[CPD23] Thing 19: Integrating the Things

I'm quite glad there's no new Thing to think about this week, as the programme seems to have flown by and it's good to be prodded into doing some reflection on what we've already covered! 


"Old" Things

About half of the "technical" things have been ones I'd tried out at least once before. Doing CPD23 has made me the explore things that I hadn't given much time to before (Zotero and Google Calendar in particular) more closely, and now Google Calendar has made its way into regular use. I think Zotero might well be very useful next year in my MA, and anyway as Jen says, it's a useful thing to be able to tell our students about. I was already a regular user of Twitter, RSS feeds and, of course, blogging, and these remain some of my favourite Things!


"New" Things

Of the technical Things I'd not tried before, I really like Evernote, screencasting and Prezi, though I haven't had much reason to use any of these yet. I've made a LinkedIn page and have joined a few groups. I'm finding it quite useful to follow the discussions but I haven't joined in much myself, it's just one social network too many at the moment! Even though I wrote the instructions for Pushnote, and so should perhaps be feeling some fondness for it, I didn't find it useful and have deleted the addon from my browser.

'Thinking' by Karola Reider on Flickr

Although I may have done some of the professional development activities before, I'm lumping them all in together under New Things because I'd never really thought about them properly before. These have been the Things where I've most enjoyed reading other peoples' blog posts, even if they have been much harder to write posts for! I think rather than integrating any one of these "thinky" Things into my work life, the most useful thing I could take away from this programme would be to get into the habit of keeping reflecting on what I'm doing both at work and outside of it, and thinking what I could do better/more.


"Extra" Things

While I've been taking part in CPD23 and Cam23 2.0, I've obviously been trying a lot of different tools. And from reading other participants' blog posts I've picked up several tips for other handy tools, of which I have started using three fairly regularly.

Ifttt allows you to create tasks based on the format "if this, then that." Ifttt currently supports 33 different channels, including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Dropbox (no Blogger yet unfortunately). This allows seemingly endless possibilities for the tasks you can create. So far I have set up three: If I publish a new Tumblr post, automatically tweet the link (the rest of the message can be customised when setting it up). If I'm tagged in a Facebook photo, download it to my Dropbox folder (thanks @SuzanneStage for that one!). If it's forecast to rain in Cambridge tomorrow, send me an email (I never seem to check weather forecasts!). At the moment Ifttt is invitation only, but if anyone would like an invitation I have a few. Thanks @meimaimaggio for inviting me!

PrintFriendly is a really simple idea, which is both useful and environmentally friendly, saving ink and trees. If you drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar, then it allows you to convert any webpage into a print friendly PDF in a few seconds. You can change the font size, and click on any pictures, logos and even paragraphs that you don't need to print, and it gets rid of them for you.

Picnik is a free online photo editing tool, you don't have to download anything or even register, so it's very quick and easy to tart up your photos (which you can either upload or grab from Facebook, Flickr, Picassa etc.). You can also add text, frames and effects to the photo, so could be used to make posters as well. Thanks to @jimmy1712 for introducing me to this!

[CPD23] Thing 18: Screencasts and Podcasts

There is quite a lot going on in this week's Thing, but luckily we have covered both screencasts and podcasts before in Cam23 2.0. I haven't done much extra exploration though, as I've just got back from Dublin and have a lot of laundry and stuff to do!

Screencasts

I hadn't heard of Jing before, but had tried Screencast-o-matic for Cam23 2.0. I think I would most likely be making screencasts at work rather than at home, so won't be able to download Jing there. I was quite happy with Screencast-o-matic though, so I think that will do for me!

Here is the screencast I made for Cam23 2.0, showing how to create bundles in Google Reader. I didn't think I had a microphone so I didn't do a commentary, but when I played it back I heard my LOUD TYPING NOISES, so clearly I have a built in mic on my laptop! I'm learning so much doing this programme ;)



Podcasts

I didn't know much about Podcasts before doing this Thing. I’ve never made a podcast and had very rarely listened to them either.

I don’t use iTunes, but Lyn had suggested a few other places to find podcasts. First off I had a look at Podcast Alley, but I was a bit disappointed that all of the podcasts I clicked on there hadn’t been updated for several years. This doesn’t matter for some podcasts of course, but for the technology stuff this is not much use! My next stop was the BBC, which as Lyn said has a wide range of podcasts from its radio and TV shows. I subscribed to Click, which I enjoy watching the TV version of. Moving on to the CILIP Communities Podcasts (I didn’t know this existed!), I’ve subscribed to Adventures in Library Instruction, a monthly podcast on the topic of teaching information literacy.

Seeing as I didn’t have much luck searching on Podcast Alley, I hit Google and started searching for technology podcasts and books podcasts. I subscribed to the Guardian Books podcast series, and taking a recommendation from Mashable I’ve subscribed to the How Stuff Works podcast. I'm ashamed to say I didn't know the Arcadia seminars were available as podcasts! Thanks to MG for the tip off, I will have to have a look into those.

Podcasting is fairly similar to presenting, in that I think I will keep my mouth shut and listen to other people doing the talking, at least for now!

My 1st Blogiversary

My blog, in cake-cloud form. Mmmmm.

One year ago today I wrote the first post on this blog.

I've been fairly prolific this year. This will have been my 91st post (I thought about trying to make my 100th post and my blogiversary happen on the same day, but...effort!). I think I've become a slightly better writer - I plan my posts slightly more now, not a whole lot more though! One thing's for sure, my writing style has definitely evolved and blogging has become a lot easier as I've found "my voice".

I slowly changed who I was writing for -  in the early days this blog was intended for family and friends to let them know what I was doing, however most readers and commenters were library people and so professional stuff kind of took over. Now my blog is about 95% library stuff, and if I write anything that my family and friends might be interested in I will post a link to it on Facebook. There's more of a purpose to my blog now, early posts were all over the place with random topics from A Very Potter Musical to hen parties to Studio Ghibli films, with things I did at work thrown in. Not that any of these are bad things to blog about, but it does kind of feel like I took everything in my brain, stirred it up with a big wooden spoon, tipped it out and clicked "publish". Direction and purpose are good!

Lately almost all of my blogging has been about the CPD23 Things, or the Cam23 2.0 Things on the Tumblr blog I created for that programme. While this has been a great experience, writing around 50 blog posts on prescribed topics over the course of four months has left me with little time or energy to blog about anything else, so I'm looking forward to resuming my normal blogging routine once all the Things are over and I've started library school. I just hope that in and amongst a degree and a part time job I will still have time to blog occasionally!

[CPD23] Thing 16: Advocacy, speaking up for the profession and getting published

Ooh, another mahoosive topic to blog about this week!

As Lauren said, speaking up for libraries has become really crucial in the UK in the last few years. As a bit of an indicator, this was the first topic chosen for #uklibchat, a fortnightly Twitter chat for UK librarians. I'd recommend taking a look at the chat summary  if you're interested in this topic.

While I don't greet every new person I meet with "Hi, I'm a librarian, isn't that awesome?!" (which would be a little strange), when people find out what I do this generally prompts a "why...?" or "you needed a degree to do that?" At first I would kind of laugh awkwardly and go "um, yeah...". After a while I started to take the opportunity to do a little advocacy and re-education. I haven't exactly got an elevator pitch to fire back at them now, but I usually explain how rewarding it is, what I do all day besides stamping books and that yes, most librarians have degrees, plural.

I work in a university library which seems fairly stable...for now at least. With the trend among a large proportion of the public being that everything is available online, you would hope that students and academics know better than this, right? Unfortunately most students will still head to Google first and won't make the most of the scholarly databases provided by their library. If you can get a quick fix from Google, why bother going to the library? In the future the academic libraries might be the ones needing all the campaigning help they can get.

Meanwhile, many public librarians can't speak up for their jobs for fear of losing their jobs... pretty rubbish really. So most campaigns will need to rely on other library sectors for their manpower. On Save Our Libraries Day last February, I took part in a Read Aloud flash mob in a shopping centre in Cambridge, reading from Roald Dahl's Matilda and handing out leaflets about what the library provides and what cuts are being proposed. This was organised by Emma Coonan, a university librarian and most of us there were academic librarians.

So I do dabble in activism, and I frequently end up speaking up for my profession amongst small groups of people. Of course this pales in comparison to the tireless efforts of some library campaigners! I look at people like Lauren, Johanna, and Ian and then look back at myself and think "must try harder".

[CPD23] Thing 15: Events

Attending

I've been fortunate enough to have been able to go to lots of events this year. I went to the CILIP New Professionals Open Day in October, which was a brilliant way to start off. It would be very easy to start off a new job (especially one that has the word "trainee" in the job title!) feeling as if I should keep my head down until I've learnt more, and not interfere with what the professionals are doing. But at NPID2010 many of the presenters were people with only a few years of experience, who had got stuck in and got involved in everything they could, which was incredibly inspiring.

Other things I've been to this year have ranged from a TeachMeet to the New Professionals Conference in Manchester a few months ago. I've made a point to blog about events as soon as possible afterwards, as otherwise I find the details and even important points slip away fairly quickly.

LibCampUK is coming up in October - I was a bit wary of this at first as the concept seemed very loose! But now it seems like almost everyone in my Twitter feed is going so I'm glad I did sign up, will be nice to meet a lot of people face-to-face finally! I would love to go to a huge conference like the IFLA conference or ALA annual, but would definitely require a helping hand from a conference bursary to be able to do that!

Speaking

I'm good at other things though...

I haven't presented at any events, and I can't see it happening any time soon! I think it's best to play to your strengths. I'm a pretty awful public speaker so while I could happily write a paper, it would probably do more harm than good to my career for me to get up and present it! At the Libraries@Cambridge conference in January the trainees put on a presentation about the Graduate Trainee scheme in Cambridge, and since there were seven of us which would be rather a lot to get up on stage and speak, we split ourselves into writers and presenters and it worked very well.

Organised 

I haven't done any organising for conference type events, but  I'd feel more confident about doing so after having been involved in organising various events for Cam23 2.0. We've had a launch party and are currently thinking about the wrap event, and we've had a couple of reflection week meet ups in between. So far most things have gone very smoothly - Doodle has been great for deciding dates and times, and having a team of organisers means that when I forget something someone else will remind me! Always important. There have been one or two hiccups along the way, but again, these are  much easier to overcome with a good team.

[CPD23] Thing 14: Zotero

Argh. It was such a frustrating thing to learn these existed just after I completed my undergraduate dissertation, which had over 100 footnotes and a 6 page bibliography. I had the style guide by my side and went through and typed out each new reference in the right format, and then there was a lot of copying and pasting going on. So when I first heard about reference management tools earlier in the year I downloaded Zotero straight away and vowed to get to grips with it now so I'd be a pro by the time I had to write my MA dissertation next summer. And then...I forgot all about it.

Thank goodness for CPD23 reminding me about that little button sitting on my toolbar, and prodding me into exploring how it works. I've had a go at adding references for books from our library catalogue and from Amazon, which worked well. As you'd expect, Zotero could fill in more fields from our library catalogue than from Amazon, where I had to look up where my book was published. I added a couple of websites to my test bibliography, but for these I had to fill in several of the important fields such as author and date. Even though you might have to put some of the details in yourself, the genius of course is that all of your references are stored in one place, can be organised into collections and can be made into a bibliography at the click of a button, in various different citation styles.

Some of my test references

It's good to know there are several different reference management tools out there with various features, but I think I'll stick with Zotero for the time being. We'll see how it works out when I'm using it "for real" next year!

What I've been reading in August

eBooks

#uklibchat, Summary - Thursday 4th August 2011 eBooks Discussion (I've been finding the fortnightly Twitter chats very interesting and fun to take part in. Every other Thursday, 6-8pm!)

Aaron Saenz, Pixar Ex-Designer Creates Stunning Interactive Book for iPad. Blurs Lines Between Books, Film, Games

William Skidelsky, The True Price of Publishing

Library Marketing

Andy Woodworth, Marketing & The Donated Book

Save Libraries

Francis Bennion, Public Libraries are Protected by Law  (Full letter to The Times from the man who drafted the Bill which later became the Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964)

Johanna Bo Anderson, Activism, Advocacy and Professional Identity

Social Media

Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging (Cambridge: Polity, 2008) (Really interesting book on the history and culture of blogging)

Phil Bradley, Twitter for Librarians (A very long list of Twitter resources that could be of use to librarians) 

Robert Sharp, Always link, even to your enemies

Jez Cope and Geraldine Jones, Connecting Researchers at the University of Bath

Nathan Jurgenson, Augmented Mobs: Riots and Cleanup On and Offline

Technology

Mike Ellis, QR isn't an end, it's a means (I found the final four paragraphs particularly interesting)  

Mary Mallery, Tales of Technology Innovation Gone Wrong (or rather, how to learn from mistakes, plan ahead and fit the right technology to the job in hand)

Relationships with Library Users

Social Justice Librarian, How Academic Libraries Annoy Academics (Some of the comments on this are pretty astounding, and not in the good way)

Katie Birkwood, Doing It Wrong (Excellent commentary on the above post)

Rebecca Halpern, Ethics in LIS

Information Literacy

Lauren Smith, The Three Rs: Reading, wRiting and Rioting 

Steve Kolowich, What Students Don't Know

Library School

Hack Library School, Best of the Summer Semester

Job Applications

Laura Wilkinson, Tips for Applying for Library Jobs

Misc.

#uklibchat, Summary: Thursday 18th Aug 2011: Breaking down barriers within the profession