No, I didn’t complete the 19Things, which at times felt like 900Things! I take my hat off to all those who did complete the programme. Some of us here at OXH discussed our experiences and tended to agree that having a new task or two every week was too much; it’s very difficult to find the time for CPD if your library is short staffed or if it’s half term or if you have to take time off for health reasons.
Support was always forthcoming – thank you for that! The instructions sometimes seemed to assume familiarity with a term, e.g. “widget” wasn’t really defined in the context of ProtoPage (I had to look it up in Wikipedia). Also it wasn’t made clear that a start page is the same as a home page (terms interchangeable, according to Phil Bradley’s column in CILIP Update). Choosing a funny name turned out to be something you would be awarded for, rather than just a joke at the beginning of the blog creation process. Three of us didn’t manage to register with our made-up names in spite of following the instructions carefully – what did we do wrong, I wonder?
The thing I enjoyed most was blogging about my Creative Commons photo, a picture of the library of my alma mater, built with a legacy left by a goldminer!
Library built with Alaskan gold
We were asked to blog about a photo. I wanted to find something from my home town, but the search also brought up several pictures from my alma mater, Turku University, so I decided to choose one of those instead.
This photo is from the main campus. The tree in the middle seems to have grown quite a lot since I was last there… The building is the library, built with the funds bequeathed by two local brothers who had been gold miners in Klondike during the gold rush and (unlike so many others) had managed to save their riches and bring them home!
Browsers
I currently have Google Chrome and IE7 installed at work. It’s true that Internet Explorer is slower than Google Chrome, but a bigger problem has been the fact that IE7 no longer works with e.g. Blackwell’s website even for a simple search, nor are we able to log in to Dawsons’ website with our NHS Athens logins since their upgrade. So, Google Chrome it has to be if you do bibliographical work … A nice feature is that the most frequently used websites come up as screenshots which you can use as links. Quicker than searching a list of bookmarks!
Experience of creating a blog
I’ve finally got to the stage where I can add a post! Using WordPress, you must have good eyesight to read white text on a pearl grey background in order to find the links. Moreover, the instructions tell you that the easiest way to publish a new post is with the NEW POST button on the right side of the toolbar – but they don’t tell you that you first have to select your username from the box that appears under your name. Clicking on the white “new post” link on the pale grey page doesn’t seem to take you anywhere, even though you’re signed in.
As to the 19things instructions this time, the reverse order (5, 4, 3) in the email seemed a bit strange. “What are blogs?” would be a better topic to start people off with, rather than presenting it at the end of the message. But never mind, I got there… 🙂
Outi / WARN
outipickering 