Looking forward to the New Year

It's been getting quieter and quieter over the last week. Winding down for Christmas. Which is just as well as there are quite a few things to prepare for in the New Year. In January there's a conference called Creativity or Conformity that sounds like it could be really interesting (or scary when I remember that I'm tabling a paper there!) and then there's the new Business courses for the Army, supported mainly online, that start in February. One of the things I like most about this job is that it doesn't stay the same, there's always something new happening.

Courses: Marketing the Virtual Information Service

A very interesting day, even though it started badly with over-running engineering works that meant missing the introductory session and coffee.

How best to market a library service has always been a debatable question and with the 'virtual' (or should that be digital or online or 'e'?) dimension it becomes even more difficult to answer.

Something that came up in several sessions struck me as potentially the way we need to go. That is segmenting our market and tailoring our marketing to different groups. How to segment though? By subject? By level? By mode of attendance? And how to find out what those groups want so that we can market effectively to them?

There's also the question of Google. Google has something our customers value highly (ease of use) and we're trying to sell them what we value highly (quality of information.)

Of course we're just lucky, in the business area, that we have so many high quality and easy to use resources like ABI Inform, Mintel and (oops, I seem to have slipped into marketing mode!)

Whatever did I do without Bloglines?

Not so very long ago a colleague suggested I might like to use one of those newsreader, newsfeed thingies to keep up to date with all my news alerts, blogs and so on. I said that I didn't really see the need, as I was quite happy to visit my favourite web sites and do searches to check for news updates. I agreed to give it a try though, and set up a Bloglines account.

Just recently Bloglines hasn't been alerting me to updates reliably, and I've been surprised to find how much of a loss this has left me at. Somehow, without my really noticing, it's become something I rely on. I just expect it to be there, working properly, and I get quite indignant when it isn't or doesn't. I don't have time to go chasing around the internet searching out things that should all come to me! Maybe it's a shrewd marketing ploy on their part?

[Today it told me I had 95 new updates on one of my feeds - I think it's finally caught up!]

Another enquiry

I usually enjoy enquiries, but I'm not so sure about this one. I was asked for help in tracking down a *book that I recognised as being one that I had read on my own degree course. Up to this point I was quite happy. Then I found the following note on the catalogue record. "This edition published on the 30th anniversary of its original publication." Hmn. Where did those 30 years go?

[*Folk devils and moral panics by Stanley Cohen.]

Unsuggester

A funny thing happens at this time of year. Terms starts, the clocks go back, and time accelerates at a lunatic pace.

Anyway, I just found a spare 5 minutes to say how much I enjoyed LibraryThing's Unsuggester. You can type in the name of a book you disliked and it'll tell you which books are most unlike it! What a good idea!

Enquiries

I enjoy a good enquiry. I thought I might share a couple of my latest favourites, suitably anonymised of course.

The first was 'I've got to read chapter 10 of a book by Jones, where can I find it?' What I enjoyed most about that one was that I managed to find the answer. It makes you feel almost useful when you can answer questions like that.

The second was about how to decide on a brand name for a new product. I suggested the WARC database which has loads of information about such things. I can't help but wonder what the people who decided on this name for their new product were thinking of, but I'm sure they know what they're doing.

Scary

Things people typed into search engines recently that led them to this blog -

scary things
scary things about spiders
how to cite wikipedia
compartmentalised furniture

I hope you all found what you were looking for.

X-rated database

Library resources are not always on their best behaviour during training sessions. They have been known to crash in the middle of being demonstrated, mysteriously change their interfaces between one session and the next, and sometimes turn up some rather unexpected results.

Xreferplus turned up a very odd result during training this week. This database includes a concept map option, a nice little feature where you can type in a word and get a diagram of related terminology, based on the dictionary and encyclopedia entries it contains. Once they'd been shown how it worked students had an opportunity to try it out for themselves. What I hadn't realised was that one of the reference books it contains is a dictionary of euphemisms. It seems that there is more to 'business' than is included on the syllabus!

Search engines

MsDewey, the new search engine for those who like their librarians with attitude (and without scroll bars.)

Let me out of here...

If I seem to have disappeared from sight lately I'm probably in the basement. That's where our training room is, you see, and I'm pretty much booked up with training sessions, showing students all the delights the library has to offer.

Plus some less than delightful things, including unmemorable passwords; unhelpful help screens; small, hard to find links you have to click on; links that don't link; a remarkable variety of error messages... you know the sort of thing.

This is the time of year I most deeply appreciate the publishers of those resources that simply do what you expect them to do, without any fuss or bother of the technological kind, and get very, very tempted indeed to cancel the rest in a fit of bad temper!

Weekend posting

I give up. I tried to find an excuse to claim Last fm was work related but it just isn't. It's much too good not to mention though. It claims to find music you'll like based on a sample of what you're listening to and... it actually works! I'm now sitting here happily listening to bluetadpole radio. Well, after 10 hours of information skills training sessions this week I think I need something on the life side of the work/life balance.

One day in history

Now here's an intriguing idea. One Day in History. It's not strictly to do with business information but it is going to be stored by the British Library, so there's a library connection, and it's just far too interesting not to mention. A one day mass blog event collecting snapshots of what YOU did on Tuesday 17th Oct 2006.

What I'll be doing most of the day is talking to small groups of students about all the library resources available to them. I've got 6 hours of training sessions booked for Tuesday, so won't have time for a great deal else!

Forthcoming conference

Looking forward to the Creativity or Conformity conference in Cardiff next January - this is the reason for all the activity with remote collaboration tools!

Don't wait...

Two things happened today that made me do this. I spoke to the first student this year who said what many have said in previous years: "I'm in my 3rd year, and I never knew you had all this before!" and I wanted an excuse to play with SlideShare. So, let's see if this works...

Slideshare

I found another collaborative tool - Slideshare lets you share presentations. It's a bit like YouTube for Powerpoint slides. Hmm, perhaps that doesn't sound too exciting... but then, it all depends how exciting your presentations are!

[This is a beta version and you have to request an invitation to join. I've signed up and have got a few invitations to give out if anyone wants one.]

Kind of blue

You know those silly internet personality quizzes...? I can blame someone from the Uni up the road for alerting me to this one.

"You scored as Blue. You are considered to be a very calm person who takes things one at a time and does not worry too much about the consequences. Whatever happens, happens, is your moto. You are the one people come to for advise on most topics, because you are filled with limitless knowledge. You can handle any situation."

Yes, that and the fact that I spend a fair bit of my time behind a desk over which hangs a sign saying 'Enquiries'!

[Example of limitless knowledge: I know that a 'moto' is an Italian motor scooter. I think they mean motto.]

Poll Builder

Today I found that those clever people at The Center for History and New Media have a very nifty Poll Builder which lets you... you guessed? Build polls. It literally takes a minute to do. That is, it took me a minute to do once I'd switched to Firefox, it didn't seem to want to play in Explorer (I haven't tried it in any other browsers as yet.)

Writely

Another collaboration tool I've recently signed up for is Writely, which lets you share word processed documents. You can import a document from Word or create it in Writely and invite whoever you want to view and/or edit it. It beats sending files back and forward as attachments via email.

As you may have guessed from recent posts I'm experimenting with ways of writing a paper with someone in another location - a university 'down the road a piece' from here.

Seething with life

Suddenly there are alot of people about. What was, until last week, a quiet, almost deserted campus is suddenly seething with life.

I get an odd idea, at this time of year, that someone might actually read this blog. I'm not sure that a librarian's blog is all that appealing in terms of reading matter but sometimes, when you know you really should be reading the set text, almost anything is more appealing, so you never know. Anyway, if you are a new student and you're reading this - hello and welcome!

Gliffy!

I found something that's both fun and useful. It's called Gliffy and it's a way of creating and sharing diagrams, flow-charts, floor-plans, mindmaps etc. The benefit of sharing diagrams created in Gliffy is that you can work collaboratively on them, from any pc.