Hello Kindy

Image by Accretion Disc

One of my aims for 2012 (which I blogged about here) was to make better use of my Kindle. Become buddies and improve our friendship. Last weekend I had a go at getting to know it better...

I had a pop at downloading various e-books. Mostly fiction with a few autobiogs thrown in for good measure. No other type of document, but that’s okay to start off with. I’m finding the whole e-book format thing a little tricky – for the life of me I can never remember which formats the Kindle can read. So, I took a look at Calibre software for the first time too. It’s open source and is used to help manage e-book collections by converting different file types etc. On first glance it looks fairly user-friendly and I’m looking forward to becoming familiar with it.

Feeling more confident, I dabbled with a .pdf document, but with less success. The Kindle accepts them, but something wasn’t quite right and usability was zilch. The text size couldn’t be altered and I’d have to scroll along to reach the end of a line. Will have to play around with these a bit more methinks.

There's still lots to find out with the Kindle (or Kindy, as I've nicknamed it), but so far one of the things I find quite fun is the selection of screensavers, and not knowing which will appear next. (Small pleasures and all that...)

At work, we are hoping to buy an e-reader for staff and student use. At Christmas we upgraded our e-book license to downloadable multi-users. However, our e-book platform providers inform us that our e-books are not compatible with Kindles so we are looking at alternative, reasonably-priced models. One of my tasks for this week is to research the Kobo devices. All in the name of work, honestly... it’s a hard job, but somebody has to do it...

CULN Conference

Earlier this week I went to an event held by the College University of Leicester Network (CULN) entitled Librarians’/LRC Research and IT Conference. It consisted of three presentations and one workshop, all specialising in digital data. Here is a brief outline of my thoughts on the day.

Dr John Haggerty from Salford University described himself as a ‘computer scientist’ and his talk focussed on the security issues of online data. He discussed it wonderfully in layman’s terms so that those of us without in-depth knowledge of encryption or contamination issues etc would be able to understand. He explained how digital data is intangible and ubiquitous, and how this can be problematic.  He focussed on challenges such as storage, structured/unstructured information, encryption needs, longevity of data and how all of this is changing yet again because of the throwaway culture arising relating to digital data. He gave Facebook as a perfect example of this. People create (unstructured) information purely for the purpose of giving it away, without thinking about who then owns that information or how it is stored and maintained. As technology upgrades happen faster and there is a general reduction on technology costs, Dr Haggerty predicted that these problems will increase in the future and we, as professionals, need to be aware of such issues, particularly if we use social networking as part of our jobs.