cpd23 Thing 8 : Google Calendar

In the library we have had a google calendar for a few years set up to our library account so that all staff can access it and edit it.  Last year for the cam23 things I set up a personal google account and then linked the two so that I can view and edit both (as long as I remember to add events to the right one!).  The excerpt below shows this afternoon and the work calendar is pinkish and my calendar is green (showing my crime fiction book club meeting tonight).

It is great being able to access the calendar whatever computer I am on and also on my phone.  It makes booking appointments much easier and I don’t have to go and fetch the diary.  Of course if google calendar vanished I would be really stuck.

cpd23 Thing 6 : online assimilation

This thing is all about online networking, which is something I have done on and off since library school.  Well I assume all those wasted hours on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), when I should have been creating a faceted classification scheme for my assignment, count as online networking.  Those were the days before facebook and modern browsers. We were just getting to grips with the Mosaic browser and I am only talking the early 1990s here!

Now online networking is pervasive and everyone is doing it, or at least it seems that way.  There are advantages with it. You can keep in touch with people anywhere in the world very easily even if sometimes it feels like an online version of that christmas card you used to send once a year just to keep in touch.  Colleagues, friends and acquaintances can follow your every move if you choose to broadcast it on all the social networking sites.   I have to say that I am more of a lurker (stalker?) and I go onto facebook to find out what my friends are doing but rarely update my status. Normally so bored with my own life that I can’t imagine anyone else would be interested and if I am doing something exciting no time to tell anyone.

On the professional front I am on LinkedIn but I really need to get to grips with that more and actually update my profile properly.  I do like following some of the discussions in the groups but again I don’t post.  Similarly for CILIP communities, I get an email update and will follow links to some of the group discussions but it is not my first port of call of a day to see what is going on.  Twitter I do find the most useful since it’s a good way to keep up-to-date with stuff. A great current awareness tool even if I don’t tweet that much myself.

As others have said online networking can turn into face-to-face networking even if it is just spotting names on delegate lists for conferences and matching the real person to the online one.  Although you never know what the reality is and I wouldn’t want the experience that Buffy’s Willow had in I Robot, you Jane when she met her online friend below – be warned!

cpd23 Thing 7 : Building networks

Thing 7 is all about networks and I attended a very enjoyable event this week at the Maypole pub in Cambridge run by the CILIP East of England Branch. I got the opportunity to catch up with some Cambridge librarians I hadn’t seen for a while and to meet some new people and all over a drink.  What could be better? Although in my case there was no gin in sight despite the results on the Wikiman’s excellent blog post “The Great Library Stereotypometer“.

One of the interesting things about the meet up was the number of librarians who are experiencing building work in their libraries at the moment or it is just about to start, or in my case finished last year. So a lot of people were in temporary offices and trying to maintain computer access, but still managing to blog. Hopefully it will be worth it all by the end of the projects.

I was talking to a London librarian about the networking opportunities I had had by being a member of CILIP. She asked about which meetings and events I had been to for this, especially in the Eastern Region, and I realised that actually the longer term benefits of networking I had gained from being on committees.  My first experience was as a committee member on the National Committee for CILIP’s University, college and research special interest group at the turn of the century (makes me sound old!). I then moved from that to the East of England Branch committee.  I enjoyed meeting people from other sectors and the broader remit.  On that committee at some point or other I was editor of the Sunrise newsletter, Secretary and chair.  The editorship I did with 2 other colleagues and it was something we were all new to but really enjoyed.  Most people I approached to write articles were very agreeable and it was a great way to find out about different parts of the region.  The Branch also gave me the opportunity to become an assessor for CILIP’s ACLIP award and that was a whole new learning experience.  I hadn’t realised how active I had been in CILIP over the years until I was chatting about it.  I would highly recommend it either as a chance to try something new or use the skills you already have.

I looked at some of the other organisations you listed and I liked the sound of the SLA. I am certainly going to investigate that further.

cpd23 thing 5 : Reflecting

Thing 5 is on reflective practice.  Something I should do more on but  as the blog said it is finding the time.  I have been meaning to revalidate my chartership for about 3 years now and, while I have a big bag of stuff and an online diary and cpd chart, I never seem to sit down and just get on with it.  As people have said blogging is a good way to reflect on what you do and I really ought to do that (still trying to find the time to blog about some of the really interesting sessions I went to at Umbrella11.

I also find it much easier to reflect on things that have gone very well or very bad. It is harder in the middle of the road where more thought is needed to extract the useful information and put it into practice.  Obviously the 23things programmes are all about reflection and it is just a matter of extending that to other areas of work and setting aside some time to reflect properly.  I suppose it is one of those management things where we are all doing it but just not labelling it.

So in order to achieve revalidation of my chartership I have come up with a plan of action.

Will it last though?  Fortunately tonight my v+ has saved me as I am recording the repeat of Sherlock while attending the cpd23 networking event.   Then I must make sure that I reflect on that event before watching it!

Benedict Cumberbatch in BBC Sherlock Series

 

Gratuitous shot of Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock just for librarywanderer! Or something for us all to reflect on …

cpd23 Thing 4 : Keeping up-to-date

Thing 4, trying to catch up and I have a head start as I am on twitter as @lettylib. I go through phases of following twitter quite avidly and then ignoring it for weeks – I do not miss it but when I go back I always seem to find a useful link to something and then start becoming addicted again.  It is like a favourite food where I overdose and then never want to touch it again until a few months later when I fancy it again (although I have never eaten another Paprika pringle after a holiday in Portugal back in the late 90s – can you even get Paprika flavour anymore??).  Perhaps cpd23 will get me back into twitter.  Certainly liking the new tweetdeck although as soon as I downloaded it on my PC, I got stuck on the issue desk computer and not been back!

RSS feeds are something I have failed to get to grips with. No problem subscribing to them either via a browser or in google reader. But then I never go onto them to check what is happening.  I know quite a few sites let you subscribe via email to them and maybe this would suit me better although I don’t particularly want my inbox inundated. Perhaps once a week I need to remember to check my rss feeds and get into a routine.

Pushnote I had not tried before and I have now registered for it.  Not sure of its usefulness but if Stephen Fry likes it …! I will reserve judgement on that one.

cpd23 Thing 3 : Branded with a L

This thing does require alot of thought and is an interesting topic.  As most of my internet presence came from a 23 things programme last year it wasn’t really that thought out.  I checked out my twitter page, facebook page, linkedin and other blog and there was not much consistency.  I had used one of 2 images – either my total eclipse picture or me at St David’s in Wales.  Although I think this was due to them being the pictures I had available on my pc when I created those pages! On twitter I am @lettylib, a mixture of a nickname and my role – I am called by some of my non-librarian friends as “Lyn the Librarian”, good alliteration and brands me with the L word.  In ancient times and not so ancient various criminals and slaves were branded to show what they had done or who owned them.  Imagine if we were all branded with our professions – would you go for L, IP, KM. The list would be endless.

I also googled myself and our Faculty website comes first and my name has been on it a long time now.  I was slightly irritated that google queried whether I really wanted to search for “lynn” with a double nn as if I couldn’t spell my own name!  My twitter presence was also listed but not my blogs as they didn’t have my name on them. Other Lyn’s inlcuded the daughter of a Navaho Indian, an artist and a line dancer while y full name Lynette was the daughter of a woman who had a baby with her grandson!  Reminded me of the  Friends episode, The one with the Fake Monica, where the person who stole her identity is having a more fun life than Monica is.  Although I have no plans for babies with blood relatives!

It did make me realise that I should put my name on the blog although whether it is a personal or a professional presence is not clear.  As others have said, I tend to mix the two up to a certain extent.

cpd23 Thing 2: investigate – time for Miss Marple

Joan Hickson in a Caribbean Mystery

Okay thing 2 was posted in June and now it is July! Where did the time go? But I am not going to worry about my tardiness but just push on.   I can’t even blame the cam23 2.0 programme as only blogged one extra thing there as well.

Putting on my Miss Marple tweed and picking up my knitting I am off to investigate some other blogs for the cpd23 things programme.

Now 700 to choose from so I needed to reduce the suspect list.   I work in the HE section so thought I would filter the list by HE.  But then I would be restricting myself to similar libraries. So instead I filtered by School libraries. After all it is from the schools that our main user group comes from.

There were some great titles out there but quite a few that I clicked on were blogging away but not about cpd23.  So a new tactic was required.  I thought I would try filtering by some of the more unusual letters and then some of the other sectors.

Here are some of the blogs I liked:

http://zomglibrarythings.blogspot.com/ – great look, very lively, eye catching and made me feel better about only being on Thing 2.

http://presocraticatomist.blogspot.com/ – title caught my eye, love to know why the name, and then a reference to Penelope Pitstop so can’t be bad.

http://disconnectedlibrarian.blogspot.com/ – liked the name and a thoughtful blog on the things so far from a corporate librarian.

http://fegwefew.blogspot.com/ – Books2go, now in New Zealand.

http://randomacquisitions.blogspot.com/ – still in New Zealand I liked the name of this one and the look of the blog.

http://variegatedstacks.wordpress.com/ – again I went for the name- Am I seeing a pattern here?

So to conclude my investigation. Some great blogs out there. I have started to follow some but I may chop and change for variety – if wordpress has not driven me nuts! I tried to put a second image in but it insisted on putting it at the top next to the other one. So gave up. Obviously need to spend more time getting to grips with wordpress.

cpd23 Thing 1

Last year I did the Cambridge 23 things and this year I am doing the Cam23 2.0 extra things (as well as being one of the organising team).  So did I need any more things in my life? I decided yes why not.  I liked the extra cpd side to some of the things on here and I thought I would take the chance to try and develop some of the things I did before.  I started this by deciding to try out wordpress for my cpd23 things, rather than blogger which I used last time for my 23 things ventured and will continue to use for my “extra” Cam23 things.

So here is my first post on wordpress.  I did not find it as easy as blogger (complicated by the fact that I found I had already made an attempt to set up a blog that I had forgotten about!) but I will see how it goes.  My reason for trying the cpd23 things programme is because it is a great chance to reflect on my position and my library skills.  I am currently a librarian and have been since I qualified at Aberystwyth in 1994 – was it really that long ago??? I started in systems, moved on to reader services and now I manage a specialist subject library.  I try to keep update with changes in the profession and outside and I am an active member of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP).  In fact I thought this programme would be useful for me in my attempts to revalidate my chartership (or perhaps even go for Fellowship??).

As for the blog name at the Cam23 2.0 launch in Cambridge, the rep from  our sponsors, Proquest, said in response to people worrying about what to call their blog should just look around and randomly choose something nearby like stacked chairs. So I did this and as I was in my coffee break I saw my “body in the library” mug and thought I would use that. Appropriate as I am a body in a library and I also love crime fiction (especially involving murders in libraries although that is no reflection of my thoughts towards the readers in my library, honestly).