[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.

End of Graduate Trainee year round up

Today was my last day as a graduate trainee. Wait, what?

...

The year's over?

...

Already?!

Wow. That went incredibly quickly. I guess that shows how much I've enjoyed myself this year! I won't bore you with an in-depth, blow-by-blow account of the whole year - I've blogged about most of the interesting parts anyway so I will just take the moment to remind myself (and you, poor thing) of them!

I've learnt the basics of being a librarian, and for the first time seen all of the workings of an academic library throughout the entire year, as opposed to just during term time. Along the way there's been funny times, stressful times, and "oh crap" times. I've been to read-ins, seminars, conferences, and been on more library visits than you could shake a stick at.


I've dipped my toe in the world of library advocacy and was lucky enough to win a place at the New Professionals Conference as a result. I've seen how, spurred on by one of the papers at the conference, #uklibchat has sprung into being and I have thoroughly enjoyed taking part in this each fortnight.

This year I've helped to organise a rerun of the Cam23 programme for librarians in Cambridge, and CPD23 for information professionals worldwide. Both organising and taking part in these programmes have been great experiences, though pretty much consumed all of my librarian-energy for a while, especially back in May!

And I've met (whether in person or virtually) a ton of lovely people, both in Cambridge and beyond, who are mostly responsible for getting me involved in all of the above!

In a few weeks I'll be off to UCL to start my Master’s degree, meanwhile I'll be staying on at Newnham as a part-time library assistant.

Two Library Visits

Doing CPD23 and Cam23 2.0 is great, but it's taking up lots of my blogging energy! Therefore I'm afraid to say I'm going to lump two really interesting library visits into one post.

Cambridge Careers Service Library
At the New Professionals Conference, one of the papers I found really interesting was Megan Wiley's on the challenges of being a librarian in Careers Services. I'd not heard much about this area of librarianship before, or really considered it at all. I'm not sure why, since a couple of people have suggested in the past that I'd be a good careers advisor! After the conference I was interested to learn more, so when I got back to Cambridge I asked Maria Giovanna, Information Assistant at the Cambridge Careers Library, if I could come and have a look round her library. So last month (I told you I was behind on normal blogging!) I headed over to Mill Lane to the Careers Centre, and was given a lovely tour of the library there.

The resources in the library are arranged by a specialist class system for careers libraries AGCAS, organising the resources in a kind of chronological way, so as students go through the process of deciding what area they'd be suited to working in, then researching specific jobs and companies, and then reading about interview technique etc., they resources are laid out in a logical way. The upper floor of the library has these resources with plenty of work space for students to sit and read. Downstairs is an area with computers.

In Megan's paper she talked about the challenges of working alongside non-librarians who might not know what the library staff do, and therefore their information skills are being undervalued or ignored. I asked Maria Giovanna about this and she said communication can sometimes be an issue for them in Cambridge as well. I think in any library it's important to know what colleagues are working on, but I'd imagine this can be especially difficult when the people you are working with aren't librarians themselves! We also talked about communicating with students. Like @NewnhamLibrary, the careers library have recently started tweeting as @camcareerslib, so it was great to compare notes on our experiences!

It was really interesting to look around the library and chat with Maria Giovanna, and especially to see that while it's a different type of library to my own, with a different purpose, a lot of the challenges we have are the same.

Libraries@Cambridge have got a set of photos of the Careers Service Library up on their Flickr page, here.


Sir Harry Smith Community College Library
This week Jen and I took a road trip to Whittlesey, guided by her Darth Vader sat nav! ("I sense an exit coming up." "In 800 yards turn left. Do not break formation.""You have reached your destination....but you are not a Jedi yet." etc.) We were going to meet James Curtis, who will be on the UCL course with us next year. He'd kindly agreed to show us round the library where he works, in a secondary school.

Again, this is a type of library I'd not visited before. We've seen lots of academic libraries, but all have been in universities, so I'd been looking forward to seeing a school library. It's certainly different! Teaching was another career path I considered, but rejected because realistically I would never be able to deal with a class full of 30 kids if they chose to riot! I think I'd have the same problem if I was a librarian in a school. Crowd control's not my bag, baby! (Obviously when I end up applying for a school librarian post in a few year's time I'll delete this post and replace it with a link to my new book: "Crowd Control and me: this sort of thing is my bag, baby!"


What I found most interesting about James's job was the fact that his role includes quite a lot of stuff outside of the library, including primary-to-secondary transition. Since the library has close links with the English department he gets to take school trips to the theatre too! The librarian is also the careers advisor for the school so there was a careers section in the library.

Something I would really enjoy about being a school librarian is shadowing awards such as the Carnegie with students. (I really enjoyed going through Carnegie lists with my librarian as a student in fact!) I would also love to have the budgetary freedom James has!

It sounds a bit silly, obviously I've been in school libraries when I was at school, but I have to admit I didn't think too much about the librarians and what they were doing besides keeping a seat warm and yelling at us periodically! So it was good to look around a school library from a librarian's perspective - and it was great to get to know one of our fellow UCL-ers a bit more!

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)

New Professionals Conference 2011

Yesterday was the CILIP Career Development Group's annual New Professionals Conference. This was my first NPC (if further proof was needed that I'm a geek, it has taken me quite a while to stop thinking "non player character" each time NPC is mentioned!) and I was lucky enough to have won a place at the conference in LISNPN and CILIP's recent advocacy competition.

A few of us were travelling up from Cambridge, and we decided to go the day before to avoid a 4am start. This worked out really nicely as it meant we had the chance to meet up with some other conference-goers that evening for a drink, a meal and some librarianly chat.

The next morning I tramped across the city (fuelled by a bacon sandwich) to the university building that was the conference venue. The day was structued so that we had three of the papers in the morning, then workshops and lunch, and then the final three papers in the afternoon.

Helen Murphy started off the morning session with her paper on the juggernaut that is CPD23. (Did I tell you we have over 400 people signed up for this already? If I have met you in the last few days the answer is probably yes!) Helen's excellent slides (featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and a puppy) can be found here.

Helen spreading the CPD23 love

Second to present a paper was Rachel Bickley, on the subject of 'Establishing a dialogue between new and experienced professionals'. Establishing a dialogue and avoiding cliqueyness (spelling?!) was a theme that several of the papers and workshops touched on, as throughout the day we were encouraged to talk to more experienced professionals, colleagues at work, and the public at large, letting them know what it is we do, and the value of what we do.

Sam and Laura

The final paper in the morning was given by Sam Wiggins and Laura Williams. I found their paper 'What makes an Information 'Professional'?' really interesting, as I'd seen their survey and was keen to know what other people thought about this question. I would consider myself to be a 'Professional' despite not being chartered or even qualified, and since it was after all the New Professionals Conference, I'm sure many of the other attendees would too. Because I'm in a graduate trainee role, and have always intended to get my MA, I see myself as a professional albeit a (very) new one! Sam and Laura's research led them to come up with the following definition of what makes a Professional: "possession of qualifications, experience or skills, alongside an underlying professional attitude." I guess I've got the attitude and am picking up the rest on the way!

We then split off into our groups for the first workshop session. I'd chosen a workshop on 'Information roles - expanding our horizons' run by Nicola Forgham-Healey and Franko Kowalczuk. In this session we were given a collection of required skills taken from job listings on recruitment websites, and had the task of dividing them by whether they were traditional and non-traditional librarian skills. Although we were asked to divide them, my group ended up making more of a continuum, as did most others. We were then asked to pick three which we could improve on or get more experience in (for me: budget/finance skills, leadership skills, communication skills), and then as a group pick 5 which would be essential for all information roles. Good communicator came top, then professionalism, prioritising/time management, team player, and internet savvy. Interestingly "organising information" was only chosen by two groups, which I was quite surprised by.

After lunch, my second workshop was with Alice Halsey and Simon Barron from Voices for the Library. The theme of the workshop was 'Getting involved: activism for new professionals'. Besides fanning the flames of my Kindle-envy (Simon was using his Kindle to read his notes!), this workshop was one of the parts of the day I enjoyed the most, as it was great to hear from two members of a group that I really admire. It was also a very positive session, and I'm sure many people came away feeling encouraged to get more involved in library activism.

Then it was back to the lecture theatre for the final three papers of the day. Ka-Ming Pang and Jo Norwood were up first with 'Can we play? Building opportunities for LIS student activism and why it matters'. Click the link and take a look at the slides for this, as they're very cute. (I'm such a fan of hand drawn slides!) Despite the fact that four of the speakers during the day were currently studying for a library MA, library students often don't seem to be that engaged or active. Like in Rachel's paper in the morning, the importance of effective communication and networking was emphasised. I particularly liked the suggestion of a regular #libchat style event at a more convenient time for us Brits. If anyone were to start up a #libchatUK, I'd be a regular participant!

Up next was Megan Wiley, who works as a Careers Information Specialist. Megan talked about the importance of making sure your work wasn't 'for your eyes only', but sharing what you do with your non-librarian colleagues, and proving the worth of your LIS qualification. If they don't know what you do, they won't be able to recommend your services to students!

The final paper 'Teaching old books new tricks: how special collections outreach can help you, your career, and your library' was by my travelling companions Katie Birkwood and Naomi Herbert. I'd heard a bit of this presentation on the train on the way up, but was looking forward to seeing the full shebang. Katie and Naomi have both done a lot of outreach work at St Johns College, and although it looks like a lot of work, it also looks really good fun. The extra practice on the train clearly paid off, as at the end of the conference this was voted the best paper! Helen's CPD23 paper took 3rd place, so it was a good day all round for the Cambridge library mafia!

Presenters from the afternoon. Left to right: Megan, Katie, Ka-Ming, Naomi, Jo

 There were several themes running through the day. As well as establishing a dialogue/avoiding cliqueyness which I've already mentioned, we were encouraged throughout the day to make things happen for ourselves, not to sit around and wait for things to come our way. Twitter was also constantly being mentioned, mostly in passing as in "Any questions, send me a tweet." "Aaaah so you're @LibWig!" Whilst any regular reader of my blog will know that I am a huge fan of the Twitters, speaking to a couple of people at the conference who weren't fans of Twitter made me wonder whether this is another case of being cliquey? I'll try and bear that in mind in future.

This is getting very long now, so I'll just finish up by saying I really enjoyed my visit to Manchester, and hope to be at the 2012 New Professionals Conference!

Tied together with a smile

I've been very busy lately so I've not had a lot of chance to blog (well, not here anyway!)

Cam23 2.0 is coming along very nicely, we're all getting ready for the launch on Friday. If you're in Cambridge and are going to take part in the programme or aren't sure, why not come along to the Morison Room any time between 5 and 7 and find out more - you'll get wine and yummy nibbles too! Although we're marketing it at librarians and the examples we'll use for the Things are mostly going to be from libraries, we've got a couple of non-librarians who are going to take part too, the more the merrier really!

Meanwhile CPD23 will be launching next Monday. Helen will be speaking about this at the New Professionals Conference, so I better get in cheerleading mode! (Now where did I put that giant banner...?) I'll be making my way up to Manchester with the rest of the Cambridge library mafia on Sunday.

The other piece of very exciting news I have is that after a few weeks of flat-hunting, Rory and I have found our flat! It's a little one bedroom flat in Bishop's Stortford, which is a bit more convenient than Cambridge for me getting to London next year for my MA. Now we just have to scour Freecycle and Gumtree for furniture people are getting rid of!

With all of this going on I'm fairly glad it's getting close to the end of term. The library is getting quieter every day as the students are finishing their exams, which will be all over by the end of the week. Phew!


Oh and...

...just for Rosie :D

I want the world to stop

...just for a few days would be brilliant, kthx! There's lots of exciting things going on at the moment, as a result I rather feel like I've been spinning around in circles a lot this week!

On Tuesday the results of the LISNPN competition were announced, and I'm amazed/delighted/proud to say my  entry won second place :D Therefore on 20th June I'll be off to Manchester for the New Professionals Conference 2011 - really looking forward to that. Let me know if you're going too, will be great to meet some more people I only know online! Check out Jacqueline and Katie's entries as well, because they are fantastic.

At some point soon Rory and I are going to start serious flat-hunting. So far we've been looking at websites and emailing flats to each other going "ooh that looks nice!" but not got a lot further than that. Gotta get moving!

Meanwhile, things are coming together for the two 23 Things programmes I've been involved with organising: for Cambridge librarians we've got Cam23 2.0, and for, well for any information professional that wants to take part really, we've got 23 Things for Professional Development. I'm planning to take part in both, so I think I'll start up another blog for one of them to keep them separate, and learn about a new blogging platform. I'm slightly mad I think.

As you may have guessed from the title, despite being a bit stressed, I'm really looking forward to seeing Belle & Sebastian tomorrow night! This is a slightly early birthday present from my parents, and before the concert we are having dinner with Andrea, Rosie and Daniel when I can give Rosie her *very* late birthday presents, so it'll be a festive occasion!