What I've been reading in October

Social Media

Phil Bradley, Should we outlaw 'social media'?

Phil Bradley, Personal reputation in a social media world

Literacy

Lane Wilkinson, Beyond 'Beyond Literacy'

School Libraries

The Guardian, Library campaigners to meet MPs

Chartership

Jo Alcock, Joeyanne McLip (one to come back to when I decide to attempt chartership!)

Events and Networking

Stephanie Taylor, #uklibchat in RL! (summary of the #uklibchat session at Library Camp 2012)

#uklibchat, Summary - 10th July 2012 - Conferences, events and networking

Publishing

Publishers Weekly, Random House, Penguin Agree to Merge

What I've been reading in August

Well, we did it! My MA class has now submitted our dissertations, and that's the end of my year at UCL. This blog has been very quiet over the summer for obvious reasons, but I'm hoping to get back into the habit of blogging regularly once more now that I have a bit more time on my hands!  I managed to keep the monthly round up posts going though as they're fairly quick to put together, and here is what I've been reading in August (or in most cases this month, what I kept unread until the start of September!)

eBooks

Andy Woodworth, Libraries and eBook Publishers: Friend Zone Level 300


Marketing library services

Naomi Tiley, IFLA Conference: Marketing of Rare and Special Collections in a Digital Age

Stpehen Barr, How should academic libraries communicate their own value? 


Information Literacy

Daniel Russell, Internet Search: What makes it simple, difficult or impossible?

Meredith Farkas, The devil you know in first-year instruction


Games and libraries

Lisa Poisso, Real-life librarians hit the Ironforge stacks (interview with Ellen Forsyth from the WoW guild Where is the Library, which runs regular discussion groups in Ironforge library)

Games and Libraries, Edited transcripts of talks (archive of the Where is the Library discussions)


Presenting

Bobbi Newman, 20 Things to Do After You Accept that Speaking Gig

R. David Lankes, Beyond the Bullet Points: Bullet Points (advice for developing speaker skills)

  
Neutrality in events and conferences

Library Camp, The Co-operative Bank Grant Application

Lauren Smith, Library Politics and Agenda-Setting


Misc.

Brian Matthews, Think Like a Startup (I haven't had time to read all of this yet, but it's good stuff. Aaron Tay's post below pulls out some of the main points)

Aaron Tay, "We're a cut-and-paste profession"

Travis McDade, The difficulty of insider book theft

In the Ironforge Library by Tourach

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 - Phil Bradley

Here's my final Storify of the day, on Phil Bradley's keynote speech and the panel Q&A. It's also available on the Storify website here, and all of the presentations from the whole day should go up on the CILIP New Professionals Day website soon.

#CILIPnpd12 - Bethan Ruddock

To end the day we had two brilliant key note speakers - Bethan Ruddock and Phil Bradley. Here's the storify of Bethan's presentation on the New Professionals Toolkit (also available on the Storify website)

#libcampuk11 session 5: #uklibchat and social media

The final session I went to yesterday was on #uklibchat and using social media to cross sectors. Four out of the five #uklibchat team members were there to lead the discussion - Adrienne, Sarah, Ka-Ming and Sam.

The aim of this session was to explore ways to move forward with #uklibchat.

What people like about #uklibchat: 

• Having a set time that you can turn up and know you can have professional chat. 
• Good for solo librarians who can feel isolated. 
• Can watch without needing to join in. 
• Agenda can be anonymous and means you can think about your answers beforehand. 
• Write ups are great. 
• Focuses twitter energy!

What could be improved: 

• Intros at the beginning mean people might feel discouraged from joining in halfway through. 
• Having an "agenda" feels rigid (possibly calling it something different would solve this). 
• Having it at a specific time is at odds with how people use social media. 
• Impression that it's just for students but it's not!

Other similar chats to look at:

• #tlchat - teacher librarian chat - not at specific time
• #ukedchat

General thoughts on social media:

• Twitter is mysterious if you don't use it, who to follow, hashtags etc. Possibility of using the blog a bit more with tips and How To guides.
• Twitter is less formal than mailing lists, you need to be grown up on mailing lists! They seem like things that you need to be experienced librarian to use. Twitter reaches the wider world so good for cross pollination. Generational divide between listservs and twitter - is uklibchat offputting to older people?

Ideas for the future:

• Partner with experts for chats in particular area.
• Encourage people to use the hashtag outside of the set time as well, to discuss anything library related.
• How To guides for using Twitter, including clients.

                                                                 ---

Okay I think that is literally everything I have to say about Library Camp! Normally I end up writing one massive blog post after a conference, today I have ended up with 6 slightly shorter ones, I don't know which is better! Using Evernote to make my notes yesterday has made blogging about it afterwards a lot quicker and easier, so I will definitely be doing that again in the future. So a bit of CPD23 win in there too!

What I've been reading in September

Advocacy

Lauren Smith, Thing 16: Advocacy, speaking up for the profession and getting published (from the CPD23 blog)

Nikki (Musings from a Librarian), Thing 16: Advocacy 

Ian Clark, Advocacy etc. 

Ian Anstice, Arguments Against Libraries, Arguments For Libraries 

The Good Library Blog, About two thirds of reading in this country is of books from public libraries


Marketing

Ned Potter, Marketing Libraries in a Web 2 World [slides]


Social Media

Nancy Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2010)

Meredith Farkas, The Changing Professional Conversation

Ned Potter, thewikiman blog? There's an app for that! (Useful looking tool for turning blogs into iphone apps, shame no Android support though!)

Ian Clark, Turning blogs into apps (How the above tool could be a lot better)

Laura Wilkinson, Highlights from Oxford Social Media Day 2011

Jo Alcock, 6 Twitter Tips for Organisations #hhlib (Great advice from Donna Ekhart at the Handheld Librarian conference)


eBooks and Digital Resources

JSTOR, Early Journal Content on JSTOR, Free to Anyone in the World 

Simon Barron, UK Government rejects idea of National Digital Library

David Rapp, Sony Announces First Dedicated eReader with Wireless Library eBook Download Capability

Obnoxious Librarian from Hades, The one with the e-book chaos 

Julie Bosman, Kindle Connects to Library eBooks (But only in the US as yet)

Bobbi Newman, How to Check Out (and Return!) Library eBooks from OverDrive on Your Amazon Kindle


Library School

Annie Pho, What does your degree mean to you? (Is a library degree more than just a "union card"?)


The Future of Libraries

Ian Clark, Could the UK soon need an official 'Banned Books Week'? 

Ned Potter, Skip to the end: library futures, now... 


Misc.

Anna Martin, Organising a Day Trip 

Central Station, Mysterious Paper Sculptures

Brian Herzog, Work Like a Patron Day 2011

By LibraryMan on Flickr

[CPD23] Thing 12: Putting the 'Social' into Social Media

Quite an open topic for this week's Thing, so I'm going to blog about something that's been annoying me for the last couple of days. I'll try to keep the rantiness to a minimum.

Watching the news on television over the last few days has been a depressing experience. For those readers who aren't in the UK, we've now had 4 nights of rioting, looting and vandalism in London and several other major cities. Watching the news it is very easy to feel that everyone in the country has gone completely mad.

Most of the news reports I've seen have mentioned something along the lines of "...the riots, often being organised through social networks..." Gah! Yes, some of these idiots might be planning their next move using BlackBerry Messenger or Facebook or whatever. But what I'm seeing in my Twitter feed are messages of support for those living in the riot spots, updates on where is safe/dodgy at the moment, #riotcleanup and #operationcupoftea trending both UK and worldwide, evacuation operations for the disabled and elderly being organised...I could go on.  When I log onto Facebook I see an invitation to the Operation Cup of Tea event which currently has over 200,000 people attending. 99% of us are decent people! Some people are always going to do stupid, mindless things, but this would happen with or without social media. Meanwhile, many people are using social media to do good deeds, or just to chat and catch up with friends, which is a jolly fine thing to do in my opinion.

Bringing this post vaguely back to CPD23, I think the last few days have proved that the advantages and disadvantages of social media are entirely dependent on how you use it, as is whether or not you create a sense of community. Personally I've found my Twitter network is a really strong community, while LinkedIn for example is much less so - mainly because I haven't really got into it yet. As for whether I will be continuing to use social media in some form or other for professional development, the answer to that is a resounding yes!

Keep yourselves safe, keep doing good and keep being totally awesome.

What I've been reading in July

Graduate Traineeships and Library School

Sam Wiggins, Introducing...the World of Libraries (really useful tips aimed at future trainees, but would be of interest to library school students and other new professionals too)

Library Day in the Life

Lots and lots of people, Library Day in the Life Project, Round 7


Social Media and Technology

Laura Woods, Current Awareness, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the "Mark All As Read" Button (sound advice!)

Nicole Fonsh, Google University (what happens to libraries and library schools when a new social media platform or other disruptive technology comes along?)

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Five Things to Expect from the Amazon Kindle Tablet

S. Wade Lorenz, The internet, Web 2.0. Cloud, Marketing and Library 2.0 

Laura Wilkinson, Developing Libraries Beyond Web 2.0 

Jolie O'Dell, The State of the Tablet and eReader Market

Dave Evans, The Internet of Things [Infographic] 


Save Libraries

Ian Clark, The media love libraries - let's make the most of it! 

CILIP

Helen Murphy, If Only Benedict Cumberbatch were CEO of CILIP (also known as #CPD23 Thing 7: Professional Organisations and Face-to-face Networking) As always with Helen, this is brilliant, and the comments are really interesting too)

Misc.


John Kupersmith, Library Terms that Users Understand (handy for those thinking about library websites or user guides)

Ian Clark, The Decline of Murdoch - a Good Thing for the Flow of Information? 

Andy Woodworth, Filtering is for Coffee Makers, Not Libraries


And Finally...

Ned Potter, The Great Library Stereotypometer!

By KatieW on Flickr

[CPD23] Thing 6: Online Networks

So this week I've done a further forray into different online networks. At the moment the two online networks I mostly use are Twitter and Facebook. When I created my Twitter account I originally tended to use each for a different purpose - Twitter for library stuff and Facebook for personal stuff. There's now a blurry line between professional and personal for me, although this blurriness shows up more on my Twitter profile (where I will frequently end up talking about Game of Thrones, picnics, and most recently, Alan Rickman) than on my Facebook wall. Actually this has resulted in me using Facebook less and less over the last year. I'm also a member of LISNPN. I don't spend a lot of time on the LISNPN website, but follow forum discussions via RSS feeds, and then go to the site if something catches my interest.

For the Thing this week I'll stick to blogging about the online networks I use for professional purposes, so I'll ignore Facebook. I've talked about Twitter a lot before, so here are my thoughts on LinkedIn and LISNPN!

LinkedIn
I've been feeling like I should have a profile on LinkedIn for a while now, and this Thing gave me the prod I needed to actually sign up. So here's my new LinkedIn profile, ta dah! I have to say I've found it a bit frustrating to edit so far. I uploaded my CV, but then had to edit it quite a bit as it didn't manage to extract everything I wanted on there. As I've been manually editing previous positions I've held, for some reason it keeps deleting the websites of the places I've worked in which is a bit baffling.

I'll have to spend a bit more time on my profile to get it looking how I want it, but I've got the basics on there for now. I'll have to snoop around a bit to check what the etiquette is on adding people to my network. If I know someone on Twitter is that a close enough connection to add them to my LinkedIn? Should I add fellow University of Cambridge librarians as "colleagues" or "friends"? I can definitely see the uses though. I've only joined the CPD23 and CILIP groups so far but there seems to be a fairly lively discussion going on in both those groups.

LISNPN
I signed up for LISNPN in September, on recommendation by Sarah, my predecessor at Newnham. I'll be imitating her and recommending it to next year's trainee! The resources section alone makes it totally worth while joining, as there's a really useful collection of anonymous reviews of library degree courses, example chartership portfolios, and guides on everything from using Twitter to getting published. There are regular LISNPN meetups (I am ashamed to say I have yet to make it to one of these!), which often tie in with conferences and other events. The forums can be a bit hit and miss (a #cliquegate thread was very popular, but other threads can be very quiet) but occasionally they will feature an interview with stars of the library world (so far the CILIP vice presidential candidates from the last election, and US librarians Bobbi Newman, Andy Woodworth and Buffy Hamilton).

Considering this is a fairly fledgling network, I think LISNPN has done very well to become such a useful resource so quickly. What would make it really great would be if the forum discussion was a bit more active, but having run a forum myself in the past I know very well this isn't something you can just snap your fingers and make happen!


I've heard it said that to improve your "brand" you should have a presence on as many social networks as possible. I disagree with this viewpoint - I'd much rather have a strong, consistent presence on a couple of online networks than (as would inevitably happen) have a patchy, irregularly update presence on a lot of networks. I simply don't have the time to be all shiny and up-to-date and professional on a lot of sites, and it's partly for that reason that I haven't begged an invite for Google+ yet. For the moment I'm quite happy with my existing networks, and I'll have to see if LinkedIn proves useful enough to elbow its way into the mix!

What I've been reading in June

Save Libraries

CILIP, Women's Institute to Campaign for libraries (hooray!)

Lauren Smith, Libraries and the WI


Conferences

Various people, CILIP New Professionals Information Day blogs (a bit.ly bundle put together by Richard Hawkins)

Ned Potter, Presenting opportunities at library events, and how to get them 

Annie Pho and Lauren Dodd, Hack ALA: Get Your Network On!

Ned Potter, Librarians are horizontal; libraries are vertical (thoughts on the opening keynote of SLA 2011)

Laura Steel, New Professionals Conference 2011 

Jo Norwood, NPC 2011 Part One and Part Two (Tired of reading conference write ups? Here's the New Professionals Conference in comic form!)


Social Media and Technology

Josh Halliday, British Library creates a "national memory" with digital newspaper archive

Soren Gordhamer, 3 Pressing Questions Facing the Future of Social Media 

Audrey Watters, How the Library of Congress is building the Twitter archive

Hamilton Chan, HOW TO: Make Your QR Codes Beautiful


eBooks and Digitisation

ML Burgess, E-book campaign: advocating e-books in a visually pleasing way

BBC News, British Library makes Google search deal

Olivia Solen, JK Rowling reignites DRM debate 

Bobbi Newman, eBook FAQs. 36 Most Common Questions Answered by the OITP eBook Task Force 


Copyright

Jennifer Howard, What you don't know about copyright, but should 


Job Applications

Katy Wrathall, Gizza Job - From Both Sides of the Desk 

Becky Woods, Application, application, application


Misc.


Andy Woodworth, It's Pretty Dark Inside a Closed Mind 

Sarah Kessler, Startup Publisher Gives Readers Control Over What Books Get Printed 

New Professionals Conference audience (photo by sarahjison)

What I've been reading in May

The Future of Libraries

The Librarienne, If reference is dead, why am I so tired at the end of the day?

Tim Carmody, A Budget for Babel (well worth a read. Would you pay $100 a month for unlimited access on any device to everything ever printed?)

Seth Godin, The future of libraries

Andy Woodworth, "Bring me the head of Seth Godin!"


Save Libraries

Ian Anstice, Special Report: Newsnight

CILIP, National Libraries Day launched


eBooks

Simon Barron, Four Things Kindle Can Help You Do (I don't have a Kindle but am saving up tips for when I do get one eventually!) 

Josh Catone, Digital Publishing and the Imperative to Preserve the Integrity of Print

Fred Stielow and Raymond Uzwyshyn, Back to the Future: The Changing Paradigm for College Textbooks and Libraries  


Social Media and Technology


Boyhun Kim, Tech Skills for New Librarians & Me (Seeking Advice)

Kelsey Gagliardi, How to use Social Media to Engage Students (Google doc)

Ian Clark, A tiny contribution to the debate (some reasons why ereaders won't, or shouldn't become 'as expensive as Gillete razors' (see Seth Godin's post above)

Phil Bradley, Zanran (seems like a useful numerical data search engine)

Aaron Tay, Libraries and Augmented Reality, Adding Video Reviews to Books - Aurasma 


Library School

Sam Wiggins, Learning from librarianship

Librarian_101, Please promptly remove head from sand

Theatregrad, Theatregrad’s top advice on getting the most out of library school

Nellie Akalp, 9 ways to increase your productivity while working from home (filing this one away for dissertation time next year!)


Public Libraries

Lauren Smith, Public Libraries and Adult Learning 

CILIP

Maria Giovanna De Simone, Queen: Stop this Nonsense! (Thoughts on Annie Mauger's CILIP East of England talk a couple of weeks ago)  

Laura Wilkinson, On the Road to Chartership 

Job Titles

Andy Woodworth, Bikes, Branding and Bellyaching (Does it matter if patrons don't know the difference between a library assistant and a qualified librarian?)

Laura Wilkinson, Job Titles - What's in a Name?

Misc.

Karen Loasby, Managing information about people 

Becky Woods, "The move to co-working is a move from a culture of me to a culture of we"... 

Wendy MacNaughton, Meanwhile, The San Francisco Public Library (Really beautiful watercolours illustrations of patrons at San Francisco Public Library. Go and look.)

Bethan Ruddock, Presenting 

By Moriza on Flickr

What I've been reading in March

I was in Oxford today, and will write a post about that at some point in the next couple of days, but in the meantime, here's what I've been reading this month!

I've picked up a few books that people have recommended as pre-library school reading - have read Buckley Owen's Success at the Enquiry Desk (very clear and helpful), and have Broughton's Essential Classification and Bowman's Essential Cataloguing on the shelf waiting for me to get around to them!

eBooks

Sarah Houghton-Jan, The eBook User's Bill of Rights

Cory Doctorow, Ebooks: durability is a feature, not a bug (YES. This.)

BBC Click, Do eBooks Spell the End of Lending Libraries (Interesting video, though the publisher guy advocating a model where you have to physically go to the library to check out an ebook is SILLY.)

Phil Bradley, Further Thoughts on eBooks


Technology

Kate Sheehan, You Know, I Know, Don't Know (Overcoming technophobia - "Librarians are professional problem solvers and those skills don’t stop working when applied to technology.")

Michael Wilson, Survey of the use of social media by a selection of Cambridge libraries

Laura Wilkinson and Emma Cragg, 23 Things Oxford

Claire McAffrey, Peter Reilly and Helena Feighan, 23 Things @UL: a web 2.0 learning experience for faculty and staff at the University of Limerick

Miss Information (Closed Stacks), Social Networking Best Practices 

Junko, Heibergert & Loken, The Effect of Twitter on College Student Engagement and Grades

Matt Buchanan, What the Amazon Kindle Tablet Might Look Like 

Miami University Augmented Reality Research Group, Augmented Reality App for Shelf Reading (Very cool!)


Save Libraries

Voices for the Library, Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 (Another month, yet another thing...)

Library School

Julia Glassman, Apprenticeships: A Model for Library School?


Teaching

LFairie, "Threw his book on the table" : My first teaching session


Professional Awareness

Lauren Gibaldi, Know Your Literature - Keeping Up With the Kard... uhh...New Books.


CILIP

Céline Carty, CILIP Branches & Groups: Some Thoughts



User Friendliness

Darlene Fichter and Jeff Wisniewski, Practical Website Improvement Face-Off (One of the articles being discussed at this month's Brown Bag Lunch)

Erin (User-Centered Cataloger), What "Fix the Catalog" Might Really Mean  (Now if only there was an augmented reality app to help me do this...oh wait.)
Andy Priestner, Advertising Space


The Future of Libraries

Justin Hoenke, Thank you Harper Collins (for making the path forward a little clearer)

Ned Potter, The Future of Libraries is Transliteral

Simon Barron, The National Digital Library: A Personal Quartet 

Lots of people, Tweets from the Personalised Library Services in Higher Education Symposium

Emma Cragg, Personalised Library Services in Higher Education

'Illuminated Keyboard' by Connect7 on stock.xchng

At the halfway mark

So, incredibly, I've been in Cambridge for six months which means I'm halfway through my graduate trainee year! Needless to say, it's gone by very quickly, and as I think you can tell from reading my blog, I'm still really enjoying myself. Exciting news - I had my letter of acknowledgment back from UCL at the weekend, so I will most definitely be off to London next year for my Library and Information Studies MA!

Also, this means I've been blogging and have been on twitter for six months too!

In the space of about a week at the end of August I went from creating my twitter account because it seemed like something I should be doing, to knowing it was absolutely something I should be doing. For me now it's the number one way of keeping up to date with library related things. I tend to catch up with my friends outside of work on facebook, and use twitter to network and chat to other librarians, with a little bit of crossover between the two. Number one on my 11 Things for 2011 was to tweet more frequently instead of being a passive listener. I've definitely been tweeting more since then - whether I'm saying anything worthwhile is another matter!

Keeping this blog has been useful in several ways. It's great to have a record of what I've done this year that's more detailed than the Excel spreadsheet I'm keeping at work. It's made me part of another group (the echochamber of library bloggers!) that while it's great to break out once in a while, it's also brilliant to be "in the tent" with other like-minded people. Thirdly I've just enjoyed writing, and I think I'm getting better at it as I go along.

I think I've said before that librarians as a group are one of the most welcoming, friendly and (obviously) helpful bunches around. Online and offline I felt straight away like part of the profession - there's no exclusion because I'm just a noob while others have been doing it their whole lives. So thanks everyone :)



All icons by Aleksandra Wolska on IconFinder

What I've been reading in January

Here are the most interesting library-related things I've been reading this month. A lot of these came from people linking to them on twitter, so thanks everyone for sharing the good stuff!

The Wikiman, Blogs Still Work, and other Stuff I Learnt in 2010

The Chronicle of Higher Education, Death by Irony: How Librarians Killed the Academic Library (Interesting...)

BBC, Tech in 2011: Who Knows What's Next?

Allan's Library, Super-Connectors?

Andy Burkhardt, Don't Make It Easy For Them

Girl in the Moon, Together We're Better: Libraries@Cambridge 2011  

The  Wikiman, Libraries at Cambridge Event

Inside Higher Ed, Undergraduates and E-Books: a  Marriage Made with a Shotgun

The Guardian, Library clears its shelves in protest at closure threat 

Use Libraries and Learn Stuff, UK Public Library Closure News 

Associated Press, Review: Library e-books easier, but still hassle 

Mary Hoffman, Libraries again - the Oxford Movement 

Phil Bradley, Library Bumperstickers

Librarian by Day, Top Ten Links 2.3: All About eBooks


And finally, this has nothing to do with libraries but is insanely cute:
Ashley Baccam, Children's Letters to Hogwarts

'Leyundo un libro' by dottur maku on Flickr