Category Archives: VHL 2.0

Learning is delightful and delicious

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You may or may not know that the VHL has a page on delicious.com where we save links to all sorts of websites that we come across which we think might be useful for our readers.   Hopefully this is building up to be a really useful resource for you all, and might point you in the direction of some great sites on the web that could be helpful for your research.   You can search or browse our list, or get notified when we add new sites by subscribing to the RSS feed.   If you follow us on Twitter then you will already have noticed we are posting directly there from delicious when we save things, and I’ve just set up an auto-post system for the blog to do the same thing.   If it works (*crosses fingers*) then you will soon see posts on the blog listing new sites as we save them.   Hope this will prove to be a useful service!   If you come across websites that you think other readers might find helpful to be alerted to, then do let us know and we’ll add them to our page.

By the way, I’ve had a bit of a splurge on adding sites today, so the first auto-post is likely to be somewhat larger than subsequent ones will be!

VHL on Twitter

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It was probably only ever a matter of time, given my enthusiasm for shiny new web things, but the VHL is now on Twitter. At the moment we’ll just be using it to push out our newsfeed and link back to the blog, but if you use Twitter and like to get your updates that way, please follow us! Our username is @vhllib.

VHL 2.0 survey – your library needs you!

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As I’m sure you are all aware, the VHL has been experimenting with web 2.0 sites and services this year. We set up this blog, and have accounts and pages on Facebook, del.icio.us and LibraryThing, as well as all sorts of widgets on our website. From my point of view, I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting and I think it’s been a valuable layer of icing on the VHL cake, but I’m not exactly an impartial judge here so it would be great to find out what you all think too. Please take a few minutes to complete our web 2.0 survey, or as ever, if you just have general feedback, drop me an email or comment on this blog post.

New look for the blog and Trinity Term seating continued

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The VHL blog is now just over six months old, and to celebrate I’ve given it a makeover. Hope you all like the new look! If you usually read our news via a feed reader you might want to drop by the actual page and take a look.

Another thing to flag up, for those of you reading our feed, is that we have a quick poll running on the blog at the moment about the Trinity Term seating issue. We’ve had a variety of comments from readers about the new system, both in favour and against, and so are canvassing opinion – if you have feelings about this one way or another, please vote in the sidebar.

VHL on LibraryThing Local

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As readers of this blog will know, the VHL has been on LibraryThing since November, adding our new acquisitions each month. I don’t know how many of our readers are LibraryThing users (or Thingamabrarians, as I believe we are referred to) but I am a huge fan of LibraryThing. I have my personal book collection on there too (for which I either hang my head in shame or proudly proclaim my geekiness, depending on how you view such things), and I am loving the new developments they are constantly bringing out. The latest of these is LibraryThing Local, which basically adds listings of libraries, bookshops and literary festivals to LibraryThing, searchable by location. You can find the VHL here, and you can add us as a favourite library on your LibraryThing profile. Or even befriend us as a fellow Thingamabrarian!

(and a reminder, we’re available to be friended on del.icio.us and Facebook too, if anyone feels so inclined…)

VHL on LibraryThing

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As part of our VHL 2.0 experiment, we have created an account for the library on LibraryThing. LibraryThing, for anyone not already aware, is a social cataloguing site, and thus combines the power of ‘proper’ cataloguing with the collective knowledge of its users, who can add all sorts of spangly web 2.0 type things – tags, reviews, ratings – and link to each others’ libraries to see what other people are reading, get recommendations and talk about books. A bibliophile’s paradise, in other words! Now obviously, we do have a proper catalogue for all our books, but we thought that our readers might also like to have the access to the extra social data from the LibraryThing hive mind for books we have recently acquired. I have therefore just uploaded our new accessions list for November (also available with links to OLIS on our website), and this can be viewed on LibraryThing at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/vhllib, or via the lovely new blog widget on the sidebar here. Links will also be created directly from our webpage, and if you use RSS feeds, then you can subscribe to our new books with this url: http://www.librarything.com/rss/recent/vhllib.

As with all our web 2.0 experimental features, we’d love to get your feedback about whether this is useful, and also encourage any of our readers who librarything themselves to link to us.

What’s in the blog? You tell me!

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One of the big advantages of having a blog like this one for library news is that it is so easy for me to post things. This means that I’ve been posting all sorts of different bits of information, but I have no way of knowing what you find useful or otherwise. So, in an attempt to find out, I’ve set up a quick poll on the sidebar of this page for you to vote on what kind of information you want to see here.

Please vote if you have a second, the feedback monster is hungry…

Welcome and introduction to VHL 2.0

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Welcome to the official blog of the Vere Harmsworth Library! We’ll be using this to keep our users up-to-date on everything that’s going on, new services, changes to existing ones, new resources, and anything else we think you might want to know about. You can use this to keep up-to-date by subscribing to our RSS feed, and can also let us know what you think about what we’re telling you by commenting on the posts. We hope that it will be a valuable and dynamic new way of keeping in touch with our readers.

This blog is also an important part of our new experiment: VHL 2.0. We’re expanding the library presence into social sites such as del.icio.us and Facebook, and are inviting you, our loyal readers, to join us as we take our first faltering steps into the brave new world of web 2.0. The library world has been much exercised recently by the possibilities offered by all these new online services, and so we thought we should take the plunge, give it a go, see whether it works. It’s worth a try anyway, hey? However, we’re not going to get anywhere very much without YOU! Yes, YOUR LIBRARY NEEDS YOU! Take a look at our del.icio.us page, where we’re building a list of hopefully useful and relevant websites. If you use del.icio.us, add us to your network and save sites for us too. Join our Facebook group, and discuss issues with us and other users. And above all, let us know what you think!