Thing 6 - Online networks

I will confess i am not the worlds most natural networker. I am the awkward one in the corner trying to pluck up the courage to say hello. Most people who know me would probably find this difficult to believe as i am also the chatty one, always have been, my school reports always said at the end 'Aline is a chatterbox'. Somehow, I still find it hard to talk to my colleagues for networking purposes. This is where online networks can come into there own, it does make it a little easier to get involved.

I am on Facebook but so far i have used this mostly for keeping in touch with friends and family. I am also on Linkdin though as yet i haven't networked or really participated in any discussions. I do however use a number of JISCmail discussions to follow current practises and find these very useful. In particular the e-forums held by the Cataloguing and Indexing groups are very useful.

I think that this is an area that i need to develop more and as i stated before online networking should in theory make this easier. I have had a brief look at Cilip communities and will be looking at this further in the future. Time to take the next step and get more involved!

Thing 5 - Reflective practise

Well, i find myself a little behind. So i will keep my comments on reflective practise brief. I have been utilising this technique (or trying too) for the last year for my Charter. I found the whole process really useful as it gives you a chance to really think about why and how you are doing things. This at the end of it all seems to be the main point and a very useful thing to do. As has been suggested time is the big problem and i found the easiest thing was to schedule an hour each week (usually in the morning before things really get going) to think about my week, courses i have attended, or tasks, meetings... what ever has been going on and really think about what my aims and goals have been, have i achieved them and ultimately what could i do better, smarter, is there a different approach to take. I have found that this is the most productive time in my week as it allows me to plan for the next week. I also try to use this time to look into and reflect on professional developments, what have i learnt this week and how can i use this knowledge in the future. Some times i end up asking more questions than getting answers but this is all part of the learning curve and is how we all develop.

Thing 4 : Keeping up

Twitter : @ales3
Well as you can see from above i am on twitter and i have been for a while, like many i started not sure what to do with it and following celebs and not really seeing the point. However in recent times i have attended a number of CILIPS and CIGS events where social media and its professional uses has been punted, this inspired me to start looking for more library related tweeters (should that be twitchers?) and i have found i am getting more interesting news in my twitter feed. I am still more of a lurcker than a contributer, which i will need to work on but i am finding that there is still lots i need to learn about twitter, following the right people for me seems to be the key and i am getting much better at this. Alison Tyler gives some excellent advise to ease that need to read everyhting that you see on your feed and I have found that i am begining to get the mind set required to just read what's there when i log in, rather than trying to catch up with conversations past. Twitter is a live in the moment kind of thing.

RSS
I have subscribed to various RSS feeds before but that is about the extent of it, i have created a google reader account now and will need to play around with it before i can really judge but any tool that helps you filter our the wheat from the chaff has got to be useful. I am intrigued by those that are torn between twitter and RSS, as i haven't made best use of either yet i shall wait and see if this happens to me!

Storify
I like the concept but like many others i am tied to Internet explorer at work, however i understand there are lots of other similar tools out there and will be keeping my eye on this as a useful way to communicate with our customers.

In the end these tools are great for keeping up to date and from the general feeling of the blogs i've looked at it seems to be a case of horses for courses, everyone seems to have their favourites which fit in with their life and work style and although it may be tempting we don't have to use everything, just keep aware of what tools are out there and what they can do for us. After all, they are tools, designed to help us not hinder us, in the end i will be choosing to use the ones that i find useful but keeping my eyes on the available tools as circumstances change, what is useful to me now may not be later on. I enjoy testing out new things and sometimes they come as a revelation, other times i have found myself revisiting (like twitter) once i have got a better understanding of what it can do for me.

Thing 3 : alive and well...

A quick addition, googled myself again as I realised I hadn't looked beyond the first page of results. Found some more intruiging things I didn't realise were there, another article from another library event from a different time in my career, my presence on Lanyard for a Cilips conference and an obituary! Same name not me and I am pleased to add, obviously not me, but a little bit of a spooky moment when you see your name followed by obituary. This online presence thing is trickier than i thought!

Thing 3: The search is on...

Ok, so I googled myself and was suprised. I was expecting to find this blog and some bits relating to my work. First of all the big suprise was this blog didn't come up. When I first set it up I did so thinking that it was going to be a personal blog and so used my nickname, as I do for all aspects of my private life, what I haven't done is put my given name anywhere on these pages...until now. Once I have finished writing this I am going to do the big reveal and attach my name to these pages. This is something I was thinking carefully about, after all that exposure of yourself to the world is a big thing to consider, however as this is now a personal blog about libraries and professional issues I am no longer concerned about the personal and the private blurring for this blog.

My first search just using my name didn't really get me many results in the first page so i added library as a search term and hit the Jackpot. A piece on the CILIP careers gateway, which I am in no way embarassed about, twitter, facebook and LinkedIn pages, and an article from a number of years ago in a local paper about a library event I was involved in and a couple of references on the local council web pages giving my work details. So far so good. What I did realise was that my LinkedIn profile needs some work, to be honest I joined and then didn't really give it much attention so I will make some changes there.

In conclusion I am happy enough with my online profile, some areas need a little work and i think i need to decide where the line between personal and private lies as I am not some one who takes my work home with me, I love libraries and adore my job but I feel the need to leave all that behind when I cross the threshold of the library door, I believe it is important to keep a balance between the two and I am definately someone who needs a personal space away from my work. Proud Librarian though I am, I only take the library home with me in my bag in the form of books for leisure.

Having said that, there is always a little of the Librarian that sneaks out unexpectedly. A couple of nights ago I had a call from the AA wanting to do a survey, I was feeling particularly helpful that evening and agreed. After answering a whole load of questions about their most recent marketing materials we got to the market research questions... which age bracket are you?... what is your job?... on saying Librarian, I got a suprised exclamation and we ended up engaged in a conversation about libraries which ended with me giving the (very nice) gentleman some advise about a lost book. My partner and a friend who where in the room at the time where in fits of laughter by the time I got off the phone, I probably should have claimed the enquiry statistic for my service! Perhaps this is a case of when you are a Librarian it's not so much what you do for a living as who you are?!

Thing 2 Look around...

I have looked and read and left some comments, looked a bit more and decided that there are only so many library blogs you can read in one sitting. There are so many of us out there and it's always pleasing to know 'you are not alone'. What comes across is the wide range of library and information work going on, the breadth of the writing styles alone tells us what we already knew: that you can't tell a librarian just by looking at them and few of us meet the stereo type, though I have been growing my hair so perhaps I might try out a bun just for fun!

The reasons for people participating are varied, some are looking for confidence with Web 2.0, some are looking for networking, some are embarking on a journey of self discovery and so it goes on. The one thing we all seem to have in common is that curiosity and friendliness of the library professional, collectively we all eat from the same buffet table of knowledge and we are all left hungry for more. The willingness of the members of our profession to continue learning throughout our careers, the enthusiasm for our roles with in our communities and the genuine love of our work speaks volumes for the love of books and learning (excuse the slight pun.) The fact that so many of us are willing to take tentative steps into the unknown at every opportunity we get says a lot for our steely determination that what we do is important and to continue to do it well we need to develop ourselves.

Library and information professionals are evolving, we are Darwin in action.

Saturday morning blogging seems to bring out the deep side of my nature so I should also add that the other thing I noticed and perhaps it is the most important thing of all, we seem to have quite a good sense of humour and although we take our roles seriously we don't on the whole seem to take ourselves to seriously, we are an eclectic and eccentric bunch of people but that's the very thing that makes us interesting!

CPD 23: thing one, take two

Well, here i am firing up the old laptop again for another go at participating in the 23 things. I got to 14 last time but life and work got in the way, so this time i am aiming to finish all of the 23 things and hopefully improve my blogging and social media participation. I really enjoyed doing this last year, so am quite looking forward to trying this again and no doubt there will have been some changes so it will be worth it to up date my knowledge. I am hoping to follow more of the other blogs than i did last time and get to better grips with things like twitter that i am only vaguely using at the moment. After all you will only get out of it what you put in!