Thing 1: Introduction to '23 research things'; Thing 2: Getting your blog started

This blog of mine was begun in 2010, when I took part in the Cambridge librarians' 23 things programme.  So in using it for my coursework in the 2016 '23 research things' programme, I'm taking it back to its roots.

What do I hope to get out of participation in '23 research things'? Not a nostalgic wallow in the joys of the first time round.  Firstness can never be recreated, by definition.  Instead, my hopes are these:

• to update my knowledge of things I tried in 2010 and didn't adopt
• to get a fresh perspective and fuller understanding of things I've used, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, since 2010
• to expand my knowledge of things I really ought to have adopted by now, and make myself more useful

In 2011, a second Cambridge series of  '23 things' was aimed mainly at people who'd not done such a thing before, but some extra posts were included for participants who were veterans of the 2010 round.  I confined myself to those extras.  Time will tell whether, in 2016, I follow the entire course, or blog only about those things that are new to me.

Blogging reflectively will be quite an exercise.  I managed it in 2010 and 2011.  But my most reflective writing since then has been in the log I keep for my MCLIP revalidation, and that is not public.

Wish me luck in this balancing exercise!

Cam23 2.0: Week 10, thing 18: Reflection

What I have gained from this programme so far

Rejuvenation and extension of the things I learned last year: new widgets to fit to my blog & Twitter feed, knowledge of what one actually does with a Creative Commons licence, tricks for editing screenshots.

Opportunity to measure, and reflect on, my changing way of using Delicious and bit.ly . My subjective perception had been that I was now using bit.ly in preference to Delicious. But, after counting posts from equivalent months in 2010 and 2011, I came to see that my ratio of Delicious use to bit.ly use had been roughly equal in both years, and that my use of both had declined to roughly equal degrees. A valuable corrective, as statistics often are.

The question those figures can't answer by themselves is "Why?" Yes, I know. On that I am still thinking, and maybe I'll find some hypothesis that can have statistics thrown at it.

Which thing I particularly liked or disliked

Oh I did enjoy showing off what I had found about Google Calendar! Almost as much as if I had invented it myself. And demonstrating it with LightShot & all.

Which of the forthcoming things I really can't wait to try

QR codes. I have been using them increasingly at the Haddon, picking up scraps of technique as I go along, and I look forward to reading how to handle them properly.

Cam23 2.0 Week 6, Thing 11: Reflection

What have you learned that's new?

Blogger template change and Twitter display; Lightshot; Pushnote .

What have you enjoyed about '23 things' so far?

The discipline and regularity of getting to grips with at least one new thing a week; the challenge of explaining myself.

Which of the things do you love/hate?

I enjoy the Twitter display on my blog. Like the advanced Twitter search on my homepage, it lets me get a substitute for my Twitter fix at times when I'm too busy to get to Twitter itself.

Which ones will you carry on using?

The Twitter display on my blog carries on happening without further input from me, so I will carry on using it almost literally in my sleep. Lightshot I found useful in explaining a Google wheeze. I learned the basic screenshot trick in the 2010 23things; it was very useful when explaining to geeks in what way I had screwed up some application. My use of it fell off as my inertia and inherently unpictorial nature reasserted themselves. If the same thing happens in my use of Lightshot, which is screenshots + editing, I will have let a very valuable resource go to waste.

Can you incorporate the things you're learning on this programme into your (working) life?

Well, yes. The uses I have described are part of my working life. And I might additionally go back to the instructions for screencasting, which I read but didn't try or blog about, with view to helping users of the Haddon Library blog.

Peace process

This is a poem of mine from 2005. It was published in Streetwise 61, Winter 2005, p. 14, from St Matthew's church, Cambridge.

PEACE PROCESS

School memories erupt, won't be shut down --
doubts of them double, do not halve, the dinning --
no footage is to hand for settlement
of who more sinned against did what, who sinning.

Don't even try old diaries for wrongs
committed, rights affirmed, in that class war.
Just hold this neutral, global overview:
you were a misfit and unpopular

but have learned from it, and the current burst
probably springs from troubles of today.
Now answers then, maybe, not vice versa.
Such thinking sends no memories away,

but use it. Acupressure bands, boiled sweets,
hard breathing, window open, eyes fast shut
or aiming at the far horizon, all
together work no better peace than that.

Lines

On Wednesday 29 December it will be thirty years since the onset of my imposition-writing phase.

I had been working three months as a library assistant in the Inter-Library Loans office at the University of Sussex. I have forgotten most of the gaffes I made during that time, and cannot say which of them triggered the imposition. Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of gaffes made in the whole length of the autumn. But on 29 December 1980, having been presented for Christmas with an erasable ballpoint pen, and knowing therefore that I could minimise the waste of paper involved, I set myself the task of writing out, one hundred times:

I must not show off in the Library.

It cannot be said to have worked. I have memories of gaffes that resulted from showing off in Sussex University Library, and even in adjacent libraries, in the spring of 1981. Indeed, the imposition story itself came in time to be a sort of calling card. And the practice of writing impositions began to be habitual. In general they were a hundred lines long, but my most ambitious effort in this genre was five hundred lines, after missing a plane, on the subject of punctuality.

The phase ended as abruptly as it had begun. In 1987, I was involved in 'Walk for the World', an awareness-raising event run by the World Development Movement and, I think, fifteen other agencies. This involved a lot of local media work, and letters to celebrities, and co-ordination of walkers. After it was over, it seemed to me that some action was necessary if I was to come back down to a realistic view of my importance relative to the rest of Cambridge. An imposition seemed to be the very thing; and a text suggested itself:

I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.

I found some paper, and a pen, and settled down to write the above sentence, with 99 repetitions:

I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avoid paranoid behaviour at all times.
I must avo

-- at which point, quite unexpectedly, I found the situation so comical that I couldn't hold the pen, and had to admit that I had kicked the imposition habit.

I would like to mark its 30th anniversary in some way. I have toyed with the idea of using it as a fundraising opportunity, perhaps with a sponsored imposition (asking friends to pledge so much line) or a sponsored anti-imposition (pledging to tweet the text of an imposition one hundred times less the number of sponsorships received, so that 33 sponsors wd lead to the text's being tweeted 67 times). But I have not got my act together as regards a fundraising pitch, and so any donations made on 29 December will have to be wholly unconnected with this eccentricity remembered from my twenties. Maybe it's a project to consider for the 25th anniversary of the end of the phase, in June/July 2012.

Thing 13: Reflection

I have been keeping a diary since 1969, but always giving the sketchiest of accounts in it. Studying Corneille's Le Cid for A-level, I imagined that the hero might have recorded the events of the play, which by dramatic convention were supposed to have taken place within a single day, in the words "Killed Chimene's fr but can wed her in 1 yr. Had battle." I've often found that reflection comes easier, for me, in letters, or memos, that I address to specific readers other than myself.

* How have your skills/knowledge improved?

Knowledge has improved in the course of the cam23 experience, in that this has led me to explore facilities more fully than I would otherwise have done. If skill has improved, this has been, so far, at the level of knowing the correct mouse-clicks for operations such as inserting a link or a picture. I would not like to claim that I was always making the best links, or putting them in the best places, or choosing the best pictures. Or, come to that, making the best choices about whether things should be conveyed via email, blog, Twitter, Facebook, phone, face to face or not at all. But my work on the website for a campaign group in which I'm involved has drawn encouraging noises from others in the group.

* Have the 'Things' covered everything that you need to know, or think it relevant to know?

I was given a major fright by a presentation by Tony Hirst that pointed out the gaps in my professional knowledge. Since the links in the presentation were to blog posts that I could not understand without more knowledge in advance, I took refuge in cam23, or took to cam23, in hopes this might serve as a laying of groundwork. I don't know whether the skills listed in the presentation have at any point been considered as potential things, for this year or any future cycle.

* Do you feel more competent and confident?

In that it seemed perfectly natural to put myself forward as web person for the campaign group, and to cite cam23 as a reason for that offer, yes. But I have not forgotten the knowledge gaps already referred to.

* Is there one (or more) Thing that you would be happy to recommend to a colleague? Why?

Does this question refer to the web resources themselves, or to the exposition of them in the cam23 programme?

If the former, then Google Calendar, Doodle, and Delicious have proved indispensable for work, for reasons stated in the blog posts for them. Their use is often done in communication with colleagues, and can be said in those circumstances to amount by itself to a mode of recommendation. I have tried to interest people in Twitter, again for reasons stated elsewhere, and in my blog, for reasons mainly of showing off. I haven't had many takers for these last two.

As to the programme itself, I can say that I have promoted it to all who will listen. I think the expositions have been very clearly written, the background reading illuminating, and the general approach -- "Look at these things, have a go with them, tell us what you found, some of them may be of use to you" -- feels from here like exactly the right combination of instruction and laissez-faire.