Since early May I’ve been helping organise our department staff development day. It’s been a little hectic to say the least but the day was yesterday and it seemed successful (we’ll know more when feedback is analysed but verbal feedback was very positive).

Approx. 160 staff from Learning & Information Services attended; the theme was “Enhancing the student experience”. The Dean of Students gave a talk in the morning and that was followed by lunch (which went down very well!) and workshops in the afternoon. There were workshops on a variety of topics, some to do with the theme of the day, some generally work-related, and others not so work related. I organised for Alternative Display Company to do a workshop which was interesting – we learnt how to make proper bows from ribbons, could be useful one day! We also had exhibitions from the local theatre and police service as well as a display from a colleague showing progress on our Federated Search project.

Despite the stresses, I really enjoyed organising the day, benefited from networking within the department as well as externally and learnt a lot about project management as well as event management.

Highlight of the event for me was this little gem from YouTube:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k8BKX2eQ0Q[/youtube]

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research into new developments in Web 2.0 recently, partly due to my career (I think you may have guessed that from the blog title!) and partly through my own interest. I thought it was about time I got myself a blog and used it properly. I’m intending to use it to store and share useful titbits of information I find as well as recording things within life (e.g. my progress in my studies!).

I initially decided to use Blogger as I have a personalised Google account anyway, however Blogger didn’t seem to want to work with the hosting I have (courtesy of my boyfriend Chris, thank you), so WordPress it is. I’m having a bit of a play with the themes and suchlike, I’d like to think of it as a learning experience and learn a bit more code whilst I’m at it so I’m trying to choose a theme close to what I want but add my own touches too.

Anyway, enough blabbering – welcome to Joeyanne Libraryanne!