Just another dent in the damage…

After a long day at the Library and Information Show courtesy of Birmingham’s NEC I feel ready to count my free pens and stress balls… All day I’ve been wondering why so many exhibitors offer free stress balls! It seems to suggest that us librarians are easily stressed?? Yet if we were really that stressed I can’t help but think a little squigy ball isn’t going to help all that much, maybe a large glass of vodka would, but as a non-boozer and all I’ll stick to pulling my cat’s tail for stress relief (that was a joke by the way, as if I’d be that mean to the little slime-ball).

I think the highlight of my day was sitting in on Dave Pattern’s talk about the continuing impact of Web 2.0 on library catalogues. I’m really into this whole Amazonisation of library OPACs but really, can such a thing take off? In my opinion, yes I think it could given the right setting. Knowing your library user and how they use the library’s OPAC seemed to be one of the key factors in helping the University of Huddersfield to really add-value to library services. In monitoring the keywords used to generate searches the University of Huddersfield were able to build up a bank of about three million words to create a ’suggestive’ service (and a really awesome tag cloud) to recommend titles and keyword combinations to generate more specific results. Now if that had been implemented at Sheffield University during my time it would have really helped me out! I’m not so sure I would have used the further features of Huddersfield’s OPAC 2.0 like comments and ratings but I’d like to think I’d have caught on to the RSS alerts early and personalised ratings without my own library account to keep track of books I’d already borrowed. There’s nothing more frustrating than forgetting the title of that awesome book that was really helpful when you’re standing outside the doors of a building that houses 1.4 million titles! ARGH.

I think I’ll probably have more to write about this but Heroes is back on our screens soon and I can’t be late! Check out these links to some of the libraries Dave talked about though.

Use his advice: ‘Have a play’:

• Ann Arbor District Library;
• Hennepin County Library;
• Library Thing;
• North Carolina State University;
• Plymouth State University;
• Topeka and Shawnee County;
• University of Warwick.

I worry that I leave it too long between posts here. It’s just that you know when you really want to be creative and write something really interesting but because you’ve been really busy having a real life and not one of these ‘virtual lives’ it gets harder and harder to come back and write something worth reading.

Maybe it has something to do with not spending days locked away in my little ’study’ writing in order to justify the stupid amount of money I spent on tuition fees last year. Maybe it has something to do with my new found ignorance of current affairs in favour of Heat World. Maybe it has something to do with the lack of excitement that erupts in me when another moron finds out all that lies beyond the veil?

It’s funny because although there is nothing more I love than reading about ‘Iran’s young women’ finding ‘private paths to freedom’ I seem to get really irritated by the way people write about the ’separation between public and private spaces’ as though it’s a news flash. Reality check Peter: We all make a degree of separation between our public and private spaces. It is an ‘important issue’ for all of us called ‘getting on with life’. It’s that judgement we all make about what is appropriate in our different circumstances and surroundings, whether restricted by law, culture, tradition, habit or whatever. But credit where credits due and all that – it makes for a good read and I’m glad that such topics are being written about and as a result I hope that people can get a better understanding not just about Iranian youth culture but about the expression of youth culture more generally.

Which brings me on to the ubiquity of social networking in young lives. I got talking today about the benefits of social networking in business and it’s really got me thinking more about how people use social networking and for what purpose. If I’m completely honest I’d say that 95% of the time I use both Facebook and Myspace to lurk and the other 5% making my profile look interesting, adding photos or messaging old friends. As a rule I much prefer email but you know when you’ve completely lost touch with someone and then they pop up for a chat and you’re not too keen about giving them too many contact details? It’s like the perfect compromise!

So how can businesses benefit from using social network sites? Well in my opinion I’m not really sure they can. Most businesses have some form of software to set up collaborative forums, bulletin boards or news feeds and I don’t think it’s necessarily important for businesses to have a photo tagging option or ‘never-ending quiz’ feature. Portals on the other hand along with blogs and wikis – well that’s another story altogether.