• 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!

I know a number of people said they were interested in viewing it so I’ve included the details below. I have also added it to my publications page.

Strategic marketing in academic libraries: an investigation of current practice

Purpose
The purpose of the research is to investigate strategic marketing in academic libraries, incorporating elements of organisational orientation, strategic planning, and processes and procedures to support these.

Aims and objectives
The aim of the research is to build on existing literature, extending the knowledge of current practice in a relatively unexplored area within UK academic libraries. The objectives of the research are to identify key considerations for strategic marketing in academic libraries; to critically evaluate current theory on the subject; to explore current practice; and to formulate recommendations of best practice.

Methods
A mixed methods approach was chosen, using survey and case study strategies. An online questionnaire was used identify trends in current practice, whilst telephone interviews enabled more detailed exploration. A geographical sample, university libraries in the West Midlands, was chosen due to convenience. All nine libraries were invited to participate; one chose to opt out whilst one did not respond. This resulted in seven libraries participating in the questionnaire, with five of those also participating in an interview.

Results
The key considerations for strategic marketing in academic libraries emerging from the literature included market orientation, marketing planning and customer relationship management. Results showed that though market orientation is seen as a useful approach for libraries, the topic is relatively unfamiliar to librarians. Responsibility for marketing
planning varied across the libraries interviewed, though all but one utilise groups to bring experience from different areas of the library. All participating libraries have some form of marketing plan and engage in customer relationship management activities, however formal procedures and embedding into service planning was not evident.

Conclusions
Strategic marketing in academic libraries is of clear relevance to today’s economic situation, and the research highlights the need for raising awareness of such issues and considering implications and barriers to practice.

The item record is available in Aberystwyth University’s Cadair repository with the full text PDF linked from the item record.

EDITED TO ADD: This is likely to be my final blog post before Christmas this year, so I’d like to take the opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas! If you feel like doing something fun over the festive period, why not enter the Festive 24 Things 2011 quiz?

Kiyomi asked me to write a guest blog post and complete an interview as part of her leaders of tomorrow series on her blog. I decided to write from an international perspective about my experience at ALA Annual, and share my top tips. Hopefully they will be relevant to anyone attending a large conference for the first time, whether it’s ALA, SLA or any other library/tech conference. The blog posts are now both available on Kiyomi’s blog:

• Leaders of tomorrow: Jo Alcock
• 10 Top Tips for attending an ALA Conference by Jo Alcock

Guest blog post 1

The first is on one of my favorite library blogs (and one I recommend to many librarians), Librarians with Lives. This blog takes a different approach to most, encouraging guest blog posts from other librarians with lives. The main focus of the blog is CPD for the time-stretched and I’ve been wanting to write a guest post for a while but wasn’t sure what to focus on. My recent event amplification blog posts gave me an idea about following events from afar (which I have found incredibly useful), so I wrote a brief introduction and some tips for their blog:

• Following events from afar on the Librarians with Lives blog

Guest blog post 2

The second post was for CILIP Update blog, and discussed the CILIP West Midlands Election Hustings event I organised recently. I was really pleased with the positive feedback from the event, and will be writing a post for the CILIP West Midlands blog about live streaming which we utilised to extend the reach of the event. The post on the Update blog gives a brief overview of the event (and included another plea to encourage people to vote):

• Who should I vote for? – a CILIPWM election hustings report on CILIP Update blog

The election closed yesterday and I’m pleased to say my efforts to encourage people to vote may have helped as the election received a higher response than usual. If you are interested in the results, I blogged about them on the CILIP West Midlands blog.

Festive fun

And finally for a bit of fun! I have been wanting to run a 23 Things type programme for a while, and have been discussing some ideas with Damyanti. She came up with a brilliant idea to theme it around an advent calendar, and so Festive 24 Things was born. We’ll be posting a short blog post every day along with relevant web resources we think you might find interesting. We’ve kept the Christmas theme throughout so each post will share links to Christmas related resources or get you to use a tool for a Christmas related task (I’m not saying any more now, you’ll have to wait and see). This also gives me an excuse to try out a new plugin I’ve installed called Blackbird Pie which should enable me to embed a tweet:

Welcome to our online advent calendar #festive24things, we hope you'll follow & enjoy http://bit.ly/e6Ajn0

November 30, 2010 11:36 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@festive24things

festive24things

Go on then, what are you waiting for?

• Festive 24 Things blog
• Follow Festive 24 Things on Twitter

I’m really excited about this project and hope you’ll join Damyanti and I throughout December (1st-24th) as we discover new tools and have some Christmas fun. Happy Advent!

Also, a brief mention about the publication process – as it is peer-reviewed and all handled online this was a new experience for me (previously I’ve mainly dealt with the process through e-mail communication with the editor). It seems to work well – there were a few issues with the system in that it doesn’t alert the reviewer/editor when updates have been made, but it wasn’t too arduous to send a quick email to let them know. I really liked the ability to track the progress of the article, and online storage certainly helped in terms of version control to ensure the most up-to-date copy is being used. I know this approach is used by a number of peer-reviewed journals now and I can certainly see why – I can also see the opportunity to use this sort of system for any document control which needs to go through a similar reviewing and updating process (project documentation, theses and dissertations, and dreaded reading lists!).

Anyway, enough about that – read the article if you’re interested in what LILAC 2010 was all about, and you may also wish to read my blog posts from LILAC. Hopefully it won’t be the last LILAC conference I attend; I really did get a lot of value from it and would recommend it to all researchers and practitioners interested in information literacy.

I wasn’t able to attend this event, but I followed it via Twitter thanks to @LISResearch and @lenocsor. You can see the tweets in relation to the event at the TwapperKeeper archive. Obviously, I didn’t get the benefit of attending the day’s events but I did get a flavour for the discussions and could follow up links mentioned and view presentations online.

I’m a keen advocate of research, making evidence-based decisions wherever possible. I’m involved in my own research as a librarian (for work-based projects and to inform elements of my job role), and I also spend my free time researching areas of interest -sometimes for articles, presentations or blog posts; sometimes just to increase my understanding.

One of the things I was really impressed by at LILAC 2010 was the emphasis on research-informed information literacy teaching, using both existing research and conducting original research to help make decisions about the approach to teaching.

Commitment to research by librarians is something I’d love to see more of, but I think all too often it’s overlooked as other activities take priority.

The librarian as researcher event examined the importance of research for practitioners, and I was particularly interested in Miggie Pickton’s presentation which you can see below:

I initially set up this blog to record my studying progress, although it developed into something more reflective and practical. Most of my blog posts either report on events I’ve attended, discussions I’ve had, books/articles I’ve read, my experiences… etc. There is usually some reason to my blog posts (although I appreciate at times it may not seem like there is!), and I usually refer to these reasons throughout the post. Most of my posts refer to background information, although these are primarily other websites or blogs to allow ease of follow up for anyone reading the post. I do think that most of my thoughts emerge through consideration of research and evidence, and although in a practical sense my blog posts might not be as detailed as my assignments and I don’t always seek out the opposite point of view, I do generally try to consider other points of view to help develop my own.

As an academic librarian, I spend quite a lot of my time working on an enquiry desk (almost half of my working week!) helping others find research. I’ve learnt to use different databases and use different techniques when searching specific research databases or search engines. I’ve become pretty good at tracking down research, and knowing the best places to start researching different topics (although there’s always more to learn!). So once I’d finalised my dissertation topic (strategic marketing in academic libraries), I was able to go off and find loads of really useful research relating to lots of different aspects of my topic.

Now that’s it’s actually time to write all this research and knowledge I’ve learnt from it up as a literature review, I have to confess I’m struggling a little. It’s not that I find it particularly difficult (although there are times I struggle to get my head around some of the more complicated research analysis despite having a Statistics A Level!), but moreso that the style of writing just doesn’t come naturally to me anymore. I think my time blogging, writing reports at work, and short articles for journals had changed my writing style to be more practical in nature and less formal (I guess more like conversational English). I’m now having to pad out my writing with extra points which I probably wouldn’t usually if they don’t add a lot to the purpose of the article/report/blog post.

I know which I’d rather write, and I know which I’d rather read (give me practical, experienced based advice any day over purely theoretical information), but for academic purposes I have to adapt my writing to prove that yes, I do always research my sources and try to discover alternative points of view, and yes I can critically evaluate research.

I can see the importance of demonstrating these skills, but I’m really beginning to appreciate why I find it easier to blog than to write assignments – of course there is also the fact that I can blog about whatever I choose to, but mainly the issue for me is adapting my writing style to use language I wouldn’t ordinarily use and include more of the theoretical rather than a focus on practical and experience-based information. Don’t get me wrong, I do actually love researching and am really looking forward to starting my data collection for my dissertation, but I’d be a whole lot more enthusiastic if I could write it in a more informal, reflective way.

What do you think? Do you think we may see a shift in the future to more assessed work being written in a similar way to blogs, or is it important to ensure academic writing standards remain the same? Do you struggle to adapt your writing style or is it just me? Am I just lazy and need to kick myself into shape?! I do recognise the irony of procrastinating by writing a blog post about how I’m struggling to write my literature review – almost 800 words added to my blog, zero to my literature review! I’d appreciate other people’s thoughts on my ponderings though.

I’ve recently co-authored an article with Christine Rooney-Browne for Refer, the journal of the Information Services group of CILIP, which has now been published in the Autumn 2009 issue. Refer offer some of the material from their journal online at REFERplus, and our article is available in pdf format, please feel free to read and let myself or Christine know what you think.

The article, “Blogging: an opportunity to communicate, participate and collaborate on a global scale”, is written primarily for reference librarians, although the majority of the material is general in nature. It was an interesting article to write; much of the material we already knew through our research interests and the fact that we both already blog ourselves, but it was interesting to research further into blogging and particularly some of the blogs written by, or for, reference librarians. We found blogs used internally for teams of reference librarians to assist each other in their work on the reference desk, reference blogs written about library services for the general public, and I also mentioned a personal favourite of mine, Swiss Army Librarian, which features a “Reference Question of the Week” – I always enjoy reading the enquiries he has had and how he answered them.

The process of co-writing the article was a new thing for me – we used e-mail and a wiki to communicate, and bought it all together towards the end in a Word document. I’ve also been trying out Google Wave recently though (feel free to get in touch if you’d like to add me as a contact), and I imagine something like Wave would make it even easier in the future to collaborate in such ways. It was good to bring our different knowledge and interests together in the article and I’m really quite pleased with the result. Many thanks to Christine, whom it was a pleasure to work with.

CILIP members living in the West Midlands will receive a print copy of Open Access soon with their CILIP Update, but it is also available online for anyone to read from today. You can visit the website (previous editions of Open Access are also available from the Issuu account), or view the embedded version on here (trying out a new plugin!). Comments on the issue are welcome, although you do need an Issuu account first.

Hope you enjoy the special edition, I found the other articles really interesting and it’s great to highlight work going on in the region.