I found last year’s resolutions useful in helping keep me on the right track last year, and am pleased to say I kept most of them – here’s a review:

• Complete my MSc dissertation – finished in July
• Attend more conferences – I attended lots of great conferences and events in 2011
• Implement the Getting Things Done system at home and work – I seem to have this sorted for electronic information, though need to work on physical organisation of paperwork and notes
• Participate in Library Day in the Life – I took part in both rounds of Library Day in the Life in 2011
• Continue to blog – I posted 44 times on this blog in 2011, and also blogged for Evidence Base and for projects I’m involved in

As it was a useful exercise for helping me focus last year, so I’ve decided to set myself more resolutions/goals for this year. In common with Erin, these are general aims so cover all areas of my life.

1. To work on CILIP Chartership (reflecting on achievements and updating wiki on at least a monthly basis)
2. To improve physical organisation, particularly in home office – notes and paperwork etc.
3. To achieve a more productive balance between different parts of my life ensuring I make time for professional, personal, and social activities
4. To continue to blog about professional issues and ideas as well as reflection on activities
5. To publish at least one paper (preferably peer-reviewed)

Bring it on!

At Online Information 2011, I presented in one of the European Librarians Theatre panel discussions. The discussions are hosted by EBSCO and SLA Europe and bring together librarians from different parts of Europe to discuss a topic and the experiences within their country. My session, ‘Everyone is talking but is anyone listening?’ focused on social media. It was chaired by Sara Batts (see tweet below), and my fellow panelists were Katrin Weller and Dennie Haye.

Last fun duty of my year as SLA Europe president: about to chair today’s #elt2011 with @joeyanne @obnoxiouslibrn @kwelle #online11

— Sara Batts (@Batty_Towers) November 30, 2011

I think the panel discussion flowed well – there was largely agreement across the board on a number of different factors, suggesting that libraries across Europe are at a similar stage with social media (the panel had representatives from UK, Germany and The Netherlands). There were some really interesting examples from my fellow panelists – one example of Yammer being used for internal communication (in an international organisation with staff dispersed geographically), and one example of Facebook being used by a University before students arrived to help answers queries and help them begin to make friends.

The main messages I took from the session were that libraries and librarians should experiment with social media to see what works, and should aim to understand more about their users as no two libraries will use social media in the same way.

You can see the tweets from the session at the #elt2011 hashtag (thanks to @WoodsieGirl and @EBSCOUK for such comprehensive tweeting!) and there is a write up of the session on the SLA Europe website.
As mentioned before, I decided to get  information for my section of the discussion via a brief survey – many thanks to those who gave feedback. The main themes emerging from the results of this are shown below. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been asked to take part in a panel discussion as part of the European Librarians Theatre at Online Information next week titled ‘Everyone is talking but is anyone listening?‘. I’ve got some ideas from my own experience and conversations with others, but as I’ll be representing the views of the UK I wanted to open it out and ask you to help me.

If you work in a UK library, please complete the form below (or complete the online version) to let me know your views. The feedback is anonymous – though if you have something you are particularly proud of which you would like me to mention as an example of good practice – please feel free to include links in your response, leave me a comment on this post, or email me.

EDIT: Thanks for the responses, I have now removed the form as the panel discussion has passed.

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

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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?

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I’m very fortunate to be in the position where I am able to get involved in a number of professional activities – committee work, presenting at conferences, publishing articles etc. I really enjoy these activities and like to be involved in the profession both for my own personal development and to help others; it can be very rewarding.

However, sometimes you have to say no to things. It might be something that you don’t feel capable of doing (or you know someone else could do a far better job); it might be that it’s something you’re not as passionate about as your other commitments (or maybe even something you don’t agree with or have ethical issues with); or it may simply be that you can’t fit everything in. Laura wrote an excellent post recently about prioritising activities and finding time for yourself – something I have recently come to realise is incredibly important. I’ve had to think recently about my priorities to help me manage my time effectively and ensure I have time to do the activities which are important to me, and I thought I’d reflect on this process.
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As a personal member of both CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) based in the UK, and ALA (American Library Association) based in the US, and being involved in a CILIP branch committee and a group committee, I’m always interested to find out about what the professional organisations do and how I, as a member, can keep up-to-date and get involved where appropriate.

So when the opportunity to attend ALA’s first Virtual Town Hall, an online webinar, I was interested to find out more and signed up. I’m a relatively new ALA member so I don’t know much about the structure of ALA yet and I’m still learning about the different groups and round tables, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to find out more about central ALA issues and some of the priorities of the organisation.

It happened tonight (I’m writing this as it happens!) and I am so impressed that I wanted to share some thoughts about the organisation of the session and something we can maybe bear in mind for similar CILIP events. Read the rest of this entry »

CPD23 logo

Many readers are likely to have heard of the 23 Things staff development programmes (also known as Learning 2.0) which have been used in a number of libraries across the world over the last few years. For those not familiar – it’s an online self-discovery learning programme used to introduce library staff to some of the technologies relevant to libraries (particularly social media). It’s achieved via a reflective blog which serves as an introduction to blogging as well as recording progress on each of the 23 ‘Things’ thoughout.

In the UK, a number of public and academic libraries have run the programme, including Cambridge who did it last summer. Some of the Cambridge librarians loved it so much that they’re doing it again – in fact this summer they are running two versions! The first is a repeat of the initial programme, whilst the second is what this blog post is about – 23 Things for Professional Development. So what’s that then? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m fascinated by personality and how it affects the way we work; my Psychology A-level was one of the most interesting courses I’ve taken and my undergraduate dissertation (on Sports Psychology) focused on individual personality differences and their impact on sport participation. I’ve also always loved taking personality tests to try to find out more about myself.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I found out about a book by Devora Zack titled ‘Networking for people who hate networking: a field guide for introverts, the overwhelmed, and the underconnected‘. Now I don’t hate networking, but I do find it difficult so thought this book might be able to help (plus it has pictures on penguins on the cover and within the chapters, which was always going to sway me!). I decided to buy a copy for my Kindle and have really enjoyed reading it.

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As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been thinking recently about advocacy and educating people; not necessarily on a huge scale like some of the campaigning going on in the library world, but on an individual level. It’s sort of a double pronged approach – doing things at ground level to help spread the word as well as some of the larger scale campaigns.

Some examples

As a librarian, I often end up in conversations where I try to explain what I do to people. I’m not as good as I’d like to be at it, especially since moving to research librarianship which I find even harder to explain, but I do like to do my bit to help people understand the work of the profession. I often find it easier to do this when talking to strangers – I’ve had a number of conversations about it with taxi drivers, train passengers, and a particularly interesting conversation with a train ticket collector at a train station in Exeter. I was there for last year’s UC&R/CoFHE joint conference, where I was doing two presentations; one about your library brand and the student experience, and one on professional networking for new professionals. It was a three day conference with around 100-150 delegates (I’m guessing). As I arrived at the train station I stupidly put my ticket through the barrier and it kept it. I needed the tickets to be able to claim back the expenses so I had to ask the ticket collector if he could retrieve it for me. He was very nice about it even though this meant he had to go through ALL the tickets to find mine (which happened to be in the last pile he checked). During that time, we struck up conversation about what I was doing in Exeter. I explained about the conference and his initial reaction was one of surprise – what did librarians have to talk about that could fill three days? When I explained that this was actually just a very small section of the librarian profession and mentioned some of the other conferences I had presented at and attended and the things we had discussed, he was amazed. We got chatting about what a normal day is like as an academic librarian, and he was really impressed with the variety of things I was involved in and the support we offered to the University. He had no idea that we taught or provided support for developing information skills, he didn’t know that we took a qualification to become librarians, and he was amazed at the variety of topics I mentioned would be discussed at the conference. He then found my ticket and I thanked him profusely before leaving the station. As I was leaving, I noticed he had started chatting to his colleague about our conversation and some of the stuff academic librarians do – our conversation had obviously made an impact on him.

Another thing I talk to people about (probably more often than librarianship as it arises so often due to having to eat unusual meals!) is the fact that I have coeliac disease. I’ve been diagnosed since December 2009, so it’s still a relatively new thing for me, though it’s almost normal to me now. For those who don’t know, those of us with coeliac disease have an auto-immune response when we eat anything with gluten (wheat, barley and rye are the main grains that have gluten). It brings different symptoms which makes diagnosis difficult, but thankfully when I was suffering I was tested for pretty much everything by my doctor and following a positive blood test for coeliac disease I had an endoscopy to confirm diagnosis. It’s a condition you have for life and there’s no treatment other than cutting gluten out of your diet. I get some food on prescription, and my grocery shopping now takes a lot longer than it used to as I have to check every product to check whether or not I can eat it. It’s a bit of a pain, but it’s necessary – I feel so much better since adopting the gluten free diet and it means I’m now at far less risk of some of the problems I could have if I continued to eat gluten (things like osteoporosis, infertility, and cancers). It does make eating out a little tricky, and I’ve had some revolting gluten free offerings at events.

There’s a lot of confusion about gluten free diet – some people choose to adopt a gluten free diet but don’t need to (though I don’t understand why – it’s so difficult to eat gluten free and most people can manage gluten with no problems), and some coeliacs seem to think that they can get away with eating gluten or that their body will learn to cope with it (not true, but some coeliacs don’t have physical symptoms so I can see why they might think they’re not affected). Also, because it’s not really an allergy, the effects of inadvertently eating gluten aren’t as immediate or violent as someone with a severe food allergy (in my case it takes about 12hrs to take effect and symptoms last about 3-4 days). These issues dilute the message about the importance of a gluten free diet for coeliacs (high profile chefs with coeliac disease saying they eat pasta and pizza don’t help either!). And let’s face it, it is bloody awkward! We can’t have anything that’s been anywhere near gluten, so I can’t even use the same toaster without using one of those toaster bags for my gluten free bread, I can’t use the same butter as my non-gluten free partner, I can’t use the same serving tongs if they’ve been used for food with gluten, I can’t have sauces that have been thickened with flour…. Like I said, it’s awkward and difficult!

I do understand that for people not familiar with the condition, it can be difficult to understand. But because it’s so crucial for me to follow a gluten free diet (and I want to make it easier for myself and others in future), I do try to do my bit, particularly when I’m eating out. I have to ask about gluten free options anyway, which I think in itself helps raise awareness, but I will also explain it to people I’m with or servers/chefs at restaurants if necessary. At a hotel in Edinburgh recently, the rate included breakfast. Now I can’t eat cereals, or toast, or muffins, so breakfast can be tricky. I’d asked the hotel if they were able to offer anything for a gluten free diet and they were really accommodating. They bought in lots of special food including gluten free bread, cereal, and rice cakes for me (for any coeliacs reading, I would definitely recommend Holiday Inn Express Royal Mile if you’re visiting Edinburgh). This did however mean that I had a loaf of bread and a whole box of cereal on my breakfast table. It got some odd looks from others in the hotel, and the guy next to me asked me why I’d bought my own breakfast. I explained that I hadn’t, and that the hotel had got some gluten free food in for me. What followed was another interesting conversation, where I basically had to defend my diet and explain that it wasn’t a faddy choice – it was something I had to do to stay healthy (as it happens, during this conversation we also discussed why we were in Edinburgh and I also got to do a bit of library advocacy too!).

I’d like to think that through these examples, and many others conversations like it, I’ve managed to educate a few people about both librarianship and coeliac disease.

So?

I thought I’d share my experiences because maybe you’d like to help spread the word about something you care about too. My advice is to get out there and start talking about it – either face to face, or online. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t get involved in campaigns if you can, but grass roots level stuff is important too and it all helps.

Think about the main message you want to get across; this is something I’m trying to do at the moment so that I have an easy to understand answer when people ask what I do.

As much as I despise BT (though they are hopefully installing fibre optic broadband for us tomorrow so I might change my opinion slightly if all goes to plan), I do think their old advertising campaign is relevant here: “It’s good to talk” (though nowadays with social media there’s no need to spend money on expensive phone calls to do it!).