Goodbye and hello

Thank you for reading over the last 6 months. I'm now saying goodbye to this blog and starting afresh over at The Toast in the Machine. Please join me!

Thing 23: reflection (c)

Time to reflect on the programme as a whole and on what I want to do next, then.

I've never done a professional development programme entirely online before and this format (or rather I in relation to the format) had both strengths and weaknesses:

Strengths: could do it in my own time and at my own pace; highly interactive and hands-on; informal; participatory; plugged into my existing social networks.

Weaknesses: could (fail to) do it in my own time and at my own pace; isolated physically from other participants if not electronically; easy to 'cheat' and/or misunderstand instructions.

So while it was great to be introduced to new tools and techniques (and people), it was also easy to avoid engaging more deeply with Things that I didn't like the look of (eg. Thing 11, Thing 21). As I said in my very first post I am a lazy article sometimes, prone to short-cuts and half-measures. A flexible learning programme without deadlines or a trainer/leader breathing down my neck is brilliant for creativity, but does risk playing to that side of my personality...

What next?
I'm thrilled that I have found practical applications for many of the Things covered and will be continuing to use them (Evernote, Jing, wikis, Prezi). I also want to keep up some sort of regular reflective practice - I'm getting busier and busier at work so this is both more difficult and more important than ever. Blogging has been a good way to do this during cpd23, but I think I'll probably start afresh rather than continue here.

I'm not quite ready to do a Personal Development Plan yet, but I will report back if and when I come up with something. And when I have a new blog, possibly!

Photo by Jennerally on Flickr

Thing 23: reflection (b)

My cpd23 journey as a Wordle:

Apart from being slightly distressed by what the frequency of the word 'really' says about my prose style, I think it looks about right, and is a good aide-memoire to what was covered. Onwards to full-blown reflection shortly...

Thing 23: reflection (a)

It's taking me a while to get round to a proper evaluation of the CPD23 programme, partly because I've been really busy and partly because I want to do it justice.

In the meantime, I thought I would share my 'six word story' summing up my feelings about the programme. Which would be something like 'thinking, doing, lots of warm fuzzies'.

In slightly more words (25 to be precise) it was a nice combination of conceptual/psychological exploration and experimentation with practical tools, and there was a great feeling of support and sociability throughout.

Some updates

Before I complete the programme with a final(?) reflective post for Thing 23, here's a couple of updates on earlier Things:

1. Prezi (Thing 17)
Last week we gave our annual library induction presentation (to two groups of about 80 students each) and used our new Prezi for the first time. To be honest it was a bit of a struggle making it fit with our Cephalonian method of having questions thrown at us from the audience, but luckily we had an accomplished mouse-tamer on the team to navigate around the different circles of the presentation... I managed to watch some of it from the back when my part of the presentation was finished and although we did occasionally fall into the Prezi traps of a) having bits of one section visible when we were talking about another, and b) zooming around too much, overall it looked far nicer than our old Powerpoint and I think all the fiddle was worth it.

2. Wikis (Thing 13)
I've been itching to create a wiki and finally I went ahead and did it even though I wasn't sure whether anyone else was going to participate. It's a Wikispaces wiki for guidelines, tips, resources etc on maintaining the library's social media presence. At the moment this translates to 'that stuff Archel does on Twitter which nobody else gives two hoots about' but I'm hopeful that other people will eventually contribute and that if we do branch out into other social networks it will become genuinely useful. As a true child of Web 2.0 I like the nice clean format, the WISIWYG editing and the way it's let me liberate some of my notes/knowledge/links from a) my hard drive and b) my brain.

Thing 22: volunteering to get experience

My kneejerk reaction to this Thing is to post something along the lines of 'I can't afford to work for free, I have a family to support etc'. But when I thought about it a bit more I realised that I have been doing just that for many years, just not in a library context. Since I graduated in 1999 I have worked as an arts administrator for a local literature festival, set up a creative writing website, written features and reviews for poetry journals and arts blogs, proofread journal issues and sifted through slush piles, and of course written and performed poetry. All for free. I don't think of it as volunteering to get experience, though, so much as using my spare time to work on things that I love. And much as I love being a librarian, I've never loved it enough to take an unpaid position. Or maybe I've just been lucky enough not to need to.

My feeling is that it's better to take a low-paid position in a workplace or area that you're interested in and then put yourself forward for higher things than to work completely unpaid, but I've certainly encountered the 'lack of experience' Catch-22 in applying for professional positions and can see how volunteering could help break out of this. I think for myself I've just been unambitious/patient enough to hold out, but then I've been fortunate enough to have jobs that I really enjoyed even if they weren't advancing my career at any great pace.

Photo by CommunityFriend on Flickr

Thing 21: promoting yourself in job applications/interviews

I thought Maria's post was excellent and useful, but I'm still bowing out of this Thing to some extent. I really really like my current job so I'm more interested in developing the role and myself within it than I am in looking for outside opportunities. I do believe that it's worthwhile to consider my interests and strengths, and to reflect on my skills and experience, even at times when I'm not in the job market. But I was almost made redundant two years ago and I'm still a bit traumatised from the experience, which means I can't bear to work on my CV or anything associated with job-hunting, interviews etc, to be honest. On the one hand, readiness is all. On the other hand, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Photo by marcmo on Flickr

Thing 20: careers/Library Routes Project

I have now dutifully added my Thing 10 blog post to the Library Routes wiki, which is a lovely thing really. I like that people talk about their journeys with such enthusiasm, and how different each person's path has been (is this diversity specific to librarianship I wonder? Maybe it's because there are so many different ways of *being* a librarian/information professional that there are at least as many ways of becoming one...)

I don't have career tips or insights really, but I love my job and I can see myself staying in libraries for the rest of my working life, if they'll have me. And although we're facing cuts and deprofessionalisation in many of the services that we traditionally think of as employing librarians, I would hope this doesn't put people off who are thinking of entering the field - wherever information needs managing, we'll be needed!

Thing 17: Prezi and Slideshare

Prezi
I've seen some excellent Prezis over the past few months (as well as a few seasick horrors), and luckily my colleagues in our loose library induction working group turned out to be just as keen as I was to try creating our own. (In fact it was Ned Potter's guide that really swung it.)

This will be the third year I've been involved in our annual induction, which has two main components: a presentation which incorporates Cephalonian method questions, and a library scavenger hunt/quiz. In some ways Prezi is a natural fit with our existing presentation, because it isn't linear - the slides are grouped together based on different aspects of the library service, but within these groups the questions could be asked in any order. And I think Prezi will help make the structure more transparent - it's quite dense in information but if we can show where things fit within different 'circles' of the library experience then it might help new students feel less overwhelmed.

On the other hand, first experiments suggested that Prezi would make the practicalities of our method a bit more difficult, since we can't just skip to the correctly numbered slide when a question is asked. But we have a 'controller' who operates the keyboard/mouse while the more show-offy amongst us leap about in front of the screen, so with practice we should be able to get the Prezi operating just as smoothly. Hopefully it should also work as a stand-alone guide which students can view later.

Slideshare
I really like Slideshare as it has allowed me to view presentations from events I couldn't attend in person, to see interesting slides in general, and to borrow ideas for presentations. And if I created something that I thought might conceivably be useful to others I would definitely put it on Slideshare. That's it really. Sharing stuff - what's not to love!


Photo by theevilmightyf on Flickr

Thing 19: catch-up/reflection on integrating things

I'm going to use this post to evaluate how much I've been able/willing to integrate the Things into my professional routines. Via a Star Trek analogy.


Fully assimilated (resistance is futile)

• Twitter - can't do without it
• Google Reader - still the best way of keeping up with everything
• Evernote - loving this now I have figured out how to use it for to-do lists. The only problem is that at the moment it's 'fighting' a bit with Delicious in terms of saving and tagging webpages. I'm mainly using Evernote to collate stuff on social media and libraries - examples of best practice, case studies etc, but some duplication with Delicious is starting creep in...
• Jing - still very new to this but it's so handy that I'm sure I'll be using it again
• Reflective practice - something I was sceptical about but maintaining this blog is definitely changing my mind

Could go either way (Seven of Nine)

• Blogging - although this blog has been useful for reflective practice I'm realistic enough to consider the possibility that I won't keep it up. Very time-consuming!
• Google calendar - useful at home but not at work. And again the problem of duplication with other calendars/systems.
• Google docs - can't realistically use at work (eg discovered last week that my boss doesn't have a Google account and doesn't want one; I had to open and then email her a Google Doc someone else had sent her...)
• Mendeley/Zotero - still faintly excited by these tools but have had no opportunity to test them in a real-life situation yet
• Wikis - I like wikis as a collaborative tool but first I need other people to agree to collaborate with me...
• Personal brand - I sort of understand the importance of this but still lean towards letting it grow organically and watching as the sheer force of my personality takes over the whole interweb.

Not going to happen (Jean-Luc Picard)

• Pushnote - nuff said
• LinkedIn - I'm still sort of using this (adding new connections, following a couple of group discussions) but to be honest I'm not getting any real benefit
• Mentoring - never say never, but it's definitely not for me for now
• CILIP - I just can't afford to join

Photo by Rafel Miro on Flickr

Thing 18: screen capture and podcasts

I could have taught an entire hands-on seminar in the time it took my laptop to download Jing, but that's by the by. I'm also not entirely sure about the little perma-sun at the top of my screen as I keep thinking I've got a blob of custard on it, but I suppose I can always turn it off when I'm not using it. I decided to try a simple screen capture of a record display from our OPAC, highlighting the document delivery option. In the end I did two, indicating the first two stages of the process (a video would have been better, but see below for why I was reluctant to record my voice). These are the two boringly basic screen caps:

http://screencast.com/t/bsXewNKjboq

http://screencast.com/t/NoinqI5MQBLd

Jing was easy peasy to use and I will definitely use it again if I'm trying to explain an online process. (Incidentally though, I didn't really understand the example given in Jing's own tutorial, as it just seemed to be sharing an unannotated map - in that situation why couldn't I just send my friend the direct link to the map?) I'd also like to explore how it might be used in online library induction/training materials.

Since I got my smartphone I have started listening to quite a few podcasts via Google Listen (mainly The Archers if I'm honest) but the subscription model does make it feel a bit like another lot of Stuff to keep up with, like blogs. As for making them myself, I suspect that I'll be giving ice skating lessons in hell before that happens, because I hate my own voice even more than I hate (for example) James Blunt's. But it might be nice to be familiar with the software considering that other library staff occasionally mumble about wanting to 'do a podcast', and I'm always up for dazzling colleagues with my tedious knowledge of some new geeky process. I won't be downloading anything else tonight though, in case my laptop explodes.

Thing 16: advocacy and publishing

I advocate for libraries every day. I love my local library, the library where I work and libraries in general and this is probably obvious every time I talk about them, which is a lot. But that personal advocacy is clearly not enough, especially in the 'current climate'. It's easy for people to agree that libraries are a Good Thing, on a par with cake and hugging. But unlike libraries, neither cake nor hugging are having to compete for public funds during a recession. It's less easy to get people to a) agree that libraries are an essential public service even (especially) in times of austerity and b) actively campaign to save them from being cut to pieces.

I almost lost my job last year, along with most of the other staff in our information department, and it's partly down to the brilliant advocacy of our head of library and others involved in writing our proposal for renewed funding that we're all still here and running a bigger and more innovative library than ever. But pretty much every day we're asked to justify our existence in the wider institution. Here the best advocacy seems to be to excel at your job, get results, exceed targets, and find new ways to make a measurable impact.

Being good at your job doesn't do much to influence public opinion though, and it's deeply impressive to me how members of the library community have come together online and in real life to lead strong campaigns, write eloquently in defence of our profession, and talk to the media. I'm afraid that my own advocacy here has been mostly armchair-based (although I don't want to apologise too cravenly for spending more of my minimal spare time with my family than going on marches). I have signed petitions, put up posters, and promoted the #savelibraries message on every online forum I have access to as well as to my Unison branch, friends, family and colleagues. And I think I can make the moral, social and economic case for libraries if asked to (something every librarian should be able to do really).

Since I call myself a writer as well as a librarian I often think about getting published in some form or other. My dissertation research was almost turned into an article until childbirth and various other things got in the way, but I still remember the excitement of writing it and the prospect of getting my work 'out there'. There's no obvious subject for me to write about right now but it's on the long-term agenda, definitely. When I publish a poem or a book review I may make a handful of people muse on an idea or consider buying a book, but if I could publish meaningful research or educate someone on the value of libraries that would be a whole different ball game :)

Picture by Phil Bradley on Flickr

Thing 15: attending and participating in events

Before I had a 'proper' library job I almost never sought out or volunteered for events or training, because a) I didn't really fit into any one sector and there just didn't seem to be relevant events out there for me, b) there was never really any money or encouragement to go to them, and c) it was usually a logistical nightmare due to having an infant to look after at the beginning, middle and end of every day.

But since I started in my current post in 2009 I have become something of an events junkie. Unlike a (lovely) ex-colleague who cheerfully declared that 'I'd rather stick a pencil in my eye than go to Umbrella', I volunteer for every conference, visit and training session that could possibly be construed as relevant. Why the change? I think it's partly down to what might be called an 'enabling environment' - I'm encouraged and often expected to attend training and library events, and my personal capacity to do things has also increased now my daughter is older. I'm also hearing about a lot more opportunities through my engagement with social and professional networks.

I'm not sure I have any great tips to pass on about attending events, except:

1. make sure you build in 'alone' time for reflection/recuperation, especially if the event lasts several days and there's a busy programme.

2. talk to people. This is scary, but I find it helps if you don't think of it as 'networking' and ease yourself in gently by starting a conversation about the biscuits or something. I also like to home in on someone I follow on Twitter and stalk them until they talk to me give them a compliment about their brilliant tweets etc.

3. think about how you are going to apply what you've learned/communicate it to the rest of your team when you get back to work. Kind of the opposite of 'what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas'.

4. get free stuff

I haven't yet been a speaker at any kind of event, but I'd quite like to, if I had anything to say! There are one or two things I could probably bang on about but other people are already banging on about them much better than I can. Maybe next year...

As for organising things, well my past experience of running events (not in a library context) has given me the unfortunate impression that it's a mug's game, fraught with logistical and political problems and generally not worth the effort. Which isn't to say I'll never do it again, because I am a known masochist. I do love the idea of TeachMeets, LibraryCamp, and other informal events. We have a regular 'tweetup' where I live, which happily bridges the gap between online interaction and real life, with beer. I know there are library tweetups happening all over already, but if there's any interest in a regular Brighton/Sussex/South East event then I'm sure something could be arranged...

...oops, told you I was a masochist.

Photo by phonakins on Flickr

Thing 14: Zotero/Mendeley/citeulike

I was pleased to see this Thing come up, because I'd been meaning to investigate these tools for a while - not so much on my own behalf but for our users (postgraduate students and researchers). They do regularly ask questions about reference management etc and frankly it's about time I got up to speed! I can pass as a digital native in most areas but I have to admit I really haven't got my head around using technology to do bibliographic referencing yet...

I'm hoping to create a user guide to social media/free web 2.0 tools soon and would like to feature Zotero and Mendeley quite prominently, so my main challenge with this Thing is not just learning to use the tools but also figuring out how to explain them to others. I suspect a training session/visual demonstration would be clearer here than a written guide, but I'm not sure I'd be able/allowed to offer this at the moment.

First step - download Zotero plugin. This was pretty easy as I'm already using Firefox at work and happily my permissions allowed the plugin. Registering my account and setting up sync preferences was slightly more alarming at first glance (there's about a billion options on the preferences menu) but in practice quick and easy too. The interface of the 'library' itself is fairly generic and simple, although as with any new toy, if you're used to creating/managing your citations manually this is a bit of a leap in terms of workflow. But a worthwhile one I'm convinced. Putting myself in the shoes of our users, I don't think they'd have too many problems here - as long as they use Firefox!

Next - Mendeley. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to use this at work as it's a desktop download, and I was on tenterhooks (tragic I know) as I slowly worked through all the installation steps. But finally it worked. Another new interface to get used to... I can't quite bring myself to try it out until I have some real PDFs/references to organise, as it feels like too much hard work just for testing purposes. But again, it seems relatively intuitive and since everyone I know who uses it raves about it, I'm sure our students would benefit.

One thing I'm not quite sure about with these tools is the social/sharing aspect - if you can attach full-text PDFs to your library and then share them in the cloud, isn't that, um, potentially illegal? Or do just the citations get shared, not the actual documents? I'm all for open access but we're not quite there yet, legally, are we? [Ok, confused and copyright-paranoid librarian bit over.]

Citeulike, as Isla says in her post, isn't quite the same deal, being more of a stand-alone organise-n-share website than a full reference management kit. I like it though - it's clean and simple and just wants to be Delicious for academic researchers. I would probably recommend it to our users, although I don't know if it really offers anything not already provided by other sites.

I definitely have more work to do here on applying these tools in real life, but since I'm nearly on holiday it might have to wait!

Photo by Barbara.K on Flickr

Thing 13: Google Docs, Wikis, and Dropbox

I've used both Google Docs and Dropbox before and they are easy, useful, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin tools. And yet I still associate them with feelings of frustration, because using them in any meaningful collaborative way at work doesn't look like happening any time soon. The way we share documents as a team is through a massive sprawling shared network drive. The way we cowrite/edit documents is usually through the 'review' features of Word - everyone will make comments and suggestions and then one person will try to incorporate them in a final draft. Everyone knows there are problems with this way of doing things, but nobody really has the will (or, to be fair, the time) to change it, or even to try out other things. There's also an institutional distrust of free tools and 'the cloud' - all large organisations are wedded to proprietary systems to some extent, and understandably risk averse. Having said all that, I haven't made any real effort to introduce alternative collaboration tools myself, so maybe I just need to jam that advocacy hat down a bit harder on my head and take the plunge...

As for wikis, I think they could be a great way of sharing, updating and presenting work that we're doing as a team, but again I can't see anything getting off the ground when we're all flat-out doing things in other ways. I don't mean to imply that suggestions of how to do things differently aren't welcome, but unless you can do it a) on your own, b) without using any resources and c), without taking up any time, it's probably not going to happen. I do want to try creating a wiki myself but a wiki that nobody else contributes to just seems a bit too lonely and sad...

Ho hum, a fairly downbeat post, but in difficult times there's a world of difference between exploring some new tools for your own professional development and actually implementing them in a busy and complex workplace.

Photo by AlphaChimpStudio on Flickr

Thing 12: social media

Oh social media, what would I do without you? Some real work, sceptical coworkers might suggest. But truthfully I can't imagine doing my job without using online social networks and tools. Some examples:

1. Cataloguing can be an odd and lonely occupation, but through Twitter and blogs and mailing lists and live forums etc I am able to talk to fellow toilers at the bibliographic coalface and feel a bit less isolated. (Special mention to Céline and Venessa and their high visibility cataloguing crusade!)

2. I 'do' social media for my workplace (mainly Twitter at the moment), and I can see it adding value to our work on a daily basis. Via Twitter I have: answered enquiries, promoted our services to hundreds of followers who have then told others about us (gotta love that retweet button), made useful contacts not only personally but for colleagues and the library in general, and been alerted to hundreds of events and projects that I wouldn't have otherwise known about.

3. I'm a better real-life networker and communicator because of my online activities. Being able to initiate conversation by saying ' I follow you on Twitter...' or 'I enjoyed that blog post you wrote on...' has alleviated conference terror on many occasions, and I feel more connected and confident in general.

4. The social web is democratizing and informal, cutting across job titles and pay grades to connect people who have something to say to each other regardless of their respective real-life roles. It's no accident that not a single online social network I can think of is based on a hierarchical structure...

So yes, I do think social networking creates genuine and productive communities. But as with any community, there's a danger of becoming TOO close. Communities can become insular and members can 'cocoon' each other in a safe blanket of confirmation bias, where your only contacts are people you already agree with. It sometimes feels like the entire library universe has embraced social media, and to those of us 'on the inside' it seems a natural and obvious fit - a perfect way for a diverse profession with a commitment to sharing information and knowledge to connect across barriers of geography, bureaucracy, hierarchy and personality (some of us are still conforming to the shy librarian stereotype, after all...)

But in reality, not everyone is at the party. And I think we do need to be aware of the self-selecting nature of the voices we hear online. Are we in an echo chamber within an echo chamber, always preaching to the choir? And will my colleagues ever join Twitter and Google+ or will I always be a bit of a freak? Tune in 10 years from now for the next exciting installment, I guess...

Image generated using ACME Heart Maker

Thing 11: mentoring

I become inexplicably anxious and queasy when thinking about mentoring. It's not something I have any direct experience of, but the very word causes images of smug wisdom-mongerers like Yoda, Mr Miyagi and Liam Neeson with stupid facial hair in Batman Begins to pass before my horrified eyes. Do I need such a figure in my life? A thousand times no. Do I need a real-life mentor? Probably.

I have a number of people who I admire professionally, but very very few I would feel comfortable asking to mentor me. Worryingly, I have a slightly higher number of people I use as a model of the kind of librarian I DON'T want to be. This leads me to suspect that I might be a teensy bit arrogant. I'm definitely terrible at asking for help, taking advice and dealing with constructive criticism. Worse potential mentee ever, in fact! Still, they say that knowing you have a problem is the first step...

Photo by CaDs on Flickr

Thing 10: qualifications and routes into librarianship

For interesting stories on routes into librarianship, see the Library Routes Project. For a less interesting story, see below...

I studied English Literature for my undergraduate degree, a subject that opens doors into a myriad of professions: academia, publishing, arts administration, journalism... or at least lets you peer through the keyhole before slamming the door in your face. Once I'd tried and failed to find a graduate job in any of these fields, I started working in an office in Brighton, about which the less said the better. I then worked in a slightly nicer office, this time in a TEFL school, which allowed me to move into my first job at the University of Sussex, in the TEFL/modern languages learning centre. I was a resources assistant, and subsequently a resources coordinator. I loved working on the university campus but after a few years it seemed that a) the language resources were about as coordinated as they were ever going to get and b) I had a strange hankering to actually Learn Stuff again. It transpired that there was a reciprocal scheme between Sussex and Brighton allowing staff to undertake any degree course, for free. (This seemed an insanely good perk - and sure enough the year after I applied the scheme was withdrawn.)

I'm not sure when I decided I should study librarianship - since both my parents are librarians I spent most of my childhood thinking it was the last thing I wanted. But there was something about the work in the language centre - organising materials, helping people find what they needed, generally supporting learning and discovery - that I loved, and was good at, and wanted to do more of. So in due course I applied to the Information Studies MA at the University of Brighton and started part-time (one day a week) in 2003.

I enjoyed the MA course but at one day a week it was only a small part of my life (until dissertation time came round and like everyone else I became a stressed and hysterical monomaniac for 2 or 3 months.) I obviously didn't do a graduate traineeship, or even a placement, because I was already working. In some ways I think I missed out on new experiences because of this, but it did allow me to do my dissertation research in a setting I already knew and on a topic that I could apply immediately in my work.

I got pregnant just as the course finished in 2006, which meant I wasn't as motivated to find a new professional post as I might have been otherwise. I didn't want to relocate, which already narrowed down the options, and I knew if I wanted decent maternity benefits and the chance to return to work part-time, I would be better off staying where I was. I ended up staying at Sussex for another 2 years, until my current position became vacant. I'm still not technically working as a librarian - my post doesn't absolutely require a qualification, although in practice if I hadn't had one I probably wouldn't have got the job, given how competitive the field is.

I do think of myself as a professional cataloguer and I certainly use the skills acquired on my MA in that part of my work. As for the rest, on-the-job training, direct experience and continuing professional development opportunities (including cdp23!) have been far more valuable. Things move fast in the world of information and you can only learn so much in a formal setting.

I haven't so far considered chartership, as I'm not in a professional post and in general don't feel 'ready' yet. But it's more important to me to like my job, which I do, than to progress in a linear way. Another consideration is that, as I mentioned in a previous post, some sectors pay more than others, and I get better paid here as an assistant than I would do in entry-level professional roles in many other settings...

Photo by adotmanda on Flickr

Thing 9: organising tools (Evernote)

I've only just realised the significance of the Evernote logo (which I love btw) being an elephant, duh! Evernote's pitch is: put your thoughts, ideas, inspiration, and things to remember all in one place. I like the idea of using it as a memory substitute that I can access from anywhere, and once I've downloaded the app to my phone I think it could be really useful for sorting out travel logistics in particular. But a) I already have a few tools that help me remember and organise stuff and b) I'm a bit worried that I don't have any 'thoughts, ideas, inspiration' to capture!

Having downloaded the software I can see that it's a pretty powerful tool, and one of those things that, once embedded in the way you do things, is impossible to do without. But it's going to take some time for this embedding to happen, in my case. At the moment it just doesn't occur to me to make my own notes about webpages, or to take photos of things I want to remember. Perhaps it should. After all, I wrote in my very first cpd23 post that ' I need to better absorb and reflect on the learning I'm doing every day' and if I don't get things out of my head and into more concrete form, that can't happen. But it's just so much quicker and easier to think 'ooh yes that's interesting, I'll bookmark it on Delicious' than to come up with an actual thought about something...

I did try out Evernote this morning to make notes during an online workshop I was (virtually) attending, and then tried sharing my note with a colleague using the email function, but this promptly crashed the programme. I like the sharing idea in theory though. I think I now need to add the Web Clipper to my browser to get full value from it, not to mention actually having some original ideas about stuff that I want to record!

Thing 8: organising tools (Google Calendar)

I'm not going to dwell very much on this Thing. I do use Google Calendar, but chiefly for organising my personal/family life, which to be honest is far more complicated than my working life. (The two do overlap, of course, chiefly when I have to go away for work and the massive childcare-finding operation cranks into gear.) My husband and I share our calendars, and occasionally we even remember to look at them.

At work we use a shared Outlook calendar as well as our individual ones and this is useful - at the moment I can't really see a way for us to use Google. I do like the way you can make a calendar public and embed it on your site etc, and I would like us as a department to become a bit more 'social' in our use of online tools (we do already use Doodle which is handy for organising Christmas outings etc). But it will be a slow process I suspect...

Photo by Helico on Flickr

Thing 7: face-to-face networks and professional organisations

Although I have a professional qualification and think of myself as a librarian, my current post is what you might call 'paraprofessional'. (Ironically pay is so bad for librarians in some sectors that I get paid more here in a research institute as an 'assistant' than I was offered for a professional post in an FE college...) So I'm slightly agnostic about being part of a professional group, I guess. Here are some professional organisations/associations and networks I have known and loved (or not):

1. CILIP
The biggie. I am not currently a member, although I used to be. Why? Simple cost-benefit analysis. Subscriptions are expensive and the income bands are completely absurd, in my view. Earn more than £17,500 pa and you pay top whack. Many nice things about CILIP are available to non-members, and since we have organisational membership I can still read Update and Gazette, and access training (such as it now is) and networking opportunities. I can see it being important for chartership candidates but at the moment it's not essential for me. Anyone care to convince me otherwise? :)

2. ALISS and IFLA
Again, we have organisational membership of ALISS (Association of Librarians and Information Professionals in the Social Sciences) and I have attended discounted events and can access ALISS Quarterly etc. Not sure what other benefits there are but it's good to know there's a specific group for us social science people. IFLA keeps us connected within the international library scene and does really interesting work.

3. UKCoRR (UK Council of Research Repositories)
I'm a new member and still learning/lurking but this seems to be an active, supportive and forward-thinking group and if I ever get funding to work on our repository properly I will be taking a more active role, I hope!

4. The Poetry Society
My other 'profession'. As with CILIP, my membership has lapsed on and off due to cost considerations, but I will rejoin at some point (I usually badger somebody to renew my subscription as a Christmas/birthday gift). They bring out the lovely Poetry Review and the handy Poetry News, run the National Poetry Competition and provide loads of support and promotion for poets and poetry in the UK. However, at the time of writing the society is holding an emergency general meeting due to mysterious (to me) funding/policy issues and - live update! - the entire board have just stepped down. Crazy times!

5. UNISON
Ok not strictly a professional organisation but I was a bit surprised to see no mention of trade unions in this Thing. Depending on their sector and role, LIS people could join various different unions. Unison (public sector/school), Unite (charities/special libraries) and UCU (academic) are probably the major ones. CILIP doesn't do representation/negotiation in terms of workplace pay and conditions and these days we might all end up needing it - so join a union if you can!

Face-to-face networking
I used to hate this. Now I'm more confident in my work and have developed some skills, interests and even expertise, I feel much happier talking to strangers in a professional context. I don't think I'm very good at it yet it terms of producing useful outcomes or making a stunning impression, but at least I don't fear it. I went to a conference this week and managed to not only join in, but actually start, conversations. Mainly about Twitter, to be fair, but then it was a social media conference...

Photo by Nicola Corboy on Flickr

Thing 6: online networks

I have to confess that my starting point here is not so much 'Facebook is the backyard barbecue; LinkedIn is the office' as 'Facebook is a party you can't leave; LinkedIn is a conference you didn't want to attend in the first place'. But let's elaborate a bit:

Facebook
I joined Facebook in 2007 and like many people I've become less and less enamoured of it, due to a combination of privacy concerns, unwelcome design and functionality changes, annoying advertising and general encroaching ennui at yet another Farmville update or mystifying quiz. I still have an account but my profile information is now quite minimal and my privacy settings are turned up to 11. I check it every so often for photos and news from distant friends, and I have 'liked' Voices for the Library, but I can't see myself ever using it professionally.

LinkedIn
I did join LinkedIn a while ago and was instantly turned off by the labour-intensive profile building process - which is clearly worth spending time on for job-seekers and the self-employed but is harder to knuckle down to when you're already happily employed. I also seem to remember getting lots of irrelevant messages and connection requests (though I imagine this happens less as you build up your profile information?) I didn't like the idea of people selling themselves to me - and I don't have any hiring or purchasing power anyway. Nor did I want to sell myself to other people. However, I have rejoined and will see if I have a better experience this time. I like the idea of being better known, better connected, and better equipped (as Helen puts it), and I can now see the benefits of talking to people in my field even if I'm not actively looking for work. I've found quite a few people from my organisation on there, but am hesitant to 'connect' with them because, well, if I need to talk to them I'll just email/go down the corridor and find them! I think groups could be really useful though and have joined the cpd23 group - hello!

Other networks
For me, Google+ offers the promise of making a clean break from FB - less pressure to 'friend' people back if you don't want to and very little likelihood of my mother-in-law ever joining. It's also nicely intuitive in the familiar Googly style and I really like that I can put everyone I know into tidy categorised circles (hey I'm a cataloguer after all), even if it's not quite that simple in real life. But I haven't explored it fully yet and it's too early to say if it will work for me as a functioning network. Mind you, my 'libraryesque' circle is already my biggest, thanks to Twitter spillover effects :)

I have signed up to LISNPN and like the idea of it, but whether I will ever remember to log in is another matter! I can see myself going there with specific questions or if I'm in general need of peer support. As for CILIP Communities - I'm not currently a member of CILIP (see upcoming Thing 7 post...) but I do use some of their free resources, blogs etc. A lot of the really exciting networking seems to happen outside of CILIP, at least that's my impression...

Photo by Royce Bair on Flickr

Reflecting on Thing 4

What? (recalling)
Thing 4 was all about current awareness tools. The three we explored in particular were Twitter, RSS and Pushnote. I didn't do a huge amount for this Thing, as I already use and love Twitter and Google Reader. As for Pushnote... well, see below.

So what? (evaluating)
There's an interesting split in cpd23 (and everywhere else) between Twitter evangelists and Twitter sceptics. I'm still not sure what the tipping point is where you 'get' Twitter. For me it isn't about accumulating followers, but more about making new connections, discovering stuff that I wouldn't have known about, challenging myself to be interesting and funny in 140 characters, getting answers to my questions, and seeing great tweets retweeted and amplified. It was good to see it on the cpd23 programme and I hope that the people who signed up (or re-investigated it) have come to love it to as unhealthy enriching a degree as I have. Google Reader was used by lots of people already - I think it's a good fit for librarians as it allows us to gather up massive amounts of information but also go some way to organising it. And then there's Pushnote, which I actually started to feel quite sorry for, so many people were generally 'meh' towards it! I reckon that Pushnote's problem is that there's no critical mass of users yet, as well as being restricted in terms of browsers. It was a good lesson in itself though, since maybe part of using the social web is being selective and figuring out that not all tools are going to work for you.

Now what? (applying)
I'm pretty happy with how I use Twitter, but I might be a bit more adventurous with my RSS feeds (my 90-odd subscriptions feels a lot but is positively tiny compared to some people's tally!) and use Google Reader more intelligently in terms of organising and sharing items. If I'm honest, I probably won't pursue Pushnote. Like Cinderella, it may get to go to the social media ball one day, and maybe if I see it in a pretty dress and nice shoes, surrounded by cool, popular netizens, I will be very shallow and take up with it again. But not today.

Photo by Lady-bug on Flickr

Reflecting on Thing 3

What? (recalling)
We considered the different dimensions of our online identity (I'm still more comfortable with 'identity' than 'brand'...) such as names, pictures, professional/personal split and visual consistency. And with trepidation, we Googled ourselves.

So what? (evaluating)
I am someone who feels 'at home' online to some extent, but this exercise made me think a lot more about how I present myself and why I make the decisions I do - especially regarding anonymity etc. I have rarely used my full/real name in social media contexts (only Facebook which is pretty locked down and not used for work at all), probably due to a fear of inadvertently sharing more than I want to with my bosses and/or somehow presenting my workplace in an inappropriate light. However, I'm starting to think that the time has come to change this practice, especially since social media is such a big part of my professional life now.

What now? (applying)
Hm, well I'm not quite ready to relinquish my anonymity altogether, at least not until I've gone back through all my tweets and removed any incriminating content... But I will be moving towards it I think. On Google+ I already use my real (married) name, but it's not the name I use for work. I think using a real photo of myself and being consistent across platforms was therefore the only way for libraryesque people to find me there. And I'm glad they have :)
I've also realised the importance of giving a bit more thought to a visual 'brand', at least in terms of feeling happy with it myself - hence the blog redesign.

Photo by The Trousered Ape on Flickr

Reflecting on Thing 2

What? (recalling)
I explored other blogs registered for cpd23 via the Delicious participants list, added a selection to my Google Reader, and (eventually!) posted some comments. I also set up a saved search for #cpd23 on Twitter, and followed @meimaimaggio's cpd list, so I could keep up with people's updates there too.

So what? (evaluating)
There was a really broad range of styles and experiences to be found amongst the cpd23 blogs - from seasoned bloggers to complete newbies, from cautiously private to expansively bonkers. I think I've found a few permanent additions to my blogroll/Twitter stream, but it was also a useful reminder that not everyone has an online presence already, or necessarily wants to. It was good to find a few new repository people beyond those I already knew from UKCoRR and the RSP school I attended last year. But I found taking the step of leaving comments quite difficult, which I talked about at the time.

Now what? (applying)
I think I'll be making an effort to search out new bloggers every so often, rather than just relying on the same few well-known ones. I'm more aware of the benefit of leaving comments on blogs - being a participant rather than just a spectator - so I hope I'll continue this. And perhaps continue with my own blogging too.

Photo by Amanda Mines on Flickr

Reflecting on Thing 1

What? (recalling)
I created this blog and used it to consider what I hope to get out of the 23 Things course.

So what? (evaluating)
I haven't blogged regularly for years, and wasn't sure I really wanted (or had time) to, but interestingly I found that the very fact of having a blog made me think slightly more deeply about things. I was thinking in terms of paragraphs again, rather than 140-character Twitter-bites. However, I was typically overeager to get started so didn't take much time to select/customise my blog template, and I ended up with something I didn't really like the look of.

What now? (applying)
I have now changed the design of this blog to something that feels a bit more 'me'. I don't know whether it matters that I didn't start out with a fully-formed perfect design, but in future I want to take more time to consider the impact, on me and others, of making speedy decisions that I later have to undo. I also want to maintain the more thoughtful style that blogging has brought back into my professional thinking.

Photo by elycefeliz on Flickr

Thing 5: reflective practice

Time to reflect on what I've done, and learnt, so far. I've previously had reservations about 'reflective practice', suspecting it of being one of those things that people promote as a method when really it's just common sense dressed up with models and tools and tips and acronyms...

But I clearly need to shed this attitude. I can be quite impatient when it comes to my professional life, because I think quickly and am good at analysing and synthesing information. This makes me inclined to mentally jump ahead in work projects and become frustrated when I perceive things as being bogged down in 'process'. I do like to think that I'm always learning, and applying what I learn to future activities, but I certainly don't do it in a systematic way. Time to slow down and see what this reflective practice stuff is all about, then...

I found Emma's post a really useful starting point and I think her and Sarah's blog brilliantly communicates their own reflective practice. The model of what - so what - what now appeals to me as it's simple and not jargonistic, with reassuringly few steps! (Though of course in the graphic it's a never-ending circular process argh!)

I will do a post for each Thing we have covered so far over the next few days.

Thing 4: current awareness

Twitter
As a heavy Twitter user already I'm finding it quite hard to step back from it and actually consider its usefulness as a current awareness tool. I suppose it's a fairly strong endorsement to say that I can't imagine my life without Twitter! I follow around 500 people, probably half of whom are from the library world, and I would say that between them they do tend to clue me in to most of what's going on. However, I would definitely miss out on things if I ONLY relied on Twitter. It's easy to get lost in an online echo chamber and forget all the things that are happening/being talked about elsewhere. So I also use good old-fashioned JISCMail (LIS-LINK, UKCoRR etc), library journals and magazines including CILIP Update/Gazette, the national and international media, and personal connections.

Two things I would say to Twitter sceptics:
1) you get out what you put in, and it's just as much about engagement as about current awareness
2) USE LISTS (and probably saved searches as well) or you have no chance of staying on top of things

RSS
Again, I'm a big RSS user. I subscribe to around 30 blogs, sites and podcasts via Google Reader and Google Listen, and around 40 via Netvibes. I'm not quite sure any more why I have two different readers on the go - I think Netvibes started as a place to hive off the library content that was most relevant to my job as I thought it might turn into a public web channel. I like both services and they are brilliant for current awareness as I can scan my feeds in a fraction of the time it would take to visit all the individual sites. I also like being able to mark, share and organise my feeds.

I've also been thinking about RSS in relation to Thing 3 - remembering that having a lovely looking blog with a strong visual brand is all very well, but if someone is viewing it via RSS they are not going to be seeing any of that. Similarly, most people following you on Twitter will just see your posts in their own stream/on their chosen client rather than spending a lot of time on your carefully designed profile page. Web 2.0 is all about syndication and personalisation, so when we create content we are not necessarily in control of how people receive or view it...

Pushnote
Ooh new toy! I do generally like to try out new Web 2.0 tools (Google+, anyone?) but Pushnote seems on first impressions a bit fiddly and underwhelming. I'm not sure I like ranking tools anyway - too reductive - although I did like the idea of reading comments from other users. Part of the problem is also the Catch-22 of social media - it only really starts to make sense once lots of people are using it, but that needs enough of us take the plunge in the first place. The only person using Pushnote I have found so far who I recognise is bethanar! So I think for now I prefer bookmarking tools like Delicious, which lets me organise, tag and share pages in a slightly simpler way. But I'll play with Pushnote a bit more I'm sure.

Thing 3: your personal brand

Now, here's a tricky one. I think I'm a bit hard to pin down online (maybe in person too?) because I feel like I have two separate identities: poet and librarian. Plus lots of other supplementary ones as well. The poet in me is not much of an online networker, but on Twitter (my main online 'home') I wear my librarian hat, my parent hat, my Lewes resident hat, my Archers fan hat and my random idiot hat (the Archers hat is particularly snazzy). Obviously everybody except the most tedious monomaniac has various interests and facets to their personality; so what does it mean to talk about a consistent online brand, let alone expressing 'core values'?

Names
I have never used my full name on Twitter or when blogging because it's an unusual name and I don't necessarily want what I say online to be linked back to my workplace. Even though I do take care not to slag off my job or my colleagues! But I do have a nickname, and variants of it, that I have used everywhere online since the late 1990s. It's not very imaginative - just a derivation of mistyping 'Rachel' all the time - but it has stuck and some of my 'real-life' friends use it too. So it's a pretty consistent and findable moniker I guess. As my professional activities cross over more and more with my online activities, it's possible I will start using my real name again, but I'm not sure yet.

Photograph
Lately I have used a real picture of myself on Twitter, so people can recognise me at conferences, tweet-ups etc. And if it pops up in other places as well, that's less to do with a desire for consistency that because it's the only picture of myself that I like...

Professional/personal identity
My tweets are a mixture of personal and work-related, but usually missing anything that would identify where I work or who I work with (see above). My library has a separate Twitter account, which I also run, but I see that account as a way to represent the library and network with people of interest to our institute as a whole, rather than discussing specific aspects of my own role, eg cataloguing. Or the Archers. I don't know if this split completely works, but hope that my personal mixed-bag approach and the fact that I am generally friendly and fairly amusing, makes me a good person to interact with...

Visual brand
Not very good at this, I suspect. Looking back at the other blogs I've had, there wasn't much visual consistency, although I tend to favour soft colours and fairly simple designs. One blog was entirely pink for a while, which was a mistake. But basically I am fickle - so I will go off and think about what I can do to develop more of a memorable style. (Blogger doesn't exactly help.)

I still don't think I know what my 'core values' are, although I'm fairly confident that my online writing/interacting style reflects 'me'. When I'm online I want to discover, learn, chat, make people laugh and form personal and professional links that can translate into the non-virtual world.

The Google verdict
In my writing life I obviously want to get my (real) name out there as much as possible. The top Google result for my name is for my book on Amazon, which is ideal. Of the remaining 9 results on the first page, 3 are related to my professional role, 2 to writing activities, 2 are people-search pages, and 2 are links to profiles on social networking sites. One of which is not me! 'Archel' relates mostly to Archel Road in London. And if I enter 'Archelina' I get some Twitter results plus an unrelated World of Warcraft character...

I think this is all fine, as I don't want to be TOO visible online outside my chosen networks. Except as a best-selling poet of course :)

Thing 2: some more

I'd been thinking that I'd gone right off blogs in recent years, and that it was probably a function of a) my chronic lack of time since having a child and b) the effect of Twitter on my attention span. I wasn't really feeling the 'comment on people's blogs' part of Thing 2, because if I want a conversation Twitter works much better for that - the blog/comment format is just much more clunky somehow. Because a blog post takes much more time and effort than a tweet, I feel a comment needs to similarly well thought out. And then you're sort of committed to the discussion - I don't want to keep checking back necessarily, but nor do I want to be emailed every time someone else comments. Moon on a stick, anyone?

But then I read walkyouhome's self-professedly ranty, but excellent post on #cliquegate, something which I'd been only half aware of but did resonate with my last post about 'self-selecting groups'. And commented briefly on it.

Admittedly, having a bit of time to actually keep up with my feeds is directly related to the fact that we're experiencing a lot of downtime with our LMS at the moment... and I figure it's better to reflect and engage during these periods than stomp about in frustration eating Hobnobs. Which could so easily happen.

Thing 2: investigate some other blogs

So, I have now roamed around a few of the other blogs, new and old, that participants in CPD23 have registered. I did this via Delicious, where participants have been helpfully tagged for easier browsing. But what criteria to use to check out someone's blog, given that I definitely couldn't look at all of them?

First I looked at a few people who were in the same sector as me. In my limited experience, the role of a librarian or information worker varies wildly between (and actually even within) sectors, so I thought I might have more of a chance of knowing what people were on about if I focused on academic/research libraries like my own. Edit: forgot to say that I was also on the look-out for people working on repositories and open access, as I've recently been involved in setting up our repository and hope to expand my knowledge in that area...

I also looked mainly at UK people, not because I don't enjoy and learn from all the US and other overseas librarians I follow via their blogs or on Twitter, but because in terms of professional development I have more to contribute, and learn, about the UK.

A third criterion was to - initially anyway - ignore people I already know, either in person or online. I am very interested to see how my existing contacts get on with CPD23, but decided that I wanted to seek out new people first!

I found it interesting stumbling on the blogs of people who had never blogged before (my library contacts are a pretty self-selecting group of social media mavens!) and people who didn't like the idea of putting themselves 'out there' online at all. I wonder if they will change their minds by the end of CPD23?

I have subscribed to a few of the blogs via my Google Reader and will no doubt add more. Now to go forth and comment!

Thing 1: blogs and blogging

This is a new blog to reflect on 23 Things for Professional Development. It's the fourth blog I've had (and I've been a contributor to several more) which frankly seems like overkill, but none of the others are really a) live or b) library-related so a new start seems appropriate.

In fact, my first blog was set up well before the days of Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Flickr or any of the other social media tools that have expanded my personal and professional world and generally made everything so much better :)

I'm taking part in CPD23 because:

a) I'm in an odd/interesting point in my career, where I love my job but am not technically in a professional post, and so

b) my ambitions and interests sometimes exceed my role, and this could probably be managed better, but

c) I also get lazy sometimes, so

d) I need to better absorb and reflect on the learning I'm doing every day through online social networking, conferences, casual conversation etc.

Looking forward to exploring it all!