What I've been reading in May

CILIP New Professionals Day 2012

Speaker and workshop presentations

Ned Potter, You already have a brand! Here are 5 ways to influence it (#CILIPNPD12) (contains links to blog posts about the day)

Social Media

Simon Barron, "Pictures or it didn't happen." (Reflections on the negative impact of Twitter)

Andy Burkhardt, Puppies in the library and social media (Puppies! No more needs to be said.)

Google

Lance Ulanoff, Google Search Just Got 1,000 Times Smarter 

Volunteers in libraries

Helen Murphy, 50 shades of volunteering (also known as #CPD23 Thing 22: Volunteering)

Voices for the Library, Arts Chief Executive comments on need for skilled library staff

Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, CILIP's Policy on the Use of Volunteers in Public Libraries: A Review

Ian Anstice, CILIP Policy on Volunteers not explicitly against direct substitution of staff

Gary Green, CILIP Volunteer Policy & Job Substitution: Letter to CILIP Update 

Johanna Anderson, CILIP and "job substitution" 

Phil Bradley, Volunteers in Public Libraries

Lisa Hutchins, Volunteers: What organisations say and what they do

Ian Anstice, Grey is not a popular colour 

Library Masters

Jen Laurenson, Masters schmasters? Rising fees, methods of learning and general confusion

eBooks

Samantha Murphy, Harry Potter Series Coming to Kindle Library in June

Lindsay Barber, Alternative E-Book Lending Models Gaining Ground and Harry Potter Meets Amazon's Lending Library

Anna Baddely, Writers won't lose out if libraries lend ebooks

Alison Flood, Pay us for library ebook loans, say authors

Misc.

Funktious, In which I rant about 24 Hour Opening... 

Ned Potter, 6 useful things Prezi can do (which even experienced users miss)

Library by Ellen Forsyth on Flickr

 

#CILIPnpd12 - high visibility cataloguers and cyber librarians

The first workshop I attended was very hands on (as you can see in the pictures below!) so I didn't tweet much. It was run by Deborah Lee and Jennie Perry from HVcats, and was great fun! We were given a pile of assorted lego and had to classify in as many ways as possible, figure out how we would deal with a new kind of brick not included in our classification scheme, and then build a tower from all the 4x2 bricks in the quickest time possible, to demonstrate the problem of distributed relatives (but mainly to win chocolate...)

Following on from that I went to Richard Hawkins and Lisa Hutchins' workshop about being "cyber librarians", which was really interesting and not something I'd really considered before. I've embedded the Storify of my tweets from the day below, or you can find it here.

#CILIPnpd12 - Ned Potter

Yesterday I spent the day at CILIP HQ in London, for my second New Professionals Day. I live-tweeted most of the day (apart from when my hands were full with lego or a giant burrito), and as I have recently discovered Storify, I am going to post a few Storifys of my tweets from the day rather than writing it all out again in a big old blog post. Here's the first bit, Ned Potter's opening keynote speech (if the embed doesn't show up, the link to my Storify is here).

Placement: Pendlebury Library of Music

When we were told to start thinking about the work placement part of our course, I knew that I wanted to go to a music library (my undergraduate degree was in music). I was very lucky that the Pendlebury Library in Cambridge was happy for me to do my placement there, and even better, I was able to do half of the two weeks there, and half in the music department at the main University Library.

I've done my first three days at the Pendlebury Library, and now will be working at the UL for a week before returning to the Pendlebury for the final two days. There is another woman doing work experience in both libraries at the same time (she's over from Germany for two months) and the library staff have been really organised and lined up some interesting projects for us to do while we're here.

At the Pendlebury library, I've learnt how to catalogue CDs, which we don't hold at Newnham so I haven't had a chance to do before. There have recently been a couple of big donations of CDs, so I'm working my way through those (they're in alphabetical order and I'm up to D so far, I don't think I will get through them all!) 

The other project, was to make a floor plan of the library showing the shelves and the classmarks. When we covered Prezi in CPD23 I mentioned that I'd love to try making an interactive library map, inspired by this Prezi by Ned Potter. Luckily for me, Clemens and the rest of the library staff were happy for me to give it a try, and here's the result!

Pendlebury Library Map on Prezi

It's only my third ever Prezi so it's not majorly sophisticated, and I did need get stuck and have to ask Ned for help at one point! I'm pretty pleased with it anyway :) It's gone up on the library's facebook page, and I think will go on the main website eventually. In theory I guess the image could also be printed out and stuck on the wall too.

I'm looking forward to working at the UL for the next week, and will try and blog about that too when I get the chance. I've also got a bunch of notes from the Libraries@Cambridge conference today which will hopefully turn themselves into a blog post while I write an essay? It might happen...

[CPD23] Thing 17: The medium is the message - Prezi and Slideshare

It has rather amused me reading through the CPD23 feeds over the last couple of weeks and seeing the number of posts along the lines of "This is a placeholder post for Thing 17, order must be maintained! *twitch*" I have to say the thought did cross my mind to do the same! Oh librarians :)

Prezi
I've only recently started using Prezi, after we covered this in Cam23 2.0. At the moment I'm still playing with it, and making frivolous presentations such as this one of my Dublin holiday:

Dublin, September 2011 on Prezi

When I start at UCL I'm sure I will have to start giving proper presentations, so I may have the chance to use this tool then. In the meantime I made my second complete Prezi for CPD23, which condenses my instruction post on Twitter into Prezi form:

Twitter: What's it all aboot eh? on Prezi

I really like Prezi as a presentation tool, it's intuitive to use and for an audience it is nice to see something other than Powerpoint slides once in a while. When I do use it I'll make sure not to whirl about madly and make people sick!

As a project for the future, I would like to have a go at making an interactive map of our library using Prezi, something along the lines of this one by Ned Potter.  I’ll probably need to practice a bit more before I attempt that though...

Slideshare
I’ve only used Slideshare as a creator once before, when I wanted to share a presentation the graduate trainees made for the Libraries@Cambridge conference. Surprisingly, our presentation was chosen as one of Slideshare’s ‘Featured Presentations’ (I’m not sure why, it seems quite a niche topic!) and then went on to get over a thousand views in a week, which was a bit of a strange experience! Again, I think this is something that will become increasingly more useful in the future as I start making more presentations.

Apart from that, I have used Slideshare quite often to view other peoples’ presentations. After conferences or other events I will usually have another look at the presentations, which are often hosted on Slideshare.

I think if you were going for a job in design or marketing, a slide-deck CV could be a good way to show your skills off. If I was going for a job which asked for these skills in the job description, I might consider putting together a Powerpoint or even a Prezi CV. It obviously couldn't contain as much detail as a traditional CV (at least, not without filling your slides with text and making a rubbish presentation) so I don't think it could replace the paper one.

I'm glad the last weeks of the programme are going to be spread out a little bit more, as I start at UCL on Monday. However I think the last few Things are going to be some of the most useful and interesting, so bring it on!