Library Thing…. I’m just not that into you.

Library Wanderer puts it so very succinctly that I’m not sure I should bother trying to add anything… just knowing that there’s a book called “Did David Hasselhof end the cold war“  (£4.75 will never be better spent)has made my life immeasurably richer.

but I suppose I should add my pennyworth…

I have to say that it would never ever in the world of a month of Sundays when every single Sunday had a blue moon occur to me to … hoot… catalogue my own books! ahahhahahahahahahha.

Not only would I be rubbish at it, but what on earth is the point???

Every one has to amuse themselves in their own way, and I will admit to buying a second copy of Cats Eye by the glorious  Margaret Atwood from the wonderful Alnwick Barter Books, within weeks of buying the first copy (see the covers, I could be forgiven for not linking the 2 couldn’t I?) but I blame that on woosiness brought on by a fine all day breakfast…. (ps have just finished The Year of the Flood, and loved loved it – v good indeed, though will have to re-read Oryx and Crake now since they’re very interconnected…..)

Anyway, back to LibraryThing, yes I know, but we really must …. I’ve given it a try as a possible way of presenting our Clinical Medicine reading lists a couple of years ago, because we thought the benefits of presenting the book covers was just too tempting to resist but, my goodness, it was a right pain to enter the data, and then once you’d found each book (not all of which actually had a cover, though most did, I admit), the link to Newton which we wanted to include was so invisible as to make it practically pointless. My tags in http://www.librarything.com/profile/SciPort are the Clinical Medicine (CM) ones – see if you can find the link to Newton for http://www.librarything.com/work/231986/book/36838359 for example… so, need more time…… not spotted it yet??? frankly I’m not surprised, and it just proves my point.

So, no, LibraryThing – I’m really just not that into you…..

flickr – a thing I like

I like flickr – I use it already on a personal basis as you can see from the feed down the side of this page. I like it because I can send pictures to my sister (who desn’t have broadband) without requiring her to spend 3 days downloading the images. I can chose to share some pictures with the world (the ones you can see) and keep some for only friends and family (my parents have yahoo/bt email, so it’s easy for them to login to see the extra pictures). 

But I have to admit that up till now  (and you can consider me a changed person) I would normally go to google to get my images. And despite trying to search for images with creative commons licence (which I think is a very good thing indeed – I went to Cory Doctorow’s Arcadia lecture and all 3 of these interviews are worth a watch/listen), I would often be a bit dodgy about the ones I actually use. 

I might be a bit surprised at anyone taking pictures of the medical library (while I find it charming, it’s not necessarily the most photogenic of locations, not like some of the other libraries in Cambridge). But I’ve found flickr very useful in the past when looking for ideas and inspiration for redevelopment of the library space (the jisc_infonet’s photostream  was particularly useful) 

but the tricky thing is that the results when I search flickr for something that’s not a thing (eg lightbulb moment) just aren’t quite as good when I search google for the same So perhaps the lesson is not to be so abstract – call a spade a spade, and get an image that suites…. 

from flickrCC

 and wordle – I’ve used it in the past, but some how have failed to get it to work again – (scroll to the bottom of this page for proof!) I tried tagxedo (apparently of words from my twitter account, but frankly I’m not convinced… but maybe I’m just feeling hard to please today)  I like the principle of tagxedo, but just don’t want to have my words put into a specific shape – yup, very hard to please today).

I’ll have a play and get back to you about tagxedo – perhaps its the answer to my wordle problems…..

 

tagging – or why I’m not a cataloguer, and never will be….

ok, so confession time – I admire and respect cataloguers, but I am not, could never, pray that I will never be one myself. I’m just not consistent enough. “Diabetic nursing”? …. well, this could be on the shelf in WKs for endocrinology, or the WYs for nursing… can’t we buy 2 copies??

I use it all the time when I’m searching Pubmed – MeSH headings are wonderful things which accommodate the fact that language can be very messy, and I may not know how many ways there are of talking about the common cold…. (BTW – I never have a common cold, I have acute coryza, dontcha know!)

I can see the value and I love it when someone else does it for me, but I just don’t care enough to do it myself….

and even when I try I’m rubbish at it – as you can see from this blog “thing3″ and “thing 8″ – space or no space… hopeless.

but I do like the suggestion “For example, one Oxford participant chose to give an approval rating to Things by using the tags ‘yay’, ‘nay’, and ‘meh’ as appropriate.” from Cam23 and I also like Kupu’s star ratings. I’ll have my own system – blinding, boggin’ and couldne give a ….

So I’m going to start, give it a try, run with it… but just don’t shout at me if I get distracted.

tagging? = couldne give a ….

 

UPDATE: this is how rubbish a tagger I am – have already (c.4 minutes later) found out that my 3 opinions (blinding, boggin’ and couldne give a… ) are inadequate. good grief….

I’m having to add another tag – “a’ right”  – to tools and things that are a’ right – not blinding, but not rubbish enough to be truly boggin’, and yet still good enough to warrent an opinion more positive than couldne give a ….… God, it’s complicated, this cataloguing/tagging/folksonomy/subject heading/key word/ taxonomy  nonsense….