Thing 4 Sunday evening

The 4th Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Librarianship Conference (QQML) was my whole existence last week, 22nd May to 25th.  It was great fun, learned loads and will blog about it for libfocus in the next couple of days.

Storify

To jump to the end first, QQML2012 is Storified!  Finally sat down to complete this part of Thing 4 late Saturday evening.  I thought Storify was going to be gimmicky and that it'd be a chore.  But no! love, love, love it!  Incredible easy to use and of course there was a ready made story in the conference.  What there was tho' was a problem with the site which said it was over capacity and just stopped working.  All fine when logged in this evening but it didn't have the last edit I'd put in.  Dunno if that be my laptop which is hopeless, or Storify.

But it was very cool to be able to use the tweets from the conference #qqml to tell a tale.  The story was there to be put together and in this my task was a compiling and editing one.  Being able to pull across images or websites was pretty much like preparing a presentation heavy on graphics which is modus operandi for me having had some cpd about presentations and read Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte.

RSS

Well, this one got put on the long finger also.  Had one attempt and did everything back to front.  Hitting the orange button was easy - but where were the feeds?  D'oh!  Dim memory of a librarian friend using Blogspot or some such.  Back to cpd23things advice and the light dawned - so I subscribed to Google Reader.  Hey ho.  Subscribed to an RSS on a blog that happened to have found thru Twitter - you can see how one things leads to another in this adventure - and when I logged in tonight there it was in all its glory.  Great.  Now it was time to replicate this success and lo, the RSS for all the 23cpd blogs has now been successfully netted. 

But my learning is like a spiral, I trace and retrace, it's like, iterative man.  And have to laugh at my own twerpiness when something comes clear and and it's been staring me in the face and waving its arms in front of me.

Twitter

Ah but yes, am loving Twitter.  Did set myself a goal to tweet live from QQML.  So cleverly alerted all (!) about my talk an hour before the session, and did a teaser implying that all would be revealed.  Super.  Well it would have been super if I'd actually tweeted afterwards.  But I didn't.  Hmm.  However, Storify came to the rescue on this and you'll find it there.

Still, next attempt was better.  After the talks in one session were complete I remained in the room and sent two tweets.  It took an age to compose them on the smartphone as adeptness still to happen there.  But I did it.  Really tho', there is a discipline here and it is a writing task.  Admire the tweeters who can write sensible 140 characters whilst listening to the talk.  This is in my future!  I was taking notes with pen and paper.  So the material is all there and how much does it matter that the tweet is done during the talk?  I'll let that play in my head a bit.  Experimented then and tweeted hours later on another talk just to put it out there.  I'm definitely going with the style that the tweet is a piece of info and has a link but aware that this might evolve.

On Twitter for about 3 to 4 weeks now and it is - Cheryl Cole quote alert - right up my street.  In creating the account I knew there would be tweeting this time round.  Had four years previously set up an account in a training session, never tweeted and still had 4 followers.  Never even looked at it in the intervening time and didn't call it anything that would link it to me - I thought. One intrepid librarian found it though, still don't know how!

I am finding really great curiosity-sating and knowledge-building stuff thru Twitter. 

I'm curious to see what picture emerges over time of what interests me enough to tweet and retweet.  Have had some fun in summarising in 140 words, and sometines punning with intent.  A policy developing that a retweet must be something I've read to the end.  Not so much thinking of an audience on the subject front tho'  because it is so easy come, easy go on twitter and it would be inhibiting.  Because I retweet some science stuff as well as library stuff there's a mix followers which is kind of fun. 

These are all useful tools and all have application to work.  Have set up a twitter account for the library and will use it as one stream in reaching our users.  The RSS feeds mean that I'll stop using my gmail for blogs, and I'll start to use lists in twitter as per A Library Lady who includes some very useful links in her very readable blog.

There are workflows to be streamlined for sure but happy to be in exploring and learning mode right now.

Thing 4 complete and looking forward to Thing 5.