More piloting...

...although the dissertation has taken a back seat to my new job, I am back in the comfy chair and fiddling around with previous studies' coding schemes to try to make the perfect research instrument.

It's surprisingly hard work, as all the categories and sub-categories seem to blend into each other after a while and I find myself second- and third-guessing my decisions. I guess I am experiencing the famous "coder fatigue".

Still, the 2nd or 3rd (depending on how you define it) pilot study is going well.

The Pilot! Pt. 2

And... we have pilot study. I have my basic results and a newly-formed coding scheme. After all these weeks! It's definitely been a question of building up my confidence and ability to just "go for it", realising that research is meant to be a step into the unknown and it's OK to change things around.

Oh, well, off home now before they close the library. I'm quite enjoying this dissertation lark now.

Library 2 You - the slides are now up!

Here are the presentations from the recent mini-conference on "library 2.0" that I attended:

Library 2 You presentations.

And here's the mini-report I wrote last week:

Library 2 You mini-report.

Enjoy!

The pilot!

It's gone well this morning, crunching through a randomised sample of blogs and altering the draft coding scheme as I go.

I got through 5 this morning and discovered one of the principle risks of blog research in the academic sector: lots of out-links to meandering blogs which link to funny e-comics!

Pre-pilot

I did a very rough-and-ready pilot with a new coding scheme including some oh-so-scary qualitiative categories... ouch.

I take back everything I've been secretly thinking about content analysis being an easy option.

I randomised my list and ended up picking a highly specialised blog which was not easy to categorise!

The categories for "objective" measures are pretty easy to allocate, but I seriously wonder whether even a suitably qualified coder would pick the same headings as me for the more warm and fuzzy categories.

Oh, well, more piloting tomorrow, it's my free day for university work. Ah, the bliss of a 9-5 routine with a bit of space for disserting.

Back in business!

Hurrah, it's been a good day!

My first day of my new part-time (30 hours per week is part-time?) job in a real live university library, and I've also put together a workable coding framework for the first pilot of my content analysis.

Now I'm off to choir practice for a nice change-is-as-good-as-a-break.

Library 2 You? Mini-conference, mini-report!

Yesterday I attended the Library 2.0 You? mini-conference. There were five speakers and four topics:

1. Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts
2. Virtual Environments (e.g. Second Life)
3. Facebook and the Library Catalogue
4. Virtual Reference
   

The first session was the one I actually felt I needed to see (though the others were certainly interesting and useful in their own right). Two librarians from the University of Bath took us through the whole process of impementing a library blog, from focus groups who apparently welcomed the idea of cutting down on mass email alerts, to planning how many blogs to publish and what sort of areas to cover, to the benefits in terms of time-saving, feedback through statistics on blog views, and the problems of promoting blogs to new readers.

One of the speakers made a connection with SCONUL's "vision" for 2010, saying that blogging especially meets the criteria of Personalisation and Collaboration.


The virtual worlds talk was surprisingly interesting, given how little interest I'd taken in Second Life at the LILAC 2008 - and it was somewhat worrying to find out about the virtual worlds being marketed to teens and kids as young as 3...! Apparently Teen Second Life has more users in the USA than the adult version. There were a lot of mentions of cultural change and attention economy and so on... it made me feel a bit strange, having grown up in the 80s and early 90s and just sort of stumbled across all these frankly rather nerdy things which are now becoming big trends (for how long? Even blogging is sort of a has-been by mainstream media standards!) and finding them intersting but not fascinating. What do people see in them? Apparently there's a very recent report from EduServe (hat tip to lindsay55 on CILIP's Communities for that!) on this whole thing.

Facebook and the library catalogue - an interesting confluence from a programming point of view, and I learned a lot about how Facebook works (slightly alarmed by the mention of all the private data on my profile being dumped to the application server every time I access an application... I will be deleting some apps soon, I'm sure!). But is it much use for the library? It would be good to have more feedback on this. I can see the value of having a Facebook presence, certainly, and I love the new OCLC WorldCat citation app, for example. But how is this going to look in future? Will we achieve the "pervasive library" mentioned in this Talis paper? "Pervasive library" was one of the terms used yesterday, but so far it seems the worry is whether things like this will give us the image "invasive library" (I don't think we should worry!).

The final talk was on virtual reference, another application I'd had my doubts about, having seen it in "action" but getting very little use from library users... However, apparently it is in full swing at wlv.ac.uk and we had a session of audience participative evaluation of some (anonymised!) samples of real chat (ah, the excitement!). It's not so trendy any more but I think it's still a good concept and if users like it, why not? Still I only just resisted the temptation to ask, "why not just get everyone on Meebo?"...

All in all, a good day, with fine speakers and good catering ;) - it was good to see such a good turn out from all over the country too. Useful for reminding me that Web 2.0 is not just about blogging.