Phil Bradley's weblog

Online09 and H1N1

As you're probably aware, if you can cast your minds back a week, I wasn't at Online09 this year. My presentations were instead most superbly interpreted by Karen Blakeman and Mary Ellen Bates. This is a lot easier said than done, since I tend to produce presentations that are screenshots, photographs and images without little integral content and I talk around them, rather than directly from them. This is great for me, but not so easy if someone else takes on the job. However, I wasn't that concerned since both Karen and Mary Ellen are such superb professionals it wasn't an issue. Many thanks to both of you!

If you want to see the presentations in native form however here they are. The first is a Twitter 101 for librarians, the second is a toolkit for searching the social web.

Twitter101 for Librarians

View more presentations from Phil Bradley.

A toolkit for searching the social web

View more presentations from Phil Bradley.

Now,the reason that I wasn't there was that I contracted H1N1 on the friday, ironically just before I was supposed to be getting my jab on the saturday. I'd felt pretty much fine all day, since I'd been running a course, but as soon as I got back to the car I really started to feel ill - by the time I got home I had the heater on at 24 degrees and I was still shivering. Then I slept for 48 hours. I did get Tamiflu, and it was awful - to the extent that I never even finished the course. I was pretty much entirely out of it for the rest of the week, and only started to come back to life at the weekend. Even now I'm sleeping for 12 hours at a stretch, but I think the symptoms themselves have finally run their course. I've had flu about 4 times in my life, prior to this one, and I've gotta say, this was by far and away the very worst bout ever. I'm told by those in the know that it'll take another 2 weeks before I'm back to normal again. The only bright point is that Jill had already had a vaccination against it, so she was ok.

Seriously - this is one thing you do NOT want to get!

Why I became a librarian

There's a whole bunch of really interesting posts doing the rounds at the moment based on the 'Why I am a librarian' meme. You can see these over at TheLibraryRoutesProject wiki site, and I've enjoyed reading many of the entries. So here's my version.

I was a fairly serious child - when I was six I wanted to become an archeologist, by the age of eight this morphed, don't ask me how, into becoming a journalist, and by thirteen I wanted to be a barrister. God, I must have been obnoxious! My cousin, older and apparently according to my mother, cleverer than I failed to make it, so obviously I wouldn't either. Consequently a re-think was in order. I'd always used the library from a young age, though my experiences were not always happy with it. I remember one time when I got a book out early in the day, read it and then took it back. This was in the days of the old Brown system and I got a real telling off from the librarian because she had to hunt through all of the tickets to find mine because she hadn't sorted them yet.

This didn't entirely put me off though, and by the time I was sixteen I was determined to be a librarian. Not however because of the usual 'I love books' line. Oh no. Librarians I had discovered could find things. 'If you can find things that other people want, that's a fairly powerful position to be in' was my opinion (which hasn't changed either by the way) and so that was that. I did the usual student working in the college library while I did my A levels, and then took a year out (during which time I learned to touch type, which was one of the most sensible things I've ever done) before going to the Polytechnic of North London to do a degree in Librarianship. I took that course because it meant that I'd be able to stay at home - and in those days, not only did we get grants that we didn't have to pay back, we also had our travelling expenses paid!

The course was dire. It was really, really bad. It was a 3 year course, and in the first year we didn't do anything to do with librarianship. Not a thing. We did some sort of English course, which was interesting, a foreign language (either German or Russian, because 'that's what scientific papers are written in') and maths. I think there was also a bunch of other rubbish in there but conveniently I have forgotten it.

In the second year we did some librarianship. An hour a week of cataloguing with Tony Croghan (who terrified us all, but who was/is a really sweet interesting guy), an hour a week on classification with Derek Langridge, although it was basically all Facet - we did literally no more than a week each on things like Dewey, Bliss, LC and so on. I also had 3 hours a week on local history with Victor Newburg (and it really was about history, bugger all to do with librarianship) and a bunch of other stuff.

Insanely I chose to carry on and do a fourth year, which was an Honours year. I still have no idea why I did that other than it beat working. Consequently by the time I actually became Chartered it had taken me over 6 years. Almost as long as to become a doctor! Insane.

Best thing about the course was that I met Jill, and we married shortly afterwards. I can't hardly recall one useful thing that I got out of the course itself, but I did get on well with the lecturers - David Nicolas, John Eyre, David Phillips to name but a few. There were 50 on my course - 1978-1982 and almost all of them have disappeared. I tried to find 'em via Friends ReUnited, from net searches, and had a little success, but for the most part - vanished! (If you are one of 'em, and you're reading this - do get in touch!).

Of course, I then had to get a job. This wasn't easy, since I didn't know what I wanted to do, so fell into a temp position at the British Council, in their Central Information Service. I loved it there and had huge experience - travelling abroad, teaching, reference work and so on. However, by then I'd seen CD-ROM technology and knew it was going to be big, and I also knew that the BC wouldn't get around to it for years to come. (In fact a decade later I was invited out to Kenya to run a course on implimenting CD-ROM technology!)

I moved to SilverPlatter Inc, a CD-ROM publisher, as the Head of UK & European Technical Support. Keep in mind at this point I knew how to turn a PC on, but that was about it. I had a very steep learning curve, and managed to keep a step or two ahead of the librarians that I was helping. I did this for 5 years, discovering the Internet as I went. I got asked by TFPL to run some training courses on CD-ROM, and this then morphed into courses on the Internet and in the end all my time was spent either working or taking days off to work for myself. Something had to give!

In 1996 I left SilverPlatter and set up as an independent internet consultant, and that's what I've been doing ever since. Teaching, writing, talking about the internet to librarians is a dream job. I've been around the world twice, I've visited about 20% of the countries in the world and had some interesting experiences. (Get me a drink sometime and I'll tell you all about Turkey, Australia, Russia, and my adventures in the Far East. But I'm not writing 'em down, put it that way!)

Am I a librarian? I think so. Being a librarian is not a job, it's a passion and a vocation. Perhaps 'librarian' isn't the most accurate word, I think 'information professional' might work slightly better, but I'm not that fussy. I think I've got a great job - I play around on the net trying out new stuff, playing with it, writing and talking about it, teaching it to other people, and I get paid for it! Just how cool is that? And of course I get to spend time with other librarians as well. Wouldn't want it any other way.

Many apologies...

but due to family health issues I'm not going to be able to run the courses in Wales that I had been planning and looking forward to. Many apologies to everyone who was intending to come on it and had made plans; I know what it's like when stuff like this happens and I wouldn't do this lightly. Unfortunately however at this time there's nothing that I can do. :(

Early iPhone experiences

I eventually gave in and got an iPhone. I've previously used another O2 phone - the XDA which has now been discontinued and replaced with other versions, and although it linked into the web it didn't have all of the functionality that I wanted. I'd played around with it in the shop and wasn't impressed with the touch screen - it was really difficult to type accurately, so I put it to one side. At about the same time my mp3 player was beginning to annoy me. I looked at the iTouch, which had pretty much all the features that I wanted other than being a phone, so Jill and I looked at the iPhone again and I decided to give it another chance.

I don't actually use my phone that much, so the £30 a month tariff was fine, even though we had to pay £159 for the phone itself. I tend to keep phones for a long time, so found this was actually a cheaper option than a larger tariff and free phone.

First problem - how to put in the sim card. When I opened the box I missed seeing the little paperclip device and illustration, but a quick trip to YouTube sorted that out for me. O2 said that it would be up to 48 hours for the new sim to take over my old number, but it was more like 4 hours, so I was online almost immediately. This was both good and bad news, since it meant that the process of swapping data over was going to be a pain. We simply couldn't find any way of backing up contacts from the old phones to a pc running Vista, which doesn't use ActiveSync (as far as I could find), and as we only have the Home Premier version on her machine it didn't have Outlook. So we couldn't save contacts that way. Eventually I had to use my XP machine to copy to, then import and export again. It was a real nuisance. However, it's done.

Onto the phone itself. Very slim, slightly larger in footprint than the XDA mini though half as thick. Very fast and very intuitive. I was actually surprised at just how little the phone came with in terms of manual. Like - nothing. But to be honest, it's not really necessary, since it's pretty easy to work stuff out. I have started to load on some of my music, which means copying to the pc with iTunes and then syncing again, so it's going to be a little laborious. The music I had on my old machine was stored in a different format (Sony), so it's a bit of a pain, but there you go. I've not tried any of the applications yet in detail, other than to check they do what they should, and I've not tried downloading anything from the Apps store yet.

So far I'm reasonably impressed. I still don't like typing on it, but otherwise, not at all bad. Expect more comments later.

Online Information 2008 Guru questionnaire

I was asked to do a 'guru questionnaire' for Online Information 2008 this year in which I was asked a whole bunch of questions about the internet and information and librarianship and gadgets. If you're interested, click on the link. If you're not... er - don't!

I've been poorly! :(

Just a brief note - I've had a few kind emails commenting on the lack of posts and checking to see if I was ok. I've had this flu/cold/cough thing that's been doing the rounds and it basically knocked me out for a good two weeks. I'm just getting back on my feet now, though I'm still coughing away. Hopefully normal service will be resumed over the next few days...

Celebrating 5 years blogging today!

It's rather hard to believe, but I've been blogging now for 5 years. My first post was back on February 1st 2003, starting with "Welcome to my blog. Since everyone else appears to have one, I thought it was about time that I did as well." I've followed that up with another 2,787 posts, so I post (very roughly) twice a working day. I looked back at a few posts from that first month of blogging and the more things change, the more they stay the same.

A student was suspended for swearing at Ask Jeeves (as it was). Apparently he couldn't get the information he wanted, so he wrote a rude email, ending with threats of bodily harm. He used his school email address, which wasn't so smart.

Yahoo! changed its homepage layout in order to cram more advertising on.

We finally discovered how the Google Pigeon Ranking worked.

Google added the alert function, and on the same day I asked the question "Is Google's continued dominance going to continue indefinately?" I could have checked with Smoogle, which was the site for smart news and tools about online search. Only it's dead now.

What lessons have I learned? Post early and post often seems to work well. I've always preferred shorter, snappy pieces, rather than long opinion filled pieces; I guess I started as a link blogger and that's what I do best. After all, if you voice an opinion you always have to remember that you could be 100% wrong, and it's down there on the screen. I've always tried to be honest in my assessments and constructive rather than cruel with my criticism, and always take the line (when I do) of 'I think you could', rather than 'You must'.

I really appreciate the people (that's you) who read the blog, and take time out to comment, put me right, add information and chide me when I'm totally wrong. Most of all however, I remain continually humbled by the many people that I don't know who are prepared to take time just to offer a word of support now and then when things get rough - both Jill and I have been moved to tears sometimes by your kindness in the difficulties of the last year, and though I can't always say it individually *Thank You* will, I hope, suffice.

Right, enough of that! Back to search engines, Web 2.0 and the rest of it.

Royal Marsden Fire

BBC NEWS | England | London | Fire forces hospital's evacuation. I've had a few calls on this, with regards to Jill. Just to let everyone know that this is the London site, not the Sutton site where she is being treated, so although she was at the Marsden today we weren't affected. Of course, we don't know what the knock on effect is going to be - I'm sure we'll find out in due course.

Jill - latest update.

For those of you without an interest, move on to another post. :) For those who want to be kept up to date with how Jill is doing, you may want to go along and view her new blog: Riding the Rollercoaster. She's going to be updating it in order to let people know how she is, what she's doing and so on. We thought it made more sense to do it that way than have me popping posts into this weblog now and then.

Briefly however, she's now on a trial at the Royal Marsden - not the one she originally wanted, but a different one, for reasons she explains. If you want to know more - feel free to visit and comment.

Too Much Information? Ignore It - New York Times

Too Much Information? Ignore It - New York Times. This was an interesting article that I got from the always amazingly useful and informative (and nice!) Steven Cohen over at Library Stuff. It's something that I hear quite often 'I don't have enough time to read all this information, or to keep up to date or blah blah blah.' I don't really understand this at all. Admittedly my entire job is based on keeping up to date and knowing what's going on, but I can't do it all. It's simply not possible. As you know, Jill's not at all well now, so the amount of time that I spend doing work stuff is shrinking almost daily, but I still find time to look at stuff. So, without further ado, and created on the spot, here is my list of things you can do to keep up to date and informed.

1. Don't try - ignore it as the article says. Don't waste time looking at the news in detail (unless you particularly enjoy it and it's relaxation for you!) I listen to the radio once or twice a day, and I tune in when it's time for the news. If it's not in the 2 minute summary then quite frankly I don't need to know about it. I'll also take a peek at the BBC headlines once a day as well, and those are the only news items that I'm going to look at. I don't go out and find the news now, I expect the news to come to me. So I also

2. Set up RSS search feeds and email alerts. Google is great for this. (Yes, I do say good things about Big G now and then!) Anything I really do want to know about I'll set up a search for, get an alert sent to me, pull the RSS feed into Pageflakes and will look at that. It's personal to me, which makes it interesting and I want to look at it.

3. Read headlines. Speed reading is great. Don't read an entire thing. Go for the headlines, first line in a paragraph and so on. If you need more, then read. Chances are that you won't. A good writer can summarise. And who wants to read a bad one?

4. Don't download email. Most of my email I'll read on the server and delete it there and then. It's only if I want to actually reply to stuff that I'll download it.

5. Do it there and then. Don't put it off, cos it isn't going to work. OR - do put it off, whack stuff into a folder or bookmarks or whatever to come back and do later. Revisit this every month, delete everything in it because it's now out of date. After all....

6. Out of date is out of use. No point in keeping stuff that you've not looked at in your RSS readers. If you haven't looked at it in a couple of days then you won't. Just junk it.

7. Don't use email if at all possible. When I can, I'll get people to IM me. A client wants to know if I can work on the 19th - email 1. I reply to say no, but the 20th is fine. Email 2. She replies and says 20th is fine. That's email 3 and email 4 is me saying 'You're booked in'. I can do all of that inside 2 minutes on IM and we're all sorted.

8. Technology isn't always better. I put all my appointments onto a large wall chart/calendar. That's it. If I'm going to a meeting I'll make a note of when I'm not available in my PDA, but that's the lot. If someone wants to date then I'll get back to them. Technology just doesn't work for me here, and I'm not about to try and make it.

9. Mostly it doesn't matter. If it does matter, it'll come around again. People are really good, because they know my mind is elsewhere and will nag me to answer something or do whatever. If they don't, it wasn't that important in the first place. Sure, you do miss out on stuff now and then, but that's going to happen anyway.

10. Get into the mindset that 'it's not you'. Sure, there IS stuff that you need to know about, and that's your job to find it, and keep up to date with it. Everything else is the responsibility of people who want you to know. It's up to *them* to get to you. Mostly you can just ignore them, or send them a form email. I look at a lot of email from companies and people who want me to play with their products and write about them. I'll take a quick read through and either write about it there and then or just ditch it - it's not my problem.

Just a few ideas - try 'em out.