Learning from the elders - Thing 11

I've received so much valuable advice over the years from more experienced colleagues and I hope I've offered similar support to others in turn, all largely on an informal basis.  My formal experiences of being mentored came with chartership and again more recently with the PgCLT, luckily my line manager is an excellent mentor and very generous with her time, and she didn't even have to pay me to say that ;)

I'm heartened to see this included in cpd23 because I've felt recently that there is a distinct and growing gap between older and younger people - not just in librarianship - which I think is sad and unfortunate and not at all beneficial. Perhaps my sensitivity to this is because I'm somewhere in the middle, but the problem seems more acute than ever and I worry for the future if this generational segregation continues.

Finding Your Wings or Floating Dead Yankee

I think that when I finish the PgCLT I may continue with mentoring, both as a mentee and perhaps now acting as a mentor.  The university where I work has a mentoring scheme and it also takes part in the Women in Universities Mentoring Scheme so there are lots of opportunities available.

You don't need a qualification to work in a library do you? - Thing 10

Wow!  Well I've worked in libraries since 1993 so that's a lot of experiences!

Why I chose librarianship as a career can be found here: Library Routes Project 

Where I am now: I'm librarian for Law, Accounting and Finance at a University library.  

 Photo credit: Dead Yankee

I've been in this role since 2001 albeit with changes to subject areas, in the past Law was combined with Computing and now, I've only just taken on Accounting and Finance - things are constantly changing and with mergers within higher education in Wales on the cards they are not going to stop changing any time soon.  I've observed changes in the needs of students and academic staff, changes in library services offered to students and staff, changes in the amount of funding available to provide those services, changes in library and academic staffing, changes in technology, changes in the locations of collections, changes in the location of my desk, you get the idea...

I got here via a Humanities degree, a PgC in Social Science Research Methods, an MSc in Library and Information Management from Bristol, and then I chartered.  I've recently gained FHEA status and I'm currently working towards a PgC in Learning and Teaching.

Next?  I'm planning on winning the lottery so I can go to that beach again...

Lest we forget, anything, ever again - Thing 9

Ah, Evernote, how I love thee, let me count the ways...

I have a terrible memory and I use Evernote quite a bit, I find it especially useful because it is in the cloud and I can access it from my phone, iPad, laptop or various work PCs. I only use it in a fairly basic way, as with all these things, I learn how to use it enough to do what I need to do at the time and then I don't tend to have more time to investigate all the bells and whistles. I have my notes tagged so haven't needed to sort things into folders and I haven't felt the need to connect it to Facebook, Google or Twitter yet.

So how do I make use of it? I use the web clipper to clip web pages, I use it to make notes at meetings and at training events, and recently whilst studying on the train. I make little notes about spending, personal goals and things to do, recipes, you get the idea - I use it for work and personal purposes. I've also taken photos of things while shopping for present ideas, photos of things I want to make, of books I want to read etc

Love that little grey elephant! I think students might find Evernote quite useful too.

I love, I love, I love my Calendar Girl - Thing 8

Oh come on, how can you not remember that Neil Sedaka song?  Or are you a new professional whose musical knowledge only goes back to the 1980s? ;)

Not Neil Sedaka*

I can completely identify with the cartoon juggler in Thing 8 and I am behind with this whole cpd23 thing as I have been juggling eleventy million other priorities.

It took me a while to follow the instructions for making my Google Calendar public because it looked a little different on my screen, not sure why, browser difference maybe? Then after all that, I decided I didn't want to make it public as I don't really use it.  I did add it to my iGoogle homepage though and I added the little weather icons because I thought they were cute, probably not very accurate, but cute.

Our students use Google calendar so I am interested in reading the articles about how libraries are using this to good effect, off to do that now. BTW you can stop singing that song now...

Yeah, yeah, my heart's in a whirl I love, I love, I love my little calendar girl Every day (every day), every day (every day) of the year

*Photo credit Dead Yankee of Rob Halford, Judas Priest

Three is the Magic Number - Thing 7

I'm a member of three professional organisations:

CILIP - I am a Chartered member. Sub-groups I am a member of are UC&R and CDG.
BIALL - My organisation is a member. I am a Committee member of the Legal Information Group.
HEA - I am a Fellow of the HEA.

I like the sound of The Library Society of the World, I will have to investigate that further :)

Tangled Web - Thing 6

I seem to have overlapped my last Thing with this one somewhat, so this will be brief, it's my fault entirely for not looking ahead.

LinkedIn - Yes, I've spent some time this evening fleshing out my profile, I need to update it more regularly and indeed 'optimise' it as suggested by the resources on the cpd23 blog! I'm a member of the BIALL, CILIP and the 23 Things groups there, but have yet to find time to engage with them properly

Facebook - Yes, I have just adjusted this to personal friends and family only, I am a 'fan' of some professional groups there e.g. the HEA. Although I've currently deactivated my account as I'm having a break from it.

I've previously looked at the LISNPN and the LATnetwork and get email updates from CILIP Communities, but once again I rarely find time to make it a priority to visit these online networks because if I am hanging out there, I can't be somewhere else, and that somewhere else usually involves doing some actual work. How to make room for new ones like Google+ is a big challenge and I now wonder what happens to more traditional means of communication such as newsletters and jiscmail mailing lists? They still exist, do they still have value?  What do we give up in order to be able to engage with what is new?

Photo credit: Dead Yankee

...through a glass, darkly.* Thing 5

Reflecting - what have I learned so far from cpd23?
In essence: be selective, there are not enough hours in the day!

Thing One, Two and Four

Through my earlier blogging experience I've learned that I am not an avid or consistent diary keeper/list maker/recorder of details unlike some who appear to be natural cataloguers/record managers.  I like to be more spontaneous and creative, although I do have a terrible memory so recording details may be a habit I should try to cultivate.  I seem to think there are many more hours in the day than I have the energy to make use of.  I have a butterfly mind and want to have a go at what I can see everyone else is doing, I am learning to be more selective! I have been tardy in applying my blogging skills to work, but I've never been able to make it a priority in a busy work week. I am observing how others are doing this successfully however, so there may be a change here in time. I've learned I can write reasonably well and try to have a creative approach to this so that readers hopefully find something of interest to read.  I've also learned that I know quite a bit about blogging and have enjoyed helping colleagues to get to grips with all the jargon.

I've been on Blogger since January 2006, when I joined the crafting blog community and posted there until April 2010 when I dipped out. I still follow other craft blogs but just don't have time to actually craft at any speed in order to have something fresh to write about regularly, to take decent photographs of each project, upload and edit them and write interesting blog posts about the projects and read others' blogs and leave comments on them, so I decided to let my craft blog go.  I'm now writing this blog and following other work related blogs instead, the balance has shifted.  I used to use bloglines and then switched to iGoogle to manage my RSS feeds.

I've been on Twitter since Feb 2009, firstly using it as a personal tool, now leaning more towards a professional approach for connecting with other librarians, lawyers and academic staff and students. As a result of the cpd23 programme I'm in the process of reviewing who I follow, to regain some quality control and focus. I still don't feel I'm using Twitter to best advantage, although this may be due more to my dislike of the cult of self-promotion and simply finding the time in hectic work days.

Other social media channels:

I've been on Facebook since 2010, but I've currently deactivated my account and am having a break from it, I've also made it just personal friends and family, in an effort to regain some privacy.

I'm not yet on Google+ my strategic approach to this is that I prefer others to investigate first, then I learn from their tips and tricks.

I've learned I have a serious love/hate relationship with all social media, I go through phases of communicating and then being quiet.

Thing Three

Still find this rather abhorrent, so probably the less said about it the better.

Since previous posts - I haven't had time to investigate Pushnote and I didn't need IS help to download and install Chrome at work - hurrah!

Photo credits: Dead Yankee

Reflective Practice Generally

It's a constant challenge to find the time to reflect on practice, but we've always been encouraged to do it as a natural part of a professional approach.  We have an internal newsletter where we are encouraged to reflect upon and write about cpd events, but it seems to have lost focus over the years and so this seems to be a chore now rather than being beneficial.  The newsletter has largely been superceded by email which is quicker to inform staff of changes to procedure etc and blogging which offers a more interesting and personal platform for reflection.  We also discuss cpd events at meetings and at appraisal too. An example of taking action following a cpd event is that I set up a 'Reflecting on Teaching' meeting for me and my colleagues following 'Librarians as Teachers' held at Warwick. Finally - I do try to ask myself this question at work  - how can we apply this here?

To do: follow some of the links to the reflective practice resources, would be interested to know how you make the time for RP?

*1 Corinthians 13:12 and many other works.

Waving not Drowning - Thing 4

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? T.S. Eliot, The Rock

I'm @glamlawlib on Twitter and have found it very useful for dipping into conferences when it's not possible to attend and for generally positive, often motivational tweets from fellow librarians about exciting things they're working on or news items that are interesting or sometimes just plain daft tweets, which can give a lift to otherwise challenging days.  

I've recently started to prune how many people I follow to be more selective, using JustUnfollow and while I do follow a mix of professional and personal tweeps, I'm moving more towards just the professional and am considering setting up another account for personal stuff, once again, much like most academics do. If you are trying to persuade academics of the usefulness of Twitter there is an interesting blog post from BishopBlog which I favourited on Twitter via @juliadesigns.

I've still not got the hang of live tweeting at events myself and I still wonder how people can apparently concentrate on work and tweet at the same time, I just dip in and out a couple of times a day, so if there are any tips on this I would be very interested! I am missing a gene!

My RSS feeds are running to well over 1000 feeds of personal and professional items, I use iGoogle to manage them and need to prune these as well. My friend is the 'Mark all as read' button, I can feel some gardening coming on!

Pushnote is new to me, but I'm wondering how I might use that as well, what with the deluge from Twitter and RSS.  Will investigate when I've got Chrome installed on my work PC, this will require an IT intervention (ugh!).

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go. - Dr Seuss

If you've read this far you deserve a nice, relaxing picture, enjoy!

Photo credit Dead Yankee

Airbrushed Out - Thing 3

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."  Orwell, 1984.

Photo credit Dead Yankee

I am a person, I am not a product. I have No Logo.

One of the reasons I wanted to be a librarian was because I loved the fact that there was a place that provided all-comers with access to information, that pretty much the whole of human knowledge and creative endeavour was available for free or at little cost to anyone, loaned without judgement or censorship. Anyone could educate themselves at a public library and many did. At the time it was also one of the only places left in the built environment that contained no advertising and no one was trying to exploit anyone or make a profit from them by selling them things they didn't need.

That was then and this is now. When you have been knocking about the Internet since 1994 you develop an understanding of the etiquette involved in online communication. At the beginning there was just orange text on a black screen and everyone was anonymous, now people publicly share 'almost' everything.  Just because you can doesn't mean you should. I remember the first time I saw a death notice on someone's personal blog and seeing those still makes me very uncomfortable. I observed the difference in American openness and British reserve and the all levels in between.

I'm sorry but I'm not vain enough to do a vanity check.

I mention my personal interests online, I have nothing to hide and if an employer decides not to employ me because of something controversial that I've said online then that is fine too, I probably wouldn't want to work for that employer anyway.  People will misjudge you no matter how contrived your personal online presence. I also appreciate seeing people online in all our wonderful, mixed up, messed up, endearing humanness, wouldn't it be boring if we were all trying to project an image of perfect professionalism, all the time?  Different perhaps for younger generations doing their growing up online, I can see a need for guidance there.

Having said all that, I do however see the need to promote the services and resources that a library offers and that we as librarians help people use on a daily basis. I'm all for reaching out to people, we've always done that whether it was putting up a poster to advertise a workshop back in the good old days or using all the means of communication that the social web now offers.

***This post is dedicated to all the librarians of the world who do not have an online presence, you are still doing valuable work, you are not forgotten.***

What do you think of it so far? (Thing 2)

After struggling to be able to comment on blogger blogs and finally fixing the problem by switching from IE to Firefox, I managed to leave a few reciprical comments. So many blogs and so little time! It's nice that the programme has attracted so many people, but phewee that's one hell of a reading list! I will have to investigate a few at a time, over time, otherwise it's completely overwhelming.  This is one of my big bug bears with blogging - (all the b's!) and  it has to be quality over quantity every time for me and it's essential to be selective in composing posts, reading and commenting, otherwise you simply drown in it all.  There are simply not enough hours in the day. So, as Eric would say, what do you think of it so far?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deadyankee/5340628620/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Blogging for Bliss - free book PIF offer!

While reflecting and thinking about blogging for cpd23 I found myself wanting to refresh my understanding of purpose and good practice. I then remembered I had actually written a guide myself (doh!) but not for LIS journals but instead for the British Patchwork and Quilting! I figured you guys had this topic covered in the LIS journals and your own blogs and websites and my own blog at the time was a crafty one.

Anyhow when I wrote that article I bought the book 'Blogging for Bliss' by Tara Frey, which I am just revisiting and is still in Amazon's top three books for blogging. It contains some very pretty images and some good advice that can easily be applied to blogs of all types. The caveat to this reccommendation is, it's very girly so perhaps not great for you guybrarians I'm afraid, unless you like pink and vintage, in which case it'll be right up your street :)

After I've finished my catch-up reading and sharing with colleagues, how about I lend this book to you? And then when you've finished with it, you mention it on your blog and offer to send it on to someone else?This is in the PIF 'pay it forward' tradition and I like the idea of releasing a book into the wild and seeing how it travels. If you like the sound of this and want to be included leave a comment with your contact details on this post and I'll put all names in a hat (random number generator) and draw out a first recipient next weekend. You'll then need to also follow whoever receives it to see when it is next on offer :)

I'm not onto Thing 2 yet, so will be visiting some more of you soon, thanks to my:
2 followers - Folk Fan and Gemcpd23
1 commenter - lynnelibglamtwin

#cpd23

Originally I started this blog as a place for reflection when studying for a PgCLT, well you can see how that went! I'm now expanding it to include: http://cpd23.blogspot.com/ and other work related learning.

One of my main problems with blogging is maintaining enthusiasm for it, I've created several over the years for different purposes, but I find it time consuming to create worthwhile posts, read others blogs and then the whole 'quid pro quo' of comments is also an issue, especially when there are so many other priorities (work and home). I suspect it is prioritisation and time management that is the real issue, not the blogging per se.  So having said all that I'm really looking forward to #cpd23and this old lag is hoping to get some positive tips from new professionals and others who are all dedicated and enthusiastic librarians and seem to use blogging and other tools to great effect.