ALA Emerging Leaders

Just a brief blog post to share some exciting news – I’ve been offered a place on the 2012 class of ALA (American Library Association) Emerging Leaders program. For those who don’t know what it is, here’s a bit of information about ALA Emerging Leaders:

The American Library Association (ALA) Emerging Leaders (EL) program is a leadership development program which enables newer library workers from across the country* to participate in problem-solving work groups, network with peers, gain an inside look into ALA structure, and have an opportunity to serve the profession in a leadership capacity. It puts participants on the fast track to ALA committee volunteerism as well as other professional library-related organizations.

(taken from the ALA Emerging Leaders webpage)

What it basically means is that to participate I will need to attend the ALA Midwinter event in January (Dallas) where I will be introduced to ALA as an organisation, meet my fellow Emerging Leaders, and join a group to work on a project within ALA. I’ll then work with that group from the end of the conference until June when we will attend ALA Annual (Anaheim) to present our findings. After that, each Emerging Leader is expected to continue to support the organisation – it’s often referred to as a fast track to getting involved in ALA.

It was recommended to me by so many people at ALA Annual last year, and I’m really excited about being a part of it. I can’t wait to meet the rest of the Emerging Leaders (some of whom I’ve already found on Twitter at #el12ala)!

*It is open to non-US residents too! I may need to ask for this to be altered – I wonder if I am the first international member involved in this?

Wow, what a day! I really enjoyed Library Camp UK 2011 yesterday, and wanted to jot down some quick thoughts from a personal perspective whilst it’s fresh in my mind.

One of my sessions - really enjoyed the conversation at this one

Read the rest of this entry »

  by  Bev and Steve (Almost back in the USA) 

Tomorrow I’m joining 174 other people interested in libraries at the first Library Camp UK. I’m hoping it’s going to be a little more civilised than the photo above – at least it should be drier as it’s indoors. It’s being held in Birmingham so I don’t even have to travel far (although getting up early on a Saturday will be a bit of a shock!). Read the rest of this entry »

I attended a really interesting session at the Handheld Librarian online conference on managing organisational Twitter accounts. The session, Doing more with less: What to do with your 140 characters, was presented by Donna Ekart from Kansas State University library (@kstatelibraries). As I’ve been using Twitter since 2007 I wasn’t expecting to learn a lot from this session, but I picked up some really useful tips so I’m glad I attended.

Read the rest of this entry »

Handheld Librarian Online Conference V (click on image to go to website)

A couple of weeks ago I attended my first full virtual conference – Handheld Librarian Online Conference V – yes, they have held five of them already! I’ve attended webinars before and tracked numerous events online that I have been unable to attend in person, but this was my first fully fledged online conference. It was really good value for money ($45), and although it meant working through the evening (due to time zone differences the conferences was 4 – 11.30pm in UK time!) it was definitely something I would do again. The software (Adobe Connect) worked really well, there were very few sound problems (ironically, the only ones I experiences was when the keynote speaker from Mashable was presenting), and the fact that is was all online meant that you could join in all aspects of the conference, including a virtual exhibition.

Read the rest of this entry »

Professor Charles Oppenheim with keynote speakers

I recently attended the LIS DREaM launch conference about developing research excellence and methods in library and information science. I wrote a blog post about my experience, but now I’ve had chance to reflect on the day I’m going to share my reflections using the basic method I learnt during 23 Things for Professional Development - what? so what? now what?

Read the rest of this entry »

This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the fifth time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009, January 2010, July 2010 and January 2011. I’m currently a full-time Researcher at Evidence Base, Birmingham City University, UK. Although my job title doesn’t include the word librarian and I don’t work in a library, I still consider myself very much a librarian – our research helps support the library and information communities.

I decided to do Library Day in the Life a little different this time round; partly because I’ve been busy, and partly as I’m not sure verbatim accounts are the most interesting thing to write or read. So instead I’ll be writing a summary of what I’ve been up to this week (using Nirvana, my to do list, to help me as I can check my logbook to see what tasks I’ve finished). My work life and professional interests often cross over so this list includes some pure work tasks, and other professional related tasks such as committee work and studying. Read the rest of this entry »

Greeting after 1 mile (yes, 1 mile!) of convention centre

Well, it’s been almost a month now since my visit to the ALA Annual 2011 Conference in New Orleans and study visit to Louisiana State University. I know some people were following my tweets (although I expect some people followed my advice to mute them!), and my Tumblr that I used before, during and after the conference. If I’m honest though, the 8am starts and midnight-ish finishes meant I was exhausted so didn’t get to blog as much as I had planned to during the conference. Having said that, I really wanted to take in as much of the sights and experiences of the conference that I possibly could, and I definitely did that.

Read the rest of this entry »

from misterbisson on Flickr

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was invited to present a session at the 2011 Colleges of Further and Higher Education (CoFHE) conference last month (Staying positive in difficult times: Maintaining quality services). My session focused on mobile technologies. I probably spend about half, if not more, of my online time on mobile devices – usually on iPhone or iPad. I use a lot of different apps for various different purposes – document creation and editing, emailing, blogging, photo management, planning travel, time management and more. But how can we utilise these technologies in libraries? Many of our users (and staff) already have mobile devices, so it’s useful to consider how we can use these to support the library service.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was recently invited to speak to a group of school librarians in Hatch End about how they can start to prepare students for university. I gave a similar presentation last November at the Digital Natives event for school librarians, though I updated my presentation and added views of other academic librarians. Read the rest of this entry »