iGoogle

My blog, Polar adventurer, has been registered on 23 Things Cambridge, and it's fascinating to view the other blogs there and to see how individual each blog is. The choice of colour, style and images, give each a character of its own, irrespective of topic.

Creating (and removing) links on iGoogle to gadgets and URLs (News feeds, RSS feeds, catalogues, calendars, map search and translation software) has proved relatively simple, but I fear taking part in 23 Things will become increasing addictive and time-consuming!

I much prefer the clean uncluttered iGoogle home page to the personalised page(s) where you are immediately distracted by the image(s). I view my iGoogle home page as a filing cabinet. By contrast, my blog greatly benefits from the use of images and colour as a means of setting the tone and scene. I view Polar adventurer as my diary.

By far the most useful function of iGoogle has been the ability to view my RSS feeds in one place, and to navigate quickly between them.

Cam 23

I have been contributing to the South Asia Archive and Library Group blog since 2008. That was also created using blogger.com, and has proved a very useful means of keeping abreast with news and colleagues in the South Asian library, archive and museum community in the UK. We also maintain a SAALG website, to which we attach more substantial articles and conference presentations from our two conferences per year.

I am keen to learn via CAM 23 how a blog might benefit the users of my special collections. I am also anxious to keep abreast with the technology used by researchers using my collections. Whilst I don't expect to meet all their expectations (especially in relation to digital archives - many students assume that an archive is digital, even if it dates from the 19th century and comprises 50 boxes of papers), I do hope to better understand where they are coming from and do all I can with limited resources to improve their archive and library experience.