A fresh start or perhaps a polar dip?

The Arctic dip at Paradise Harbour (Credit: Iain B. of Over, Flickr CC)

Another academic year has flown by and and I'm bracing myself for a second frantic summer tackling 23 Things.  Having got so much out of the programme last year, I am keen to refresh my Web 2.0 skills, and reconsider how I currently exploit the possibilities they permit, as well as tackle the Extra Things promised.  I envisage an adventure-packed summer!

I have been blogging regularly for three years - see the South Asia Archive and Library Group (SAALG) blog - and recently assisted Clemens Gresser and Margaret Jones present a Library Skills workshop on Team Blogging. I've also recently starting blogging using WordPress for the UL's Special collections blog
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/specialcollections/blog/
The basics are very similar, but I have not found the instructions for working with images etc. as intuitive as those of Blogger. It will, however, be a great way to promote some of the non-South Asian gems in the Royal Commonwealth Society collections.  The blogging take-up has been so great that we have had to carefully schedule when posts are published. 

I have had fun this week tweaking the layout, settings and widgets displayed on the SAALG and Polar adventurer blogs, inspired by Week 1's Extra Thing.  I do still feel that pictures speak louder than words, so will endeavour to post as many as possible.

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.