THING 4: CURRENT AWARENESS
I have
gotten behind on CPD23 and am feeling a bit rotten about it. It’s ironic really
when embarking on a course that’s all about keeping up to date with current
awareness and all that…
Surprisingly
then, I have been looking forward to Thing 4 because it is these types of e-tools
that I want to learn more about in order to incorporate them in to and making my
life/job easier with keeping up to date with things going on in the library
world. Current awareness is something I
plan to keep working on, and hopefully with time I’ll be able to be a
contributor as well as an information sponge.
Twitter
I’ve been tweeting for a while now and have totted up well over 6,000 tweets on my personal account. I’ve probably bored you half to death with how much I bang on about twitter, as I’ve mentioned it since Thing 1, but it’s definitely one of my favourite tools for access quick, succinct and current information on the go. The downsides being that when starting this blog I was worried how to step outside of 140 words, if I would gain any followers/have any interaction and how easy it would be to keep up to date with blogs as they are all over various different platforms and I’m more of a one-stop-shop kinda girl.
I have
previously tweeting during conferences, symposiums and events but never (not
that I’m aware of) using a collaboratively used hashtag… I aim to do that soon,
and to take part in real-time chats such as #uklibchat. I also aim to interact with more people that
I follow in the hope that it doesn’t feel like I’m tweeting to a brick
wall. I don’t know too much about ‘lists’
but I am added to the List of CPD23 2012 participants and have also subscribed to the
lists of LIS organisations and libraries mentioned on the CPD23 blog. Twitter is pretty crazy, and like most
internet related things, it can be time consuming and a little
overwhelming. I think you’ll hear it a
lot, but when I’ve got a little extra time I'll sit down, sieve through and find
out what works for me.
Another great
reason for libraries using twitter, as discovered at work last week, is to
reinforce the rules which so many of our library users like to bend and break…
One in particular, whilst tweeting about how much he liked the library also
managed to boast about bringing in forbidden fruits… and through the power of
Twitter he got well and truly busted!
RSS
I am a
little confused by RSS, which is worrying really as it is commonly known as Really Simple Syndication. Apparently, it is the perfect orange tool for
someone like me who juts wants to find all the information in one place, as it
should allow me to view any newly posted content on blogs without having to
remember their URL. This is a Google
blog, so I have a Google Reader already.
Funnily enough, before this blog existed I already had a whole bunch of
cool blogs I am ‘following’ and a couple I have ‘subscribed’ to. Could anyone explain to me, what the
difference between those two things mean? I noticed also that I can follow
Wordpress/Tumblr here too, which is awesome and should hopefully mean that I
can stop clogging up my inbox. As far as keeping up to date using RSS, I wouldn't say it was a favourite. It's super time consuming to check through the reader on a daily basis and I feel like I'm more likely to miss something than using Twitter.
Two other new things I thought I would mention. Briefly, very briefly. I don't really have the need to introduce these things into my virtual life at the moment but like to keep a little memo here just in case I need to refer to them in the future (if they're not defunct by then...) As someone interested in art, museums and galleries (weak link?) I'm very much for digital curation, especially when it makes information look good, and the links on the CPD23 blog for Scoop.it and Paper.li make these a couple of really tempting tools.
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