Thing 15: No conferring

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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: 

1. 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
2. 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)