I was invited this year to give a presentation at the CILIP in Wales 2012 conference on leadership. As leadership is one area I’m really keen to develop skills in I was delighted – this enabled me to both share my own progress so far (and hopefully help others plan their leadership journey during my workshop), and also to attend the conference to learn from those more experienced than myself.

My presentation focused on how you can develop leadership skills through professional engagement, particularly through supporting professional organisations. It’s no secret that I’m a keen advocate for professional organisations – my volunteering for them is a reciprocal relationship. I benefit greatly from getting involved in a wide variety of things I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to do within the scope of my day job (thus developing a broader skill set), and the organisations benefit from my input to committees/projects/task forces/working groups. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of a new network I have joined (Future Faces in Birmingham) I was invited to an event this evening on ‘How to network effectively’. As networking is one of my areas of focus for my CILIP Chartership and an important element of my job, I was really keen to attend.

I’m not sure what I was expecting but it was a mixed experience. Some was very common sense, other bits were really useful as they addressed areas I struggle with. The networking afterwards however, well I’m not so sure. I guess I just have to accept that I’m well outside my comfort zone and that corporate networking events are likely to attract a certain type of person.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned in my earlier post on How to run a great workshop, I tried out some new techniques at the CDG workshop I ran a few weeks ago. Now that I’ve had a little time to both reflect personally and to digest the feedback from attendees, I thought I’d share the things that worked well, the things that didn’t, and the main areas I’d like to improve on.

Workshop for CILIP CDG

Read the rest of this entry »

This review has been written for GearZap who sent me a complimentary sample product to test from their iPad Accessories.

Pocket Boom (next to iPhone for scale)

I have to be honest, I was very intrigued about the Pocket Boom. As someone who usually listens to music via headphones it’s not necessarily something I had a huge need for, but I did think it could come in handy when travelling (i.e. in hotel rooms). So what it is?

Well, it’s basically a portable speaker system but as the name suggests it’s pocket sized. It’s battery powered (needs 2xAAA) and connects to any standard headphone connection – I tested it out using my iPhone as this is what I usually use to listen to music. You just connect it to the device (in this case my iPhone), attach the other end to a solid surface, and turn the power on.

Pocket Boom setup (any excuse for some Electronic 80s Anthems!)

What makes it such a clever product is that you can attach it to pretty much any solid surface and it will amplify the music by vibration. Depending on the surface chosen it will result in a slightly different sound, and it’s good to experiment. It’s a sticky foam pad so should be able to stick to most surfaces, not just on horizontal surfaces. I quite like the sound produced when it’s attached to the side of one of our drawer units.

Pocket Boom stuck to side of drawer unit

One problem I do have with it is I get quite a lot of feedback from using my phone which is a pain. I also have to confess that despite having it for a couple of months now I keep forgetting to take it with my when I travel, so it’s clearly not yet become part of my essential travel kit. I’ll try to remember to take it with me the next couple of time and see if I use it. I wonder if it may also be a useful way to include music in my training sessions so will also give it a go for this next time I have opportunity to do so.

So would I recommend it? I probably would given the relatively low price point, though it’s not blown me away. It’s certainly an easy way to play music, and extremely portable. I’m by no means a music expert so I can’t really comment on the quality of the output but it’s certainly better than playing it through my iPhone speakers. It gets distorted when on full volume on my iPhone but that may be the fault of the iPhone (or the surface). It’s definitely a talking point too, and I can imagine it would be good fun at social gatherings.

Last week, I gave a seminar on ‘Managing yourself: how to be productive with your time’. I’d been invited by CILIP Career Development Group London and South East branches to deliver a session on this topic which expanded on my presentation from Internet Librarian International 2012 on Productivity for Librarians. The focus of this seminar was much more practical in nature so rather than just talking through some of the tools I use and the way I implement the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, we went through each stage of the GTD methodology and considered how it could be implemented for each participant through individual activities, group activities, and discussion.

The slides are embedded below and available on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/joeyanne/managing-yourself-how-to-be-productive-with-your-time

If you’re interested in learning more about anything in the presentation, please leave a comment if it’s something I might be able to help with, or I would recommend checking out the following resources:

• Allen, D. (2001) Getting Things Done: How to achieve stress-free productivity. Piatkus.
• Hines, S. (2010) Productivity for Librarians: How to get more done in less time. Oxford: Chandos Publishing.
• Houghton-Jan, S. (2008) Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload. Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload. Ariadne [online]. Available at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/houghton-jan/
• Maggio, R. (2009) The Art of Organizing Anything: Simple Principles for Organizing Your Home, Your Office, and Your Life. New York: McGraw Hill.
• Osman, H. (2011) How to design the ultimate home office (e-book) http://www.thecouchmanager.com/ultimatehomeoffice/
• Lifehacker blog – http://lifehacker.com/

This evening I’ll be delivering a seminar for the CILIP Career Development Group (London and South East division) on Managing yourself: how to be productive with your time. I’ve given presentations on this topic before, and have blogged about it, but when I was invited to deliver this session I was initially unsure if I could fill 2hrs based in my knowledge. It’s also been a while since I delivered a longer session like this – I used to on a regular basis (for students, researchers or academic staff) in my subject librarian role, but most of my recent public speaking has been conference presentation of around 20-30 minutes in length (with some discussion if I can fit it in but largely just ‘chalk and talk’ style). I thought I would benefit from learning some new skills/techniques so decided to read How to run a great workshop by Nikki Highmore Sims.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s almost time for #chartership chat again (comes around so quickly!). The results of the poll gave a tie so we’ll take the first one in the list for this week and the second for the next chat. So this week’s chat on Thursday 29th March at 6.30pm BST will be Writing your evaluative statement.

I know there are some people on Twitter currently at, or approaching, this stage and for those of us just beginning it will still be useful to start considering how we’re going to turn our evidence into a portfolio with the evaluative statement.

Please join us and if you know anyone who has chartered, please ask them to join us to share any tips and advice too. I’ve even prepared a tweet for you – just copy the message below to let your followers know about the chat this week.

Join us on Twitter to chat about writing your evaluative statement for #chartership this Thursday 29th March at 6.30pm BST.

Apologies in advance for what may be a very confused post, I’ve had lots of thoughts running through my head that I wanted to write down!

I'm not one of these (though I did use this in my presentation at my first library job interview!)

Well, you’re reading Joeyanne Libraryanne so I’m guessing that after reading the title of the blog post you’re thinking, “erm…. Yes, you’re a librarian! Aren’t you?”. Well I’m not so sure anymore. I’ve been mulling over a few things recently, partly due to the struggle to define what I do whenever I meet anyone, and partly because of some excellent blog posts to do with the CILIP Future Skills project which have really made me think (if you haven’t yet read Tina‘s post, A plea to CILIP, please do so – it’s excellent).

The main argument in Tina’s post is that to be a profession, we need to have skills that set us apart from other professions and define us as librarians. I totally agree. But what are our librarian skills? Well, I guess managing information is one, but isn’t that something most people do in their jobs? Then there’s understanding the needs of our users and delivering appropriate services for them – but again doesn’t that describe many jobs? So what is it that defines us as librarians?

The more I think about it, the more I doubt my identity as a librarian. All my work is involved in some way with library and information services, but does that make me a librarian? I have my qualification, but a qualification doesn’t define someone (I don’t think anyway). It definitely benefits my job that I am a qualified librarian and have worked as a subject librarian in an academic library so I can understand the needs of many of the people we work with, but you could do my job without the qualification or library experience (it’s not a requirement in my job description). Really, my job is a researcher who specialises in supporting library and information services. That’s not a librarian. So I have a slight identity crisis.

I’m heavily involved in professional organisations to support other LIS professionals (and para-professionals), as evident with my committee roles for CILIP and ALA. This year I’m an ALA Emerging Leader and I’m working on my CILIP chartership but is this the right path for me? To highlight the difference between my role and that of a librarian, here are my chosen areas for development which I’m focusing on for CILIP chartership:

• Research skills
• Formal communication skills
• Face-to-face networking
• Presentation skills
• Event organisation
• Project management
• Leadership

All of these are a key part of my job role, and all are skills I develop through my committee involvement too, but when you look at them as a skill set do they say librarian to you? I don’t think so. I think that describes any academic researcher. And even the marking criteria for chartership, again they aren’t really specific to librarians:

• An ability to reflect critically on personal performance and to evaluate service performance
• Active commitment to continuing professional development
• An ability to analyse personal and professional development and progression with reference to experiential and developmental activities
• Breadth of professional knowledge and understanding of the wider professional context

Then we cross the murky waters of an information professional and what defines that. Maybe I’m not currently a librarian but I am an information professional? I’d like to think so, but again that could describe any researcher really – we all collect information, analyse information, and repackage it for our user/client’s needs. I differ from Tina in my views on this topic – I think the commonalities between librarians and information professionals mean that they should be part of one profession, whereas I know Tina feels they should be separate (and I do question whether my views are totally objective!). I think it’s interesting that in the UK we have the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, but in the US it’s still the American Library Association. Where do information professionals fit in the US? Do they still come under ALA?

I’m still figuring out my identity, as well as working out what I want in the future. I love being part of this profession and don’t want to leave it (not for the foreseeable future anyway!), but the things I really enjoy about my job aren’t necessarily specific to this profession. I could do a lot of what I enjoy doing in a different field. I could be a psychology researcher for example, and I could still be working on developing all the areas I’m focusing on for chartership, just with a different subject context. In one sense this is probably a good thing (i.e. the skills I’m developing are transferable), but it does lead me to question where I fit. I can still see a lot of potential for things I can bring to both CILIP and ALA so I don’t plan on leaving either organisation, and I very much hope I can still gain my chartership, but I do think I need to accept that I’m a researcher specialising in library and information services, rather than a librarian.

What do you think? Does it matter?

ETA: As I’ve been drafting this post, Simon has posted on a very similar topic - worth a read.

ETA2: Previous posts of my own on similar topics – What makes a librarian a librarian? and What do I do?

Following the success of this week’s chartership chat (kindly written up by @Library_Quine in her blog post), which had a theme of recording and collecting chartership evidence, we now need to decide a topic for the next chat on Thursday 29th March. I’ve put together a quick poll below of some of the ideas suggested, though please feel free to suggest another – we can always add it to a future list even if it’s not the most popular for the next chat.

Please do vote and pass on the link to any others you think might be interested in joining in the next #chartership chat – the direct link to the poll is http://poll.fm/3lnco.

This week’s chartership chat we’re going to try theming the discussion. We had a great suggestions from one of the attendees, Kelly Quaye:

@joeyanne How about useful tools and techniques for gathering and organising #chartership portfolio evidence? This seemed to come up a lot

March 1, 2012 8:43 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@kcquaye

Kelly Quaye

It’s a really common topic people want to discuss so I think it will be a really useful conversation. In preparation for the conversation I thought I’d share the methods I’m using to collect information about my activities and potential evidence, the main one of which is a Google form.

There are a number of different tables or matrices for collating information about your evidence and I thought it would be useful to set one up as a Google spreadsheet and populate it using a Google form. The idea is that I can use the form to add information to the spreadsheet from anywhere at any point without having to load a document up first. Read the rest of this entry »