Thing 17 - Prezi and Slideshare

I have been looking forward to this thing, as I have seen Prezi presentations in the past and liked them but never got round to looking at Prezi for my own use, so this is the perfect excuse. It's common knowledge that using presentation software such as Powerpoint is not the key to a good presentation - the technology is just an aid to the main event. I have definitely fallen into the Powerpoint trap of too many slides and too many bullet points in the past, though I am conscious of this danger, and try to avoid it.

Prezi is very different to Powerpoint, full of whizzy graphics that can shoot round the screen. But I would think that there is still the same danger of relying too much on what the technology lets you do, rather than creating a great presentation that's enhanced by, rather than taken over by, the graphics. I have seen Prezi presentations that have the same effect on me as some 3D cinema - a slight feeling of dizziness and the beginnings of a migraine, from all those images and objects zooming in and out, and jumping around the screen while my eyes and brain try to keep up. I think there is probably an art to doing it well, and I love the idea of being able to 'dance around your subject' as the CPD blog suggests. I think that the style of the presentations can really capture the presenter's enthusiasm and the audience's interest much more than a linear Powerpoint might.
I spent quite a lot of time in the 'learn' section of Prezi trying to figure it out, and have started to have a go putting together a very short presentation for use at work. But I think it's going to take some getting used to - the basics seem easy to master, but I have a feeling that anything more sophisticated might be a lot harder! The added benefit of reading around other blog posts on Prezi was the list of other useful tools that I found - Zamzar for free file conversion, Picnik for free photo editing, Photofunia for special effects for photos and Stock.xchng for images.

A brief mention too of Slideshare - I've heard of this before, and used it to take a look at presentations from others. It seems useful, but I don't think I really have enough presentations to make it worthwhile. But was interesting to consider it in terms of being a good place to 'advertise' yourself and your presentations - I loved the visual CV example.

Thing 15 - Attending, presenting and organizing seminars and conferences

I have never attended a big 'annual conference'. When I was at the stage in my career that I might have accompanied e.g. a manager/experienced colleague to see how conferences 'work', I didn't really have a manager who was involved enough with cataloguing to take this on. The cost for big events can also be prohibitive (plus I always seem to be on my holidays when the annual CIG conference is held!). However... I would still like to attend one, though it may have to be self-funded - I had better start saving.
All that said, I do attend a fair number of one-day events; this year I have gone to various Cilip seminars - the executive briefing on RDA, a reclassification day, and my next one is coming in December on shelf-ready books. These can be invaluable - not just in terms of practical applications for work, but also for networking with those in similar posts, and increasing confidence in keeping up to date with current issues. Online events can also be good - for example, the Cilip reclassification day was followed by a 2 day CIG eForum on reclassification within the same month, which was great to take part in.
I have never presented formally either. I have at a university staff conference taken part in a poster as part of our I.R. advocacy (which was a good way to introduce the service to academic staff) but that was mostly demonstration and conversation. I have also done internal presentations and training. So I read and appreciated the tips on presenting via the CPD23 website (particularly Bethan's information professional blog's reassurance that you can script a presentation!), but I'm not sure when I will have the opportunity to put the tips into practice.
As far as organizing an event like this, I assume that one would have to join a committee somewhere to get involved in this? But perhaps I should think of a local cataloguing librarian's event to get started. I haven't met my equivalents from libraries within my geographical area. Maybe now would be a good time to - or at least to contact my local Cilip group to make sure that it's not happening already.

Thing 14 - Zotero / Mendeley / citeulike

Ah, referencing – I have always enjoyed this! I was obviously born to be a librarian…

The library I work in uses RefWorks, but my post doesn’t involve using it regularly, so I have really only a basic knowledge of it. I became more aware of it recently when we had issues regarding the changing of display of bib records in our Primo discovery system – we made some changes which had rather unintended effects on the references it exported via RefWorks, so then had to work to get a compromise between the two systems’ requirements.

I had an awareness that other referencing software is available, e.g. End Note, Reference Manager etc, but not much experience of using them, other than a very little at University. I hadn’t heard of any of the three free ones on trial in this week’s 23 things. I had a brief look at all three, to decide which to try:

Zotero – this looks very simple to use on the training video, and would be helpful for storing more than just references – it could be used for keeping track of your research in general.

Mendeley – this put me off as a desktop installation – I really don’t want any more desktop clutter unless I absolutely need it!

citeulike – this appealed more as it was online, but I wasn’t sure from a brief look that you could actually ‘cite while you write’ using this tool, so it’s usefulness might be limited. It was more of a sharing/organizational tool.  So, this is the one I decided to explore further. It took me a couple of attempts to realize that importing from the toolbar add-on only works if you use sites which support citeulike! Which is a shame. But you can do things manually if not. I found that this works well as yet another resource discovery/sharing tool – it was really useful to see what others who had tagged the same article as me had also read.

So, yt was interesting to explore these tools to get an idea of what students might be using if they’re not using RefWorks, and to realize that they may also have application for me in terms of storing references to articles/work for personal research. Currently any links to research I store tends to be in delicious, all bundled in with my other ‘stored web stuff’, but I wonder if I might get more usage from it if I separated it out a little. Picking the best online tool for the job can be tricky when there are so many out there!

Thing 13 - online collaboration

Two whole months since the last blog - oops. Meant to keep this going but outside life took over for a while. However, am getting back into the 23 things and will make a regular date with my PC to add to the blog.

Task 13 was all about online collaboration tools, including Google Docs, Wikis and Dropbox. My first thought about collaborative working in my current environment was "shared drive"! Our work shared drive can be pretty useful, but has all sorts of problems such as version control and tracking changes, so I really like the idea of online sharing as an alternative.

Google Docs was incredibly easy to get started with, which I like! And especially good if not everyone you want to share with is accessing the same organizational network (so long as everyone is happy to sign up for a Google account, of course). It also seemed to be a great tool for solo working too, and I suspect it is for this that I will continue to use it. As with so many of the tools I have tried for this programme, there is almost too much to explore within it, and I doubt I will ever find time to get round to most of it. The free templates were nice, such as a to-do list that I have started using in an attempt to replace the endless post-it notes which cover my desk. I was disappointed that I couldn't easily see a way to move docs to and from Microsoft Office however (though that might be my lack of techno-wizardry rather than a fault with Google Docs). Overall, I can definitely see myself using this for daily work in the future, and perhaps as a way of sharing docs when I need to as well.

After falling for Google Docs, I tried DropBox next and was impressed with that too. I liked that you can install it on more than one PC and have your files synchronized between them, which helps to make up for the fact that it is not online, anywhere access. But it does still clutter up your desktop, where the last thing I need is any more icons. You can have 2GB storage free with DropBox and then you need to pay. The advantage of DropBox seems to be that you can use your own Word docs etc - it is not just a proprietary format. It's also good that a colleague doesn't have to be a member of DropBox to access your files - you can just choose to share an individual file with them if not.

The final thing to try was a wiki - we do in fact already use wikis as part of our VLE intranet for shared projects, which we have found a good place to bring together group documents and comments with a nicer format than just a file and folder structure. What I don't like about our current wikis is that I need to go to them to find out about updates - an RSS feed/email notification would be really useful. But that might just be our VLE - I haven't really explored other wikis (apart from Wikipedia, scourge of the library universe!). I was interested to see that PBwiki is free for librarians to use, but I didn't try it out as I have already signed up for so many things that I need to start getting choosy now! This task has at least made me realize that I ought to go back and examine our internal wikis in more detail to figure out how to get the best from them, and also to consider moving our current cataloguing procedures to this format, which I have heard of several other libraries doing.