. You can upload photos from your computer, do web searches or link to various sites. I easily linked to my Flickr, Photobucket and Facebook accounts but ended up loading a couple of very familiar photos from my PC - they are the ones featured in this blog for Polyxena and Hecuba.

I played around with colour options (B/W, sepia etc), adding text and stickers and borders, and cropping and resizing. In both cases I added the vignette tool to highlist the cat, though this is not quite so clear with the Xmas trappings added. Then I saved my photos. Initially I thought I could only save back to the source where I had uploaded, but with the second one I discovered that by clicking on the Flickr tab I could easily save to Flickr.

I don't know what the other tools are like, but this is a great one. I can see great use for it both for staff who don't have access to Photoshop and also for use on public PCs.

#35 Mini or micro blogging

Back in #19, I remember Jonathan deciding to explore Twitter and there it is still on his blog (s). It is easy to see how these short messages started life as SMS messages, but perhaps less obvious how useful they can be outside SMS. They remind me of the quick takes in Facebook where people tell you what they are doing at this minute and indeed that is one use for the tweets. And so I suppose that if these tweets are coming through on blogs and other network applications, people will know where you are and where you are heading, and whether you can be at Brunetti's for a coffee in ten. I am obviously working this through in my head as I go.

So this is possible, but do I want to be reporting on my actions every minute? I looked at Twitter when Jonathan was experimenting with it in #19 and my reaction then was that I didn't. However, despite yesterday deciding that I wasn't going to bother, today I have enrolled and have linked Twitter up to this blog, Hecuba's Story, and also to my Facebook profile. Doing both of these connections was simple as and just a really good example of how interconnected all these applications are and how interconnected people expect them to be.

I can see the usefulness of it, but don't seem to have many friends who use it. Surprise, surprise - I found two colleagues, Jonathan and Fiona. It certainly could be useful if friends were online and wanted to catch up. Maybe having it up on my Facebook profile will make people more aware of Twitter and encourage them to join in. Like many Web 2.0 things it is good to know that they are possible and to know how to sign up and operate them. Again, in terms of my specific personal learning goal, I am not clear what I could use this for in relation to local and family history. In the library generally, however, Twitter could used to tell people where you are and what you are doing, e.g. at a meeting. VOIP should enable us to do this when installed but in the meanwhile maybe this is an option.

#19 Web 2.0 awards

This was a fun topic. I was interested to explore all the different categories and was pleased to see that in the course of Learning 2.0 I had explored quite a few of them already. Certainly it gave me lots to go back later and explore. With the Organize category it helped me with my frustration in the previous task with Zoho. For this task, I decided to focus on social networking tools and joined up Facebook.

Like many of the other tools I have explored here, I knew and had talked about Facebook but no action! So I signed up and used it to explore the profiles of various politicians, as I was doing it yesterday between voting and watching the election results. This is a link to my local member, Linday Tanner's Facebook. It was interesting to explore the different categories of "friends" he has, to watch his Youtube, and to see his photographs. I was particularly interested to see that we shared some favourite films and TV, and indeed that Kevin Rudd and I did too. Kevin 07 is also fond of Vivaldi, and has a cat named Jasper, so the Hecuba in me liked that. John Howard seems not to have used this tool in his electioneering, though there are some made up profiles for him.

I am amazed at the number of links to others that are available using Lindsay's Facebook as an example. I could link to see who else was at his address, who else had a Master of Arts, who else had Life of Brian as a favourite film just to give a very few examples. Facebook has lots of potential for developing communities of interest. I made a few additions to my stump of a profile and found that there were a few people on Facebook who had breast cancer as an interest, and others who are interested in family history and/or local history.

For comparison purposes, I also took a look at MySpace and of course checked out the topical, namely Kevin Rudd and his Kevin 07 campaign. Kevin's MySpace site seemed to provide a bit more scope than the Facebook site in terms of customization. You could also search and view the sites without signing up, though you couldn't comment. This was a disadvantage with Facebook.

In terms of my aim to discover tools that are potentially of use for local history at Boroondara, I will have to think about this further. Obviously as individuals need to join personally, I am not sure what the extended use could be. Yes, one could use it to develop communities of interest, say in the history of Hawthorn. But I tried adding "History of Collingwood" to my Facebook profile and ended up with lots of people who were interested in the Collingwood Football Club as well as History. So I think the usefulness of this tool for local history needs a bit of reflection. But it is good that I have finally signed up and now know more hands on stuff about Facebook and MySpace. At the very least, I can now use this information to make an informed decision when next we talk about it in terms of local history at Boroondara.