Dumpling in a Hanky

Spiegeltent inner roof canopy Last week, I was part of the Scottish Law Librarians Group annual outing to the Edinburgh International Book Festival. This year, the chosen talk was The Guardian debate,  "Rethinking the Internet: is the web changing society for the worse?" , with the following description: We have embraced the online revolution with open arms and nearly 20% of all retail purchases are now made via the internet. More than that, the internet appears to be empowering citizens in ways that challenge the traditional relationship between individual and state. Is the net effect positive or negative? Writer Nick Harkaway, novelist Naomi Alderman and James Gleick, author of The Information, lead the discussion. Chaired by Ian Katz, Deputy Editor of the Guardian. * So, you'd think with that sort of blurb that the debate would allow some involvement from those not in the room, via the internet itself e.g. that someone official (the Book Festival does have a T...

I'm the first to admit, I love social media stuff. I've been on Twitter for almost 5 years, I (slightly grudgingly) eventually joined Facebook around the same time, and have played with all sorts of thing in between, from Formspring to Pinterest. However - my use of all those sites is almost exclusively personal (apart from Twitter, which is actually heavily weighted towards work-relevant networks). There's not actually much need that I can see to do anything involving social media in its current form for my own library service. I do enjoy reading about how academic and public libraries are furthering the use of their resources and exploring how to best use sites, using Facebook to inform users about events and service specifics, Twitter to respond to individuals, and Pinterest to collate interesting visual materials...but it just doesn't work in my situation. As a corporate librarian, I'm in a very different position from a public or academic librarians, in rel...

Ok, Thing 12 is looking at "the role of social media in building up networks and a sense of community." Now, I've got to say, I do love me a good social network. I've been a user of MySpace (back when it was actually cool), then moved on to Bebo, and finally, in the last two or three years, I've settled in to Facebook, and Twitter (with the obligatory LinkedIn presence, but I don't count that as part of my part of my active social network), with a steady background of blogs. The main benefit that I've gained from social media is using it to help me get to know so many professionals outside my own sphere. Scots law librarians are a small group, and our concerns are specific to the materials and data we have to work with. They can overlap when we work with UK issues, but otherwise, we're focussed on what we need to do to deal with our own needs. Making contact with non-Scots law professionals, and regularly interacting with them has led to me making s...

I like Twitter - it lets me (virtually, and often eventually, physically) meet lovely people. I've made contacts and friendships in the UK and abroad with information professionals in all sectors, programmers and coders of all types, lawyers and barristers in all fields, government staff of all types, teachers, au pairs, historians, housewives, artists...Through the ability to interact on Twitter, I've had help on many occasions to source hard to find materials, or been able to ask people with experience in other fields for advice. But what I have really grown to hate is the people tweeting Every Single Point made at these events. When you tend to follow a lot of people who work in similar sectors (unsurprisingly for me, that's librarians), you also find a lot of them go to the same events. And that means that you have a LOT of people tweeting exactly the same thing, sometimes differently worded, continuously during talks. The useful content of each tweet usually is low -...

Today, for the first time, live tweeting will be allowed from the High Court in Glasgow , for the sentencing of Tommy Sheridan in his perjury case. STV News made a formal written application to be allowed to do so, and permission was granted. I wonder if this will be an exceptional situation, and live tweeting will only be allowed for this case (due to the media/public interest), or whether this is likely to be something allowed in future for other, less "exciting" cases?

Oh, it’s all go on the jury front at the moment! First, I’m called up to be a juror, then the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales decides to d iscuss the topic of tweeting and doing online research while acting as a juror . In terms of my own experience in a Scottish court, I have to say, there weren’t any warnings about tweeting or going online via our phones by anyone official while I was in the public area of the court, or the jury room. I think there may have been a comment by the Clerk to turn phones to silent while we waited to be selected, but that may be a figment of my imagination, as I was reminding myself to make sure my phone was on silent while sitting there. Once selected and led to the jury room we were told by the court officer that we had to turn our phones off, and we were to be allowed one phone call to a relevant person who needed to know we’d been selected and therefore unavailable until 4pm (childminders etc) on the landline in the room, but other than ...

So, tomorrow's a big day - CILIP Council are experimenting with an open session to discuss how CILIP could / should be using Web 2.0 tools to interact with and support its membership. If (like me) you can't be there in person, you can take part via Twitter (although I'm not sure how this is going to be integrated into the session), and the presentations of Phil Bradley and Brian Kelly are either already available in draft form, or will (I think) be made available after the session. CILIP Council blog post here . Twitter hash tag is #CILIP2 (#CILIP2.0 tag has been abandoned as the 'point' disrupts some applications)

So, a month or so ago* I did a trawl through all the institutional / professional group blogs on the UK Library Blogs wiki, checked that the ones I'd found before were still there, added any new ones I'd found, and added a new area on entries, for account information on those groups or professionals with Twitter accounts listed on their blog. I'm trying to do the personal blogs soon too, but with more work, less time to do it in, and my own life getting a bit busy, don't hold your breath for that to happen in the next few days! :) As always, if you're not on there (and that's quite likely, the Magical Interweb is a big place, with many nooks and crannies hiding things), contact me either via the 'contact owner' option on the wiki front page, or via the email cunningly disguised in the right hand sidebar here, and I'll add you as soon as I can :) *Oh, looks like it was a bit more than a month, more like two! Time flies!

It's a busy time for Rabbie Burns. As the National Year of Homecoming is centred around the 250th anniversary of his birth, he's got a lot of people looking closely at him and his work. So, he's been reanimated, and popped up on Twitter , tweeting poems, line by line. After the initial news reports, NTS actually posted the essential information needed for following him on Twitter: his username - ayrshirebard. They might however want to note that Twitter updates to your phone haven't been possible in the UK for many months. And now, the revived poet has also taken to blogging! Robert Burns' Letters will be posting the letters of the bard, on the anniversary of the day they were actually written. He's currently in full love-letter flow, writing to his 'Clarinda'. The content of 91 letters will be being posted, concluding in 2010, when it is hoped the National Trust for Scotland will be able to open the doors of the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. Funds ...

I finally weakened and decide to see what was going on with Twitter. I joined in January 2007, but never used it, as I didn't know anyone else who did, or ever would. But now, I do know people who use it...perhaps it's finally reached critical mass for me? There's no guarantee I'll actually make much use of it, but it seems more interesting when there's people you're interested in posting on it. And it's letting me rant about my crappy day while my boss isn't there to hear it... I'm a Luddite, but I'm also always willing to change my mind if I can be persuaded of the usefullness of things! I was going to say it's like the opposite to my Facebook account, in that it's workmates only, whereas Facebook is friends only, then realised I've got a bit of crossover of both on Facebook. Note to self - the next social network you join needs to have a way of separating out groups and allowing them only a certain amount of access to you. "Wo...