Curator Tools - Thing 8

As a librarian, curator tools sounded right up my street. I like things to be organised. I especially like everything to have a place and to be in it's place (one of the reasons I like shelf-tidying though I don't get to do that much these days). The task for Thing 8 included looking at one of the tools covered by the post on Rudai 23, explore it and blog my thoughts.

I decided on Flipboard. It was one that I had previously signed in to and had started using when I first got my tablet but after a while I had dropped it. I was interested to see what it could do now. For a start up there now was a web version - this was great. I find sometimes that it can be a bit easier to set things up on the PC and then continue to use them on the tablet or mobile phone. The web version made it a lot easier to search for things and move back and forth between the screens. And another thing, it seemed to sync perfectly with my tablet! I had my tablet beside me (some might say I had a command centre going on) and all the changes I made on the PC came through to the tablet. A revelation! I always have problems syncing devices so it was a great feeling to know that I didn't have to do anything. Flipboard works better on mobile devices not least because of the flipping motion to turn the page of information over. You don't get that same action with a standard PC/laptop.

However, after this I was a bit disappointed.

Firstly, I wanted to include blogs but I couldn't see an easy way to do this. I tried to search for a number of blogs I follow but to no avail. I went to the blog itself and looked for a way to add it to Flipboard but a lot of blogs ask you to sign up via email so you're notified of a new post. I looked at the help section on Flipboard (which rather unhelpfully was a bit tricky to find) but again there was a nice little video but no real information on how to do add blogs. So this was strike 1 against Flipboard.

Strike 2 followed close behind in the way that the magazines are created. I want a magazine to contain all the information about a topic that I follow. So if I follow the topic 'Libraries' and the topic 'Information Science' I want a magazine that pulls this all together. It seemed to me that you read the article/post etc and then decide to put it into a magazine, thereby pulling together all the information you thought relevant or interesting enough to refer to again. I'm afraid Flipboard, I want the flip of this.

Possibly I'm just being awkward. I already use feedly. And it does just this. I have a folder called Library Stuff and when I look in it, I can see the posts etc pertaining to Library Stuff. It also allows me to add some blogs (not all of them for some reason but some is better than none). The only thing is that feedly is a bit sparse on images and colour - something which Flipboard does very nicely.

I have been trying to think of how you would use the other curation tools mentioned. Storify is one that I intend to come back to. In work, we have a number of social media accounts and frequently we post questions about our services etc. Storify, from the description provided, seems to be the ideal way to collate the responses together from the social media tools we use and present these to senior management as evidence on how a campaign worked or progressed. Used in the right context, this could be a really useful tool to have to hand. Pinterest seems at first glance to be a bit more personal than work based. I'm struggling to see how an academic library could use this effectively.  I'm going to hold back on this one for now.