Thing 10: Live Streaming

Before Rudai I participated in webinars and a few live podcasts. I really only started watching live streaming videos when the stream Twitch Plays Pokemon happened. I then got into watching e-sport events. The latest one was the League of Legends World Championship.

I watched the Rudai Google hangout live and participated in the twitter chat event. I was inspired by the speakers and was motivated to catch up with my Rudai posts at the time. I think I was about six posts behind because of a late start on Rudai. Google Hangouts is like a mix of Skype, webinar and WhatsApp. 

I think streaming live events from the library is a very good idea. It gives another platform for librarians and information professionals to express their ideas. It also gives the library more opportunities to interact with their wider community.

It allows those unable to attend community events to join in off site. For example if a community meeting was to be arranged in a library with streaming capabilities, then the meeting could be streamed to housebound members of the community. There are even some streaming sites with options that allow you to limit access to a certain region or use passwords for entry.

Also after the event there is a recorded video so people who missed the event or did not have time to attend can watch at a later time convenient to them.

Part 10: 23 Things Course Rudaí 23.
Tasks: Take part in the Rudai23 Hangout-On-Air OR Set up your own Hangout-On-Air OR Explore Periscope

Thing 8: Curation Tools

Pinterest is one of the social media platforms that I discovered during college. Unlike other platforms I was not recommended to the site but happened to stumble upon it when looking up pictures of art and hobby supplies.

I have not been on Pinterest for a while but luckily enough I still remembered my password. I  have not gone into much division or classification of the boards I already have on Pintrest and have not felt the need to reorder them because the main use of them is for my hobbies.

I decided that since I was already a Pintrest user for this thing I would try to use the mobile app and compare my experiences of the two.

Overall both experiences for the app and the website were intuitive and easy to use with some small differences. I found that scrolling and pinning from the app was faster than the website. 

In general for both you can search for boards and pins using keywords and once pinned confirmation notice appears at the bottom of the screen. The background of the search in the app was black with white text while it was the opposite for the website. For the website quick menu options appear when you hover the mouse over the pin but in the app you have to click into the pin to pin it. There is a permanent follow button on boards that are in your news feed which is a pin icon in the app. I found it easier to search for boards on the website. Setting up new boards was the same.

I set up three new boards:

Library: random selection - A collection of library related themes with various topics.

Library; Fantasy - A collection of fantasy pictures, reading lists, inforgraphics and quotes.

Books; Art -A collection of various types of drawings with a book or reading element to the picture.

Part 8: 23 Things Course Rudaí 23.
Tasks explore Pintrest of Flipboard or Storify

Today's Posts postponed

Unfortunately I have to postpone Today's planned posts because it took me longer to get home than expected.

Thing 7: Podcasts

I heard about the Librarians Aloud podcast that was starting up at an A&SL (Academic and Special Libraries) meeting. I think it might have actually been the AGM. I was at several of A&SL meetings last year because I was interning in the Teagasc Library and I was invited to attend by my supervisor.

Before the Librarians Aloud I had never listened to a Library podcast, but I have listened to several Anime and Sci-fi ones.

I think the Librarians Aloud project is a great idea, it expands the media platforms that librarians can get their views and opinions to be herd especially in today's society were there is more of a focus on new media over the traditional.

The Librarians Aloud is a monthly podcast hosted by Laura Mooney Ferris and run by the A&SL. I quite enjoyed the music in the casts if I do say so myself.

So far there have been three podcasts.
The first one had Jane Burns discussing her career path. Jane's interview was very inspiring. I particularly liked her descriptions on setting up the databases. I also liked how she had to measure the impact that the work of several voluntary organisations and took down the data in a notebook when visiting them instead f the laptop.

She also mentioned how the databases have to be designed for the user and not how the designer imagines that the data should be organised. There was a great fashion example between two types of shoes a peep hole shoe and a beak-a-boo hole shoe. The difference in the shoe designs were minimal for a normal person but the difference in design was of significance in the fashion industry and there was a need to distinguish between the two designs in the database.

Jane had a lot to talk about but she concluded with the need for older librarians to learn and gain new ideas and knowledge form the newly qualified librarians as well as the need for the newly qualified librarians to gain the wisdom and knowledge of the more experienced librarian. She also mentioned that a librarian is always interested in people and will need the skills to pick up clues that are not obvious.

The second one covered the a Zine Archive. A zine is a self-published and non commercial publications. They are essentially magazines but have a broad subject pool. I am most familiar with fan fiction and comic zines, in particular Japanese ones which are called "Doujinshi". Tom Mahar and Mick O'Dwyer were interviewed in this cast and were described as the "guardians of the Zine archive". I felt really bad for the couple who lost rare books during the floods in 2010.

The final one for the moment was an interview with Niamh O'Donavan and Stephanie Ronan on how Rudaí 23 was run and set up. They also talked about how they became Librarians. They talked about the difficulties to tech for working in public libraries. In particular the divide that was between what was taught in the course and the actual duties of a public librarian. For example singing nursery rhymes to toddlers and teaching basic computers.

I cannot ever see myself ever doing a podcast, but never say never, no one knows what is in the future. I never say myself ever going on Twitter in college and look at me now, I am Tweeting and liking it.

The Thing 7 post on Summertime blog has some interesting podcast suggestions.

Also here is a Library podcast I found in a Tweet.
Tweeted by NPD Ireland: Library Land Pod

Part 7: 23 Things Course Rudaí 23.
Tasks either create a podcast or listen to one and write a review.

Thing 6: Reflective Practice

I have not been keeping up my blogging for the last few months so I was encouraged to keep on at it by the various other bloggers who are just as far behind as me. I have been reading other library blogs but not many Rudaí blogs. So I decided to explore some blogs.

I would like to thank the author of the Summertime blog for their inspirational post about podcasts with great suggestions to listen to, which I will listen to on my way to work.

As I explored other blogs I noticed that the blog posts were a lot shorter than mine, which had me worried that I was doing it wrong because this my first written blog. I was reminded of a comment my partner said to me "doing a typical Clair thing putting in 150% of effort instead of the normal 100%".

I decided to try to write shorter posts. Then I found a kindred long post blog The Circulation of Information: A Library Blog who has manged to find a balance between long and short posts. So I decided to try to do the same with both long and short posts.

I will try to write shorter posts in general and still do longer ones when needed.

I would have left a comment on the blog but the comments were disabled on the tumbler page. I left a few comments on a few of the other blogs I read and will leave more as I read more.

In general I found the blogs interesting with lots of fun facts and hidden gems and lots more to discover. Each blogger has their own take on the different platforms and tools. I have gained a lot more reading material ideas on where to find interesting blogs, videos and podcasts. Thanks everyone.

Part 6: 23 Things Course Rudaí 23.
Tasks 1. Look at the other participants blogs. 2. Leave comments on a few blog posts. 3. If someone comments on your blog reply to it. 4. Write a blog post about the other participants blogs.

Thing 5: Online Networks [Part 2]

Twitter

One of the main reasons for doing Rudaí was to get on Twitter. I had been meaning to sign up to Twitter a few months before Rudaí 23 started, to follow library events, but I had been putting it off on the long finger.

Originally Twitter only had a text box and no photo uploads, it was one of the platforms that was suggested to join when I entered college but it did not appeal to me at the time.

In the beginning I still found it difficult to write in a causal and concise manner. This is why I was both terrified and excited about Twitter. Now I am confident enough to Tweet and can keep up with twitter chats, to a certain extent.

I signed up to Twitter a few hours before the Google hangout. I was in the middle of computer problems so I only got to complete the first two steps of the sing up process before my browser crashed.

Twitters data capturing capacity is a little worrisome. I had only entered my name, email address and preferred handle in the sign up process and when I signed in after restarting my browser it suggested my brother and some of my college friends to follow.

Normally when signing up for new social media platforms it will give you the option to select or invite friends from your email or Facebook account but to do this a permission request normally runs and asks for password confirmation. Twitter seems to have skipped this step and to have automatically completed the last few steps in the sign up itself, handy but a bit unnerving.

Years ago I had browser crashes before when signing up to platforms but usually when you re-enter the platform there are either redirect to where you left off if it was an essential part of the sign up or prompts on the site where to go to complete the missed steps.

Tweeting was not as bad as I had feared. After a few posts and re-tweets I became comfortable with the platform.

I Tweeted from a conference for the first time when I was at the “Right to Read” conference. I found this a bit difficult because I was not able to type fast enough, so I took notes and typed the tweets in between speakers.(#right_to_read)

It turns out I like Twitter chats but I get lost about half way through an hour session and feel like I am playing catch up with the questions in the second half.

I participated in a chat run by Rudai (#Rudai23) and one run by the SLA (#slatalk). I followed the (#interlibnet) Twitter chat while waiting for the SLA talk to start. I look forward to getting involved in more chats in the future.

I subscribed to several lists but haven’t had the time to explore and utilise them. I look forward to revisiting lists sometime in the future and maybe creating some of my own.

Part 5: 23 Things Course Rudaí 23.
Tasks Facebook: Join Rudai23 Facebook group and say hi, follow a Facebook page that you like
Tasks Twitter: Set up Twitter account, follow @rudai23, tweet with #rudai23, subscribe to a list. #thing5

Catch up: All Things Part 2

Rudai 23: Where I am at

My original plan for catch up was thwarted by several technological problems and a few college and work deadlines. This the first computer screen time since my exams and college assignments finished.

To sum it up my phone bricked itself, with a motherboard malfunction. I was told the data was irretrievable after bringing it to a phone repair shop. This hurts more because I had just downloaded the Blogger app to transfer the posts to Blogger because I was having phone backup problems.

We were having connectivity problems when we moved into the new apartment which were a combination of router, wireless card and computer performance issues, we went through three routers before the router issue was resolved. The wireless card issue was resolved by testing setting changes. I haven’t had enough computer time to know if the performance issues have all been completely resolved but the laptop is now usable.

As the saying goes disasters happen in three’s. I lost one of my college assignments to the final technical glitch which was a MS Word save error. Which made my college deadlines very tight. One evening when I opened the document, it was blank. In the folder with the file appeared what looked like a MS Access file with a weird name but you could not open it. I can only assume that the file was corrupted and because I was not using my own computer to work on the file I did not have my usual backups. One of my colleges in work said that a similar thing happened for her thesis.

On the work front, I just finished my Jobbridge in Teagasc and started a new Job in Kildare County Council.

Lesson learnt; the golden rule is to save the unpublished posts to the cloud.

New Plan

This weekend I hope to retype all lost posts. I still have notes for some of them because I used hand written notes and paragraphs for some but others I typed the notes and posts straight to my S memo and unfortunately all that data was lost.

o   Finish last bits of tasks for partially completed Things.

o   At least one post a day.

o   Try for two posts on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Post Schedule