Monday, June 23, 2008

Closure of an institution

Well everyone, it was with some degree of sadness that I left my workplace on friday 20th June 2008. This was to be the last day that the Edith Cowan University Churchlands campus library was open to the general populace.

Leading up to that day staff madly packed up boxes of their precious, and not so precious, belongings ready for the removalists to come on the 23rd. But also they had to pack their own computers, and 47 student computers plus printers and peripherals.

Of course we all had a quiet drink or 3 on late friday afternoon, with the Library Manager present so it was all above board.

I'm here today, keeping a watchful eye over the removalists and answering any questions they may have about where particular items or boxes are to go. Not sure I'll be here all week, but we'll see.

Where is it all going? Well many items from various faculty collections had been moved previously as the courses were moved to other campuses, most recently Nursing to Joondalup campus. What we had left was mainly post graduate business studies and items for the commercial arm PIBT, which all were to be moved to our Mount Lawley campus.

I'll log off now, but with some fond memories of the Churchlands campus, a nice neat picturesque campus, with lovely old trees and many birdlife.

Monday, January 7, 2008

A New Year of 23 Things

Sorry, I'm a little behind on catching up with the multiple aspects of Social Networking systems and how these can enlighten our work and social lives.

Before I embark on some sole searching in regards to Podcasting here's some interest tid bits from Stephen's Lighthouse, http://stephenslighthouse.sirsi.com/ Stephen being the esteemed Stephen Abram, Vice President of Innovation at SirsiDynix. I found this link from http://del.icio.us/eculibrarylearning, which obviously links from the ECU Library Learning 2.0 blog.

Objection Handling for 2.0 and Social Media Read Write Web has a great posting this week. It's called Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond by Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Read the original post for the responses. Useful stuff to have in your arsenal.

A List of Objections, Replies and Concessions Regarding Social Media and Tools

1. I suffer from information overload already.

2. So much of what's discussed online is meaningless. These forms of communication are shallow and make us dumber. We have real work to do!

3. I don't have the time to contribute and moderate, it looks like it takes a lot of time and energy.

4. Our customers don't use this stuff, the learning curve limits its usefulness to geeks.

5. Communicators [bloggers, tweeters] are so fickle, better to stay unengaged than risk random brand damage. We don't want hostile comments left about us on any forum we've legitimized.

6. Traditional media and audiences are still bigger, we'll do new stuff when they do.

7. Upper management won't support it/dedicate resources for it.

8. These startups can't offer meaningful security, they may not even be around in a year - I'll wait until Google or our enterprise software vendor starts offering this kind of functionality.

9. There are so many tools that are similar, I can't tell where to invest my time so I don't use any of it at all.

10. That stuff's fine for sexy brands, but we sell [insert boring B2B brand] and are known for stability more than chasing the flavor-of-the-month."

Be prepared.

Stephen



I found this a good precis of many peoples negative feelings. I don't subscribe to all of them, but do wonder at the longevity of some of the sites/tools, and definitely agree with point 9, which was only just highlighted in my workplace yesterday when one staff member was mentioning her nephew posting pictures for people to look at. She couldn't remember the site, but we suggested Facebook or Flickr. She said her nephew had looked blankly at her when she mentioned Flickr, so not everyone knows this well known picture sharing site!

As for Podcasting, downloadable video and audio, this I feel is certainly of interest to many areas and definitely of use to the educational sector. This of course includes tours of the library using audio, audio with images or a vid cast. The large uptake of MP3 type players, and the newer players and even mobile phones with video capability, means this kind of information transfer will most likely be a stayer. The bandwidth usage will be the main stumbling block for larger video files, but the recording compression technologies and the receiving capabilities of portable devices are improving daily.

Now, as for the usefulness of Yahoo videos and other video sharing sites, well they are fun, good to get your libary noticed if others are searching for them (however what student would off their own bat) but really great for people to discover new talent, which is why i've embedded the video below... Jacqueline Mannering. This came via searching the Yahoo video site, but many of the videos are sourced from other video sharing sites such as youtube, bliptv and metacafe. They give information about the artist or video content plus people are able to post comments.