Lib Gloss

Thing 23: Finishing touches

2011-10-22T00:04:00.001+01:00

Last Thing! I think it's fair to say that cpd23 has been a marathon rather than a sprint, so as I stagger across the finish line it's time to wrap myself in the shiny tinfoil blanket of Thing 23 while I sip at the electrolyte-replenishing sports drink of reflection.

Firstly, I'd like to say that the whole course has been brilliant, one of the best things I've ever done in terms of professional development. Not only have I found trying out or thinking about all of the suggested things really useful, but through the course I picked up loads of people to follow on Twitter and have begun reading a wide range of blogs: this has really broadened my professional reading and makes me feel much more up-to-date with current issues in the profession. So a big thank you to the cpd23 organisers and to all the guest bloggers who wrote such interesting and helpful posts on all of the Things.

One thing the programme has made me consider is how important it is, as well as how enjoyable it can be, to play around with new tools and applications. Obviously, it has been useful, as well as a great incentive when my motivation might have been flagging, to explore these tools at the same time as hundreds of other people and to read others' thoughts about them. But those advantages aside, there had previously been nothing to stop me from finding out about and subsequently exploring things like Evernote, Jing, Dropbox, Google Docs, etc under my own steam. So one thing I will take away from the course is to try to be more curious and experimental about tools and applications I could use in my work and to be more of an early adopter.

In terms of what I'd like to do next, prior to starting cpd23 I was doing an online course in Excel provided by my institution's staff development unit. I have put this on hold over the summer in favour of following cpd23 (fortunately the Excel course is also one that you can take at your own pace) so I'll be completing that now. Then I'll have a little break from professional development activities over Christmas, and then in the New Year hopefully I will start preparing to register for and begin Chartership.

As part of Chartership I'll be putting together a Personal Professional Development Plan. At work we also have a very comprehensive Performance and Development Review process - my most recent PDR was over the summer, with a follow-up session planned in January/February, so this can also feed into my Chartership preparation. I don't want to do a SWOT analysis as part of this blog, as I want to spend some time thinking about this. However, one gap in my skills and experience that I have been aware of for a little while now is that I don't have much experience of giving presentations or of public speaking in general. Things 15 and 17 from this course had lots of useful information to help me address this.

We are invited to write a "6 word story" to sum up our experience of the cpd23 course. My first attempt, prompted by my experience of actually doing the course on a week-by-week basis, was:

Monday already? Another Thing?! Soooo behind.

But now that I'm at the end of the programme the trauma of running to keep up with everybody else is fading, and, anyway, it was definitely worth it in the end.

In an idea shamelessly nicked from Alliteration Station, I decided to create a Wordle of my blog. This is what it came back with:

So, picking out some of my most-used words on this blog, my final 6 word story of cpd23 is:

Information about applications supports our professionalisation.

Thing 22: Volunteering to get experience

2011-10-21T21:44:00.000+01:00

I have never held a voluntary position in a library, although not because I haven't, well, volunteered. When I was thinking about applying to study a library and information masters I realised I needed to bump up my experience of working in libraries for my applications. I approached the Lit and Phil library in Newcastle - for no other reason other than that I liked the look of it and its collections - to ask if they had any need for volunteers. It turned out that they did have some work available - approximately 10 hours a week, shelving and helping to transfer a large amount of their stock to their recently installed storage space - and that they would pay the standard hourly wage, and were happy to take me on to do this. Which is a pretty clear demonstration of the principle that if you don't ask, you don't get (or, as we prefer to say in the North East, "shy bairns get nowt").

I agree that volunteering confers all of the benefits that Jo outlines in her post. It not only gives you practical experience of working in a library environment but also the chance to use and develop transferable skills, make contacts and build your professional network, gain insider knowledge of the library and sector you're volunteering in, demonstrate commitment to your professional and personal development - the benefits are endless and you can make a lot of the opportunities gained from volunteering.

However, it is important to consider the ramifications of volunteering if the volunteer positions are being used as a substitute for what should be professional paid posts. This may have always been a potential issue but is becoming more so at the moment in the public library sector with cuts to local services and the potential for community-managed and run libraries to fill the gap created in service provision. Johanna Bo Anderson outlines the ethical dilemma members of the library and information profession face when offering their work on a voluntary basis and the comments to the post are thoughtful and thorough. Several people state that while they might be prepared to work voluntarily to provide "added extras" to a service, they would not consider taking a voluntary post that would cover what should be core service provision. I have a lot of sympathy with this view. Local councils (still, just about) have a statutory duty under the Public Libraries & Museums Act 1964 to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service for all and it is unclear at the moment where community-run libraries would fit into this provision (for more about this, see the relevant page of the advocacy section of CILIP's website).

An alternative way to volunteer your time and skills is to get involved in committees and working parties, either at your workplace or in the wider profession, and also to undertake wider voluntary activity with, for example, community or sporting groups and organisations. I was a committee member of my local CILIP branch while an MA student and in the first couple of years of my post-qualification work, and I feel that this gave me useful experience of the wider professional community (while also, I hope, enabling me to give something of value to that community as well). Last year at work, I was part of a team that organised the staff Christmas party (I sort of volunteered and sort of had my arm twisted, although I'm sure I could have said no if I really didn't want to do it). This was quite stressful and time-consuming at the time, but actually it gave me loads of useful things to talk about and evidence of skills - such as team-working, managing a budget and organisational skills - in a subsequent job application. So volunteering, at whatever level and in whatever capacity, does give you the chance to fill in gaps in your experience in ways that might prove to be unexpectedly useful in the future.

Thing 21: Apply - some pressure?

2011-10-21T21:32:00.002+01:00

Thing 21 is about applying for jobs: both the preparatory work of considering your strengths and weaknesses (which in many ways is the hardest part of the process) as well as putting together a strong application and giving a good account of yourself at interview.

Identifying your strengths

Maria suggests that we consider our strengths and the things we like (or don't like) to do - both at work and in our personal lives. If it's not too wussy/lazy I'm going to postpone this activity for the moment as I want to have a really good think about this (and also I'm not sure I'd want to post my conclusions on a public blog). However, I would like to mention CJ's post on this Thing at 23 Mins in the Library, which discusses how to talk about your strengths/interests and weaknesses/dislikes in such a way that you are explaining the value your strengths add to your work and putting a positive spin on your weaknesses. There are some great ideas in CJ's list which I may well be nicking - er, I mean adapting for my own purposes.

Putting together an application

At the moment my CV is catastrophically out of date, but that's because every job I've applied for in the last five or six years has asked for a completed application form instead - sometimes a hard copy but more often one that's to be completed and submitted online. Because I'm just that sort of person, I print off and keep on file copies of my completed application forms so that I can refer to them in any future applications - often, especially for basic factual information about your education and work history, you can just copy passages from previous forms with minimal tweaking.

And also because I'm that sort of person, I'm very methodical and thorough when completing the application. I examine the essential and desirable criteria in minute detail and make sure I can offer evidence that I fulfil each one - usually I print off a copy of both the job description and person specification, scribble notes next to each point, and then draft and re-draft my application form answers until I'm sure I've covered every point. I try where possible to use the same language and phrases as in the job description and person specification - without appearing as though I'm just mindlessly parroting the employer's words back at them - to make it really obvious that I've addressed all of the criteria in my application.

Make sure your application ticks all of the boxes
(Picture by adesigna)

Interviews

There's lots of useful advice about giving good interview in Maria's blogpost and in the links she provides. However, I have a feeling that being an effective and impressive interviewee is something you can only really develop from actually going through the real-life process numerous times - you can't learn and develop the skills just from reading about it. Even practising interviews is of limited value, because you won't be able to replicate that special combination of tummy butterflies, anxiety-induced dry-mouth and worries over practicalities - What shall I wear? How am I travelling to the venue? How firm should my handshake be? Do I accept a coffee or glass of water if they offer one? - created by the real interview situation. Of course, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't spend some time before the interview thinking about the questions you're likely to be asked and what your answers might be - Ned Potter's blog has a comprehensive list of likely questions for an interview for a library role.

What next?

I am not long (two and a half months) into a new job, so I hope I will not be going through the application and interview process for a while yet. I therefore have the luxury of being able to spend the next few weeks or months considering my strengths and weaknesses and updating my CV (I will need to do both of these anyway once I register for and begin Chartership). I also need to consider any gaps in my experience and skills and think of ways to address these - which is where the next Thing comes in...

Thing 20: Root down

2011-10-16T17:01:00.000+01:00

For Thing 20 we are directed to the Library Routes project, in which information professionals document and share their stories of how they came to work in the library and information sphere and the routes they have taken through the profession. I have created an account and have added a link to the post I wrote for Thing 10, about my career in libraries thus far and my plans for the immediate future.

Other people's stories make interesting reading. For some reason, I find it particularly cheering to read about people who had relatives who were librarians and then subsequently went into the profession themselves - it makes me think that there might almost be a "librarian gene" that gets passed on through the generations, although I'm sure the same phenomenon occurs in other professions too.

I don't think my route into and through libraries has been especially unusual; it goes: bookish and library-using as a child, undergraduate degree in a humanities subject followed by a postgraduate qualification in library and information studies, and since then various roles - both part and full-time, temporary and permanent - in several different libraries. The only way in which I diverge significantly from the "traditional" route into librarianship is that I didn't undertake a year-long graduate traineeship before doing my masters qualification. I did apply for several traineeships and even got as far as being offered one, but eventually decided to turn it down - mainly for financial reasons - and go straight to my masters course instead. I do sometimes wonder if I missed out by not doing the traineeship: it obviously can be a valuable source of learning opportunities, practical work experiences, and contacts, and serves as a way to help you "bed into" the profession. Perhaps completing such a traineeship might have got me on to the track towards a professional post a bit sooner. Too late to do anything about it now, but it is interesting, if ultimately fruitless, to consider the paths not taken.

Thing 20 also briefly mentions the Library Day in the Life project, which is a twice-yearly event during which librarians across the world document their daily working lives. I took part in Round 7 of this, which took place in July 2011, and throughout the week I tweeted about what I was doing at work. This was a fascinating activity. In the first place, it made me more active on Twitter, as I was using it to tweet about things that I would not normally think worth mentioning. It is also quite a challenge to describe your daily tasks in such a way that they are pithy enough to be contained within Twitter's 140-character limit while also being comprehensible to people both within and outside of the library profession. Once the week was over, I also wrote about my working week in a very long, boring blog post, which you can read here. I will definitely take part in the next round of the project but I will try to do something a bit more creative - maybe a photo journal - next time.

Thing 19: Integrating the Things so far

2011-10-16T12:10:00.001+01:00

"It's time for a little bit of a breather and some reflection on what you've gained from the programme so far and how you might continue to use what you've learnt," says Jo cheerily in the post for this Thing. Well, it was time for a breather when this was originally posted on 12th September; it's now four weeks later and I am desperately staggering through the final few Things, so not much chance for breath-catching for me.

Fortunately I don't think I'll have to spend much time reflecting on this, since the things I've picked up from cpd23 that I'm going to be using on daily basis, I already am using on a daily basis - they've proved so handy, as well as being easy to learn and implement, that they've slotted into my work routine with no effort or consideration on my part at all.

For me, the stars of the programme in this respect have been:

Twitter
I use Twitter on an almost daily basis and from it I have picked up so much information and links to news, articles, blog posts and discussions that I wonder how I ever managed without it.

Evernote
This is open on my taskbar all day at work and often at home - I use it to store notes and snippets of information, to-do lists, useful URLs and so on, things that previously would have been scrawled on scraps of paper (and subsequently lost). As a result I feel much more organised, and tidier, through using Evernote. This one's a keeper.

Jing
I only got round to the Jing Thing a couple of weeks ago and already I've used it extensively, to produce illustrative screenshots in a training document and to send screenshots to users of our electronic resources to guide them through various procedures. What's more, two of my line managers have been impressed enough to ask how I produced such nicely-annotated screen captures, so now I look like a complete technological whizz thanks to cpd23!

There are some tools that I haven't used much but that I probably will use in the future after I've played around with them a bit more and/or when the need arises:

Dropbox (and Google Docs and Wikis)
I loved Dropbox when I first tried it out but I confess I haven't used it since. I will try to keep it in mind the next time I need to transfer documents from one device to another. Similarly, I have yet had to produce any collaborative work that would require using Google Docs, but it is useful to know about it for future.

Prezi
I was a bit down on Prezi, finding rather too flamboyant and in-your-face when first introduced to it. I do still intend to try it out at some point though. Although I am very rarely called upon to give presentations, either at events or as part of a teaching session, Thing 17 did make me consider using tools like Prezi and PowerPoint just as a way of presenting and recording information for general reference, rather than it being tied to a specific spoken presentation, so I will work on this soon.

And there are some tools and Things that could go either way:

Social networking, particularly LinkedIn
Way back in Thing 6 (12 weeks ago now) I said that signing up and creating a profile for LinkedIn was on my to-do list and would be completed "over the next few weeks". Hmm, yes, well... I may still get around to doing this, but it's not a very high priority any more, partly because, although I've never read or heard anybody saying "Wow, LinkedIn is brilliant and has helped me to get loads of jobs", I have heard several people on Twitter and elsewhere moaning about how useless it is at everything apart from sending its members pointless spammy emails numerous times a week. Sounds great.

Blogging
I had never blogged before starting cpd23 and my original intention was to use the programme as a pair of stabilisers for my blogging bicycle; once cpd23 finished I would be ready to wobble off into the distance under my own steam. I have to say, though, that I've found blogging to be less satisfying than I imagined. I'm not sure if I will continue this blog (or at least I won't be posting very regularly) once cpd23 is over. Let's be honest, I have barely managed to keep up to date with my cpd23 blogging; without the prompt of a new Thing every Monday and at least the semblance of a deadline for completing the posts, I am even less likely to produce a regular flow of material. I am also very bad at commenting on others' posts and still have to make a conscious effort to do so.

I think everything we've been introduced to throughout the programme has been worthwhile, even if it just prompts you to consider a new tool or method of working before deciding "It's not for me at this particular point." There's lots of stuff that, even if I'm not using it immediately, I will squirrel away for future reference.

Thing 18: Workin' on a Groovy Jing

2011-10-09T00:35:00.000+01:00

Jing

The worst thing about Jing is that every time I read or hear its name I feel oddly compelled to say "Jings!" in a comedy Scotch accent. Everything else about it is pretty tip-top though.

As part of my job I provide over-the-phone and email assistance for users of our e-journals and, in particular, the University's research management system. This system was designed to be as user-friendly and intuitive as possible - a condition that's easy to plan for but difficult to achieve - and we also have some written guides available to download from the homepage of the system. Obviously, nobody ever actually reads these. Result: I spend a lot of my day trying to explain computery procedures to people who aren't necessarily in the same building as me.

Until now I've been using the snipping tool in Windows to capture screenshots. I now prefer Jing though, not least because its annotation features are much more extensive and useful. I've also been experimenting with Jing's screencast (or video) function and that works pretty snazzily too, although I would like to become a bit more proficient before I begin using it to instruct and guide users.

My introduction to Jing has come at a particularly useful time as I'm in the middle of creating some training documents and manuals for staff who are going to be working on our research management system, so I have been busily capturing, copying and pasting screenshots and drawing big red arrows all over them. I'm also hoping to build up a library of screencasts of typical procedures for staff to refer to whenever necessary.

I have come across only a couple of hitches when using Jing:

The semi-circular "sun" that's installed at the top of your screen can get in the way slightly if you've got lots of browser tabs open (when using Chrome anyway); however, this is easily solved by dragging it to either side or to the bottom of your screen, or you can alter your settings and hide it altogether.
I captured some videos and then when viewing them at the links in Screencast.com found that they played back at twice the expected speed. Again, it's easily rectified if you take care to make slow and deliberate motions when recording your video, but it's something you need to be aware of and get used to.

These minor issues aside I will be using Jing a lot from now on.

And now a short musical interlude, included here because it inspired the title for this post, because its lyric pretty much sums up my feelings about Jing, and because - well, just look at it:

Podcasts

I listen to podcasts a fair bit. Podcasts I have known and loved include:

1. The Collings and Herrin podcast, which, alas, is on hiatus since they had a tiff a few months ago

Lads, lads - less scrapping, more podcasting please

2. The Word podcast, depending on who the guest is (Danny Baker is always good value)

3. And for those times - it doesn't happen often - when I tire of repetitious, puerile jokes about crude sexual acts (see 1) and pointless music trivia and anecdotes (see 2) I like to kick back and chillax with an episode of the Philosophy Bites series

Not much there relating to libraries. The arcadia@cambridge series referred to in the cpd23 post does look intriguing - some very pertinent and timely topics are covered - so I will download these and listen to them at some point. I also had a quick search in iTunes for other library podcasts and didn't find a great deal, apart from the Bodleian Libraries' series of podcasts, which is called - I hope you're sitting down for this one - BODcasts and looks pretty interesting, although not entirely focussed on library issues as such.

In terms of software for making podcasts, I have used Audacity before, to convert some vinyl records to MP3 format and also to tart up some of my MP3 playlists. I found it a bit fiddly for the latter activity, but if you're just using it to record a single sound source then it's perfectly do-able.

However, I'm struggling to think of a subject that I could usefully make a podcast about. At my library we have previously produced an audio tour, stored on individual iPod Shuffles that users can borrow and listen to as they explore the library on their own - quite a nifty idea and you can also produce versions in different languages for international students. But most other topics and issues have some sort of visual component which make their demonstration better suited to video or screencasting.

Thing 17: Fight the PowerPoint

2011-10-08T21:18:00.001+01:00

Prezi

Prezi styles itself as the anti-PowerPoint. Where PowerPoint is linear, staid and conventional, Prezi is multi-directional, vibrant and innovative. Prezi enables its users to unleash their creativity and map their own narrative routes through their material. Prezi is sassy, attention-grabbing and, if I'm being honest, a teensy bit annoying. It's the Louie Spence of presentation software.

I've never seen a real-life Prezi presentation but I've viewed several online. To be fair, some of them are conceptually and visually arresting and some of them... not so much.

I created a Prezi account for this Thing but so far haven't played around with it much because:

I don't have a particular subject I want to make a presentation about at the moment
I don't have a spare 30 hours that @jessedee suggests is necessary to create a decent presentation (in You Suck at PowerPoint)

Also, if you have a free account then your work is automatically publicly available on the Prezi website, which makes me less inclined to fiddle around when I don't really know what I'm doing with it. I have nevertheless received an automated, unnecessarily chummy email from Prezi asking me if my experience using it so far has been "awesome, gnarly, or somewhere in between?" (Gnarly? Oh dear Lord...)

I probably will come back to wrestle with Prezi at some point. But sometimes I wonder if, when giving a spoken presentation, the most impressive and engaging thing you could do would be to simply stand up and talk, with no notes and no supporting materials. Not sure I would ever be brave enough to try that though.

SlideShare

In the past, I must have viewed dozens of presentations hosted on SlideShare without quite realising or investigating what it is. So now I have investigated and may well be consulting SlideShare much more frequently in the future, to see what people are talking and presenting about, to view presentations from events I wasn't able to attend, and to get inspiration (or more accurately, to nick ideas) for my own presentations.

I would just like to mention one minor point about the cpd23 blogpost for this Thing. In describing the reach and impact of SlideShare Ange states:

This is not your institutional repository, this is on the open web and can be discovered by a much wider and variable audience.

But most of the material in institutional repositories is also on the open web (where copyright and licensing terms allow) - repositories are indexed by Google and other search engines and anyone can search for and retrieve their contents from a web search. Admittedly not many institutional repositories will have the 55 million visitors a month that SlideShare claims, but a repository isn't - or shouldn't - be a place where content is locked away from users who don't belong to that institution - in fact, completely the opposite is the case, as one of their main roles is to make the research and publications of the institution's academic staff as widely available as possible. Oh, hang on, here's a presentation about the University of Lincoln's repository that I found on SlideShare and that serves as a good example of the role and aims of an institutional repository.

Okay, end of repository-related pedantry. And, come to think of it, now I have a topic I can make a Prezi about...

Thing 16: Advocacy and speaking up for the profession

2011-10-08T19:19:00.000+01:00

Here are two statements about libraries and librarianship:

1. "Most libraries are infrequently used and have become superfluous with the advent of the internet."

[Comment by tonners72 to blogpost 'If you tolerate this...': Nicky Wire on library closures at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/07/nicky-wires-library-closures-manics; retrieved 8 October 2011].

2. "What's the training required to hand a book out and stamp it and take it back in the following week?... A good volunteer can run a library, it's as simple as that."

[Peter Davies, Mayor of Doncaster, in an interview with BBC Radio Sheffield, Tuesday 4 October 2011; audio clip of comment here].

I sincerely hope that statement 1 is just some weapons-grade messageboard trolling (has to be, right? I mean, the commenter can't really believe that all the material anybody could possibly want is freely available on the internet). I can't even begin to address the arrogance and stupidity inherent in statement 2 so instead I'll direct you to Lauren Smith's post OY, Mayor Davies: there's more to working in a library than stamping out books, which rebuts his "point" very effectively by providing an extremely long list of things library staff actually do in addition to issuing books.

What these comments illustrate to me is that, while I might think that libraries are so self-evidently a Good Thing that it barely needs saying, other people disagree and have no problems publicly stating as much, no matter how fatuous they make themselves sound. So maybe I should be making more of an effort to articulate what I believe about the value of libraries, on whatever platforms are available to me.

I've used public libraries all my life and would hate to think of living in a society without them. Ways in which I have advocated for the public library service are:

Use it or lose it

I regularly visit and borrow items from my local library. I don't often use my full allowance of 20 books, mainly because I would struggle to carry them all home (but even so, just stop and think about how brilliant that is for a moment: anyone can join their library and then leave with hundreds of pounds worth of books at a time, completely free at the point of the use), but I usually take out 7 or 8 books. Often I do this even though I know I won't really have the time (or sometimes the inclination) to read all of them, in the vague belief that I'm helping by boosting that library's borrowing figures.

In fact, when doing some background reading for this post, I was looking at my council's budget figures and supporting documents for this year and I noticed that the yearly issue figures for the county's library service are included. I know that shouldn't be a surprise - as anyone who has ever worked in a library will be aware, every time somebody farts it has to be recorded using a five-bar gate and the monthly totals transferred into a spreadsheet - but it does ram home the point that every book issue is counted and noted for the record and, presumably, the higher the number the more valuable the service is perceived to be.

Sign on the dotted line

I've signed the Women's Institute's e-petition in support of public libraries - it's available here: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/1269. I do sometimes wonder what practical benefits or changes can result from these petitions. The government has stated that petitions that gather 100,000 plus signatures "could be debated in the House of Commons" - note the use of "could" and also note that "holding a debate" is not necessarily the same as "changing government policy in accordance with the demands of the petition". Nevertheless, the higher the number of signatures, the stronger the indication that public libraries are an important and valuable service, so I would encourage anybody who agrees to sign the petition.

Have your say

Last year I completed a consultation survey created by my council, Gateshead, on its draft spending plans for 2011/2012, in which residents were asked to give their views on the value and priority of various services, including libraries, leisure and culture services. Other ways to have your say: most (all?) councils hold consultation events on various issues which you can attend - there's one for Newcastle Libraries later this month; and there's lots of information on the WI's Love Your Libraries campaign page about how you can contact your local councillor to express support for libraries.

Looking at the points above it occurs to me that all of my advocacy so far has been on an individual level, and that statements and gestures in support of public libraries have more power and visibility when done in combination with others. I'm going to spend some more time looking at a number of resources - the WI's website mentioned above, the Voices for the Library site, Public Libraries News - to get some ideas, advice and contacts.

So my to-do list following this Thing is short but punchy:

1. Be more shouty

2. Consider joining up with others and being more shouty together

Thing 15: No conferring

2011-09-29T19:25:00.001+01:00

Conferences are brilliant aren't they? You get to take a day (or more!) away from the office. You get to meet, chat and network with new people and hear about the latest developments and practices in your field. You get to learn about what people in other libraries and other sectors are doing, and share your own experiences with them. If you're particularly lucky, the lunchtime buffet will include those little chicken satay sticks; and maybe some posh tortilla wrap things; and for afters a mahoosive fruit platter, which everybody ignores in favour of the mini muffins. And you might get some freebies: a pen, for example, or a triangular highlighter, or those weird little tins of mints that I'm sure nobody ever actually eats. Yes, who can honestly say that they don't love a good conference?

*raises hand sheepishly*

I do occasionally attend events and conferences, but probably not as many as I should and I do find them somewhat challenging. Here are the reasons and, because I don't want to be all Captain Bringdown, in each case I'm going to consider whether there are any tools, practices and information I've picked up during cpd23 that could help me to get more out of events in the future.

Reason 1

The problem: As I have noted previously, I'm terrible for neglecting to follow-up or consolidate any of my learning from training and other events - all the handouts and notes get carefully filed in the bottom of a drawer and I never look at them again.

The solution: The emphasis on reflective practice in Thing 5 was particularly useful and if I make the time afterwards to think about what I've learned from events I attend I can write up my reflections as a short report and post it on this blog. I can also use my beloved Evernote to record notes, reflections and action points from events I attend (and I think if you have a suitably app-ed up smartphone you can just scan your pages straight into Evernote).

Reason 2

The problem: I know attending a conference is supposed to inspire you and send you back to the workplace with lots of exciting new ideas, but actually I find that even the best, most interesting event has the opposite effect: for me going to a conference is enervating rather than energising, and I usually find that by the 3pm coffee break both I and my small talk are exhausted and I'm longing to go home. I'm sure this has something to do with being an introvert, as the bigger the event the more pronounced the effect: the mere thought of going to one of the mega-conferences like Umbrella makes me sag at the knees slightly.

The solution: There are lots of useful tips in Jo Alcock's post on Networking for introverts. And once I've mastered those, I can move it up a gear into the realms of Introverts' Power Networking, to which there is an entire blog dedicated. I also liked the first tip in Archelina's post for this Thing - "make sure you build in 'alone' time for reflection/recuperation" - and will try to do this in future.

Reason 3

The problem: I don't wish to come across all "chippy Northerner", but quite often the big conferences and events are held a long way from where I live, so you can add an eight hour round trip and upwards of a hundred and twenty quids' worth of train fares to the cost of attending (it's usually not my money that's being spent, but I still find it irksome).

The solution: Er, move house? Actually, I realise I'm just moaning for the sake of moaning here - I know that lots of people will be in the same position (and might even be going to international conferences) and that if you feel the event is going to be valuable to you then you will make the time and find the money to attend. However, since I've joined Twitter and begun following numerous blogs as part of cpd23 I've discovered that it's possible to follow a lot of conferences online, via Twitter hashtags and reading people's follow-up blogposts. It was also interesting to see that this year's CILIP AGM, which took place last week, was broadcast via a live stream on their website (it's a shame though that a recording of it is not still online). I know these channels are not an exact substitute for the face-to-face contact you get from attending events in person, but in a lot of cases they might be good enough for me.

I think the overall message to take away from this is that planning and preparation is vital if you're to make the most of any conference or event. You need to make time to think beforehand about what you want to get out of the conference and decide how you're going to make the best use of your time while you're there. Then, once you've returned you need to set aside some time to think about, write up and hopefully implement things that you've learned from the conference.

I'm going to the RSP's Autumn School in a few weeks' time and, despite my moaning above, I am looking forward to it and to meeting fellow repository types from across the country. I'm going to use the lessons and advice above to make sure I really get the most out of the event.

Thing 14: Giving me ex-citations

2011-09-15T20:58:00.003+01:00

When I did my library masters dissertation all those *smothering cough* years ago, I handwrote all of my references and citations as I came across them on index cards, which I filed in a little plastic box. I then used the information recorded on these to type my bibliography out manually. I know some would consider this activity to be a monumental bum-ache, but I actually find referencing and citing quite an absorbing and satisfying task. Also, top dissertation-writing tip: faffing around with your bibliography is an excellent displacement activity for those times when you should actually be writing your main chapters but don't want to/can't bear to.

Now there are software packages and applications that can be used to automatically generate and manipulate your citations - and in doing so probably offer new and high tech ways to procrastinate. At my institution we use EndNote; although I have received basic instruction in this, my job doesn't involve helping library users with it, nor do I have cause to use it regularly myself, so my knowledge of it is sketchy to say the least. Might as well have a look at some other options then...

Zotero

I have not used Zotero before, so for the purposes of this Thing I registered an account, installed the Firefox add-on, and set about gathering some citations from various sources. The subsequent wranglings with Zotero left me feeling confused and slightly inadequate. Everywhere I turn, on cpd23 participants' blogs and on the web generally, people seem to be raving about how brilliant and easy to use it is. This was not my experience, and now I'm not sure if the problem lies with me or with Zotero.

Here are a few of the things that irked me:

I wasn't able to extract bibliographic details from a record from my own library's catalogue - attempting to do so just gave me a pop-up box with an error message
I had similar problems trying to save details from a Web of Knowledge record
I received the same error message when trying to save details from a Scopus record, but then when my Zotero account next synced the reference had been added to my library - oh-kaaaay...
However, the data taken from the Scopus record did not include the article's DOI - so not ideal, really

To be fair to Zotero, I did manage to extract data from other sources, including Copac and online journal pages, although the punctuation in the resulting citations was slightly iffy and would need to be tidied up. And I was impressed with the way it grabs useful, usable metadata from web pages. And manually adding citations was reasonably easy. And, with a modicum of head-scratching, I managed to create a bibliography from citations in my library (although, again, I needed to edit some of the references to improve their accuracy and consistency). And I'm basing these impressions off about an hour's use and I'm sure I could get Zotero to work effectively for me if I play around with it a bit more. But it was kind of a bruising first encounter, one that replaced the soothing satisfaction of carefully crafting and sorting my own citations with eye-rolling frustration, and it made me not really want to explore it any further.

In spite of my extended moaning, I did manage to compile the beginnings of a library of references using Zotero

Mendeley

I first heard about Mendeley last year when there was a presentation about it at a Repositories Support Project event. Maybe I was being a bit dim (it was the first session immediately after lunch), or maybe the presentation wasn't very clear, but I came away with the impression that it's a tool to extract and share full text files from users' computers. Consequently, my inner copyright guru was screeching "Er, hello? Is that even legal?". Having investigated a bit further I now realise that Mendeley principally extracts bibliographic data rather than the complete files themselves. (However, authors can share their PDFs within small private groups - um, depending on which versions of their articles people are sharing and the contracts they've signed with the publishers, I'm still not sure that's entirely legal, but whatevs.) Anyway, now my inner cataloguing guru is screeching "Er, hello? Authority control anyone?"

In fact, checking out some of the online user reviews of Mendeley reveals that, as with Zotero, you do often have to manually tidy up the citation data that's been extracted, but I can totally dig that for many (non-weird) people this is much less of a pain than having to create all of your citations from scratch.

However, I think where Mendeley does have some advantages is in the social network it builds around users' profiles: user can join or follow public groups based around their interests, and in smaller private groups they can share and annotate documents together. In this sense, Mendeley might be classed as a collaborative tool along with those discussed in Thing 13 as much as a reference management tool.

I'm also intrigued by the function in Mendeley that, for each article or citation, recommends "related" items, chiefly because I would like to see if it's more useful than similar recommendation features such as those offered by Last.fm and Amazon (newsflash Amazon: the reason I viewed the Box Canvas Print of Paul Ross is because the customer reviews make it the funniest page in the entire history of the internet; it does not necessarily follow from this that I would be interested in purchasing the Paul Ross photo mug or the Paul Ross jigsaw puzzle. But thanks for the suggestions anyway).

CiteULike

Despite, or perhaps because of, its somewhat ridiculous name (did they nick the idea from Spudulike?), I really did like CiteULike. I've now got the "Post to CiteULike" widget installed on my toolbar and have picked up a few citations, which went a lot more smoothly than with Zotero [insert contemptuous snort here]. A few of the features that I liked about this application:

You can see which other CiteULike users have the same references as you, and with one click you can go and have a good nose around in their library
I particularly loved that you can rate each item in your library according to the likelihood that you will use or look at it (including the blunt but probably accurate assessment "I don't really want to read it")
There's a handy little button that lets you write a blog about individual items in your library. I'll probably never use that, but it's a nice feature anyway

Out of the three tools investigated here, CiteULike is probably the most light on features, the least flexible and the least snazzy. But perversely it was the one that I found most charming and the one that I would be most likely to keep using.

Thing 13: Just collaboration (running away with me)

2011-09-15T10:05:00.002+01:00

In this Thing we're looking at three tools that enable collaboration and sharing of documents with others.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a brilliant tool that does everything it claims to easily and smoothly. It's easy to set up (particularly if you already have a Google account), using it to create and edit documents is nice and intuitive, and likewise sharing and controlling access to your documents is a cinch.

I doubt, however, that I'll be using it very much, mainly because I'm not sure if most of the people I work and collaborate with are also Google Docs users. This brings us to one of the problems of collaborative working: everybody has to be using the same tools and applications for things to be shared effectively. At work we have a shared drive where all communal documents are stored. This is where people save documents that they want others to have access to, and it's the first place people look for useful documents. To use Google Docs instead of, or running in tandem with, this would, I think, be difficult. On the other hand, I can see how Google Docs would be useful for collaborating with people from different institutions or geographical areas, so I will certainly keep it in mind for future use.

Dropbox

I had similar misgivings about Dropbox, in that it seems to be solving a problem that I already have solutions for. If I want to transfer documents and files I tend to use a USB stick or email them to my web-based email account (I've also got some cloud-based storage space, which I never use, as part of this account). I wasn't sure that I needed any alternative or additional tools to achieve this.

Nevertheless, I gave Dropbox a go, and found the experience so whizzy that I think it will now become my preferred application for transferring files. Setting up an account was incredibly easy and quick - as in it took nano-seconds, so quick that it had been accomplished before I even realised what was happening. I used it to store my PDR documents so I could work on them at home (because I'm that much of a girlie swot) and was very impressed with the way documents you edit on one computer are magically synchronized so that they are updated on other computers where you also have the client installed. Dropbox is one of those applications that works so incredibly well I can only assume it is powered by Voodoo! or something.

As with Google Docs, I'm not sure how many of my acquaintances outside of cpd23 are Dropbox users, which limits the collaborative possibilities somewhat. Nevertheless, if I ever need to share any documents with people who happen to have a Dropbox account, then I'm right on it.

Not the contents of my Dropbox, unfortunately
(Photo by Mr Thinktank)

Wikis

I've recently used and added details to the Library Day in the Life Wiki when I took part in Round 7 of that project. I must admit that I felt slightly trepidatious when doing so: the scope of the Wiki - the fact that it's an international project with hundreds of users - made me more worried than usual about accidentally hitting the wrong button and erasing other people's contributions. And in fact somebody did manage, accidentally I'm sure, to erase mine and others' entries so that they had to be re-added. This suggests another problem with collaborative tools: as innumerable locked Wikipedia pages testify, you can't guarantee that everyone involved will play nicely or competently with the information displayed in the Wiki. However, I'm willing to concede that this is a problem with the act of collaborating itself, rather than the tools used to enable that collaboration.

As a result of this Thing, I have started thinking about how I could use Wikis to share training and information documents with others in my workplace. In particular, the work I do with our institutional repository generates large amounts of documents and information - user manuals, correspondence with authors and publishers, meeting minutes and training notes - that are currently scattered throughout several folders on the shared drive and in the repository's email inbox. It would be useful to bring all of this information together in one place so that everyone who works on the repository can view, amend and add to it as necessary.

I've looked briefly at PBWorks and MediaWiki in preparation - the former looks slightly more user-friendly and simple to set up (and is free for librarians), so I will be investigating this one further. I have a horrible suspicion that the gravitational pull of the shared drive will be too great to overcome and that after a couple of weeks I might be the only the person looking at and contributing to the resulting Wiki, but I will push on regardless, as I do think planning and setting it up will be a useful exercise in its own right.

Thing 12: Social media reflections

2011-09-02T21:45:00.001+01:00

As discussed in previous posts, I have long been a social media naysayer. A combination of Luddism, privacy-lust and the probably erroneous belief that I have better things to do with my time has kept me away from Twitter, Facebook et al. Since I've been taking part in cpd23 that attitude is slowly changing, although in truth it's really only Twitter that has captivated me so far (but I do still intend to make the time to join and participate in LinkedIn, LISNPN and CILIP Communities at some point).

The advantages of social networking

The major draw of networking online is that you can do it at home, sprawled on the settee, wearing your most comfortable, least aesthetically pleasing jogging bottoms. Er, not that I do that, of course. I just mean that you could. If you wanted to. Ahem.

Could you attend the AGM of your local CILIP branch "dressed" like this? Well, could you??

But there are some situations where the usefulness of social media is not just based on the fact you don't need to change out of your jim-jams to participate.

If, as I currently do, you work in a large organisation, in an established sector or branch of the profession, and your professional specialism is fairly common, then you are probably well-catered for in terms of physical-world networking and development opportunities. You have colleagues to talk to and ask for advice or help. There may be national and regional conferences you can attend. If you're a CILIP member there will most likely be a special interest group for you, with newsletters and training courses and the opportunity to get involved on the committee, if that's your bag. In this situation, social media platforms are a nice addition to your professional life, but not absolutely essential.

However, I've also worked in a job where I was the only librarian/information professional in the building, in a sector where there were only a handful of other people across the country performing a similar role to me (and they were in Leeds and Luton). In circumstances like these, without a ready-built community, you either have to do without or create your own, and social media can be the most effective, cost-efficient (and sometimes just the only) way to do this.

Any disadvantages?

But of course.

In some ways, the convenience of social networking is also its biggest drawback. A real-world conference or meeting is a limited-time event: you turn up, with a bit of luck you manage to prise yourself away from the coffee urns and pluck up the courage to have conversations with a few other people, and then you go home. You might follow up the meeting with a bit of note-writing or email chit-chat with the other participants, but essentially all of your networking activity is confined to the actual day of the event itself.

Not so with online networking: the conversations on Twitter and on the forums are always going on, and with them the possibility that you might have a new message or a new follower/friend. The fact that you never know when one is going to pop up only makes the urge to keep checking more compulsive, even when you really should be doing something more pressing or productive instead. If your social media accounts are based largely around your professional contacts and interests, you might even be able to kid yourself that you are doing something productive, even though you are just aimlessly passing time by repeatedly switching between browser tabs and pressing f5.

(NB: In the preceding paragraph, every time I say "you" I do, of course, mean "me".)

There's a nice little article here, from Oliver Burkeman's excellent "This column will change your life" series in the Guardian, on the effects of such "intermittent variable rewards", including how they can be used to reinforce positive behaviours. Ultimately, however, I don't know if the only way to overcome this compulsive activity is to get a grip and turn the bloody laptop off.

Can't look away?
(Picture by jypsygen)

Does social networking really help to foster a sense of community?

I'm not entirely sure what this question is getting at, but if I were to bring my own preconceptions to the table I would guess that it's asking how concrete, long-lasting and ultimately meaningful are the connections made via social media? If introducing yourself to someone is as simple as clicking a "follow" button, how much of a relationship can you really build? I must confess that, among the people I follow on Twitter, the ones I feel most connected to and am most likely to converse with are those I have met or worked with in real life.

Of course, connections made via social media can be reinforced if you later meet your online friends in person. I've booked a place at the Repositories Support Project's Autumn School, which takes place in a couple of months' time, and one of the things I'm most looking forward to is meeting people who I currently only know via Twitter.

A-meeting and a-tweeting new people

As a final part of this Thing we are encouraged to make some new contacts on any of the social media platforms we're using. I am gradually increasing the number of people I follow on Twitter. When I first joined during Thing 4 I wondered how it was possible to follow hundreds of people without getting lost among the flow of information and conversation. However, I'm currently following 183 people or organisations and have not found it too overwhelming at all (or perhaps many of the people I'm following just don't tweet very often), so I will keep following interesting and funny accounts as I come across them. Once I'm following 500 or so people I reckon it will be time to start using Twitter's list feature to manage them, so that's a learning activity for the future.

Library Day in the Life, Round 7

2011-08-18T21:23:00.003+01:00

The Library Day in the Life project is now in its seventh round. Twice a year (in January and July) librarians, library staff and library students from all over the world are invited to record what they do during their working day or week, using blogs, Twitter, audio or visual tools, or anything else they fancy. Round 7 took place between 25th and 31st July 2011.

I first heard about the project, via a Tweet from organiser Bobbi Newman, a couple of weeks before Round 7 kicked off. Since I was new to it I thought I would observe rather than participate this time. However, once Monday 25th July came round and the hashtag #libday7 began ticker-taping through my Twitter feed I couldn't resist jumping in and taking part myself.

Another reason I decided to take part is that Round 7 coincided with the final week of my existing job (before starting a new job in the same library on 1st August) so I thought it would be a nice idea to record this; then, when Round 8 takes place I can do the same for a week in my new job and see how the two compare.

I work as a library assistant in the Technical Services section of Newcastle University's Robinson Library. (My new job will be as a senior library assistant in the same section). Technical Services is the section of the library that deals with the acquisition, processing and organising of the library's collections and resources (both physical and digital).

There are three main parts to my job:

Checking and editing records of publications in the University's research management system, called MyImpact.
Working in an administrative capacity on the University's institutional repository. This involves checking the copyright conditions on files that academics have uploaded, to make sure we can make them available from our repository. Often this necessitates contacting publishers to request permission or ask for clarification of their policies.
I'm also part of the periodicals and ejournals team, where we are responsible for making sure that the library's catalogue and e-journals list are up-to-date and accurately reflect our actual print holdings and electronic journal access.

Here are some examples of what I got up to during Round 7 of Library Day in the Life.

Monday to Friday mornings

Mornings are mainly devoted to MyImpact tasks. As well as checking and correcting the bibliographic details of publication records held in the database, this role involves a lot of email support to the users of the system (the University's academic staff) - we respond to emailed queries about the system, help users add records for new publications and flag any issues or bugs with the Development and IT teams. The summer months, when many users are on holiday, are often a bit quieter in this regard and so it was for most of this week. We usually get a deluge of queries at the end of the holidays and the start of the new academic year, particularly from new staff who need to add their publication lists to the system, so this is a bit of a "lull before the storm" scenario. I took advantage of this relative calm and celebrated with a biscuit.

Monday afternoon

I spent some time on a task I've been working on recently which involves removing from the library catalogue redundant ebook records (i.e. those that had not been borrowed by users during our trial subscription to various packages and will therefore not be added to our permanent collection). I was disappointed to note that nobody had borrowed The story of Judas Priest: defenders of the faith, and now never would. With thousands of records to check and delete this was quite a large job. As I had other things to work on, my line manager later decided to share the work among other staff, taking it off my hands. I celebrated with a biscuit.

No love for the Priest? For shame, library patrons, for shame...
(Photo by opethpainter)

I also spent a couple of hours this afternoon shadowing two of my colleagues in the periodicals team, who were showing me and another colleague how to submit and record claims for missing/late journal issues with our journal suppliers. This is so in future we will be able to cover this task in case of staff holiday or absence. We managed to find some written instructions on how to do this, in a now-several-years-old staff manual, so although they were useful we will need to update them.

Tuesday morning

On Tuesday morning my manager asked me to sit in on a meeting she was having about the University's repository. One of our assistant subject librarians is responsible for advocacy of the repository (encouraging academic staff to use it and deposit their publications, basically) and she is currently putting together a questionnaire to find out more about our academics' knowledge and take-up of open access options when publishing their research, and about their opinions of our repository. As part of my job involves adding material to the repository, or helping/advising academic staff who are doing so, my manager thought it would be useful for me to attend as well. We spent some time discussing what information we wanted to find out from our respondents and between the three of us we came up with an initial draft for the questionnaire. We also discussed when and how to disseminate it (we're going to use the Bristol Online Surveys platform). Overall, we made a good start on putting something together. I celebrated with a biscuit.

Tuesday and Thursday afternoon

One of our tasks in the periodicals department is sending issues of print journals to the bindery to be bound together as single volumes (and then receiving them again when they are returned from the bindery). We are pretty lucky at Newcastle University in that we have an in-house bindery; as I understand it, many university libraries don't and have to send their binding away to be done off-site, which obviously takes more time, probably costs a lot more, and means any mistakes or omissions can't be corrected easily.

Check in and shelving staff remove issues that need to be bound from the library's shelves. Our job is to check that the parts or issues for each volume are there, are in the right order and are banded together. For some journals there may be a separate index, or maps or other supplements, so we need to make sure that these are included as well. We update the location for each volume on the library's holdings system and online catalogue to show that the items are currently at the bindery, so that users or library staff looking for missing issues on the shelves know where they are. Then we load them on to a trolley and once that's full (which takes about 50 or 60 volumes) we send it down to the bindery.

When I first started in this job about 18 months ago, there was a large backlog of volumes (about 12 shelves' worth) waiting to go to the bindery. We (both me and my colleagues in the periodicals department and bindery staff at the other end) have gradually chipped away at these over a period of months (a bit of a Sisyphean task since, as fast as we can clear the shelves, new volumes are being added all the time). On Thursday afternoon I finally managed to catch up so that the shelves were entirely empty - woo, and indeed, hoo. I celebrated with a biscuit.

Wednesday afternoon

An academic had emailed me 10 files (of the full text of some of her journal articles) for inclusion in our repository, so I spent some time this afternoon checking these. Most publishers will not allow the final published version of their articles to be deposited, but will allow some form of the author's original manuscript, so we have to check uploaded and emailed files carefully to make sure we have the permitted version. We use the very helpful RoMEO database to help us check the specific details of journals' and publishers' copyright and archiving policies. Happily, in this case the academic had sent usable versions of her articles and, after attaching cover sheets to give the citation and publisher details for each article, I was able to upload 8 of the 10 files immediately (one article had been published in a journal that didn't allow deposit at all and another specified an embargo period of 12 months before we can include it in our repository). I emailed the academic to thank her for the files and to let her know what we had been able to deposit.

Friday afternoon

A large chunk of Friday was spent preparing for my new job by tidying up my drawers (er, my desk drawers, that is) and moving paperwork and files to my new desk (which is only a couple of metres away from my old desk). I'm quite an organised person so thankfully there wasn't too much rubbish to sift through. Unexpected finds included one box of herbal tea bags with a best before date of January 2007 (do not want) and one chunky Kit Kat I'd forgotten about (definitely do want).

No thanks

(Photo by clifico)

Yes please!

(Photo by Aline Rebelo)

Later on Friday, ensconced at my new desk, I spent some more time checking full text files that had been uploaded to the repository. Most of these were book chapters or conference papers rather than journal articles so they necessitated a bout of emailing publishers and copyright holders to check permissions. As I bewailed on Twitter at the time, Friday afternoon is perhaps not the best time to have been doing this.

So that was my week. As I left the library I celebrated by, er, pulling the handle off the door as I was leaving the building. Then I got home and celebrated the beginning of the weekend with a biscuit.

Thing 11: Mentor as anything

2011-08-14T18:53:00.000+01:00

Jack Donaghy: That's how you should dress for work by the way.

Liz Lemon [wearing a pink Chanel suit]: Yeah, if I was President of the Philippines.

Jack: Lemon, I'm impressed! You're beginning to think like a businessman.

Liz: A businesswoman.

Jack: I don't think that's a word.

Jack: Lemon, I would like to teach you something. I would like to be Michelle Pfeiffer to your angry black kid who learns that poetry is just another way to rap.

I would totally be on board with the whole "getting a mentor" idea if, and only if, 30 Rock's Jack Donaghy could be that mentor. (Short-haired, salt-and-pepper version preferred over slicked-back, weird chestnut dye job version, ta). Failing this, I fear I may have to give this Thing a miss.

It's not that I can't see the benefits of having a mentor: having someone willing to share their experience, knowledge and advice with you and take an interest in your professional development sounds great. And in fact there are people I have worked with in the past and that I currently work with who I admire and try to emulate (in what I hope is a non-creepy way), so I have certainly learned and taken advice from my colleagues and managers at various points in my career.

It's just that the hurdle of having to ask the question out loud is insurmountable: the very thought is making me cringe myself inside-out. I could no more utter the words "Will you be my mentor please?" than I could dunk my head in a bucket filled with those stringy black poo-bits you scrape out of raw prawns.

There's no way I'm searching for an image to illustrate that last sentence, so here's a picture of a hamster holding a cocktail umbrella instead.

On the other hand, I feel more comfortable with the notion of arranging a mentor for my CILIP Chartership. I think it's because the prospective mentors have volunteered to take on the role, and this, coupled with the fact that there are published guidelines for both mentors and mentees, serves to formalise the relationship, giving it a definite purpose and end-goal. And, happily, it also makes me feel considerably less self-conscious about asking. At least, that's what I'm hoping, since I intend to be doing just this when I register for Chartership in a few weeks' time.

Thing 10: Career, my dear

2011-08-08T21:13:00.000+01:00

In Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, the main character, Rob, is asked by his exasperated girlfriend to compile a list of his ideal jobs. (Rob is currently the owner of an independent record shop, but is undergoing something of a personal and professional crisis.) The suggestions he comes up with - NME journalist 1976-1979, producer for Atlantic Records - are all completely impractical and/or temporally impossible, and he and his girlfriend decide he is probably better off staying where he is.

I feel much the same way about me and librarianship. If I had to choose my ideal job, it would be a dead heat between "roadie for Girlschool" and "taste tester for Fox's biscuits". (In my more ambitious moments I imagine combining the two: perhaps I could spend my days at the Fox's factory while moonlighting with Girlschool; or maybe I could take my biscuit samples on the road with me and get the rest of the crew to help me taste them.) However, vacancies for these roles do not come up very often - and anyway, I'm not sure the hours would suit. In their absence, I have always looked to working in libraries as the best option out of the choices available to me.

Dear Girlschool, further to your Job Centre advertisement (ref: MI/0002/1357) I enclose a recent CV...

This tendency began right at the start of my career, when I undertook my 6th form work experience placement at Northumberland County Library and very much enjoyed it. Fast forward three and a half years and I was engaged in the traditional pursuits of the aimless recent humanities graduate: a combination of signing on, desultorily applying for completely unsuitable roles from the Guardian's media section, voluntary work and a succession of minimum wage jobs in the service industry.

In desperation I threw myself at the mercy of Newcastle University's careers service. In the course of my research librarianship came up time and time again as the career most suited to my educational background, interests and aptitudes. I decided to bow to the inevitable, and applied to study for a one-year, full-time masters in library and information management (although I'm not sure I would have done this quite so readily had there not been a course - at Northumbria University - close to where I was already living and working). The Northumbria course was unusual in that it did not require students to undertake a year's traineeship before starting. Still, I decided I needed to gain some additional experience of working in libraries so, by the simple expedient of knocking on the door and asking, I got two part-time temporary jobs: one back at Northumberland County Library and one at Newcastle's Literary and Philosophical Society. These were in addition to my existing part-time job working in the book department of a branch of WH Smith.

For the ten months before I began my masters I was working 60-65 hours (not including travel time) spread over a seven-day working week. Looking back I'm amazed I managed to do that without becoming ratty and exhausted, but I did. It helped that I enjoyed all three of my jobs, but I think most of all I was powered along by the sense that I was finally working towards the job and career I was meant to have.

The course at Northumbria was pretty good. Some modules turned out to be more useful than others in my subsequent career, but I met some lovely people and at the end of the year had the qualification I needed to progress. The cpd23 blogpost for this Thing says that

It is becoming more and more necessary for holders of professional library positions in the UK to have or to be working towards a qualification in librarianship.

I would say that the competition for jobs is so great that it is essential to have this qualification even for para-professional, library assistant-type posts, which is what all of my roles have been so far.

I was very fortunate that, while I was completing my masters dissertation, a position became available at the Lit and Phil, and I was able to finish my masters and step straight into a full-time, permanent library job.

The Lit and Phil is a delightful place to work: it's charming and idiosyncratic, and houses a fantastic collection of books. Working on the issue desk you got to chat and exchange jokes daily with members who, collectively, were hugely knowledgeable and interesting and enthusiastic about their specialist subjects. In terms of staffing and organisation, staff numbers were small with quite a flat hierarchical structure. The advantage of this was that I got involved in a wide range of tasks; my main role was as an assistant on the issue desk, but I got to do a whole bunch of other stuff: cataloguing, working with rare and fragile books, giving tours, a bit of IT support, preparing displays and posters. The downside was that opportunities for promotion were rare (a vacancy might arise once a decade, if at all) and it was hard to find the time and money for formal training activities or courses.

After six years at the Lit and Phil I felt it was time for a change of environment. I'm going to have to draw a discreet veil over my next job (it was an information-type role, but not in a library). Suffice it to say that when I came out of the other side 18 months later I'd learnt two valuable lessons:

Don't be a breadhead, man (I'm not, particularly - who really becomes a librarian for the massive amounts of wonga on offer? - but it did ram home the message that no salary increase is worth it if you're not enjoying your job); and
I really, really like working in libraries and am not really comfortable anywhere else. I like being surrounded by books and journals and online resources and the pedantic, nit-picky side of me likes organising and sorting and cataloguing those resources and the sociable, interactive side of me likes helping other people by showing them how to find and use those resources.

Fortunately, it was not long before I managed to get a job at Newcastle University's Robinson Library. This was a six-month contract, cataloguing a number of collections that were moving to the soon-to-be opened Great North Museum. As that was coming to an end, I got another part-time contract job, this time editing records in the University's research management system. Then I got another part-time job working in the Library's Technical Services section. This experience, I would say, is increasingly a feature of the profession (maybe of every profession): full-time, permanent jobs are incredibly hard to come by and you may well have to juggle a combination of part-time and temporary roles for a large part of your career.

This week, after working at the Robinson Library since January 2009, I've started in a permanent role as a senior library assistant in Technical Services. I hope to stay here for a good while yet. Apart from anything else the University and the Library offers lots of opportunities for training and development, and I want to be able to take advantage of these. Once I've completed cpd23 (ten Things down; only, erm, thirteen?!! to go) my next goal is to set off on chartership.

However, I do still subscribe to Rock Chick Monthly and International Biscuit News and am regularly scanning their "situations vacant" pages. Just on the off-chance, like.

Surely everybody's ideal career involves copious quantities of biscuits?

(Picture by Caro Wallis)

Things 8 and 9: Organisation inspiration

2011-08-06T23:25:00.002+01:00

I would describe myself as quite an organised person. I never turn up late for, and certainly never miss, appointments, and I never forget to do whatever it is I should be doing (at least, not the really important stuff anyway). I manage this by having a reasonable memory, supplemented by an elaborate system of notes and to-do lists, scrawled in various notebooks, on loose bits of paper and on wads of post-it notes stuck around my monitor and on my desk at work.

While this works perfectly well, it is not the most efficient system and I am definitely open to alternative methods which are more streamlined and generate less paper waste. Let's have a look at the contestants shall we?

Google Calendar

I have briefly tried Google Calendar for this Thing and, to be honest, I'm not sufficiently impressed to use it permanently. For one thing, I don't really like the look and feel of it compared to the calendar in Outlook (which may just be a question of unfamiliarity). For another, my Outlook calendar is shared with a number of colleagues and I don't want to keep two separate calendars (while I'm sure there is a way to sync a Google calendar with Outlook, I just can't be bothered to find out what it is). I can see how the ability to embed your Google Calendar into a web page is useful if you're an institution or group and want to display your calendar to lots of people but... I don't need to do this.

I also have concerns (this may be unnecessary paranoia on my part - although perhaps that's what they want me to think) about the amount of knowledge Google increasingly has about me and my comings and goings. I use Google Reader as my RSS feed aggregator, so Google knows all about my blog-reading habits; I use Google Blogger as the platform for this blog, so Google knows what I'm writing; I have a Gmail account, which, if I ever actually used it, would mean that Google knew all about my contacts and correspondence. And now I'm going to keep what is essentially an online diary, so Google knows what I'm doing and when and with whom? It's like: back the hell OFF Google, give a girl some space why dontcha?

So I'm afraid, sorry Google Calendar, but it's a no from me.

Evernote

On the other hand... Evernote, you're through to the next round!

I hadn't heard of Evernote before this Thing, but after just a couple of weeks I've fallen for it, and fallen hard. Oh Evernote, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways:

1. You are brilliant simply as a means of creating and editing text documents. I much prefer using Evernote over Word as it saves regularly, syncs my documents so that everything is up to date on both my work and home computers, and is easily searchable. I also find Evernote's notebooks much more easy to organise and control than Windows folders. I've now started a notebook where I keep drafts of all my cpd23 posts and am increasingly using Evernote to create and store work documents as well.

My notebooks and tags in Evernote

2. You've helped me to create dynamic, workable to-do lists. Previously I wrote a daily to-do list by hand in a notebook and crossed items off as I went. Each day's list started on a new page. This worked ok, but was a bit cumbersome, particularly if I didn't finish (or indeed start) a task on the assigned day and then had to squeeze items on to later lists. Referring back to previous days' lists was also what is technically termed "a faff". In Evernote I keep a note called "To do list" that contains a week's worth of daily lists. I can therefore see much more clearly what I've got to do in any given week, and can add, cross-out or delete, and re-arrange items easily. And, again, as I use Evernote on both my home and work computers I have access to the most recent version of the list pretty much whenever I need it. (I don't have a smart phone, but if I did Evernote would be on there too.)

3. Your web clipping tool is fun to use and is an elegant way to save, refer to and search snippets of web sites.

4. Tagging! I love me some tagging - that's why I have over 200 tags in my Last.fm library and wept hot bitter tears the day they withdrew their tag radio stations. I have been diligently tagging all of my Evernote notes because a) tagging is F.U.N. y'all and b) it makes my notes easily findable and sortable (infinitely more so than the mountains of paper notes I previously used).

And there are many Evernote features that I haven't begun to explore yet - you can use it to save photos and scanned images, or audio notes, and you can set it up so that your email is forwarded into Evernote, and you can integrate it with your Twitter account and use it to capture tweets. There are some handy "how to use Evernote" posts here and here, but just Google "I use Evernote to..." for lots more.

Finally, you can even buy Evernote T-shirts! Is it totally sad that I really, really want one? (Actually, I think I know the answer to this already.)

Me in my lovely Evernote T-shirt (NB: may not actually be me)

Thing 7: Join the professionals

2011-08-03T21:13:00.001+01:00

Following Thing 6's discussion of online networking, we now turn to in-person networking and membership of professional groups and organisations.

Professional membership
I am a member of CILIP and have been continuously since I was studying for my library and information MA 11 years ago. I was a student rep for the North East branch of the Career Development Group, then continued to serve on the committee for some time after completing my masters. I edited a couple of issues of the newsletter, took part in sponsored walks, attended the CDG's annual meeting one year, and helped to organise the NE branch's AGM for a couple of years (I sorted out the venue, solely because my then place of work had a suitable meeting room and was handy for train and transport links).

I enjoyed doing it all. I felt like I was making an active contribution to my new profession and got warm fuzzies from the feeling that I was making a difference, however minor. In return I was able to develop and gather practical evidence of a variety of soft skills (organisational nous, communication skills, ability to meet deadlines). I had something to put on my CV that beefed up my day-to-day work experience and evinced a commitment to professional development.

And then my involvement slowly began to wane. For no good reason at all, really. It was quite difficult to get to meetings: the only evening that everybody else on the committee could attend was also an evening that I worked late, and it became a bit of a faff having to leave work 15 minutes early and hoof it across town. I gave up my committee position, but with the vague intention of continuing to take part in one-off activities like the AGM and the charity events, determining that I would reignite my involvement when my work circumstances changed.

That was in 2006.

Oops.

I really would like to become more professionally active once again. I know it's a cliché - indeed I'm wincing a bit even as I type this - but the benefits you derive from professional membership are commensurate with the effort and commitment you put into your involvement. I am hoping to begin chartership later this year (it's next on my professional development to-do list once I've completed cpd23) and obviously taking an active role will be an important part of that.

Handshakefulness: a vital character trait for the aspiring networker

(Picture by AndyRobertsPhotos; available under a Creative Commons Attribution license)

Special interest networking
I occasionally do a spot of networking in the form of attending conferences, training courses and suchlike. At the moment, part of my job involves the day-to-day administration of my institution's open access repository. There are quite a lot of networks and groups developing around repositories and the open access movement in general, perhaps because it's a relatively new, relatively specialised area and we are all learning the landscape together. A lot of networking takes place online, via Twitter and mailing lists. I am a member of UKCoRR, principally so I have access to their very useful discussion list. But there are also regular opportunities for face-to-face meeting. I went to the Repositories Support Project conference Doing It Differently last year and would like to go to some more of their events in the future (time and staff training budget permitting). There is also a group for repository staff at North East universities which meets regularly, and I'll be going to my first meeting in a couple of weeks. I find this sort of contact with other repository practitioners immensely helpful; apart from anything else it is reassuring to hear others' experiences and know that you are not the only person slamming your head onto your desk on an hourly basis as you try to decipher the convoluted legalese that comprises most publishers' copyright and archiving policies.

Going to the pub
Aaah - my preferred method of networking. A couple of weeks ago I went to the north east cpd23 meet-up, organised by Shannon Robalino, to coincide with this cpd Thing. Although I know some other regions' meet-ups were centred around formal activities such as lectures and presentations, ours was a bit more informal and basically involved meeting in a room in a pub. Hence, it was great. I swapped news with a recent colleague who's now working elsewhere, met a bunch of totally new people, and generally had a lovely time. There's talk of doing it again in the future (especially as not everybody who wanted to could make the last one) in which case I will be there bagging a table and providing the pub salad (bag of crisps, bag of nuts, shake together and then tear open bag to facilitate communal consumption).

The sign of a successful networking event

(Picture by curtis.kennington; available under a Creative Commons Attribution license)

Thing 6: Got my mojo networking

2011-07-30T21:30:00.001+01:00

*rushes in, wild of eye and hair* Sorrysorrysorrysorry. I know I am ruinously behind on all of my Things. I offer two, only slightly flimsy, excuses.

First of all, I have recently been applying for (and getting – squeee!) a new job. This meant that time I would have devoted to Thing 5 was instead spent ~~freaking out about~~ preparing diligently and calmly for my impending interview; consequently I am currently running approximately a week behind the programme.

The second reason is that I have never used or signed up for any of the online networks mentioned for Thing 6 and I therefore wanted to spend a bit of time exploring them before writing this post. I realise that I am saying the same about every thing that comes up on this programme – “never used that”; “nope, don’t do that”; “have never even heard of that” – which kind of makes me conclude that it is a ruddy good job I signed up for this as I am expanding my knowledge and armoury of professional tools with every week that passes.

Anyway, enough of my yakking: online networking, let’s boogie.

Facebook
As previously mentioned, I’ve never used Facebook. This is for a variety of reasons: I’m a bit shy; I’m wary of splashing my personal details all across a public domain; and I already spend quite a large chunk of my leisure time piddling around unprofitably on the internet and am reluctant to sign up for what would no doubt be another massive time drain. I take Phil Bradley’s point, made in his discussion of Google+, that as an individual (or institution) you need to be where your peers (or users) are in order to connect and communicate with them – I just don’t want to put it into practice in the case of Facebook. And every story I hear about how hard Facebook makes it to protect your personal details and how difficult it is to extricate yourself from its clutches if you try to delete your profile makes it less and less appealing to me. So, soz, but me and the big FB are Never. Gonna. Happen.

LinkedIn
I’ve been aware of LinkedIn for a while now, but have always assumed that it’s not for the likes of me because:

I thought it was full of business people having business-y conversations about important business things. Business. I had not realised that there is a large population of library and information professionals on there.
I also assumed that it is most useful for freelancers and contract workers – people who change jobs frequently and therefore need to make sure they have a presence where employers can see and get in touch with them.

That said, roles in the librarian and information sector (along with, I guess, every other profession) are increasingly offered on the basis of temporary or fixed-term contracts: I myself have spent the last two and half years working in a succession of temporary posts, albeit at the same organisation. It was also quite an eye-opener to see, during the discussions of personal branding and online presence for Thing 3, that LinkedIn usually comes near the top of any Google searches you might run on yourself or other people.

So all these things considered, I will be signing up to LinkedIn. I need to sort myself out with a suitable profile picture first. I hate having my photo taken and indeed have only done so a handful of times in the last decade, which is why my current picture on Twitter and this blog is a hastily-snapped webcam shot in which the lower half of my face is cunningly concealed behind the 1986 Whizzer and Chips Christmas annual. Alas, this doesn’t quite convey the levels of gravitas and professionalism necessary for LinkedIn, so I will have to procure something a bit more suitable. I also need to tidy up/completely overhaul my CV. I’m going to designate “joining LinkedIn” as a work in progress, which I hope to complete in the next few weeks.

LIS New Professionals Network
I hadn’t heard of this before cpd23, but upon investigation it looks like it will be really very useful. I already recognise a lot of members from their cpd23 blogs and from Twitter. The forums seem pretty active, and the topics cover an interesting mix of practical advice and information about chartership, job opportunities and suchlike, and more general discussion points (is there a “new professionals clique”; how far would you travel or commute for your dream job; erm, do you like drum and bass). I also love the downloadable resources section and will definitely be referring to these in the future. I am not, by even the most elastic definition, new to the library sector (having worked in it on and off for 11 years) and I am currently in a para-professional rather than professional role, but what the hell – they seem like a welcoming bunch anyway. I have therefore registered with this network this week, will probably consult the forums quite frequently and, once I’ve pimped my profile a bit, may even contribute to it.

Librarians as Teachers Network
I don’t do any teaching as part of my current role. Which is not to say that I will never do any teaching in a professional capacity, nor that I couldn’t make use of some of the advice and resources posted here. Therefore, although I don’t think I will join this network at the moment, I have bookmarked the site for future reference.

CILIP Communities
I am a member of CILIP but must admit that I am not currently a very active one, have not even looked at the website for quite some time, and was only vaguely aware that CILIP Communities existed. The forums don’t seem terribly fast-moving and overall I’m not convinced that it offers a great deal of information or networking opportunities beyond those which are already available via other channels, Twitter in particular. However, I haven’t yet delved very deeply into the various individual networks on offer from the site. I will try to find some time do so in the coming weeks and will reserve final judgement until then.

So that’s two networks that I am definitely joining and will hopefully be participating in and two networks bookmarked for further investigation (Facebook, however, can continue to do one). As it turns out, this has been quite a productive and involving Thing for me.

Thing 5(b): Mapper’s delight

2011-07-20T22:24:00.001+01:00

While reading about reflective practice for Thing 5 I was quite taken with the idea, suggested in Sarah Stewart’s presentation, that your reflections don’t necessarily need to be recorded via formal prose – you can use other mediums such as poetry, journals, painting, music, mind maps, or performance if you like.

So that’s why I’ve decided to choreograph, perform and record an interpretative dance expressing my feelings about cpd23 and upload it to YouTube.

Oh, wait, that’s wrong. What I meant to say was, I thought I would try creating a mind map as a way of recording my experiences with the programme so far: what I’ve done, what I’ve learned, things I’ve enjoyed, things I’ve found hard, and what I’m going to do next.

My learning style normally centres quite heavily on the written word: I organise myself by writing down lists, I memorise things by writing them out over and over again, I can understand something much more easily by reading about it rather than listening to someone talk, and I’ve prepared for every exam I’ve ever taken by writing reams of notes and essays. So I thought it might be interesting to try a slightly different approach to my reflection on cpd23.

At work we have access to a piece of mind mapping software called Inspiration, so that’s what I’ve used. And this is what it looks like so far:

(Click thumbnail image above to view full size version)

It looks a bit unwieldy already, but I'm going to continue to add new branches, along with some pictures hopefully, as I progress through the course. I'll post an updated version during the next catch-up/reflection session in Week 8.

Thing 5(a): Thinks can only get better

2011-07-20T21:31:00.001+01:00

Never wanted many things except the chance to learn from my mistakes /

Funny how you never learn but know them when they come around again

Echobelly – Great Things

Yes, I know reflective practice is as much about considering your successes and achievements as it is your mistakes, but I thought what this blog really needs to zhuzh it up a little is a lyric from a much missed (by me if nobody else) second-tier Britpop band.

Reflective practice and I have never been formally introduced; however, over the course of my career path we have occasionally bumped into each other, and done that awkward side-to-side shuffle as we try to get out of each other’s way.

My library master’s course included a work placement. As I far as I can recall through the haze of the intervening – my God – ten years, the written element of that module entailed a reflective account of the student’s experience of the placement, although I’m equally dimly aware that it wasn’t billed as “reflective practice” per se. There was also at least one group assignment where we were required to give a team presentation and analyse the group’s overall success and our individual contribution within it.

The institution where I currently work has a well-developed personal development review scheme: every member of staff has a review at least once a year, where you discuss with your line manager what you’ve done well over the previous year, any difficulties you’ve encountered and what training and development activities you might want to plan as a result over the next 12 months.

So I have been reflective on occasion, but only when forced to. If reflective practice is a cyclical process of:

Greenaway (1995)

then I certainly do a fair bit of planning (as I do like to be as prepared as possible before I undertake any task, mainly to try to eliminate any nasty surprises and so I can factor into my schedule as much time as possible for tea and biscuit breaks). And, much like Betty Boo, I do the “do”. But I don’t think that, truthfully, I do a lot of reviewing: once a task is done, I move on to the next thing.

Why so? Obviously time, and the lack of it, is a consideration. Plus, it’s hard work, man. I’m not a particularly deep thinker: I tend towards the glib and the faintly jokey (regular viewers may have noticed that I can’t resist a good pun – or, for that matter, a terrible one). Examining my feelings, even about work-related matters, and really thinking through the consequences and implications of my actions is not something I care to do if I can help it.

Not being overly familiar with reflective practice, I thought it would be a good idea to go looking for examples. Lots of university websites offer advice on reflective writing, with examples and links to further resources. I found this information from the Learning Centre of the University of New South Wales particularly helpful. The Faculty of Humanities at Manchester University also provides some useful pages on reflective writing and learning. And missrachelsmith’s blog has some excellent examples as she is doing lots of reflective writing as part of her CILIP Chartership.

I can definitely see the value of being a reflective practitioner. I've noted before that I often attend training and then subsequently fail to put into practice or revisit anything I've learnt from it. I would really like to break this habit, because it makes attending even the most interesting and useful training session or conference a complete waste of time. So I will be giving reflective writing a go in the future, and with this blog I have a handy place to record my musings and chart my progress.

Thing 4(c): P-push it: real good?

2011-07-10T17:38:00.000+01:00

I’d not heard of Pushnote before signing up for cpd23 and, judging by others’ tweets and blogs this week, neither had many other people. Moreover, most people seemed to be distinctly underwhelmed by their first interaction with it.

I don’t know - I kinda liked it. It’s quite interesting, although of dubious professional utility, to learn that on Wednesday the third most popular webpage among Pushnote users was Bill Bailey’s message to Metallica. I’m still puzzling out how most of the features work (for example, I haven’t rated or shared anything yet), but I think I’ll continue to fiddle with it for at least a couple more weeks, before probably forgetting all about it. (The icon that appears on your toolbar after you’ve installed the Pushnote add-on is curiously easy to ignore.)

I think Pushnote’s problem is twofold. Firstly, although it’s a truism, to be successful an application like this has to fill a need (sometimes one that users didn’t even know they had until the application came along). RSS feeds obviously do this, in that they eliminate the need to trog repeatedly around the internet visiting your favoured websites and instead deliver new content straight to you. Twitter also does this, by providing a way to converse with others, share links and ask for help or advice, all in real time and in a much more immediate way than other applications.

Does Pushnote work on a need-to-use, as opposed to a nice-to-use, basis? It’s doubtful: there are already plenty of ways to share recommended websites with friends and colleagues. And if you’re a visiting a particular site or page under your own impulse, then it’s just as easy to have a quick look at the site yourself and come to your own conclusions, rather than relying on the comments of a bunch of people you don’t know off the internet.

Secondly, any social networking or sharing tool obviously works better the more users there are to network and share with, and I don’t think Pushnote has reached that tipping point. From the various websites I’ve looked at, even ones that must be heavily visited such as the Guardian’s website and IMDB have not received many comments. In many cases, comments that have been left mainly date from January 2011, when the service was first launched; there are comparatively fewer recent comments, which probably tells its own story.

Lord knows I am nobody’s idea of an early adopter, so it is a bit strange for me to be kicking around in an application that has yet to reach a critical mass of users. I don’t think at the moment that Pushnote is anywhere near as indispensable as Twitter or RSS feeds (or, no doubt, other tools I’ve yet to discover) but I’ll hang on for a little while longer just to be sure.

Thing 4(b): Feed demon

2011-07-10T17:30:00.001+01:00

Google Reader is another tool that I’d never used until this week and which I’m already wondering how I managed without.

Setting it up was fairly easy. At home, running Firefox, it worked like a dream. At work, using Chrome, I hit a bit of an obstacle, as hitting the feed button on web pages seems not to connect to Google Reader but instead returns screeds of XML data. (I gather this is more likely to be Chrome’s fault than mine and is probably fixable using some sort of workaround or extension; but it is slightly vexing that Google’s browser doesn’t work smoothly with Google’s feed reader.)

Anyway, as long as I’m using Firefox I now have numerous feeds set up and am finding it mightily useful, not to say indispensable. I did subscribe to the full feed of all cpd23 blogs but found the constant influx of new, unread material slightly too much, so I deleted that; now I’m picking up selected blogs and websites as I come across them. I am staying on top of my feeds chiefly by skim reading rather than studying each new item in-depth, and “starring” posts that I particularly enjoy or may want to refer back to in future.

I know the problem of information overload is a perennial concern, and I can’t be sure that I won’t fall disastrously behind on my reading – in fact, I’m almost certain I will. I’m kind of relying on the idea that the really important or interesting stuff will be re-blogged or retweeted so much that it becomes almost impossible to miss.

Thing 4(a): Twitter sweet symphony

2011-07-10T17:27:00.001+01:00

I appear to have got a bit carried away writing up this week’s task, so I’ve decided to do three separate posts, to break up the text a bit.

Thing 4 of cpd23 is about current awareness and suggests three tools to help today’s busy information professional keep on top of news and developments. Since at the moment my current awareness activities extend to randomly visiting bookmarked websites and failing to remove my copy of CILIP Update from its polythene wrapper every month, I figure I could do with some help in this area.

First up is:

Twitter

Up until now I have been a Twitter abstainer on the twin assumptions that:

1. It’s full of people broadcasting banalities about their day-to-day business

2. I don’t particularly want to broadcast banalities about my own day-to-day business (and you can read below to find out how that’s working out for me).

However, the point of taking part in this course, and the point of professional development in general, is to discover new sources of information and ways of working, right? Also, the impression I’ve hitherto had of Twitter is that it is solely a means of spewing out your own thoughts; I had never even considered the possibility that it also functions as a sort of news feed, allowing you to receive other people’s opinions and news.

So now I have a Twitter account (@dianajwright). I wish I’d read thewikiman’s 3 essential things to do AS SOON AS you join Twitter before setting it up, since I had comprehensively failed to do any of them. This has since been rectified and I must say that I have really, unexpectedly, enjoyed my first week on Twitter.

I am following an assortment of real-life colleagues, cpd23 participants, other library and information professionals (principally those tweeting about open access and repository issues) and a few media types and famouses. From them I have picked up an astonishing amount of news, ideas and useful links, and I also feel much more engaged with my peers and my profession than before (for example, I don’t think I would have found out about the proposed North East cpd23 meet up, or at least not so quickly, if I wasn’t on Twitter). I am also following a few hashtags and saved searches: #cpd23 (natch), #uklibchat, #libday7 and #openaccess.

In spite of my hatred of the term “profersional” that’s approach I’m taking with regard to my own tweets, partly because a feed of nothing but library/work stuff could end up being a little one-sided and dry, but mainly because, with the zeal of a new convert, I’m finding it too damn hard not to broadcast my every random thought. (It took me just three days to begin tweeting about my lunch and, what’s more, I don’t even care.)

I do have a couple of caveats:

1. I’m still not au fait with all aspects of Twitter etiquette, such as having a direct conversation with another twitterer and properly crediting people via retweets, but I’m sure I’ll pick it up soon enough; and

2. I am a bit concerned about its potentially deleterious effects on my already-ravaged attention span.

Nevertheless, I have found Twitter about a million times more engaging and useful than I anticipated. I will definitely keep using this, at least for the duration of the cpd23 programme, by which time I will probably have a Twitter monkey the size of King Kong on my back.

I can quit anytime I want, right?! (Picture by carrotcreative)

Thing 3: Brand of Gold

2011-07-03T18:48:00.001+01:00

First off: I was totes going to call this post “Brand on the run” until I Googled that phrase and learned that everybody who has ever written an article about branding or marketing has had the same hilarious idea – blast their eyes.

Secondly: from reading other people’s blogs this week I know I’m not the only one who felt a bit sceptical – not to say downright icky – about thinking of myself in terms of my “brand”.

But having read Jo Alcock’s introductory post on the subject I can agree that it is sensible to present yourself in a consistent, distinctive yet professional manner in your online communications. And just as in the real world most people would attend a job interview wearing a smart suit and a polite smile – as opposed to, say, turning up in a “Federal Boob Inspector” t-shirt and belching in the interviewer’s face – so on the internet we’d do well to keep some of the more, ahem, “frivolous” parts of our personality under wraps.

Jo asks us to run a web search of our names and see what results are returned. As I expected, there were almost no results related to me, just a couple of links to a directory I compiled in a previous job and a mailing list including my current work email address. Both are work-related examples, but they are buried in the third or fourth pages of results.

This online absence has been a conscious decision on my part. Ramblings of a Trainee Bookshelf Prowler sums up the reasoning behind this better than I can. Suffice it to say that even in the physical world I am somewhat reserved and private; online, just revealing my first name and a potted employment history on this blog has left me feeling unnecessarily exposed. I’ve never signed up for Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn. I do have a Last.fm profile, which I tend obsessively as though it was my own child, and a LibraryThing profile, which I neglect like an unwanted step-child, but I don’t think you could identify me from anything posted on them.

However, my reading and reflections this week have led me to wonder if maybe I am missing a trick by taking this approach. Among the links to further reading that Jo provides, Danah Boyd and Dave Fleet both suggest that whatever the pitfalls of presenting yourself for public inspection on the internet, declining to do so entirely is not an option – or not an advisible one at any rate. There was also an interesting interview in last Friday’s Guardian with Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, about his new book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. The author has misgivings about the fact that today’s digital information will most likely hang around forever waiting to embarrass our future selves, but even so states:

I don't like digital abstinence. I want us to embrace participation in digital culture and global networks. Just not at any cost.

The internet is where people live and forge relationships for much of the time now and withdrawing from it is like withdrawing from the world.

The good news is that, if I decide to build my online “brand”, I will be starting from scratch and so should be able to implement some of Jo’s suggestions – choose a meaningful user name and if possible use it consistently across all your profiles; decide how much you want your personal identity to overlap with your professional identity – from the off. The bad news is... I’m starting from scratch. I am going to see how this blog evolves over the coming weeks, although at the moment I am quite happy to use it mainly as a kind of personal diary in which I reflect on my cpd23 activities and basically amuse myself. I also see that a future “Thing” is going to cover online networking, where your online identity is obviously of crucial importance, so I expect I’ll be returning to these issues – and possibly trying out some other profiles and platforms – then.

Although... as a final thought for the time being: I wonder if it is ultimately a bit futile to manage your brand too closely, as you try to second guess (often incorrectly) the impression you’re creating on other people. A case in point: a previous commenter referred (in a nice way) to this blog’s title as “girly”; in the real world, I am as ungirly as it’s possible to be while still being in possession of two X chromosomes. Before you’ve typed a word, every little decision you make about your online communications – what platform or software you choose, your user name, blog title, colour scheme – will say something about you, and usually they say different things to different people. So you may as well just do what you like (within reason) and, in the words of many a tedious indie band giving their first NME interview, “if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus”.

Thing 2: Single and Ready to Mingle

2011-06-26T18:18:00.001+01:00

Thing 1 on the 23 Things programme was to create a blog (done). Thing 2 was to have a nose around and comment on some of the other participating blogs.

I’m not naturally sociable and consider myself pretty hopeless at networking (in fact, one of the reasons I’m taking part in this course is to pick up some tips and ideas in this area). As the list of participants swelled alarmingly (there were around 100 when I first clocked in on Monday morning, increasing to about 350 when I got around to creating this blog later on that day, and at the time of writing there are now 576 people taking part) I felt like I was at a party where I knew no-one and was destined to spend the evening hugging the wall while nervously sipping at a lukewarm glass of white wine.

A useful tactic in such situations is to find somebody – anybody – you vaguely recognise and cling to them like a limpet, so I was relieved to spot my colleagues Christina and Louise and made a beeline to say hello to them. Suitably emboldened by these encounters, and by some comments left on my first post, I felt able to venture a bit wider.

Although I fiddled around with the tags on the Delicious list, I mainly picked blogs to visit at random. I was struck by Rhythm & Knowledge’s somewhat meta but very enjoyable post about the self-consciousness engendered by writing a blog and having your potentially cringe-worthy prose open to examination (not least by yourself). The Weeded Librarian and AngleD both touched on the issues of privacy and confidentiality that need to be considered when writing a blog about your personal or professional life; this is something that also concerns me slightly and is one of the things that has stopped me from writing a blog before. Younggeekylibrarian made me feel less guilty about my admission that I attend training and then frequently fail to implement the lessons or advice from that training, and wondered if we may be suffering from information overload, which certainly sounds like a better reason than my previous excuses of incompetence and/or laziness. Odd Librarian Out noted that the tendency to lurk rather than comment on blogs is a strong habit to break – as a perennial lurker myself, I have certainly found this week’s activity challenging but I’m glad to have begun the tiny babysteps from passive reader to active commenter.

On a side note, Dots & Loops is among a handful of people I noticed who are using tumblr to host their blogs. This is a platform I more usually associate with caffeinated teens furiously reblogging animated Harry Potter and Lady Gaga gifs. However, the cpd23 participants using it all appear to be stalwart bloggers who are giving tumblr a go as a bit of an experiment, and it will be interesting to see what use they make of it as a professional tool. For my own part, I am already ruing my choice of Blogger which, even for a blog novice like me, feels a bit clunky and offers mainly unlovely design templates to work with. I intend to faff around with the design and layout of this blog at some point in an attempt to make it a bit more visually pleasing, but at the moment I wish I was hanging with the kool kidz over on WordPress instead. Still, never mind, onwards to Thing 3.

Thing 1: I Started Something I Couldn't Finish...?

2011-06-20T15:02:00.003+01:00

I’ve created this blog initially as a means of following the 23 Things for Professional Development (cpd23) course, although I hope to continue blogging beyond the end of the course in October.

I’ve been working in libraries for 11 years, including a stint in a public library, a very enjoyable six years at this venerable Newcastle institution, and my current role in the Technical Services section of the Robinson Library at Newcastle University.

I’ve decided to participate in cpd23 as a way of booting myself up the backside, professional development-wise. Like many people, I expect, I diligently attend training courses, think “Hmm, that was jolly useful”, then shove the notes and handouts into the bottom of a desk drawer and never refer to them again. So partly this blog will be a place for me to record and reflect on my training and other CPD activities.

I am also hoping to learn more about social networking, web 2.0 technologies and related gubbins. I don’t Tweet, although I do Google others’ Twitter feeds from time to time (top 3 faves: @nulibarts, @feministhulk and @Grantholtfacts). I’ve heard of RSS feeds but if asked to explain them I would merely go red and stammer for a bit. And if you asked me to explain what Pushnote is, I would point to a space just behind your shoulder, gasp “Look! What’s that over there!!” and then scarper. So I’m expecting big things and lots of usefulness from Week 3 and Week 5 of the course (no pressure, cpd23 organisers!).

I’ve toyed with starting a similar blog in the past, but the fear of running out of things to say after three weeks has always stopped me; I hope that having four months’ worth of topics provided for me will give me the impetus I need to get started and then keep going. Meanwhile, the hardest part about doing this blog, so far, has been trying to come up with a snappy, non-stupid title for it (I will leave it for the reader to judge whether I’ve succeeded or not...).