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 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

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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/

Last week I gave my first ever webinar as part of the American Library Association (ALA) Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) Mobile Computing Interest Group (MCIG) virtual meeting.* It took place instead of a physical meeting at ALA Midwinter to enable more people to attend and present. There were five presentations in 90 minutes so we each had 10 minutes to present and 5 minutes of Q&A. If you’re interested in the topic, you can watch a recording of the webinar – see the blog post I wrote for our m-library community support project blog.

I thought it would be useful to reflect on my experiences of presenting a webinar – I’m noticing more and more webinars set up to enable more people to attend virtually across different time zones and without the expense of travelling, so I imagine presenting at webinars is something we’ll be seeing a lot more of in future.This is my setup – home office with laptop for webinar software, headset for listening/speaking, iPhone for timing, and iPad and notepad for presentation prompts (and all important glass of Ribena!):

Webinar setup

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I’m a creature of habit, so I’m continuing the tradition of posting an end of year blog post (see 2008, 2009, and 2010). It’s actually really useful for me to look back and see what I did each year. So, what has 2011 involved?

1. My ALA 2011 badge complete with ribbons!, 2. Louisiana State University, 3. Osney Building at University of Oxford, 4. CILIP signage Read the rest of this entry »

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.

ILI 2011 (apologies for poor photo!)

Last week I attended my first full Internet Librarian International conference. It’s an event I’ve often followed virtually and this year was really pleased to be able to attend and present on using web tools to improve productivity for librarians (see previous blog post for more information).

I attended really interesting sessions, met great people and had engaging discussions.

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Last week at Internet Librarian International 2011 I gave a presentation on productivity for librarians. I’m a fan of the GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology and like to utilise online software to help organise my work and increase my productivity. I thought I’d give a brief overview of some of the tips I’ve picked up along the way as well as sharing some of my favourite productivity tools. Read the rest of this entry »

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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