Tom Roper's Weblog

The Cambridgeshire

Newmarket 205: Rockinante
Newmarket 235: Lightening
Newmarket 310: Sampdesa
Newmarket 350: Man of Action

Ayr Gold Cup day

Newmarket 220: Kyanight
Newmarket 255: Coupe de Ville
Newbury 305: Kirthill
Ayr 320: Eton Rifles

Doncaster and The Curragh: St Leger Day

There's a P G Wodehouse story, which the master introduces and sets the year by telling us which horse won the St Leger that year. I think 2011 will be remembered as Brown Panther's year, and even more so as the year in which Kieren Fallon finally won the oldest classic on the calendar. As for the Irish event, I cannot disagree with @anniemauger, a better judge than me by far,  that Aidan O'Brien's Fame and Glory will win.

Doncaster 205: Entifaadha
Doncaster 235: Waffle
Doncaster 310: Brown Panther
The Curragh 315: Power
The Curragh 350: Fame and Glory

Doncaster: Doncaster Cup day

125: My Propeller
155: Bourne
225: Motrice
300: Regal Realm

CPD23: thing 14: Zotero, Mendeley, CiteuLike

I've been looking forward to this thing, though I'm afraid it will be yet another excuse for me to hold forth about the old days. I first became involved with personal bibliographic management software (PBMS), as we used to call it, in a phrase that tripped off the tongue, round about the time I moved into medicine. At that time there were three packages, EndNote, ProCite and Reference Manager; all are still with us, though have been owned for sometime by the same monopoly capitalist. They were all stand-alone software packages, nothing more than fancy databases (and I often thought that the PBMS business was money for old rope). There was endless fun to be had in downloading references from databases, playing with file formats and import filters, and then creating bibliographies. When I was a student, both at university and library school, we had done it the old-fashioned way, on 5 x 3 cards. In those dear dead days, reference checking enquiries were common; a student or lecturer would, when making notes, fail, through laziness or having drink taken, to record a citation accurately or completely and would ask a librarian to piece it together, often with only a coffee-stained photocopy of part of the document as evidence.

I should note here that the development of these commercial packages was part of, and rendered possible by,  a wider opening up of the scientific literature. The advent of electronic abstracting, indexing and citation databases, made bibliometrics easier and faster.

The flaw in these packages was that they did not allow sharing of information. They ran on one's own computer and,the only ways to share them with anyone else was to print off, or save to a floppy disk, a copy of one's references.

I first became aware of social reference tools while at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. The first on the scene was CiteULike, and I added it to the popular support sessions I provided to researchers. I also began to use it to manage my own collections of references. I took against CiteULike when it was taken over by Springer; while this offered it a more secure future, I was suspicious of its links with a single publisher. At that time, I was unimpressed by Zotero; it was so closely tied in with Firefox that using it offline was problematic. So, when Mendeley came along, it was the answer to m y prayers. You can see y collection here and, for some obscure reason, I seem to have become the curator of a group interested in documents about RFID in libraries. I include Mendeley when teaching reference management, and became a Mendeley Advisor.

See my profile: http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/tom-roper/

CPD23 thing 13: Google Docs, Dropbox, wikis

I've been using all these for some time, though I have to say my use of Google Docs is, mainly, not collaborative. I use it as a place to put documents I'm working on and need to use from a variety of locations…much the same as fact, as I use Dropbox, though I only started using the latter last year; I used to use myiDisk for much the same purpose. Looking through the shared items in Google Docs, there are some from my days as Chair of CoFHE LASEC, and one from the work I did with Emma Illingworth, aka @wigglesweets when we organised the first Brighton LibTeachMeet, (at which, by the way, @katiepiatt showed us some nifty things to do with Google forms). I haven't therefore used them to collaborate on any documents with library users, which might be their most fruitful application.

As for wikis, I'm involved in a few. Looking at the list of seven I contribute to in PBWorks, I have to confess I didn't originate any; some are more or less dead, and the one I use the most is the Voices for the Library one, which we use for documents. I also contribute, in a very minor way, to Wikipedia now and then. I have to confess to a couple of problems with wikis: one is that I find the mark-up language a pain to use. It is subtly and annoyingly different from HTML, and my poor brain finds it hard to remember the differences. The other is that, in about ten years of using them, I have yet to find a way to make them an organic part of my daily life…they're always an afterthought. I've used many more as well, mostly support sites for software I use, who have used a wiki to organise support information, not, I'm afraid to say, very successfully. One organisation I'm part of has tried to use a wiki as the basis for its whole web presence. I shan't name them, to spare their blushes, but it is not a rousing success.

 

CPD23: thing 12: putting the social in social media

I feel that this thing might be better placed at the very end of the programme, as a review of everything we've learnt. However, here it is, and we are asked to 'consider the role of social media in building up networks and a sense of community'.

We're asked to consider disadvantages. The chief ones seem to me the much-discussed and well-known ways in which online communication can sometimes lack the subtlety of face-to-face conversation, and the difficulties of compressing complex arguments into 140 characters. The major one seems to me that, because of the volume and speed of communication through social media, it's easy to be seduced into the belief that nothing else exists or is important.

There are also some practical considerations; in organisations with a more cautious view of social media, sites may be blocked, or their use deemed frivolous. Not every member of the library and information profession, never mind everyone we serve, has the same level of access.

I have a wide network of contacts on Twitter, Facebook and through the blog. I have added new ones through CPD23, though not everyone, which would have been unmanageable. I've tried to concentrate on people in similar areas of the profession to me. I certainly did use social media before CPD23 came along: I joined Twitter, for example, in November 2006, but I use such tools for a wide range of interests, not just professional development. I will certainly continue to use them after CPD23 is over.

 

Ascot and Haydock: Betfred Sprint Cup

I put the children's tuition fees fund on Bated Breath in the big race this afternoon, in the belief that faster ground than he had at York in the Nunthorpe will do the trick.

Ascot 315: Smarty Socks
Haydock 335: Bated Breath
Ascot 345: Parlour Games

CPD23: thing eleven: mentoring

I've got a long way behind with my CPD23 posts. Here I am writing up thing eleven, and we're up to thing sixteen already. I may canter through the next few, to catch up with the field.

I am a mentor. I mentor candidates for CILIP qualifications, and it would be wrong to go into the details in public here, but I'm afraid I came into mentoring without any experience of being mentored myself.

I can think of various reasons for this. For one, I think in the period when I was a young professional, we were much less open to making such relationships explicit.  I admired some members of the profession, I would sooner have died than approached one and asked them to mentor me.

Then again, as a young man in a hurry, I was impatient with many of my elders, and found it hard to accept that they might have anything to teach me, apart from an ability to 'sit on your arse for forty years and hang your hat on a pension' (Louis McNeice). Before you judge me too harshly, remember that in 1978 the age of deference was far from over. In my first post the Librarian-in-Charge, Miss H, expected to be addressed by her title and surname, but addressed her staff by our Christian names. In a slower-paced world, there were careers to be made out of resisting change. I and others of my generation saw ourselves as the Red Guards of a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in librarianship; bear in mind that the cultural revolution in China had only ended a few years before.

I also think that men find it harder to mentor one another. It was not always so; in ancient Greece it would have been normal for an adolescent boy to accept the affections of an older man, in exchange for his lover's wisdom. The sexual ambivalence of the relationship between Telemachus and Mentor is interesting. In several of their encounters it is the goddess Athene who takes the form of Mentor. Make of that what you will.