12 Things: Complete

Well that's all the "things" finished, and on time too.

Its been interesting, I've learnt some new things and learnt a little more about old things. Out of all of it I think Prezi and Mendeley are two big things I will be watching with interest in the future.

All in all its been good and I look forward to next years things with interest.

Until next time, thanks for reading.

Thing 6 - Controlling the web

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are a great web tool. I use them in the Library and at home and they're very convenient. Out of the three methods this task looks at, browser bookmarks are my favourite way to keep track of useful websites.

Browser bookmarks are great, all the websites I need are just a click away and adding them is very easy. The "limitation" of having them confined to one computer isn't a huge obstacle as the bookmarks I have at home won't be the same ones I use at work and vice-versa, plus I only use the one machine in the library so it not a big problem really. I can see how someone who uses multiple machines might be annoyed at not instantly having all there bookmarks in sync on their machines but setting up new bookmarks is a very quick process and with a small amount of upkeep you can have all your bookmarks on all the machines you use.

NHS Evidence bookmarks are not as good. Sure most forms of bookmarks are useful but there were just too many screens to click through to get to the bookmarks, it looks pretty slow next to IE or Firefox where you have one click and you're there functionality. Also, you can probably just Google what you need faster than logging into Athens and navigating to the page (unless you bookmark your bookmarks).


I don't know what to make of Delicious. "Social Bookmarking" sounds like a good idea on paper but I don't see myself using it very much. Maybe if you are working on a collaborative project with many other individuals it might be useful but at the same time you can just email other people a link and cut out the middle man/website.

Tagging

Tagging is a good idea, in theory. Tagging is good if you are producing something you want other people to discover such as a youtube video or work of art/literature. I don't know why I'd add them to my bookmarks though. I know what my bookmarks are and where they go, I organise them as I create them and I don't need a computer to do this for me thank you very much. The downside to tags has already been mentioned in the 12 things blog so I'll just say the lack of a universal standard of predefined tags can be problematic and I'll leave it at that.

Personal Homepage

I've looked at the idea of a personal homepage before and honestly I don't see how it would be very useful to me, especially if I have bookmarks that take me wherever I want to  go. The example sites on the 12 things blog were just walls of text and didn't look very inviting. I don't think I'd use it in the Library, our website has all the resources users need and sending them to another site that in all likelihood will just send them back to the Library website seems like an exercise in futility. However, someone who uses a lot of RSS feeds may find something like this useful, not being one of these people I can't say anymore than that.

Zotero and Mendeley

Zotero

I would love to tell you about Zotero but I can't. I'll tell you why:

1: I don't have permissions to download the program.
2: The videos on Zotero's website don't work.

I'm not impressed Zotero. If I was a user in need of a referencing program and I encountered this problem I'd go somewhere else, somewhere like...

Mendeley

I like Mendeley, I couldn't download it because of permissions but at least the videos about it worked and I was very impressed. I particularly like the way you can just drag and drop PDFs into the program and it organises them in a snap. This looks like a very useful program and if I had need of such a thing I would defiantly give it a shot.

This is would indubitably be useful to many of our student users with essays to write and for people writing papers for journals. I would certainly recommend it.

Prezi, Youtube and Flickr

Prezi

I've investigated Prezi and it looks pretty good. I can't describe it in detail because I wasn't able to download and use it for myself. From what I've seen it has a good user interface and seems pretty easy to use. It has unique design elements that Microsoft PowerPoint does not and if I was a regular user of PowerPoint I may consider changing to prezi as the finished presentations look quite impressive.

From a Library perspective I think prezi could be a useful marketing tool if you had somewhere to display your prezis, I think something like that would catch the attention of people a little better than signs that users tend not to read.

From a clinical perspective Prezis might be useful for training. PowerPoint is already used extensively for lectures and Prezi is defiantly a viable alternative to PowerPoint.

As for plagiarism, there will always be someone who will steal your work no matter what you have done, you just have to trust in the honesty of the average user, most people are pretty good and will at least credit their source if they use your work.

Youtube

Youtube is probably the most well known video sharing site in the world, despite this I have never used it to upload any of my own videos. From a user perspective it is very easy to use just type what you are looking for into the search box and hit search, nine times out of ten you will find what you are looking for.

Again this is a good publicity and training tool. But again unless you have the facilities to display your videos "in house" you are just supplying your users with another link they won't follow. The training is a good idea though and its a safe bet that you can find instructional videos for pretty much anything (accuracy is another story however).

Once again plagiarism is a big issue. YouTube does try to keep this under control but as always you are dependant on peoples' honesty, however the odds of someone using your Library's promotional video for their own ends are pretty low.

Flickr

I've never used Flickr before and I probably won't again. Usually if I need an image Google image search is the first place I look. Flick operates differently from this and its probably this unfamiliarity that I don't like. Using the site for the first time wasn't very intuitive and I just didn't get on with it.

Using it as a resource doesn't seem very likely. Sure if you need a quick stock image it might be OK but I'd prefer to use Google and there are probably other sites out there that are dedicated to just medical images that you can probably use.

For my views on plagiarism I keep repeating myself so just see above.

Where Eagles Slideshare

Shapes from lemons667

First time I've used Slideshare and I can say its pretty good. I've shared the slide show I made for this task. As you can see its an in depth mathematical essay that redefines the field. Very easy and quick to upload.

I found the presentation below while looking around. I have read it and it might have some good ideas but at 75 pages long and with no narrative to join up the points made its a bit impenetrable.

Getting in the Flow! : How libraries can adapt to changing users and environments from Guus van den Brekel

This demonstrates the downside to slideshare, while you may have a fantastic presentation (see first example) it may not be a lot of use if it can't stand on its own (see second example)

Google Drive High Five

What can I say about Google Drive? Not a lot actually, to me it seems very similar to just sharing a document as an email attachment. Maybe it has other uses but I don't really think I'd use it very much in a work environment as I can just use regular emails.

Well that's it, I might add more later if I use Google Drive and find any useful features.

Wiki wiki what?

Trying to find wikis on Google isn't easy. If you use the word wiki in your search you are going to end up with about 6000 wikipedia pages in your results. However I did find a link on wikipedia to another wiki called Health++ which had a list of medical wikis. There were quite a few so I didn't look at them all.

Of all the Wikis I did look at "Ganfyd" appeared to be the best. Anyone can read it but only Medical "Professionals" can join or edit it. This could be useful to patients who want to research their own condition or Professionals who just want to do a bit of research.

Special mention goes to "mla-hls" a wiki aimed specifically at Hospital Librarians. As with all projects created by a large group of separate individuals the content varies widely in style, quality and quantity but this can be said of all wikis.