Moving in

Once again, the list of things I want to blog about is getting longer and longer and the amount of actual blog posts tends towards zero. What can I say: it's been a busy couple of weeks with the Umbrella conference, and the building project at work moving on at speed, as well as the usual pre-semester work. I spent most of this week moving in to the new library space, and associated new office.

I'm saving photos of the library for a proper post when it's all done, but here's a sneak peek of the new LUP Librarians' office

It's quite a lot smaller than my old office, but more compact, more efficiently designed, better lit, and while I no longer have air-con, I do have an actual window. More to the point, it's in the perfect location relative to the new library. The team who did the renovations have done a really nice job: hard to believe this was a poky over-heated computer lab a few weeks ago!

It's not quite finished - the noticeboards are waiting to go up on the wall over the desk, and I'll be adding a couple of chairs for visitors - but it already feels like a good place to work. I'm really pleased with how it's come together. I hope it will feel open and welcoming to my students and faculty, too, as that's key to everything I plan to do out of the space!

Thing #3 again - cards

There was a certain amount of synchronisity with Jo's CPD23 Thing #3 post touching on business cards. I've never really had the need for them, but over the past couple of months there have been two or three occasions where they would have been really useful, and I'm off to Umbrella 2011 next week, so now's clearly the time.

Somewhere back in the mists of time I remember reading about a music fan who had made business cards out of old record sleeves (something akin to this idea, although these are not they). I remember wondering how well the idea would transfer to books at the time - if it would carry the same sort of messages, or if, given how strongly many people feel about the sanctity of the printed book, you'd just come across as an evil book murder.

One of the things I've been working on in recent weeks was a full stock weed, ahead of moving the library, and amongst the books I pulled off the shelves were a few paperbacks where the binding had simply collapsed. They were no longer of any use to anyone as books, so some stickers and guillotine-wielding later, I have these (see photos)

So - what do you think?

CPD23 things #3 and #4

Thing #3 is 'Consider your personal brand' and #4 is 'Current awareness - Twitter, RSS and Pushnote', and I'm considering them together, not as a short cut but because of the inter-relationships between the tools we use for both.

For example, I use Twitter, but not as part of my public profile. I have a locked personal account, which is a great source of incoming news and links, a really useful tool for current awareness, and is invaluable for bouncing ideas off people.

A few years ago, I also had a public Twitter account set up under a random pseudonym (an account which has long since been deleted) which I set up to learn on. Twitter was one of those things I really had to try on for a while to see how it could be useful. Setting up a test drive account, not tied to my "personal brand" in any way, gave me the freedom to experiment and learn by doing, without the worry that I'd somehow do something that would be inscribed forever on the permanent record of the internet.

I do occasionally feel a bit boxed in by the decision to keep Twitter personal rather than professional - at least in terms of what I'm posting, rather than reading - but at the moment the balance of costs and benefits still isn't pushing me to go public in full.

I have a lot of respect for the benefits of 'living in public' ala Jeff Jarvis , but I think pseudonymity and 'constructed publics' - like a locked Twitter account - give many of the advantages with a lower level of risk.

Searching for myself online showed both that the personalized search bubble issue isn't particularly affecting this search, and that I need to do a little work. The University biography page that's been anchored as the first result in my vanity searches for several years vanished in the re-vamp of the department's website at the start of the year, and it's new location, hidden inside my library's OPAC pages, doesn't have quite the same SEO juice.

This blog doesn't show up in general searches (only a couple of the people-specific search sites had made the connection), so I need to tweak the meta-data to better represent the fact that this is one of the spaces where I choose to be public-broadcast.

The name 'Miss Alice' is, I admit, firmly tied to my current post - one of my past students started calling me by the title, and it all went from there. It's one notch more formal than just 'Alice' but less so than 'Ms Tyrell', and I'm not faculty so the generic 'Prof' isn't appropriate. The name landed here, because I started the blog for a student audience, and my using it for library-related thoughts is a relatively new development.

My LinkedIn profile, which is now the first substantive thing you find when you search for "Alice Tyrell", isn't as inviting and informative as I'd like it to be. I've done a little tidying up, but not being able to re-order my 'current' positions to list my primary post above my two part time volunteer gigs without fudging the dates fairly spectacularly is ... frustrating.

I think it's relatively clear that I'm not any of the other Alice Tyrell's that show up in the search results, though - I didn't die in 1422, I'm not a thoroughbred horse, nor was I a vaudeville dancer in the 1920s.

thing #2 - blogs

The 600+ blogs listed on the CPD23's delicious list is, I admit, somewhat daunting when taken as a whole: my approach was to filter by tags and then browse through looking for names that caught my eye. Not exactly scientific, but it's better than giving in to choice paralysis, and has led me to some interesting blogs.

(Props to The Library Scull for drawing my attention to Reading's ThisIsMe project, which I'll be coming back to in Thing #3.)

Heading out to leave comments on a selection of new-to-me blogs did remind me just how much I loath captchas, though. I know why people use them, but the extra step is off-putting, and the accessibility issues are manifest. (I'm mildly dyslexic and sometimes really struggle with them; I know others find them essentially impossible.)

Also it really struck me how distancing having a comment referred for moderation can be. Again, I recognise why people choose that setting, but the past couple of hours reading did prompt me to go and check my Blogger settings.

I had moderation set only for posts over 14 days, and I've tweaked that up to 30 days. Most of the issues I've had with spam comments, both here and on the group blog I manage for work, have been on older posts, so that seems like a fair balance, especially once you add in Blogger's automatic spam comment filtering, which I've found pretty decent (only one false-positive to date).

* Man Blogging, after Gabriel Metsu, by Mike Licht, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.