#uklibchat at Library Camp 2012

On Saturday I went to my second Library Camp, an unconference event held in Birmingham. While I enjoyed the whole day (and will hopefully blog about it at some point this week), the highlight for me was the I helped to facilitate with other members of the uklibchat team on the topic of careers.

 After a delayed train and a half-an-hour scurry across Birmingham (I have short legs and was walking with some tall people!) I arrived at the venue in the middle of the session proposals. Luckily, Linsey and Lyle were on hand to propose the uklibchat session while I got my breath back. A post-it with our session name got stuck up on the timetable, and we were in!

Photo by Sarah Childs

We'd picked careers as it had been the most popular topic for uklibchat this year, and we hoped it would be something that plenty of people would want to talk about. Lots of people did turn up, and we had a good discussion which I was very happy about!

All the tweets are archived on Storify, and there is a post on the uklibchat blog which gathers together resources mentioned during the session, and posts from other blogs about the session.

Things that didn't go as planned:

• Wifi. The venue's wifi was either broken or just not equipped to handle so many tweeting and blogging librarians! I wasn't able to get a connection at all, so our grand plans of a hybrid session had to be scaled back a bit. We'd been hoping to live tweet the session, take questions from Twitter as well as the room, and set up a projector with a #uklibchat twitter stream so everyone could see all the tweets. However I was able to tweet from my phone, and we did have several people participating remotely. We'll have to try again at another event in the future!
• Sadly Ka-Ming missed her train and couldn't make it to Birmingham which was such a shame, but I thought Sarah and Linsey did a great job of introducing and facilitating the session without her. I was just desperately trying to keep up with the tweets as I'm pretty slow at typing on my phone!

Things which worked well:

• There was a really good mix of sectors and experience among the people at the session, which was great for this topic.
• People who couldn't make it to the session at the time were chipping in with their opinions on chartership, recruitment agencies etc. for the rest of the day on the #uklibchat hashtag.
• In the first session of the morning a few people had pointed out that it was difficult to follow the different sessions simultaneously being tweeted about on the #libcampuk12 hashtag, so I decided to stick to the #uklibchat hashtag for our session (having tweeted a couple of times on #libcampuk12 to warn people that that's what I was doing). I think this made it much easier to follow the session as we were going along, and to archive it afterwards.
• Lots of people took business cards at the end, woohoo!

Hopefully everyone who came to the session took something away from it. I found it an interesting discussion at least!

Photo by Sarah Childs