The course design, content and methods matched my objectives precisely.

2) What are the difficulties encountered in accessing the course materials on the Internet at your workplace which have NOT been reported before?

I have reported most of these as they arose.  However, they bear systematic repetition.  Before the course began, armed with the Course Specification I requested (a) permission to follow the course; (b) that all the course sites be unlocked and (c) a check that the hardware, software and bandwidth available on my desk was adequate for the course requirements.  As messages were passed between Siemens and the Trust’s IT Department, I heard that (a) had been granted, but saw no evidence that parts (b) and (c) of the request were addressed.  In practice this meant that no individual sites identified in the Course Spec were unlocked in advance, so I still had to file a formal request for each site to be unlocked on a case by case basis.  Such a request might go to an operator who had heard of the earlier permission or to someone who queried why I needed it.Despite this agreement in principle, the following areas remained barred: all pocasts and displaying the links for social bookmarking.  In the case of the latter my repeated requests for this refusal to be communicated in writing, rather than verbally, led to this decision being reversed at the end of Week 5, so the social bookmarking functions were granted to me for the latter stages of the course schedule.These combined factors led to delays in accessing and exploiting sites as the course progressed and contributed to my falling behind in the early weeks.  I did not properly engage with the curriculum of this 9 week course until week 5, leaving me with several assignment deadlines already missed and a significant catch up task.  It also led to my being uncertain whether the individual difficulties I encountered were because the function was refused or other factors.The failure to address whether the PC on my desk was adequate to the course demands was also significant.  The course demanded signifcantly faster response times than my PC could deliver making creative use of the Web 2.0 difficult.  This was not entirely an internal Dudley fault.  I consider that the Course Specification should spell out more about hardware recommendations. They should also include minimum standards for memory space and processor speed.  My 5 year old PC was not up to easily switching between Web sites, leaving windows open, or running more than one browser at a time.

3) Did you need to seek the permission of your trust IT before you accessed certain course materials on the Internet?

Yes. There was also a complication in the communication channels due to a separation of the Trust’s I.T. department, which acts as the ICT commissioner and the PFI partners, Siemens, which acts as the provider.  Communications between the two did not easily lend themselves to resolving the issues thrown up by this course.

4) Do the readings meet the learning objectives of each topic?

Yes.

5) What is the average amount of time you spent on the course each day?

Weeks 1-5 15 mins; Weeks 6-9 2 hours.This reflects the fact that I only fully engaged with the course at the end of week 5, rather than the course structure itself.

6) How do you find the interaction among participants of the course?

Excellent

7) Will you continue blogging and/or reading RSS after the course?

If the Trust allows, yes.  However, this has already been refused in principle, since the permssion to access RSS was granted for the duration of the course alone and should shortly be revoked.Action planning for the next 3 months:

Here’s another late assignment the weekly personal blog on Wikis.  Although this personal blog assignement was originally intended in the course structure to represent our first thoughts about Wikis, it cannot now fulfil that function, since I have already participated in the Group assignment on the same theme and the thread of commentary is proceeding in parallel.  Also I have already posted a personal blog under the title “Wikis – further thoughts”.  So to try to “start again” I will introduce some left field stuff, and try to work today’s date into the theme. 

Aristotle and Pliny the Elder claimed sole authorship with their encyclopaedias, though the latter at least probably had educated, literate slaves working for him unacknowledged.   The French officially started off the teamwork idea in 1751:  Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres was published under the editorship of Diderot and d’Alembert with many of their enlightenment colleagues submitting articles.   What is interesting is the use of the word Société in the title.  Then the Scots followed up in 1768 with Encyclopaedia Britannica following the contributor/editor model.   When we look for modern standards of citation acknowledgement we may get disappointed:  Voltaire published Principes de Newton under his own name, though recent research has revealed that it was written by his lover Emilie du Chatellet.   (I own a copy of the 1752 edition.)

At first I felt that the amateur posing as scholar format of Wikipedia was revolutionary against the above backdrop, but now I’m not so sure.  The old encyclopedia model could not avoid opinion nor was error proof.  Every product included subjective assertion and some deliberate vandalism.  The recently departed music scholar Stanley Sadie was fooled by and passed for publication some bogus articles submitted for his New Grove II dictionary of music. 

So I feel now that Wikipedia possesses more continuity with the earlier models, but using the new Web 2.0 tools.  Unpaid amateurs are the authors.  Some are scholarly, some are giving opinion, some are conscious vandals, like Alan Coren corrupting his own entry with a false birth date.  If some scholars feel that Wikipedia represents a shift towards anarchy in publishing scholarship, consider how more strongly similar concerns were held and voiced by the Royal and ecclesiastical authorities of the C18th about Diderot and Johnson.  250 years later echoes of that debate still reverberate in our time with controversies over “intelligent design” in the USA.

So how does July 4th Independence Day fit into all this?  Benjamin Franklin was a member of the enlightenment crowd that produced the C18th encyclopedias.  OK, it’s a bit contrived, but the concept of independence interfaces here with that of collaboration.  Together these ideas challenged the hegemony of an old world in which church and state without consultation or collaboration with most people had the first and last interpretative take on the nature of the universe.

Another thread to sweep up.  Many of us on this course have drawn attention to the tension between the inherent lack of consistency in social tagging and the standardization of thesauri and indexing disciplines.

My contribution to this is to say that there clearly isn’t some ideal compromise here between one approach and the other: a half way house fits neither model.  Rather we need to view the two approaches as achieving different objectives.  Folksonomy does not replace MeSH or any other indexing tool.   However indexers themselves need to recognise that no thesaurus is ever perfect or always up to date.  How long did it take MeSH to incorporate evidence based terminology?  Has MeSH ever introduced terms which address the reorganisations of the British NHS which take place every c.3 years?

Folksonomy might fill the gaps which top down thesauri miss.  We could link to reader generated Folksonomy sites, but do so with appropriate health warnings: in-built bias, lack of consistency, rigour or editing.  If folksonomies assist some of our users to locate our resources, why try to stop it?  Those who are capable of using our indexes are not going to be put off by supplementary tools out there.

Taking up the threads of my missing assignments this particular Web 2.0 tool strikes me as the most obviously applicable tool.  It offers a better way of delivering a core LIS service, namely that of SDI/current awareness. 

Yet it offers more than a mere technology upgrade.  The LIS officer can certainly initiate and promote SDI services using RSS Feeds, but it also empowers the recipient of the service to take ownership of the process, to add their own feeds to what the LIS officer has started.  This it seems to me is significant.  Even when delivering SDI services in the old manner, users might confide to the LIS officer “I do value what you offer, but it isn’t the full turn-key solution: actually I’ve got my own sources as well.”  The RSS Feeds environment gives users an opportunity to take ownership of the process  and bring together all relevant resources from whatever electronic source.  

We should not find this threatening.  Our role is to point out the difference between quality and non-quality sources.  RSS Feeds can only be a help, not a hindrance in this task.  It is significant that the Specialist Libraries of the NLH have seized on this technology early on.  I have illustrated this with the RSS Feed from the Cardiovascular Diseases Specialist Library straight into my Blogsite.

Yesterday I spotted a good Wikipedia piece in the Observer http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,2113739,00.html

I have been reflecting on Bertha’s comments at the Managers’ Strategic Meeting at Redditch about the next generation of users’ expectations and the possibility/likelihood that they will bypass services which don’t address their conventions.  Indeed this is what this course is all about. 

My manager and I took a decision at the outset that I would try to complete the course at work using work tools, rather than from home.  The thinking behind this was that the workplace environment was as much the student as myself.  This “composite corporate student” has been posed with an interesting set of challenges by this course to which it has responded in various less than satisfactory ways.  Blocks on Blogs and RSS sites were lifted in principle.  In practice access to them had still to be argued on a case by case basis, rather than granted automatically, with all the delays and discontinuity that this implies.  A block on tagging was initially imposed, then revoked in week 5.  The block on podcasts has been maintained throughout so far: at least I know where I stand on this last one!   As a student on this course my motivation for seeing through these challenges was “following the course at work with work tools”.  This is an artificial construct: in the real world other options are at my disposal,  namely following the course at home without institutional restrictions and on my own more up to date PC.

 We need to be aware of our readers’ perspectives: in the context of their work they will not accept restrictions in the way I have.  Their motivation is patient care: it’s a no-brainer!

The policy restrictions on software and Web access apply equally to the hardware tools used to get there.  To have followed this course on a 5 year old PC was tactically a mistake, compounding the above restrictions.  Some of the functionality has just been beyond the capacity of this machine to respond in a serious operating timeframe.  Again, my home PC would not have been challenged in the same way.  Trying to sort out a Wiki problem last week took me most of an afternoon, and I still went home with the issue unresolved.  On arrival home I  broke our rule by logging on from home and sorted the problem in 5 minutes.

As I have encountered challenges, diagnosing the errors has always been widened to include several questions: is this function denied me, or is it permitted but the equipment is just not up to it, or simply have I just grasped the wrong end of the stick?  In some cases it eventually turned out to be me failing to grasp something.  However, the uncertainty in diagnosis was always in itself part of the problem and led to continual and considerable delays in resolving the various challenges.

 From our readers point of view the above situation is a nonsense: they are not interested in excuses.  To be taken seriously we have to deliver the right environment and with the right equipment or we will be bypassed, as Bertha points out.  I think that that is the chief lesson. 

Mix & Mash assignment due 18th June.  Well here I am with the Week 5 assignment in Week 7.  So my thoughts about week 5′s topics:

Podcasts – I can comment in theory, though not from experience, as this is an area still denied me by Siemens and the Trust.  I suspect that Podcasts in themselves are not truly a Web 2.0 tool, unless they are integrated with other tools.  Either I have overlooked something significant or they are merely refined Videos.  If they are integrated with other tools of an interactive nature, then I can see how they fit into the broader 2.0 picture.

The reference Cho A. (2007) “An introduction to mashups for health librarians.” Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, vol. 28, p. 19-22 refers to the use of Mash Ups to address the lack of user friendliness of traditional library catalogues.  Well, there are catalogues and catalogues.  One could argue that user unfriendly catalogues were just badly done ones, rather than the format itself being necessarily bad. 

Nevertheless if there is truly a problem to be solved here (as opposed to recruiting some better cataloguers who understand the job) I can see the usefulness of linking to Amazon for those who like that service.  And if the tags invented by the readers differ greatly from the subject terms in the thesaurus, then yes that needs to be addressed.  What, after all, is Medline’s mapping if not the same tool to assist those who do not work at the NLM, Washington. 

What applications have I tried?  Well, even getting this 5 year old PC to log on to some of these sites is asking rather a lot of its processor.  Trying to keep more than 2 browsers going at a time overloads its capacity and attempting to “play” with Mash-Ups is just so far outside the field.  For practical purposes I cannot recommend a site without a better PC to drive.  In the context of this course the limitations of the hardware have proved to be even more of a handicap than the restrictions imposed by the Trust on certain sites.  I learn that my PC is to be upgraded in August, just in time for the end of the course.  But I will at least be able to write my debrief on the course to my employers.

Many thanks to Sarah for sharing the tip that creating 3cst2 as a tag to a saved del.icio.us site ensures that it appears in the Course area as well as one’s own.  Remain unsure whether, having thus tagged all my saved sites, this fulfils Bertha’s criteria, or whether we are all individually and uniquely expected to tag 10 fresh sites, since there is predictably much overlap between our choices.

Until today I had been impersonating Gwen Giles in the Wet Paint area.  Bertha, however, spotted the false identity and insisted on me owning up to my true self.  Still for several weeks I clearly had everyone else fooled, or maybe you were all too polite to comment!

Now that I am beginning to string these tools together, I feel I can start tackling some of these assignments.  So – Weekly Blogging Assignment … due 28th May noon!!!

• What roles can blogs play in library setting?

Information role  Clearly Blogging is only as successful as the number of visits.  A Blog can be as witty, attractive, artfully composed as you like, but, if crying in the wilderness, will be as useful as a motor cycle ashtray.  Context is all and links to the library Blog would have to be encouraged.

Once widely recognised you could use it for News, Stock Acquisitions, User Feedback.  However, monitoring its uptake among both the actual and potential readership would be critical.  We often consider the questions about non-users.

Promotional role  Even if the visits to the Library Blog are made by only part of your readership, then non-vital stuff could be communicated.  News, rather than notices.  E.g. promotional stuff about exhibitions would be far more suitable than the only place you announce that the Library needs to close earlier than usual.  Here the Blog would be one tool among others trying to reach out.