It's now 4pm. Here's a picture of some cakes to cheer you (me) up! Enjoy!

NB. It is a free to use image :o)

Meetings and Library Things....

Meet-o-matic......sounds like washing powder but does something completely different. Luckily. Otherwise it wouldn't be Thing 15. Having spent my library life (so far) in the NHS this sort of thing hadn't really occurred to me as we use Outlook for scheduling meetings, one of the handy things with Outlook is that once you've accepted a meeting request it puts it straight into your calendar so requires little thinking and doing. I see the importance of these other meeting schedulers for those who use different calendar/email systems. I like the way Meet-O-Matic was quick and easy to use, I also looked at Doodle and found this just as good.....I'm tempted to use this with friends to bypass the endless texts/phone calls to co-ordinate everybody!

Library Things is something again that wasn't on my radar (think I must live in some deep dark hole). It looks good for sharing collections. I haven't looked at the social networking side of things yet but setting up collections is easy peesy. I am wondering if we could use it to publicise our new books? However, I can't see a way to add in the shelf mark or any comments. There are boxes for this if you edit the book but they don't appear to display when I click on book cover in my collection. May need further investigation......

Reflection.....

.....so far the 19Things has covered some stuff that I already use and some stuff that I don't so all in all it's been informative so far. I think it's also handy to be able to take a step back from what you already use and the way you use it and look at it again with fresh eyes.....as in; is this really working? Am I using it to it's full functionality? Are there other things I could use instead that have more/better features?

Enjoying it so far....when I get the time to squeeze it into my working day!!!

Pubmed RSS and other feeds.....

I've just completed 'Thing12'.....I don't really use Pubmed much, mostly the citation matcher for checking photocopy requests and the odd quick and dirty search so this was interesting and useful. It's a similar thing to setting up an alert in HDAS I think....assuming HDAS is working at the time :o/ 


When I went into My Library I realised that I'd set up RSS feeds some time ago and just forgotten about them.....probably because I never asked it to email me the results so they just sat there being neglected. I can see the usefulness of this as again it pulls together information from different sources into one place instead of having to check several different websites. I like the Pubmed search RSS, so easy to set up :o)

On the whole RSS feeds are not something I've ever been asked about by library users. Maybe it's something that we should publicise more?

Protopage....

Hi everyone.....I'm running a bit behind in these 19things so have only just got round to doing the Protopage set up. As a library service we already have a Netvibes current awareness page so i thought I'd try using Protopage to see how it compares and I have to say I think Netvibes looks a bit more professional (or maybe that's just because I've not set up the colours and stuff correct, I've used some bright pinks and blues, just because I can!). My thoughts so far on Portopage: it's ok, seems fairly easy to use and add/remove widgets/feeds etc.

Personally, I think that there is still a need for a page such as this which can bring together lots of different resources in one place. I find it much easier....maybe that's just me being lazy but if I can save myself time by using somebody else's page rather than faff around and create my own then that's great! :o)