Thing 5: Reflections

This post was written for 23 Things for Professional Development, Thing 5: Reflective Practice.

Why reflect?

Reflections at Wicken Fen

As I’m going through my year as a graduate trainee I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it and how it could be improved, but I’ve not had any structure to this thinking so I’m not really sure how useful most of it has been.  I’ve also written up very little of my thinking, so have probably forgotten a lot of

it and ended up not acting on good ideas because they’ve got forgotten.  I want to learn from the experiences I have and apply what I’ve learnt, not just go “that was nice” and carry on just the same as before.  I think integrating reflective practice into my professional life will help me do that.  Writing down my reflections will be important for a number of reasons – it will help me get my thoughts in order, I can go back later to check that I am applying what I learnt and it will be really useful when preparing for job interviews.

When and where to reflect?

Firstly, I need to decide what I am going to reflect on.  I don’t have the time to reflect on everything I do – if I did I would spend more time reflecting than doing!  I’m not really comfortable with sharing all my reflections publicy.  I know everybody makes mistakes and the important thing is to learn from them,  but I don’t think I will be as truthful if I know other people will be reading it.   Though anything I write which I am happy with other people reading will find it’s way to a blog post in case anyone finds it useful.

How to reflect?

I really like having structure and a plan for anything I’m doing so I like the idea of having a framework for reflective writing.  I found the Greenaway and Borton models mentioned in the cpd23 post and this post from last year’s cpd23 by Katie Birkwood useful in coming up with my own framework:

1. Describe the event/project/session/thing.

2. Did I do any preparation/organising/planning for it?

3. Why did I do it?  What were the aims of the project/event/session/thing and were they met?  If not how and why?

4. What have I learnt?

5. What was successful?

6. What was not successful/were there any problems and how were these overcome?

7. What do I wish I had done differently?

8. Action points – what am I going to do now/do differently in the future based on this experience?

The thing I think I need to concentrate on when when reflecting is critically evaluating and not just reviewing what I have done.  The other challenge will be to remember to follow through with my action points.  Perhaps I will keep a folder of all my reflections and periodically check through all the action points.

Thing 4 (part 1): Using twitter and google reader for current awareness

This post was written for 23 Things for Professional Development, Thing 4: Current awareness – Twitter, RSS and Storify.

This week for cpd23 we’re looking at current awareness and how to keep up with what’s going on in the world of libraries.  I’ve been using twitter and google reader for this for a little while now and find them really useful.  In this post I’ll be sharing what I’ve learnt about using twitter and google reader effectively as current awareness tools.  I’ll be covering storify, scoop.it and paper.li, which are all new to me, in another post.

So, what this is really about is getting the information you want to come to you without being swamped by too much of it or lots of stuff your just not interested in.  The most important thing I’ve learnt is don’t try to read everything.  If something is really important it will be tweeted again, or someone else will link to the blog post and if your not finding something interesting, stop reading it!

Twitter

I signed up to twitter a few months ago so that I could join in UKLibChat and at the time wasn’t really sure what other use I could get out of it.  I then started following some of the people I met on UKLibChat and found that people were tweeting interesting information and links to interesting articles.  As I started following more people twitter soon joined google reader and CILIP newsletters as one of my key current awareness tools.  If you’re just starting and looking for who to follow @CILIPinfo, @liz_jolly and @girlinthe spring to mind a tweeters of interesting/useful links.

When I first joined twitter one of the problems I found was that some organisations were tweeting lots of interesting stuff, but  they were tweeting far to often and were drowning out everyone else.  The solution I found to this was to arrange these organisations into categories and put them into lists.  You don’t have to be following someone to put them in a list, so this way they don’t swamp my home page, but I can easily see what they have been saying.  I’ve recently found out about Listorious, a useful tool which lets you search for twitter lists created by other people, courtesy of a tweet by @meg_librarian.  List searching is something I don’t think  you can do from twitter itself.

Another use I’ve found for lists is my library jobs list.  I’m not actively job hunting at the moment, but I like to keep an eye on what’s out there so I’ve created a list of people/organisations who tweet UK library jobs.  This is one place where I do try to read everything.  So far I’ve got @UKLibraryJobs, @LISNPN, @LISJOBNET, @tfpl_Ltd, @jobsforinfopros and @sarahcchilds.  Anyone know of any good ones I’m missing?

So how can I make better use of twitter?  One of the things I’d like to work on with twitter is remembering to tweet and retweet links to articles and blog posts I find interesting/useful/entertaining.  If I’ve enjoyed it, chances are someone else will too and it really doens’t take much time to post something to twitter.  If something doesn’t have a ‘post this to twitter’  button I use HootSuite’s Hootlet, which sits in my bookmark toolbar and creates an editable tweet with a shortened URL with one click.

Google Reader

Almost as soon as I discovered the biblioblogosphere, when I started my graduate traineeship last autumn, I also discovered google reader. It really does make following blogs much easier.  I subscribe to over 100 blogs with google reader, most library-related but some by friends and about other interests too, which is something I could never keep up with without a feed reader, such as google reader.  So far I’ve only used it to follow blogs, but you can follow much more with it – anything with an RSS feed.

I organise the blogs I subscribe to into different folders which helps me decide whether I want to read a post and what it might be about if the title is a bit vague.  For example I’ve got a graduate trainees folder, as I like to know what other trainees are doing, and a must read folder, which is people who I find particularly interesting and want to make sure I don’t miss any of their posts.  Although even with posts in my must read folder if I get to the end of the second sentence and I’m not interested I’ll stop reading.

When I go to google reader the first thing I do is have a quick skim through the titles using list view (button in the top right) and start by reading anything that sounds particularly interesting.  If the title doesn’t catch my interest it probably won’t get read.  Whenever the number of unread items gets too high for my liking I mark everything older than a week as read.

If you’re looking for some blogs to follow, some of my favourites are the Undergraduate Science Librarian, Laura’s Dark Archive, Dymvue, Organising Chaos and Clare’s Aber Antics.

Thing 3: Who do you think I am?

This post was written for 23 Things for Professional Development, Thing 3: Consider your personal brand

This week’s task is to consider your personal brand.  The word ‘brand’ has all sorts of marketing connotations and, like several other cpd23-ers, I’m not keen on thinking of myself as a product.  Yes, there are times when I need to sell myself, job interviews being a good example, but I don’t want to do so all the time.  However, I do care what people think of me so have been thinking of this task more as considering how people perceive me online (largely thanks to Ned Potter’s talk at the CILIP New Professionals Day which I blogged about a few days ago).

When I started this blog I spent a long time deciding what to call it.  I know that titles are often what draws me into reading a blog for the first time so I didn’t just want to use my name.  I also wanted to make it obvious the blog is library-related, though with hindsight I’m not sure that is so important.  I chose The Library Cauldron as it was meant to represent my mixing pot of thoughts – somewhere I could talk about lots of different library-related things, though I’ve been wondering what other connotations it has.  Witches, magic, fiction, potions?   An interesting comment I’ve had from @medievaljenga is that the image on the blog reminds her of Harry Potter, making her think I’d be a school/children’s librarian – which I’m not.

The photograph of me I use on this blog is the one I use on my profiles on all the social networks I use professionally.  Hopefully it helps people who see my profile elsewhere realise that The Library Cauldron, Lizzie Atkinson and @library_lizzie are all the same person.  I expect how people perceive me initially is probably more dependent on content on twitter than on this blog.  I know that if I’m trying to decide whether to follow someone on twitter I’ll read their bio and recent tweets, but ignore the background, colour scheme etc, while blogs with visual impact do affect whether I keep reading.  Maybe that’s because tweets are shorter or perhaps just because blogs differ more as it’s possible to have more control over them.

But how do I come across to people who don’t follow/stumble across me on this blog or twitter?  Most importantly, how would a potential employer perceive me from my online presence?  When I googled my name (having logged out of google – I hope this did make sure the results weren’t personalised) I was pleasantly surprised by the results.  My LinkedIn profile was the first result with my twitter profile and a blog post I wrote introducing myself on the Oxford graduate trainees blog also on the first page of results.  Adding the word library to my search terms  resulted in more success – every result on the first page refered to me in some way!  LinkedIn featured highly with lists of people on LinkedIn who share my name coming up too.  My LISNPN profile and an online guide to referencing and reference management software I wrote as part of my work at the Bodleian Libraries were also on the first page of results.  So, all good things for a potential employer to see, though I do need to do a bit of work on my LinkedIn profile which is currently a little neglected.  This blog didn’t appear until page 4 of the results which I found a bit disappointing as I doubt anyone would bother looking that far.  I guess that’s one of the cons of my blog title having nothing to do with my name.

Finally, if anyone has any comments on how they perceive me from this blog, twitter or even in person I would be very interested to hear them.

Thing 2: Lots and lots of blogs

This post was written for 23 Things for Professional Development, Thing 2: Investigate some other blogs

For thing 2 I’ve been having a look at other cpd23 blogs, and there are LOTS.  I already use Google Reader to follow blogs, and I wanted to add some cpd23 blogs to that.  I want to hear views from as wide a range of people as possible and with only one or two posts on most people’s blogs it was really hard to choose who to follow.   How can I know at this stage who I will find interesting?  In the end I picked about 30 blogs almost at random.  I don’t want to miss anything, but I didn’t want to follow everyone as I think I would just be swamped – I’m hoping that any amazing blog posts will be brought to my attention via twitter.  Though if you think I should be following your blog comment on here and try to persuade me!

On a side note, some blogs I already follow which I really enjoy are the Undergraduate Science Librarian, Laura’s Dark Archive, Dymvue, Organising Chaos and Clare’s Aber Antics (this list is by no means exhaustive).

I’ve also been having a go at commenting on other people’s blogs.  This is something I’ve done very little of before, mainly because it feels a bit intrusive.  But if someone’s written a blog post they must want people to read it and any feedback is useful.  Even just knowing someone has read it and doesn’t think it is entirely pointless is encouraging.  Once I started commenting it became easier and this is something I’ll definitely try to keep up.

Thing 1: Blogging for cpd23

I’ve decided to take part in 23 things for professional development, also known as cpd23. It’s an online professional development course for librarians, with a new ‘thing’ to explore and blog about each week.

Firstly, a bit about me.  I’m a geological sciences graduate currently working as a graduate trainee at the Radcliffe Science Library, the science library of the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University, and in September I’ll be starting an MA in Library and Information Studies at UCL (exciting!).

I’m not entirely new to blogging.  I started this blog back in January to reflect on my experiences as a graduate trainee, but for various reasons it has become a bit neglected.  I’m hoping cpd23 will give me the motivation to get into the habit of blogging regularly.  I’m not expecting it to be easy to keep up with and I’m glad there are a couple of catch up weeks, but I’m determined to make it to the end.  I’ve thought about/used most of the things that will be coming up, but not necessarily all that much and I think it will be useful to evaluate them and have to put my thoughts into words.  I’m really looking forward to hearing everyone else’s views on the things too.  I’m particularly looking forward to thing 6: real life networks, as that’s something I’d like to get myself involved in, and hearing about other people’s experiences of librarianship training options in things 9 and 10.

CILIP New Professionals Day

Yesterday I attended my first CILIP New Professionals Day.  It was a brilliant day with lots of interesting people to meet, some thought-provoking speakers and workshops and it has really got me excited about the future.  Here are the main things took away from the sessions I attended.

You already have a brand! Here are 5 ways to influence it …

Ned Potter (@theREALwikiman)

A brand is how others perceive you.  Branding is the act of attempting to influence your brand.  Focus your efforts to infuence your brand by considering what your ideal employer is likely to care about – don’t try to do everything!  If you blog, blog posts that give advice are popular.  I really like the idea of aiming it at yourself a year ago.  Oh, and most importantly, a piece of advice that kept coming up and I frequently give (and am getting better at following), don’t panic!

Game on: Cataloguing and classification in the 21^st century

Deborah Lee (@DebbyLeeCat) and Jennie-Claire Perry (@evil_jen)

When you get something tough thrown at you take it as a challenge.  It can lead to new skills, new resources for your library and/or you becoming someone’s new favourite person – good for both you and your library.  Although this wasn’t the main point of this session, it’s what really stuck with me.

Just the job: working in careers information

Megan Wiley (@wiley9000)

This is an area I hadn’t even considered before yesterday, but I’d now definitely consider a job in a careers service.  The advantages and disadvantages seem similar to working in any small library within a larger organisation.  There’s lots of variety, something that really appeals to me, but you’re not always valued by colleagues in the rest of the organisation and not all careers services employ qualified librarians, so you really need to prove your worth.

A career in corporate libraries: The pitfalls and the profits

Penny Bailey (@penbailey2) and Lisa Sabbage (@lisasabbage)

Again, a career with lots of variety in the job, but a need to prove your worth to your employers.  You need to be genuinly interested in the company and gain some subject knowledge.  There’s less hierarchy than in the academic sector, which means less chance of promotion, but you can move laterally into a managerial level position in the academic sector.

How to assemble your New Professional’s Toolkit

Bethan Ruddock (@bethanar)

Have a plan: work out how the skills you have compare to the skills you need for your next/ideal job and find ways to fill the gap.

Have a voice: “the best thing you can do is do your job well”.

Social Media now and into you future career

Phil Bradley (@Philbradley)

If you search for something on a search engine often more results are social media than traditional websites.  Things are changing on the internet and search engines are now integrating with social media.  Facebook wants to be the internet.  I agree that social media and user generated content are valuable information resources and that we, as librarians, need to realise that.  However, I don’t agree that we all need to try out every single new social network.  Why can’t we use the social networks we’ve got to read other’s reviews of new social networks?  Then we can try out the ones we think sound best.

Zotero 3.0 – exciting new features

Last week saw the launch of Zotero 3.0.  Zotero is currently my personal reference manager of choice and I was quite excited to see a couple of the new features of Zotero 3.0 (and to see them working!).

The major new feature to come with Zotero 3.0 is the introduction of Zotero Standalone with connectors to Google Chrome and Safari as well as Firefox.  Previously,  Zotero was only available as an extension for the Firefox web browser, viewed in a separate pane within Firefox.  Zotero Standalone is a desktop version of Zotero with references captured from web pages via a web browser connector.

From the point of view of using Zotero, Zotero Standalone works in exactly the same way as the Firefox extension version except that it is in a separate window rather than a pane within Firefox and you have a choice of three web browsers.  I’ve already found it useful to be able to choose whether I want to look at Zotero at the same time as a webpage (via the Zotero Firefox extension) or in full screen (via Zotero Standalone) depending on what I’m doing.

The other new feature in Zotero 3.0 which I was very pleased to see (so pleased a little celebratory dance was required!) was duplicate detection.  Zotero is now able to recognise where two references in my library are the same thing and then merge them – though don’t worry it won’t merge records unless you ask it too.  I haven’t tested it extensively yet, but it seems to work very well.

Into the web 2.0 jungle

Over the past month I’ve started using a number of web 2.0 technologies as tools professional development and networking.  They have varied in ease of use and how useful I have found them, though I can’t say I am using any to their full potential yet.  Here is a summary of my findings of this journey into the web 2.0 jungle (at times it has definitely felt like a jungle).

LIS New Professionals Network (LISNPN)

This was the quickest and easiest tool to set up.  The forums are great for getting information and connecting people, I’ve found the how-to-guides (in the downloadable resources section) extremely useful and it was through LISNPN that I found myself in London last Monday evening meeting up with other graduate trainees and library school students.  It was a brilliant evening and one that really made me really feel I am part of a community.  So a big thumbs up to LISNPN!

LinkedIn

I set up a LinkedIn account back in (I think) September, but wasn’t really sure about it and had very little information on there and no connections.  An invitation from another trainee to connect on LinkedIn prompted me to have another go with LinkedIn.  I’ve added some more information, made a few connections and joined a couple of groups, but it’s not something I’ve managed to integrate into my routine and I’m not using it well yet.  Definitely one to come back to, but I’ll probably put it on hold until I feel I’ve settled in to blogging and twitter.  I think I’ve probably tried to start too many things at once and would be better focussing on fewer things for now.

Twitter

I started using twitter because I wanted to participate in #uklibchat and initially I thought that might be all I’d use twitter for.  I’ve really enjoyed the two #uklibchats I’ve attended and have got some useful information from them.  However, the main use I have got out of twitter has ended up being the new source of information opened up to me through the frequent tweets of links to news items and blog posts.  So twitter has ended up being more of a success than I expected, though I feel I could still be getting more out of it if I used it more for its original purpose – conversation.

Getting started with twitter took more time than LISNPN, but not as long as I thought it might before I started.  An hour or so setting up the account, reading the twitter help pages and playing around searching for people and hashtags, and experimentally following a couple of interesting looking organisations and I was away.

Blogging

Blogging, as expected, has been by far the most time consuming exercise.  Blogging for the Library Day in the Life project this week on the Oxford Libraries trainees’ blog has been particularly intensive.  I’m trying to blog both on this blog and the trainees’ blog because I see the two blogs as having very different main purposes:

• I use the Oxford Libraries trainee’s blog to inform people who are interested about my traineeship – what I’m doing and what I’m learning through what I’m doing.
• I use this blog to reflect on what I’m doing and thinking about and as somewhere for me to write down my thoughts.  I’d like other people to read it and find it interesting, but that’s really a bonus.

So far I’m struggling to get as many posts written as I’d like.  I’ve now got several half written posts but they all need more research or investigation to be ready to post and I’m not managing to find enough time for that at the moment.  This is probably another consequence of taking on too many new things at once on top of a full time job and my ongoing efforts to learn more about the profession I’m entering via more traditional methods (CILIP Update, journal articles and books).  Hopefully I’ll get quicker at the writing stage at least with practice.

Facebook

I have made the decision to keep facebook as my personal social networking space and not using it in a professional capacity.  Although web 2.0 tools now blur the divide our between professional and personal lives, I still want to keep some distinction between the two.  Though saying that, I have always been careful to make sure there is nothing on my facebook profile I wouldn’t be happy with a (potential) employer or colleague seeing.  As much as I try to keep on top of my privacy settings I don’t feel that I can trust facebook to keep private what I want private.

So, in conclusion, I’m glad I made the leap and initiated my library self into the web 2.0 world.  I’m thoroughly enjoying the experience and finding value in these tools.  However, I do sometimes feel a little like I’m drowning in everything and it may have been better to start one new thing at a time.  On the other hand, everything is so interconnected now maybe doing several things at once is useful?

#UKLibChat

My second (professional) new year’s resolution was to start attending and contributing to #UKlibchat - a fortnightly twitter discussion group about library issue.  Last Thursday I attended the first #UKLibChat of the year.  The topic was Libraries and Librarians in 2012.  I particularly enjoyed the first question: “What was your biggest achievement of 2011?”  I think it’s important to focus on what we have already achieved sometimes, rather than always concentrating on what we’ve still got left to do.   I found it interesting to hear views from participants with wide-ranging library backgrounds and think this is a great way to bounce ideas off other people.

Before attending #UKLibChat my first task was to properly set up a twitter account and work out how to use twitter.  Last year I tried to follow the chat on Library School, but as I only got round to signing up for twitter about five minutes before it started, I got rather lost and confused, so didn’t contribute anything.  This time I was more prepared.  I spent some time a couple of days before going through the twitter help centre – wonderful for demystifying twitter terminology – and signed up for HootSuite which I found made it much easier to keep track of the conversation.  Although I am still getting used to twitter, I really enjoyed the experience and I’ll definitely be back for another #UKLibChat.

Welcome to The Library Cauldron

One of my new years resolutions was to remember to contribute to the Oxford libraries graduate trainees’ blog.  When I started brainstorming ideas for blog posts I found that some of the things I was coming up with, although library-related, weren’t really directly related to the trainee programme.  So I decided to start my own blog for such musings and this is the result.

Why ‘The Library Cauldron’? I wanted to make it obvious I would be writing about libraries, so having ‘library’ in the title seemed a good idea.  I went for ‘cauldron’ because I hope to write about lots of different things here and for this blog to be a metaphorical mixing pot of my ideas.

Not being sure where to start with setting up my own blog I did a bit of searching and found a ‘How to: Set up a blog’ guide by Ned Potter on the LIS New Professionals Network and his associated blog post on the wikiman.  I found these extremely helpful in getting me started, so thank you Ned!

Welcome to The Library Cauldron!