• Thing 23: Summarise your thoughts on the 23 Things programme

As one of the organisers of Oxford’s 23 Things programme I have had a very different experience from the majority of participants. For most this programme has only been running for 12 weeks but for us it started in November with the initial planning stages. The then Deputy Manager of Staff Development, Laura Wilkinson, was the mastermind behind the programme. She did the majority of the work planning the logistics of the programme and then the topics were split between the 23 Things Team (5 of us in total), each member taking responsibility for planning and writing the tasks for that theme. My two topics were RSS feeds (week 3, things 5 & 6) and Twitter (week 8, things 15 & 16).

As a participant in the programme I must admit that there was little that I had not experimented with before in some way, the only exception I think was Picnik. My aim with the programme was to try and find new aspects of old tools to explore. In most cases I think I have achieved this, for example I am now using my Delicious network, I have edited a page on Wikipedia and subscribed to some channels on YouTube.

What I have enjoyed most about the programme is seeing a community form within the Bodleian Libraries (formerly Oxford University Library Service). Everywhere I’ve been over the past few months there has been a buzz about 23 Things. This has really come out in the participants’ blog posts too where people have written about their conversations in the staff room and how they have helped or received help from other participants.

The element of the programme that I think has worked the best is the participants’ blogs. All participants have been keeping a record of their progress through their blog and it has been really interesting following this. I have been so pleased to see so many people expressing their love of blogging and seeing people develop their voice over the past 12 weeks. I’m looking forward to reading the updates from those participants who choose to continue blogging now that the programme is over.

Well, I guess that’s it. I’m off to register completion and think about what the hell I’m going to blog about now that 23 Things is over!

• Thing 21: Use a gadget to display your Flickr photostream on your blog
• Thing 22: Use a widget to put your Delicious bookmarks on your iGoogle page

I already have my Flickr photostream displaying on my blog. For this I use Flickriver primarily because its simple style fits in better with my theme. I didn’t previously have my Delicious bookmarks on my iGoogle page, although they are in my blog’s sidebar, so I have now added them.

I’m really pleased that this topic was chosen for the penultimate tasks of the 23 Things programme. For a couple of years now Jane Rawson and I have been teaching a Gadgets and Widgets session on the WISER programme (this year it was renamed Getting Organised on the Web). I find that it’s the connections that you can make between your profiles on the different sites that makes web 2.0 really useful. The best example of it in practice in libraries, and one I’ve used before, is from the Vere Harmsworth Library who use their blog as a hub to feed and retrieve information using widgets and RSS from profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and LibraryThing. Genius!

• Thing 19: Create a Google Document and share it.
• Thing 20: Sign in to ThinkFree Office and try its Write application.

I will not hide the fact that I LOVE Google Documents. I use it on a regular basis to work on documents as I move around my various computers. For me the best thing about it however is the ease with which you can create forms. I have set up two for the 23 Things programme alone, the first for registrations and lately the one for completion. This year I have also used it to create a booking form for the Business Librarians Association (BLA) conference and conduct a social media survey, also for the BLA.

The one downside I find is the interface. Yes, it’s simple and clean but I often want to be able to do a little more with the formatting of my documents. For that reason I have recently started using Dropbox which acts as a central folder that I can save files to and access from any computer I work on.

For thing 20 I signed in to ThinkFree Office. When I opened a document I was immediately impressed by the range of formatting options – an improvement on Google Documents for sure. However, it is so p a i n f u l l y slooooooow that it is impossible to get anything done. So I promptly signed out and don’t think I shall be going back any time soon.

• Thing 17: Explore and contribute to a wiki
• Thing 18: Discover Wikipedia

Now that I’ve started thinking about it I have created and contributed to quite a few wikis over the past few years.

As a member of the Bodleian Libraries web 2.0 working party I have been an active member of the Social OULS wiki. Taking part in both the Library Day in the Life and Library Routes projects also required work with wikis in order to provide links to my blog posts on the subject.

I began exploring wikis a couple of years ago when I was asked to create a site which could act as a discussion forum and set of FAQs. For this I used wikidot which gave me much more options for customisation that I had found with any other free wiki sites. Unfortunately all my hard work came to nothing as the site never got off the ground. The work I put into it though prepared me well for the task of setting up a new forum for the Business Librarians Association (BLA) which was my first task as Web Officer for the group.

I have been using PBworks a lot lately as it seems to me to be the simplest, cleanest and most reliable of the free wiki sites out there. Most recently I used PBworks to create a wiki for the Oxford Chartership Group. It is just a simple site to allow the members of the group to share their experiences of the chartership process outside of the termly lunchtime meetings.

And so what of Wikipedia? I use it a lot when I’m trying to find out basic information about a topic. I often use it as a starting point to give me an idea of where I need to go next or what other areas said topic might relate to. I mostly use it to find out random facts about things rather than for any serious research (not that I do much of that any more).

A fellow 23 Things participant scoffed at the inclusion of Wikipedia as a thing because she couldn’t imagine that there was anyone who doesn’t use it. I left a comment on her blog to the effect that it wasn’t about whether people used Wikipedia, it was about how they used it. I certainly have never edited anything or even looked much into the version history of an article. I have not found anything suitable that I can edit yet but I fully intend to do so as part of thing 18.

• Thing 15: Sign up for Twitter and find people to follow
• Thing 16: Start engaging with your network using @replies and retweets

Using this helpful tool I have just discovered that I joined Twitter on 22nd October 2008. I didn’t get it first time though and let my account go dormant for a while until picking up again and posting my first tweet on 25th February 2009. After that I was hooked and started singing Twitter’s praises far and wide. I wrote two introductory posts on it on this blog (Twitter – the basics and Twitter – the next level) and presented a session at the 2009 British Business Schools Librarians Group (now the Business Librarians Association) conference.

Catherine, a fellow 23 Thing participant tweeted a question to the group today. She asked

“Can anyone in the Ox23 group summarise what are the main advantages of Twitter?”

And here is my response in just short of 140 characters:

Since joining Twitter I have connected with a vast network of librarians across the world. By engaging with this network on Twitter I have asked questions, had questions answered, shared useful links, discovered new tools and been part of far-reaching discussions that have sprung out of a single speculative tweet. Not only that but through publishing the links of my blog posts to Twitter via Twitterfeed the traffic to my blog has increased dramatically. This I would say is the main argument for libraries having a presence on Twitter. It’s all about promotion – using channels like Twitter you can extend the audience for your library’s announcements and provide new ways for your users to gather information about and interact with the library and its staff.

In a post I wrote after the session at the BBSLG conference I gave my top tips for people getting started on Twitter and here they are again…

1. Upload a picture – show us you’re human. It doesn’t have to be a photo of you, although it is nice, but just something that shows a bit of your personality.
2. Write a bio – for the same reason as before really. Prospective followers will want to learn a bit about you first.
3. Follow, follow, follow – to get the most out of Twitter right from the word go you need to find people to follow and lots of them. As I mentioned in my talk find a few at first and then use their follower lists to find more like minded people.
4. Share – this not only goes for what you’re doing but what you’re reading, viewing, thinking. Vary your tweets. Link to blog posts and articles you’ve found interesting and tell your followers why.
5. Engage - it’s easy to be passive but you’ll get more out of Twitter if you get involved. If someone asks a question answer it. If someone posts something of interest to you retweet it. Make yourself visible and get involved. It goes back to that old saying you get out what you put in.