Day in the life of a Librarian – it’s Thursday!

Thursday is my late night, so I had a very nice morning in Hove, drinking coffee and writing a few notes on my Chartership whilst reading “Building your Portfolio: the CILIP Guide” .  Then we read in the paper that part of the West Pier in Brighton was being dismantled this morning so we went down to the seafront to take a look.  They’d removed the first part of the sunken bashed up old pier because there was unusually low tides which meant there was good access.  So we just saw a big pile of bits of pier on the beach and some wokrmen in diggers.

Back home and had a special treat – battered sausage and chips for lunch, mm hadn’t had that in ages.  Anyway, onto librarian related activities… headed to work for 2, and the phone rang as soon as I sat down.  It was the the Systems Librarian who then popped up and we had a chat about an issue to do with the catalogue and how information is displayed and whether it is clear enough for users of our external colleges and other non-Uni sites.  I still need to consider it and let her know any suggestions/opinions I may have.

It was time then to go to Reprographics and pick up the A3 posters that they did for us to promote the drop in sessions.  They look pretty good and I stuck a few up, and left some for colleagues to take and put up around the Schools so students hopefully see then on their way to lectures.  Following an email from a colleague I was jolted with the realisation I was meant to have ordered the promo pencils for the Information Services promotional week and I HADN’T DONE IT YET!!!! I meant to do it earlier in the week so I very rapidly dug out the email from the rep at the company and requested a repeat order asap, they were very efficient and replied straight away with the quote and I got that signed and sent off. Phew.  They’ll arrive in time too for the week beginning 22nd. Double phew.

By the time I’d finished with that it was dinner time, so I enjoyed my pasta and a few biccys from the tin in the staff room and headed to the enquiry desk for the evening session.  Continued to have a very productive sessions and got lots done, including sending my mentor meeting log to my mentor (bit of a toungetwister that is) and that was a miracle as the deadline was actually Friday! Wednesday night was the last night of 24 hour opening so I stuck a few posters up to remind the students that tonight we close at 2am instead of staying open all night… no one complained this time fortunately.  Last Summer when I worked at the end of the 24 hour opening some students got really annoyed we closed at 2 because they wanted to stay in the library ALL night, because that’s what they always do the night before an exam. Hmm, doesn’t seem a great idea to me.  They demanded the manager’s phone number and that we stay open all night.  wasn’t going to happen.  I pointed out that the posters had said exactly when it ended and had been up for the past 6 weeks, but they still claimed ‘no-one told them’. Oh well… Overall a productive and busy day, was very glad to head home at 9.  As we cycled home a three wheeler looked like it had broken down so we stopped and helped the old chap push it into a parking space at the side of the road.  Initially we rode past but then doubled back to see if he was OK as he could have been quite vulnerable,  but he was alright.  Got home and watched ‘Delia through the ages’ on i-player. Chocolate bread and butter pudding…mmmmmmm.

Librarian Sarah

Day trip to Kingston University: Part 1 Knights Park and Penrhyn Road campuses

On Thursday 28th January I arranged to go to Kingston University to visit my Rachel my Chartership Mentor, who is a Senior Information Adviser on the Knights Park campus.  I thought I’d record here the events of my day out and include a few piccys that I took on my phone.

Rachel sent me very clear directions from the station, one of them was to walk past the tumbling phone boxes…didn’t know what that meant until I saw them. Nice.  I liked them.

So I headed past these and ten minutes later reached Knights Park campus.  I was a bit early but I enjoyed sitting in the lobby area watching the students come and go, and I overheard one student with her tutor receiving feedback on her portfolio which was interesting.  It made want to go to art school! There was also a very nice looking art shop, unfortunately I couldn’t go in, you just ask for what you want and the lady at the counter brings it to you! Bet nothing gets nicked that way. Anyway, back to library stuff.  Rachel came and met me and I then enjoyed a tour of the LRC.  It’s the library for Architecture, Art, Design, Fashion, Film, Photography and Surveying! I was impressed with their DVD collection, loads of great looking films on the shelves.

I think I’d be browsing it every Friday evening to find a good film for the weekend if I worked there! I liked looking at th eposters and signs used and think that their round ‘Silent’ signs were quite effective, so maybe we could consider some shaped signs back at Brighton…. In their group study rooms they had swish flat screen TV’s that students can hook up their laptops to, which was nice and useful for presentation practice.  I liked the carousel of ‘recreational reading’ books and thought that was nice, occasionally we get asked at work if there are any fiction books in the library and sadly we say no… It was interesting to visit another academic library and just see how things are done.  At Kingston all staff work on the main desk which doubles up enquires and issues/renewals etc which I think must help all members of staff to feel part of a big team? I like seeing the types of promotional materials used, and was impressed with the nice leaflets and signs, and also the very pretty leaflet tree as seen here.  We then had a chat about my progress with my portfolio and agreed some deadlines, they will be challenging to meet but I do work better with deadlines so I’m hoping the next couple months will be very fruitful indeed!

After our chat and tour we headed over to another nearby campus – Penrhyn Road where there was another library to check out.  This was quite a biggy, several floors, nice coffee area and even a reading garden! I loved that… I’d like one please. 

I liked the swishy self issue machines, the blue lights were nice… I was told that at the Nightingale Centre where I was heading to next there was a machine that sorts the books automatically after they go into the self return area, now that I was looking forward to seeing (library nerd or what?).  You’ll see a picture of that in my next post!  so I enjoyed my tour, and the encouragement that I was on the right track, and just need to write up lots now.  Oh, and here’s a pic of the nice self issue machines….

So I then got the uni bus over to the Kingston Hill campus to meet Anna who works there (we met on the CPD25 Chartership Sessions back in 2007/08) and she chartered last year.  I’ll write about that in my next post…

Library day in the life – round 4, day 4

Is it really Thursday already? Yowsers.

I’m still at work as it’s my #latenightlibrarian duty until 9pm. I got here circa 9.15 today to discover my colleague had done herself a mischief tripping over and landing quite heavily on her hand. She was first aided, but ended up having to go to A&E just be sure she was all ok and just bruised rather than broken. Still, made things a bit trying for her today!

So,  I was  bit grumpy this morning for no particular reason, which generally makes me even more grumpy, because I can’t rationalise it! Idiot! Anyway, I had the usual start to my day- emails. Emails, emails, emails, emails. I finally sorted out the journals stuff for GY327 and the lecturer seems pleased, this was the start of his reply:

‘Wow, you are super-efficient in the library.’

Loves it! So, journal articles have been requested. Great.

I then did some more preparing for the recording for BURST and went over to Watts where we have a sound studio. Phil (the sound engineer) and I set things up and did some testing, testing, checking the levels and all that and we were ready to go. My colleagues arrived and we had a discussion about safe computing. This will feature in IS for you Week. One of my colleagues, Robert Schifreen used to be a hacker, so knows all about safe computing!! Recording went well and was fun too.

We had a break for lunch, desk lunch for me again, (which I actually hate doing, but have done twice this week I think, naughty) this gave a bit of time to catch up on emails etc. I then went back over to Watts and loaded the recording onto a computer with Adobe Soundbooth on, I would have preferred Adobe Audition, but that isn’t on the computer I was using, nevermind. I made a start on the editing, which takes a bloody age! I really enjoyed it though. I used to do internet radio stuff back in the day and this was a reminder of how much I did enjoy it.

Anyway, bits of editing done and back to the office to try and organise more recording for BURST with our SUVP for Education and Equalities and our Director of IS. Still need to schedule these in, but the SUVP for EE seems keen which I’m pleased about.

Freaking out slightly about the lack of time we have, but we’ll get it done. Sarah and I will be out and about harrassing students for their views and ideas about IS. I’m looking forward to that

So, I’m now on the enquiry desk and it’s been a fairly busy session. Things keep breaking, well a phone and the printer credit machine, I’ve had to do a few more walk arounds than normal to try and keep the noise levels down as we’ve had a few complaints about that. For the most part though, people seem to respect others are trying to work, but there’s always a rowdy few!!!

Tomorrow is set to be another busy day with more IS for you Week stuff, this time a photo competition to discuss and get moving on. Then an enquiry desk and then I’m off to a Career Development Group London and South East Committee meeting at UCL. Phew!

I’ve got chartership activities that need attention which will have to be this weekend I think. Rock and roll!

Ok, that’s the end for today, just half an hour to go for Late night librarian Emma.

Library Day in the Life – round 4

So, this is part of the Library Day in the Life project. I haven’t done anything for it before and as I understand it this is round 4! You can find out more about how to join in from the Library Day in the Life wiki. It doesn’t have to be a blog post, there’s lots of Twitter #libday4 activity and photos and all. So have a look and participate however you like!

What’s happened today?
Well, having got up, stretched, showered and peppermint teaed I had my usual cycle to work arriving circa 8:45. I was changed and ready for library action by 9.00.

First activity was going through the emails. Lots of them from all sorts of people! Second activity was deciding what my priorities for the day were.

First off I had a look through the withdrawn titles to see if there were any I needed to replace or find alternatives for, fortunately this week there weren’t many for me! This was followed by checking through the fortnightly reserved titles for my subject area (environment – geography, geology, built environment and civil engineering) and ordered any extra copies or ebooks that were available. I then had a quick jaunt up to the third floor to retrieve a book and make sure that people were observing the new silent across the whole floor status up there. There were a couple of people on mobile phones, but they were ok to move to a different floor to finish their conversation. One thing I have noticed with this is that people want to talk to each other when they’re looking for books.

After that it was time for my enquiry desk session, 10.45 till 1. It was a fairly steady session with the majority of enquiries relating to room bookings. Our group study rooms are pretty busy at the moment so there were some disappointed people!  Others people couldn’t find books and wanted interlibrary loans and the like. There were also a few emails to reply to in the AskAldrich inbox.  I managed to get in some BNB action selecting some new titles and a brief squiz through some other publishers catalogues. This will continue tomorrow. A student also reported the ‘bad smell’ had returned downstairs in the computer poolroom and social zone. This caused the library to close yesterday, so we had the estates people in to try and sort it out. Turns out it’s a blocked pipe and they are trying to shift it all so the smell should go with that. Poo! Yuck!

Desk session done and time for some eating, checking my personal emails and having a quick look on Twitter and a scan of the blog posts brought to me through google reader and a look through emails from the lists I’m subscribed to, some interesting discussions from the new professionals, more about that another time.

Lunch was followed with a meeting with a couple of colleagues to discuss how we are going to do a photo/image competition on Community@brighton as part of our IS for you week coming up in February. There’s been lots of planning for this and there should be a good selection of activities throughout the week to help raise the profile of the department to staff and students. This deserves a post of its own so I’ll mention more about that another time.  This meeting was to see how we could use the technology of Community for the competition.

Back to the office to find more journal articles for a lecturer for a new module. Very comprehensive list give which is great, but I don’t think we’ll be able to get all of them! More work is needed on this and I’m hoping to finish it tomorrow. We already subscribe to a fair few and I’ve managed to find some others freely available online, but then there’s the ones that we can’t request through HESS, so I’m going to see if we can get them as photcopies to have in desk loan. Anyway, more work on that tomorrow. Also ordered some more books for the same module.

More email checking and getting ready for tomorrows task. I’ve written a list! Brilliant.

Now I’m just writing this from one of the engineering labs waiting for my boy to finish tinkering with his diesel engine and then I can go home! I think I’m getting a bit woozy from the diesel fumes! Will be nipping round to my friend Christopher Whales when I get home for the swoop to be returned to the fringe and who knows what!

Ok, well that rounds things up from me. Crikey, I sound really boring!!

Until tomorrow, when some more interesting things might have happened

Librarian Emma.

Happy Anniversary! My first year as an Assistant Information Adviser at the University of Brighton

So, yesterday  was my one year anniversary as an Assistant Information Adviser (AIA) at the University of Brighton (UoB) and I’m going to get my clichés out straight away! The time has flown by, so for the most part it must have been fun, and indeed it has. Of course there have been a few freak outs, crossed wires and a couple of uncomfortable situations, professionally and personally, but each one of these situations has taught me something, so that’s good.

This post is going to look at some of the highlights of the year for me and the easiest way to do that is chronologically, so here goes! A year in the life of Emma Illingworth, AIA, UoB. A lot of what I mention we’ve previously blogged about so it links to them rather than repeating what we did etc.

January 2009

On the 12^th of January 2009 I started my job as an AIA at the Aldrich Library, UoB.

First impressions:

• Much larger department than I’d previously worked in.
• Lots of people to get to know, sharing an office with one other, when I’ve been used to open plan and a smaller team.
• Lots of potential to develop in the role and lots of opportunities.

February – March 2009

• Getting into the swing of things, finding out about the academic staff and the courses I’m responsible for; familiarising myself with reading lists, learning about stock selection, ordering, weeding.
• Enjoying the enquiry desk and the variety of conversations to be had on there! Started to find out more about delivering workshops as part of our LOCO programme to staff and researchers.
• Also attended a session about mobile technologies and how they are being used for education.
• Observed a couple of user education sessions delivered by a colleague to get an idea of what needs to be included – how to deliver them etc.
• Visit to Falmer library to see their self issue machines in action and find out a bit more about how this has changed how they work.
• Got in on the Marketing Action Group to see if I can contribute to this working group which looks at marketing across the department.
• We trialled 24/5 opening hours which was very well received, but had its challenges! People sleeping here, take aways being delivered = mess and odd smells! Yuckers! Study rooms locked with people’s stuff in.

April-May 2009

• Submitted proposal with Sarah for the first New Professionals Conference, which got accepted! Aces!
• Delivered my first workshops with colleague Maggie – Getting to grips with the Online Library and An Introduction to Endnote.
• Attended my first school board.
• Planning with Sarah for New Professionals conference – ideas, ideas!

June 2009

• IS overview – this was great as we got to visit all the other site libraries of UoB – Falmer, Queenwood and DGH (Eastbourne), UCH (Hastings), Grand Parade. We also got an overview of the other sections of IS – computing, network services, media centres, reprographics. A very useful insight which gave me a better understanding of how I fit into IS.
• Planning for the New Professionals conference continued as a busy Sarah is double booked! We go for video action. Book in with Janette Grabham for recording in the TV studio. Exciting!
• More marketing activities.
• Looking at Camtasia for visual ‘how to’ guides.
• Our Information Services Manager , Lyn Turpin, retired and was eventually replaced by our current Information Services Manager, Steve Newman.
• Glastonbury!! Loved it.

July 2009

• New Professionals conference 06/07/09 – Yikes! (Paper now available online) Met Kathy Ennis (CILIP) who asked me to do a workshop at the CILIP graduate day.
• Learning and Teaching conference at UoB – Representing Information Services at this conference held at here.
• Umbrella – used itouch for tweeting sessions. Met some lovely people. Hoping to do a session at the next one!!
• Stewarding at the award ceremonies – students from the School of Environment and Technology, which are my subject areas. It was me in July 2008! Ah the memories!
• More weeding.
• Started Librarians on the Loose!

August-September 2009

• Planning for and delivering user education sessions! Eye opener and learning curve!
• Chartership preparation underway, meeting mentor
• Roaming helping trial – worked well.
• CILIP graduate day – This was aces. Delivered a couple of workshops about marketing yourself as a new professional in the workplace.
• Getting reading lists and buying books.
• Start of term!
• Break ups and meltdowns. Boooooo!
• Bestival! Another aces musical adventure!

October – November 2009

• More user education sessions.
• CDG committee meeting
• More Endnote and Getting to grips sessions
• Box of Broadcasts launch
• CrossSearch launch
• IS for you week planning and ideas – this is for a week of intense activity from Information Services to promote what we’re about. We’re on for the week of the 22nd February 2010 and I’ve no doubt there will be a blog post about that! So far there’s radio activities, drop in sessions and a mobile enquiry desk from Aldrich Library and more from other IS departments. Ooooooooohhhh.
• Drop in sessions – these didn’t work so well, but we’re going to have another go from February 201o, so we’ll see.
• CILIP Manifesto Task and Finish Group activities – overwhelming, but valuable experience. Not sure I contributed so much to this.
• New Professionals Support Officers Training Day
• Start attending the CPD25 sessions to help with Chartership activities

December 2009 – January 2010

• My birthday!
• Freak out! – I had a bit of a funny old time mid-end of December which mainly involved doubting my ability to do anything! Great.  Good email talking to from my mentor though, which helped to put things into perspective. Thank goodness for that!
• IS for you week planning and ideas continue
• More book ordering
• Drop in sessions – still trying with these in December
• Information Services Christmas party – good quiz and lots to eat! Sarah and Helen were on the organising committee for this.

Phew! So, that’s it. What a busy year. 2010 seems to hold lots of adventures which we will of course let you know about on here. In coming weeks I think we’ll probably post more about IS for you week, the silent top floor and 24/5 opening hours.

Here’s to an exciting and productive year for 2010!

Librarian Emma

The art of being a school librarian – we like Cathryn Moon!

This has been ready to upload forever! Just needed the pictures. Happy reading. Librarian Emma.

In mid-December, Sarah and I had the pleasure of visiting the Learning Resource Centre (LRC) at Bognor Regis Community College after meeting Cathryn Moon, the LRC Manager at a CILIP Sussex event at the Audrey Emerton library earlier in the year.

I have an interest in school libraries and what the priorities are there because working in a University library we see that students here have difficulties with information literacy, how to find and access information that they need to complete assignments etc. I’m interested in finding out if there is a way university librarians can work with school/college librarians to try and get students information skills to a standard that will benefit them when they start university. I’m sure lots of this sort of partnership work exists already and I will have a look into this more, so if any of you work in school or university libraries and have done any work together to improve information literacy, then let me know!!

Speaking to Cathryn and seeing the kind of work she does really helped me get a better understanding of the priorities and issues working in a school library.  Things that seem obvious like reading for pleasure. Working at a university library where the priorities are so different I forget about the importance and value of reading for pleasure even though I like to make time to do that myself!  Cathryn doesn’t get a lot of  formal, lesson contact time with students to help them get to grips with using the library and gaining an understanding of how to find and use information, but when she does she plans and delivers (what I think!) are interesting and engaging lessons.  Cathryn showed us some examples of the exercises she uses to help the students with all sorts of library related activities from finding books in the library to creating a bibliography of the materials they have used. Listening to her experiences and how she keeps up to speed with what’s going on with other school ibraries really gave me a good insight into her work.

At the moment Cathryn has an information literacy session with year 7 students only. There isn’t any other formal class time she has with any of the other year groups. Time certainly has its part to play here as the year groups are large with many form groups, so if she was to work with each year that is all she would do!! Cathryn sseems to want to be able to do more, but practically there are other aspects of delivering a library and information service that Cathryn has to consider.

Cathryn works closely with the teachers to ensure the library is supporting the curriculum as best it can. While she has many challenges in her role, she does acknowledge that the school does value the library and it’s purpose within the school, which at the moment, while school libraries are not compulsory, is great!

When we went to visit Cathryn and her colleague Alison split their time between two school libraries. One for the younger students and one for the older students. At some point in early 2010 they will be moving into a new building with a new library which combines the two old ones. It’ exciting times ahead for Cathryn and Alison and we’re angling for a visit to the new library once they’re settled in!

I learnt a lot from this visit and while I recognise that the priorities of school libraries are really different from those of a univesity library I still think we can better prepare those at school for coming to study in a university environment so that they do have good information litercy skills that can be developed and they can become more independent learners.

Hurray for Cathryn Moon and all the other school librarians out there!

Librarian Emma

CPD25 – E-resources Collection Management

Last week I attended a CPD25 workshop about E-resources Collection Management which was given by Anna Grigson, E-resources Manager at Royal Holloway, University of London. For me the workshop was interesting and useful and prompted some questions for me to ask our Eresources Coordinator about how we manage our e-resources.  Sarah has mentioned our potential radio activities in 2010 and I think our E-resources Coordinator would be a great person to do something like the day in the life feature for that.

Anna took us through the workshop in the following stages:

• What are e-resources?
• Where are e-resources?
• How do users find e-resources?

• How do we select e-resources?
• How do we buy e-resources?
• How do we manage e-resources?

• Policy
• Practicalities

We had opportunity to discuss each of these questions and doing this made things clearer for me about what we do here at the University of Brighton. An interesting discussion point was how users find e-resources. There was common theme that people don’t really get how e-resources can be accessed and searched which gives us the challenge of getting people to understand what’s available to them and how they can use the resources.
Another area of interest for me is all the different authentication options and how they can be managed, what the providers dictate and how that limits what we can do. Our 3 authentication options are: athens, exproxy and shibboleth. These access options are described on our Information Services website.

The other discussion I found interesting was about who selects and buys e-resources. Usually selection comes down to the subject librarians, the e-resources team and suggestions from academic staff and other users. Anna told us about a pay per view option which allows for user selection and purchase. As I understand it a portion of the budget gets allocated to a central pot with the publisher/provider and users can select and buy items of interest. Limits and checks can be used so that what is being bought by users can be monitored. I’d be interested to see how this works in practice. In theory it seems like a great way to develop a collection.

Anna gave us some issue to think about relating to e-resources collection management, which I have attached, along with her presentation slides.

Librarian Emma

Here are the handouts we got at the session from Anna Grigson, E-resources Manager, Royal Holloway, University of London

CPD25 E-resources issues handout
CPD25 E-resources references handout
CPD25 E-resources presentation

All change please…

It feels like a long time since I posted anything, but in real life it’s been just over a week! Imagine that. Anyway, all’s mostly ok here in Brighton. It’s been very blustery and rainy just lately, but no where near as bad as the what’s been occuring in Cumbria.

In work – more user education sessions and new staff in the pipeline
So, what’s been going on? Well, it feels like a lot in the last week; I’ve got another literature searching session for some final years booked in for next term and a couple of Endnote web ones to go with that, so I’m going to get thinking about how I can make these sessions interesting and engaging. The last literature searching one I did there were a couple of activities and a quiz throughout which seemed to keep them interested. I try and keep it to 40 mins to an hour max depending on questions which seems just right for most.

Our department has been going through a fair bit of change and this will continue now the new managers have been appointed. It’ll be really interesting to see how they will change the department and direction we will take. I was very pleased to hear that one of them will be responsible for developing a martketing strategy for the department as this is something that’s been bugging me since I started here. A colleague of mine did a lot of work for this, but somehow it’s never seemed to move forward for one reason or another, but once the new people start hopefully this will progress. I’d like to get involved in that somehow. We’ll see what happens. It’ll be great to get a consistent approach to marketing across our sites and this should defo help. It’s quite exciting really!

Chartership – the marketing theme continues…
I attended the first in a series of workshops put on by the CPD25 which should help with the chartership process. This one was about marketing library services, which I know a bit about already, but I’m always keen to hear the experiences of others and see how other university libraries approach their marketing. This session reinforced what I already know and gave me some ideas about what we could do here. Timing wise it fits in quite nicely with what I mentioned above about developing a marketing strategy for the department. I also met some lovely people and I’m looking forward to the next one, even though it is on my birthday!

What else? I’ve got a deadline for finishing my PPDP which is going slowly! I thought I’d be all over it, especially because me and mentor decided on this deadline, but I am rubbish! I don’t know where my time goes. Anyway, that’s a task for this weekend I think in between two birthday celebrations and a wedding! Crikey.

Right, that’s it.

Librarian Emma

Committees, groups and social media o clock

Ok, so you won’t be surprised to hear that I’m going to mention chartership in this post. It’s becoming a more prominent thing in my life, but so far I’m managing to balance it with everything else that I’m involved in.

There are two themes to this post:

1. Being involved in committees and groups

2. Social media

So, let’s start with ‘being involved in committees and groups‘. Everyone knows that taking an active role in committees and/or groups that you are interested in benefits both you as an individual as well as the group. I attended my first Career Development Group (CDG) London and South East committee meeting last Tuesday with the aim of finding out; if there is anything I could contribute to the group, if so, what?
Now, the CDG in my opinion is one of the most important CILIP groups and I support their mission and aims which is why I am interested in becoming a more active member and here lies my problem. What can I actually valuably contribute to this group? Being a committee member would be great, but I feel like I’d be more active if I had a specific task/role. With this in mind there is the opportunity to put myself forward for some vacant roles on the committee for 2010, so I’ve got until 27th November to make up my mind.

In addition to the CDG London and South East Committee, I have been asked to become part of the CILIP South East Branch Committee for 2010. For this there would be a specific role looking at publicity and marketing for the branch and I would share this role with Sarah. We are both interested in how to effectively market library services here at the University and it will be a great experience to see if we can use these skills in a different setting and for a different purpose. I’m looking forward to finding out more about the scope of what we can do.

The final group activity I wanted to mention was the CILIP Manifesto Task and Finish Group. I’ve mentioned this in previous blog posts and we had the second meeting to discuss the drafts of the manifesto and the outcome of consultation at the Policy Forum and at the Members Day. This was a really interesting group to be involved with, but I don’t feel like I contributed very much to the meetings. I worked with Maria Cotera on writing the introductory statement to the manifesto and feel like I acheived something with this, but in terms of revisions and changes to what others had contributed in the ‘golden bullets’ I didn’t feel so confident.The manifesto is now in the hands of Peter Beauchamp and Guy Daines, who with Maria Cotera will work on a final draft.  I was glad to be involved with such a varied group of experienced information professionals and definitely learnt a lot from it.

Being involved in all of these groups/committees is great for me to get an idea of what I want to do and where my strengths are. The process of finding out about those things is an important one.

Social Media

I read a blog post from the Running Librarian James Mullan looking at Social media as a new drug and this got me thinking about all the social media activities I do. I don’t think I’m addicted to the tools that I use, igoogle, twitter, facebook and most recently Google Wave. They are useful to me in a work and social way and a good way to find out what others in the profession are doing.  They serve a purpose and that’s the main thing. Similarly Ned Potter, the Wikiman was wondering how useful LinkedIn is for people and again I guess this comes down to what you are going to use these tools for and how they are going to help you with your work or whatever. So, really it just got me thinking about what social media I use and why. I realise LinkedIn is businessy rather than social, but they are all means of communication, but just with different faces.

Librarian Emma

It’s all about the new professionals!

The main thing in this blog post is the New Professional Support Officers Training Day, which I attended at CILIP on Friday 4^th November 2009.

I was pleased to attend this training day to which there were two main aims:

• To demonstrate the value of being an active and involved member of CILIP, particularly the Career Development Group (CDG).
• To bring together the New Professional Support Officers from the regions to discuss the possibility of hosting graduate days across the UK.

Why be an active member of the profession?
During the morning Kathy Ennis and Lyndsay Rees- Jones, the Membership Support Unit at CILIP gave us an overview of what CILIP currently do to inform those interested in the library and information profession. We also looked at the benefits for us as new professionals to be involved with the development of these, and other activities and why we should encourage others to take an active role in the profession in a wider context, so through the special interest groups and specifically the CDG. In addition we looked at the way CILIP and the CDG are structured and how it all fits together.  It was useful to get this background knowledge about how things currently work so we could think about how to take things forward. This may well feature as a blog post on the New Professionals, which has been set up by New Professionals Coordinator, Chris Rhodes and which everyone is welcome to contribute to: http://lisnewprofessionals.wordpress.com/

In addition to this Kathy and Lyndsay introduced us to the ‘Big Conversation’. This will begin in January 2010 and CILIP are keen to involve new professionals. The idea is to get people talking about what CILIP should be and what we want to represent in ten years time. As new professionals now, it’s our vision that will help to shape our profession and all that goes with it, so this is a fantastic opportunity for us all to have an input. Definitely watch out for more about that and how you can be involved.

The Graduate Day – what can we do?
The current Graduate Day is hosted at CILIP in London and organised by the Membership Support Unit team; Kathy and Lyndsay. Based on feedback about this event it is felt that the opportunity to attend a day like this should be extended across the UK making it more accessible to those that are interested in finding out more about working in the library and information profession.
It was great to be involved in the discussions of how we can take the Graduate Day to different regions of the UK and some really good ideas were formed which Kathy and Lyndsay are going to help develop. The whole idea for these graduate days is that we, the new professionals will deliver them in collaboration with Kathy and Lyndsay, which provides an excellent and exciting opportunity for us in terms of developing our skills and for those attending, it allows them to get the real life experiences of us as new professionals as well as an insight into the profession from the established and experienced professionals.

My thoughts
For me personally, I was able to contribute to the discussions about how we could realistically take the Graduate Day to different parts of the UK as well give a bit of an insight into the opportunities I have had as a new professional and what they have led on to. All of the things I have been involved in this year are as a result of presenting a paper at the New Professionals conference in the summer. CILIP are really keen to have new professionals involved, contributing and developing ideas, because we are the future of the profession and it is up to us to help shape what we think that should be.
Overall, this was a productive and inspiring day which confirmed to me why I want to be an active member of CILIP and of my profession.

It was also aces to see some familiar faces again as well as meeting some new people from across the country. I like being part of this network of people!

I’m going to the CDG London and South East committee meeting tomorrow for the first time, which I’m really looking forward to, so I’ll post about that later in the week.

Also, more CILIP stuff. The second Manifesto group meeting will be underway on Thursday, which is likely to be a lively one and really important for us, so I’ll keep you updated with what comes out of that.

Finally, there are interviews going on here at the moment for several new posts, so there’s change coming. I’m interested in seeing how that develops and changes our services. It’s going to be an interesting few months.

Ok, this is defo the last thing! Sarah has got a book review coming out in the Times Higher Education on Thursday, so keep an eye out for that. I’m sure she will post about that soon.

Watch this space!

Librarian Emma.