CILIP New Professionals Day 2012 part 3

The final part of the day contained talks from Bethan Ruddock and Phil Bradley.

How to assemble your New Professionals Toolkit

Bethan introduced us to the New Professionals Toolkit and the 5 tools we need;

• Tool 1 - networks - you probably already have one, people you know at work, met at college etc. You can also create networks using social media, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or join groups such as LISNPN
• Tool 2 - mentors - scarily she suggested that there is a chance we could be mentors ourselves, without even knowing it! (I worry for sanity of anyone who would choose me)
• Tool 3 - resources - there is so much out there it can be hard to know where to begin, but you could use your networks to help point you in the direction of resources that would be beneficial to your career
• Tool 4 - a plan - Where are you now? Where do you want to go? How can you get there? You could do a skills audit, and keep an eye out for job adverts for your dream job, you can check on any gaps in your skills and experience and start working towards filling them now
• Tool 5 - a voice - think about the kind of contribution you want to make to the profession (time and skills allowing)

She finished off with advising that we remember to keep our balance and conserve our energy!

 

 

Social Media now and into you Future Career

The final speaker was Phil Bradley, who began by stating that social media is information, and as information professionals we deal with information in all its formats.

"We don't have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we DO it" Erik Qualman (Socialnomics)

He suggested we all make sure we are engaging with social media, and showed us that Google searches now routinely return social rather than traditional media (websites) results. Using social media brings the information you need to you, no longer have to go out looking for it. "Less search, more finding"

However, when he started listing all the various tools you could use, and the many social media accounts he engages with, I started to feel a bit overwhelmed. It was a long list, and I'm not sure how he manages it, I barely manage to keep on top of the few that I currently use. I wasn't the only one who was feeling this way, one of the questions put to the speakers at the end was whether it was better to try to spread yourself thinly over all areas, or just focus on a few which you can use in more depth. The general consensus seemed to be that while you should spend some time trying everything out, so that you are aware of them and can recommend them where appropriate, it may be better to restrict your own use to only a few social media tools.

CILIP New Professionals Day 2012 part 2

During the mid-part of the day we attended three workshops, pre-selected from a choice of nine, you can see a full list of the workshops offered here.

Continuing Professional Development Adventures. What? Why? How?

The first I attended was Continuing Professional Development Adventures from Emma Illingworth (wearing some amazing printed leggings).

We started off with a discussion of the barriers and benefits to CPD, Emma asked us all to jot down an idea for each on a post-it (there were a lot of post-its in evidence at the various workshops, is CILIP sponsored by Post-it?) and we stuck them to some sheets on the wall. Time and cost won by a landslide victory over any other barriers, and the benefits were a more even mix of developing new skills, widening horizons and gaining employment.

Emma gave us a guide for how to plan a CPD journey

• What do I want/need to learn
• What will I do to achieve this
• What resources or support will I need
• What will my success criteria be

And gave us an exhaustive list of resources we could use to help plan and achieve our CPD goals, which you can access in her slide show presentation here.

The session finished with a brief look at reflection (an integral part of most CPD activities) and I really liked her suggested reflection questions;

• What did I do
• Why did I do it
• What did I learn
• How have/will I use what I've learnt

 CyberLibrarians: Information management jobs in the digital age

The second session was CyberLibrarians by Lisa Hutchins and Richard Hawkins, I was really looking forward to this particular one, I had no idea what to expect as it was so different to the type of work I do day to day (which was primarily why I picked it!) but I felt really inspired by the end of it.

The session began with Lisa and Richard explaining their backgrounds and the type of work they do. They defined Information Architecture as 'the underlying structure of a website or e-resource, the way in which its content is organised and navigated'.

One aspect of this type of work is how common freelance work is. Lisa described how the cons (job instability and lack of security) weighed up against the pros (opportunities to work on exciting projects), and some of the personality traits required such as, patience, the ability to see the big and small picture, people skills and hearing what people don't say as much as what they do. She also described how you have to be mentally tough enough to market yourself and the value of what you do.

The take home message was;
"An entrepreneur is someone who is a taker of opportunities, apply an entrepreneurial spirit to your career".

The full Prezi for the workshop is available here.

 

 

 

Have you tried logging out and then in again?

After lunch (the much anticipated burritos!), the final workshop I went to was on managing e-resources with Simon Barron and Abby Barker (who was wearing amazing red high heel shoes, Abby that is, not Simon!).

Courtesy of @usernametaken10

After explaining the winding ways in which they became e-resource librarians they started explaining what it is they actually do, including some of the types of queries they tend to deal with (and a clip from The IT Crowd to illustrate).

Then it was our turn to have a go at answering some (apparently real life) queries. I think what came across most was that rather than having some kind of amazing tech abilities, what an e-resources librarian really needs is good people skills.

Check out the full presentation here.

CILIP New Professionals Day 2012 part 1

There is simply too much information to share in just one post (or it would be so freakishly long no-one would want to read it) so I'm going to break it up into parts.

I headed down to the CILIP New Professionals Day on the 11th May, the first time I'd ever been to one, and coincidentally the first time I'd ever been to CILIP HQ! My train was at a horribly early time (I am not a morning person) so I was very thankful to the lovely cabbie who took me to the station, and was very helpful even though my brain clearly wasn't switched on, and apologies to the staff of Upper Crust whose crisp display I destroyed (I have nothing against crisps, I'm just clumsy).

Arriving in London, I negotiated my way to Ridgemont Street just in time for Annie Mauger's welcome.

The first speaker of the day was Ned Potter, who discussed influencing your brand. In the past I lacked real understanding of the usefulness of creating a brand (see Thing 3, from CPD23 last year) but the more I learn about it, the more I think it is 'a very good idea'.

Ned kicked off his talk with four points;

1. Don't panic, it will be fine
2. You already have a brand
3. You can never fully control it
4. Don't panic

He then got us to submit our definitions of brand via Twitter, using the #npdbrand hashtag, and we could see them pop up up on the screen in front of us.

The purpose was to distinguish the difference between 'brand' and 'branding'. He gave us the definition that a brand is 'the sum total of everyone's perceptions about what a service is or does' that it is 'in the eye of the beholder' and quoted Jeff Bezos 'your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room'.

Once we'd establish what a brand is, Ned shared his advice on how to influence it (in 5 ways!).

1. Get online - he recommended Twitter as a good starting point for those who are not already online
2. Publish something - try something like In the Library with the Lead Pipe or check out the Library Writer's blog for writing opportunities
3. Organise something - join a committee & help out with events, or if the kind of events you like aren't happening in your area, organise one yourself (eek!)
4. Share something - some of the most popular blogs seem to be the ones that share advice & resources that can be helpful to others in the information profession
5. Present something - apparently after the first time it becomes less scary (hmm)

He pointed out that it is not realistic to promote yourself as a 'super librarian' 24/7, or to worry too much about what other people are doing, it's not a competition. You only really need to compete with those that are pursuing exactly the same career path as you, and as there are so many different ones to choose from, the chances of you having exactly the same as anyone else are relatively slim.

I think the most important point I took from his talk was to 'focus your brand on what your goals are', that basically your brand needs to be relevant to your chosen profession. And that ultimately 'the brand is not the end goal it is just a by-product of pursuing your own issues and passions'.

Ned ended his talk with the following messages;
"Just do something, anything! If you have an idea, try and make it happen"

You can see the full Prezi for Ned's talk here, and better write ups than mine are available from Annie Johnson, Siobhan B, The Neon Librarian and Lady Pen (Penelope Dunn).

Thing 2 - investigate other blogs

I'm always on the look out for blogs by other people working in special libraries, and particularly museum libraries, so the first thing I did was have a scan through to see if I could find any. As usual there weren't that many, but perhaps as the course goes on more will feel inclined to take part.

As I'm organising a CPD23 meet up in Cardiff I also went through looking for any participants in my area. I've already started to put together a list using Delicious to find any tagged with Wales, which will hopefully grow as people start setting up their blogs.

However the best ways I've found to keep up to date with who is taking part in CPD23 is to subscribe to the CPD23 single feed on their website, and to save the #cpd23 hashtag as a column in TweetDeck on my phone.

Cardiff CPD23 meet-up

With the CPD23 course running again this summer, CLIC has decided to organise an informal meet-up for anyone starting the course or thinking about taking part, based in the south Wales area (or close by). Although CPD meet-ups are often organised as part of Thing 7 (see the Cardiff #yurtup), we thought it might be nice for people to get to know each other prior to then.


Barocco in Wharton Street, Cardiff

 It will take place in the upstairs section of Barocco in Cardiff city centre from 6pm-9pm on Wednesday 16th May. A number of CLIC members who took part in the course last year will be on hand to talk about their experiences and offer tips and advice on any aspects of the course. You can check out a presentation made by Karen Pierce on her CPD23 experiences at a recent CLIC event. Parking is available not too far from the bar (click the link to see a map of nearby car parks), and Barocco does really nice food!

You can pop in at any time, it's an informal event, more a chance to have a chat than anything else, and if you need any more information you can contact me via this blog or my Twitter account @KrisWJ

Hope to see you there!

CPD23 2012

The 23 Things for Professional Development course is running again, and even though I took part in it last year I decided to sign up for it a second time. A lot of the 'things' introduced to us during the course were very new to me and that, combined with the fast pace we worked through them, meant I often had to resort to just skimming the surface rather than looking at them in any depth. My mantra started to become "I'll go back and look at it in more detail when I have time".

Since then I have not had a chance to do any of that further investigation that I promised myself, and I wondered if it was because the motivation had lessened. So, my plan is to do the CPD course again, but this time cover more of the aspects that I didn't have a chance to do first time. For example, last year when we did 'Thing 4' I was new to Twitter, so I primarily focused on setting up an account, finding people to follow, and sending my first Tweets. This time around, now that I use Twitter on a regular basis, I'll look more at organising Twitter feeds and creating lists, so that the volume of information I get in my timeline feels a little less overwhelming (something I have been meaning to get around to doing for a while now anyway!).

Hopefully by the end of the course I will have explored the tools introduced last time to the extent that I have a greater understanding of them.

Conversations with Cataloguers in Wales

At the beginning of March I went to a cataloguing event for people working in libraries in Wales organised by Karen Pierce (@Darklecat), who has written up the event on her blog here.  It was an opportunity to get together with others working in the same field and build links.

The day consisted of a number of presentations (one of which I jointly presented!), followed by a discussion session at the end of the day and plenty of chances to chat to fellow cataloguers. Helen Price Saunders (@Ceridwen339) kicked things off with a fascinating talk on cataloguing the Salisbury Library at Cardiff University. The library is made up of books relating to Wales that were collected by Enoch Salisbury. The University acquired his collection in 1886, and has since been adding to it. Helen's talk was a great insight into the quirks relating to taking on a private collection and the interesting modifications that private collectors can make to items that can make identifying them a challenge, such as cutting and reassembling books into their own formats! She also talked about the in-house classification scheme used by Salisbury and inherited by the University when they took it over, and how that works (or not) with their own system.  She finished by discussing whether the collection will be reclassified to fit in with the Library of Congress scheme the University uses, or whether it will continue to use its own. There is a worry that it will lose its identity as a distinct collection if that happens.

Dorothy Hartley talked about the massive job of reclassifying the Thomas Parry Library at Aberystwyth University. Thomas Parry Library used to employ Universal Decimal Classification, Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress classification schemes, but they began moving to one unified scheme (Library of Congress) in 2008. It was a mammoth task (well illustrated by a photo showing rows of trolleys filled with books!) which had to be done with as little disruption to students as possible.  However they finally finished in 2011, ahead of schedule!

After a short break Ken Gibbs and Karen discussed cataloguing the Cardiff Rare Books collection acquired by Cardiff University in 2010.  They explained how overwhelming a task it was as they didn’t have any prior experience, and that even after CILIP training they felt under prepared.  They have now taken on a full time cataloguer for 3 years to make a start.  They also talked about the many gems that have been turned up since they started working through the collection.

Then came the presentation I was dreading! Louise Carey (the Assistant Librarian) and I did a talk discussing the use of the Metropolitan Museum of Art classification system that we use for our art library. It was the first time we had done a presentation on this subject, so we were understandably a bit nervous. After I gave a brief introduction to the history of the museum and our library collections, Louise discussed the classification scheme and its pros and cons.  A copy of our slide show is available here.

Next was a great talk on the TermCymru database from Miranda Morton at the Welsh Government. TermCymru is a database of Welsh terminology which in addition to giving the Welsh term for a word, also provides a context and a rating on the terms status (widely accepted, official etc). She talked about the lack of consistency with search terms and the need to formalise and weed it.

During a break for lunch, many of us took the opportunity to look around the newly refurbished Trevithick Library.

The first speaker after lunch was supposed to be Elly Cope (@ellycope) but unfortunately she wasn’t able to make the event so Karen very bravely filled in and talked us through the massive project to reclassify the University of Bath library from Universal Decimal Classification to Dewey Decimal Classification. It sounded like a massive project which they were doing in stages, taking it subject by subject. The estimates for how long it would take to complete were in the region of another 15 years!

The final presentation was from Jemma Francis discussing archiving Welsh Government publications and making them available to both staff and the general public. She also discussed the current program to digitise the 30,000 items currently in the archive.

The day ended with a discussion, chaired by Steve Hunt from the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group (CIG), on whether to create an all Wales cataloguing group. The consensus was that it would be a good idea to create one, but it was left undecided as to whether it should be a regional part of CIG (particularly as so few of the attendees were CILIP members) or a stand alone group.

We left with the agreement that it might take a little time to decide on the format of the group and what it was to achieve, so to provide a forum for sharing ideas it was agreed that a wiki should be set up. Anyone can sign up to post on the wiki, not just those who attended the event, details are available here.