Dropbox - a Magic Pocket!

These are two introductory videos that I found helpful to understand what Dropbox is and what its functionalities are. I thought I'd post them first before I get into the nitty-gritty of using Dropbox. 

The first is a very short overview on what Dropbox is and how it can be super useful for consolidating files to be accessed by a person from all of their computers and mobile devices. It's a great introduction if you've never used Dropbox before!

The second video is a longer video (approx. 17 minutes) but if you can sit through the introduction and the presenters spruiking their sponsor it will let you in on some handy ways to use and manage your Dropbox account. 

What's is covered in this video - 

• how to share and unshare folders 
• how to share and edit a document between people 
• how to recover deleted files or folders by going back to previous editions 
• how to send a specific file to a person without them needing to be a Dropbox member 
• using a mobile and the limitations of doing so (also android and iphone's different levels of compatibility are discussed) 

Hope these are helpful if you've never used Dropbox or (like me) need a refresher! 

Microblogging: Twitter

I have had major reservations about Twitter. I have never been interested in 'joining the tweeted conversation' because I assumed that I would have to wade through so much drivel to find anything of interest or worth. This is without even considering it as a tool to be used for my professional life.

Having created a twitter account in our second week of classes I have found it hard to motivate myself to really explore and actively use it. My buddy Emily had to run through what @ and # were in class and show me how to RT etc. Her enthusiasm and pithy definition of it:

Twitter: a postmodern, organic convergence of the masses; facilitates digital pub conversation.

helped to scrape off some of the negativity I've smeared on Twitter. 

Last week in the tutorial I raised that I was concerned and confused by how my professional and private lives might co-exist under this one Web 2.0 tool. Ie would it be inappropriate to tweet to friends about things that interested us personally but would have no relevance for anyone else but would see anyway? 

I have discovered TweetDeck which I found out about reading a blogpost on whether Twitter is worth it. This sums up the supposed value of TweetDeck (from the same post)- 

 "Tweetdeck effectively allows you to screen out messages from people you don’t care so much about and create individual matrices of conversations, (ie lumping all personal contacts into one frame, all business contacts in another, all news sources into a frame and so on)."

I have downloaded TweetDeck and will explore in the following weeks whether this solves my worries about having Twitter be both a personal and professional tool. I'll keep you posted on trying to create a divide between the two, and wonder if anyone else is using TweetDeck?  Also I'll post a screen grab of it once I've fully understood its functionality so you can see how its layout is different to the twitter interface and see the public/private list columns.....

I was interested to see how well Twitter did as a note taking device during week 3's lecture using 

#isys1166 (John spoke about the value of collective note taking at conferences).  I contributed during the lecture but found I was quite slow at processing what John was saying so as to type it in the correct spot etc. Emily was excellent at summarising the lecture. In the tutorial following the lecture people had mixed views on the value of twitter as a collective note taker based on what was written in the lecture. Whatever your take you can get the general gist of what week 3's lecture was about for sure. I think in terms of conferences this would be a good way to document the lectures/symposiums but would rely on more than just a handful of people doing it (sounds like its already happening!).

But its only today after a conversation with my housemate/friend/academic who uses it do I feel as though I might have come to see its benefits. That has been because I haven't understood its real purpose (or at least a way to use Twitter that I would find relevant and beneficial). I though that it was a repurposing of the status update from Facebook and allowing people another platform for tweeting micro parts of their life - eg. going out to get the paper and milk. Now I see it as a more impersonal way to keep up to date with interesting organisations, people, events and topics. My friend Rob was saying that he followed, during the last American Presidential election, noted commentators (around 90!) from both sides of the fence to come to terms with how the pre-election race was unfolding. This allowed him to access information well ahead of it being printed in newspapers or reported on newscasts. Once over he un-followed all of these commentators. So in this way Twitter acts in a more fluid way where who/what you follow changes when your interests do (hence it being more of an impersonal tool).

He also mentioned that he RT articles or webpages of interest mainly to serve as an archiving device. He can look back through his tweets to find these again. He tweets maximum once or twice a week so looking back over his tweets wouldn't be a very arduous task. I am guessing that for a very active tweeter this would be too time consuming to do.

So I've learnt that Twitter can be used -

• to follow or to learn more about an isolated event or topic
• as a form of bookmarking pages/bogs/articles sourced from the web where tweets become your archive. 
• you can follow and un-follow people and institutions according to your interests at any given time

I will now be paying closer attention to library/information management organisations (eg ALIA, SLV, Library of Congress...) and people to see whether I can get a feeling for where the information management profession is at right now. 

I will focus on the more public aspect of Twitter (not the private/friend one) and see whether I can use it to my advantage! 

Thanks for reading, E 

Blogging so far...

After a late start I'm getting the feel for blogging and the Web 2.0 world. But I'm still having some teething problems. For starters, despite the fact that I spent far too much time playing around with the layout/background of my blog on Saturday, you wouldn't really know that I had. Im still unhappy with how it looks - bland and definitely not eye catching.

So part of the plan for the next 3 weeks is to come up with a layout and design that I'm happy with and to explore the different functionalities that Blogger allows. At the moment Blogger seems quite limiting with its templates and what it allows to be upload as a background. I had grand ideas but the photo size is so small (300k in size) that by the time id reduced the quality in the images I wanted to use they looked fuzzy and of poor quality. I've had a look at some of our classmates' blogs (can't put links up as per rules of privacy) and there are some much more competently displayed blogs...

I think it matters how a blog is presented - especially if it is created for a professional purpose. The Librarian in Black blog I looked at in the previous post had lots of thought put into its presentation, and although it wasn't a design that I would choose it fitted to that particular blogger.

This task is definitely making me realise how low my skill set is (shhhh...) with Web 2.0 tools.
Next area to explore is twitter which I confess to knowing nothing about so we'll see how that goes..

IM technology blog "Librarian in Black"

I have just had a peruse of Sarah Houghton's blog Librarian in Black. She's the director of a Californian library, the San Rafael Public Library, and appears to be very involved in the intersection between libraries and the Web 2.0 technologies.

I enjoyed reading her blog which was surprisingly quite frank and she writes about both her professional and personal life. She clarifies in her about section that her posts are her views only and not of the library she works for or any other agency (which is probably necessary given that she seems to have strong views on the direction of public libraries, plus she swears in her posts).

She posts on things such as 50 great apps for librarians, what its like being the director of a library, digital piracy, and summarises conference talks such as the keynote for a conference called Reinventing Spaces and Places - Internet Librarian 2012. So this is a blog that strikes me as one that people who work in public libraries (or more broadly libraries in general) would find topical and of relevance. 

I felt as though some of the content was very specific to running a library which is obviously not something I'm about to do soon (and so not super relevant for me right now). I think she has the tone of her blog spot on - its a good mix of professional stuff and her personal views such as a a best of 2012 list for books, library apps, new service for libraries etc. I think that her personality comes out in her writing which seems to be what makes blogs successful. 

She definitely does not use Blogger and has enlisted help from a professional to create her blog. I found it easy to navigate and the sections made it even easier. 

The Beginning!

Hello fellow Document Management 1 students!

I am a little trepidatious about this assignment because there is so much for us to explore but am looking forward to learning about Web 2.0 tools, how to interact and collaborate with them and how they might be beneficial in a library or information agency environment.

It will be interesting to see how comfortable I feel with theses tools at the end of this assignment and whether my preconceptions of Web 2.0 are changed. I am particularly interested to see how well I am able to communicate and interact with my buddies Liz, Emily, Katherine and Bev and the rest of the Doc Man class.

Let me give you a little background on myself. I have a BA from Melbourne University with a Major in Art History. This is my second semester of MIM. I came to this degree/career choice by chance. I also undertook a Law degree along with my BA but decided that I'd rather stick pins in my eye than finish and become a lawyer. When I quit law I saved for a year and then went to live in Berlin. The job that I had to get me there was working in the Access Support area of the State Library of Victoria. At SLV I realised how much I enjoyed working in this environment, how interesting and pleasant the librarians were and how diverse a librarian's role can be. That's why I'm here!

I actually have a limited understanding of how to use Web 2.0 tools as unlikely (and perhaps embarrassing) as that may be to admit given that they have been around for ages now. I am an avid blog reader and one of my friends has an online magazine (Radius magazine if you're interested), and some have blogs and tumbler accounts which I follow. But I have never had a blog or a twitter account and refuse to create a Facebook account. I am somewhat sceptical of how tools such as twitter and blogs can be used in the professional environment but I am willing to be swayed. Also sometimes I am overwhelmed by the amount of content that is produced using Web 2.0 tools and question the value of these tools when the content can be so boring, pointless and sometimes erroneous. BUT I think that this might be because I haven't fully come to grips with this technology (i'm still a little shaky on RSS feeds)...and so....

.......here are my learning goals for this assignment:

• to increase my knowledge of, and experience in using, Web 2.0 tools so that I am able to use them competently and effectively 
• to explore if/how this blog and other Web 2.0 tools (ie Twitter) will allow me to collaborate, interact and communicate with my fellow buddies and classmates 
• gain an understanding of how these tools can be utilised specifically by the library and information agency sector 
• to gain a deeper understanding of how these tools are shaping how we communicate with one another on a global scale 

I look forward to reading your blogs (especially those of my buddies!)

Ellen