Reflection

CILIP in London organised a pair of half-day training days a couple of weeks back, and I'm really glad to have been able to go - the afternoon session on copyright is the one that was the most obvious selling point to my boss - and did, indeed, confirm some things, clarify some other things, and lead to a flurry of action items on my to-do list, but the morning session on reflective practice was, I think, the one which has had the most impact.

It wasn't so much new news - although there was some of that - as hearing the needed thing at the right moment. At the risk of sounding like a hippie, of being re-enforced and replenished, and having the framework of the course and time outside of my everyday, to think about the question in the abstract as well as in the specific through the exercises.

I'm busy - we're all busy - and this year seems to have been a real exercise in stress-testing and load balancing, with major changes in buildings, processes, and personnel at work as well as everything that's going on in the wider world. I know, intellectually, that reflective practise and iterative improvement are powerful tools, but this session made it so concrete to me - the speakers' passion and kindness, and working the exercises - being given permission to spend five minutes to breathe and reflect and re-focus... I came back full of ideas and energy and enthusiasm, and have been making use of some of the framework questions as I've run into things since.

Also - to tie this back to CPD23, which I am still slowly, oh so slowly, working my way through - the idea of 'Communities of practice' resonates so much more strongly than that of 'networking'. Maybe it's just me, but 'networking' and 'contacts' seem cold, harsh, kind of slippery - a totally different focus than building and nurturing and growing a community, or group of overlapping communities, which in turn support and nurture us. That last - that makes sense to me.

The last CILIP in London event I went to was the networking evening they arranged for Thing #7, which was, I must admit, a total wash for me. I managed to put my foot firmly in mouth in front of two of the three speakers, and while I did give my cards to a couple of people who I got chatting with, never heard from them again. Getting together with a group of fellow professionals all interested in learning about the same topics seemed much more organic, and the personal nature of the Reflective Practise session in particular lent itself to getting to know people, so I feel a lot more confident following up with my fellow participants.

(Photo by Camille, used under Creative Commons with thanks)

CPD23 update and things#8 & #9

I could have predicted that I was going to fall off the CPD23 wagon during August, but I have managed to squeeze in various bits of progress, though, as well as keeping all the other balls I'm juggling up in the air.

For example, I've given Evernote (thing #9) a good solid test run over the past weeks, and it's currently fitting very neatly into my work flows. Specifically, I'm one of team of three keeping our program's Facebook page stocked with several-posts-a-day about free and interesting things going on in and around London. Being able to stockpile webpages and articles in Evernote as I find them - whether that's at home, at work, or out and about using my phone - has been a real boon.

(I already did the 'taking photos of notices to remind myself' thing, so having my photos turned into easier-to-find-again notes that I don't have to transliterate by hand is also easy win.) I've got in the habit of titling each 'note' in that notebook with the date in YYYYMMDD format, so a quick sort by title pulls the events-happening-soonest to the top, and also makes weeding old notes out very easy.

Two other organisational tools I wouldn't want to be without are spiral bound notebooks, because I've yet to find an electronic to-do list manager that works for me better than my paper process, and Google Calender (thing #8).

I can't really claim Google Calender as a CPD23 discovery, though, as it's been about three years since I gave up on paper diaries, and started layering up Google Calenders. Being able to toggle various 'layers' in and out is a fantastic tool for me, for planning my time, for scheduling both professionally and personally, and for keeping track of 'things to have in mind' but which don't warrant a firm scheduled slot on my main calendar, but which I want to be able to layer in easily when it's appropriate. To be honest, I wasn't particularly sold on keeping my calendar online until a friend of mine pointed out that you could have *multiple* calenders, and that was the killer feature for me.

We also started using Google Calenders for program calenders for use with the public and with students just over a year ago - all our students are on Google Apps for Education accounts, so making it easy for them to subscribe to our program events, and the calenders relevant to their specific classes seemed like an obvious step to take.

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As the new semester beds down and the teething difficulties with the new library get fixed, it's starting to look as though I might be able to draw breath, get back to blogging more regularly, and try and catch up with the program before it draws to a close. Here's hoping!

* Photo by Incurable Hippie, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Thing #3 again - cards

There was a certain amount of synchronisity with Jo's CPD23 Thing #3 post touching on business cards. I've never really had the need for them, but over the past couple of months there have been two or three occasions where they would have been really useful, and I'm off to Umbrella 2011 next week, so now's clearly the time.

Somewhere back in the mists of time I remember reading about a music fan who had made business cards out of old record sleeves (something akin to this idea, although these are not they). I remember wondering how well the idea would transfer to books at the time - if it would carry the same sort of messages, or if, given how strongly many people feel about the sanctity of the printed book, you'd just come across as an evil book murder.

One of the things I've been working on in recent weeks was a full stock weed, ahead of moving the library, and amongst the books I pulled off the shelves were a few paperbacks where the binding had simply collapsed. They were no longer of any use to anyone as books, so some stickers and guillotine-wielding later, I have these (see photos)

So - what do you think?

CPD23 things #3 and #4

Thing #3 is 'Consider your personal brand' and #4 is 'Current awareness - Twitter, RSS and Pushnote', and I'm considering them together, not as a short cut but because of the inter-relationships between the tools we use for both.

For example, I use Twitter, but not as part of my public profile. I have a locked personal account, which is a great source of incoming news and links, a really useful tool for current awareness, and is invaluable for bouncing ideas off people.

A few years ago, I also had a public Twitter account set up under a random pseudonym (an account which has long since been deleted) which I set up to learn on. Twitter was one of those things I really had to try on for a while to see how it could be useful. Setting up a test drive account, not tied to my "personal brand" in any way, gave me the freedom to experiment and learn by doing, without the worry that I'd somehow do something that would be inscribed forever on the permanent record of the internet.

I do occasionally feel a bit boxed in by the decision to keep Twitter personal rather than professional - at least in terms of what I'm posting, rather than reading - but at the moment the balance of costs and benefits still isn't pushing me to go public in full.

I have a lot of respect for the benefits of 'living in public' ala Jeff Jarvis , but I think pseudonymity and 'constructed publics' - like a locked Twitter account - give many of the advantages with a lower level of risk.

Searching for myself online showed both that the personalized search bubble issue isn't particularly affecting this search, and that I need to do a little work. The University biography page that's been anchored as the first result in my vanity searches for several years vanished in the re-vamp of the department's website at the start of the year, and it's new location, hidden inside my library's OPAC pages, doesn't have quite the same SEO juice.

This blog doesn't show up in general searches (only a couple of the people-specific search sites had made the connection), so I need to tweak the meta-data to better represent the fact that this is one of the spaces where I choose to be public-broadcast.

The name 'Miss Alice' is, I admit, firmly tied to my current post - one of my past students started calling me by the title, and it all went from there. It's one notch more formal than just 'Alice' but less so than 'Ms Tyrell', and I'm not faculty so the generic 'Prof' isn't appropriate. The name landed here, because I started the blog for a student audience, and my using it for library-related thoughts is a relatively new development.

My LinkedIn profile, which is now the first substantive thing you find when you search for "Alice Tyrell", isn't as inviting and informative as I'd like it to be. I've done a little tidying up, but not being able to re-order my 'current' positions to list my primary post above my two part time volunteer gigs without fudging the dates fairly spectacularly is ... frustrating.

I think it's relatively clear that I'm not any of the other Alice Tyrell's that show up in the search results, though - I didn't die in 1422, I'm not a thoroughbred horse, nor was I a vaudeville dancer in the 1920s.

thing #2 - blogs

The 600+ blogs listed on the CPD23's delicious list is, I admit, somewhat daunting when taken as a whole: my approach was to filter by tags and then browse through looking for names that caught my eye. Not exactly scientific, but it's better than giving in to choice paralysis, and has led me to some interesting blogs.

(Props to The Library Scull for drawing my attention to Reading's ThisIsMe project, which I'll be coming back to in Thing #3.)

Heading out to leave comments on a selection of new-to-me blogs did remind me just how much I loath captchas, though. I know why people use them, but the extra step is off-putting, and the accessibility issues are manifest. (I'm mildly dyslexic and sometimes really struggle with them; I know others find them essentially impossible.)

Also it really struck me how distancing having a comment referred for moderation can be. Again, I recognise why people choose that setting, but the past couple of hours reading did prompt me to go and check my Blogger settings.

I had moderation set only for posts over 14 days, and I've tweaked that up to 30 days. Most of the issues I've had with spam comments, both here and on the group blog I manage for work, have been on older posts, so that seems like a fair balance, especially once you add in Blogger's automatic spam comment filtering, which I've found pretty decent (only one false-positive to date).

* Man Blogging, after Gabriel Metsu, by Mike Licht, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

CPD23 - late, but not absent.

I've been going backwards and forward on this for the past two, three weeks, but - late to the party, I know - I'm going to jump on the CPD23 (23 Things for Professional Development) bandwagon.

The timing's the issue. Both the summer schools that I'm supporting wrap up this week, so I'm end-of-semester busy and end-of-the-year tired. This is going to be a pretty intense summer, too: we start packing to move the whole library on Saturday, and launch the new library space in August. Not to mention that I've got the builders in at home, just to make sure that there's disruption on all sides.

On the other hand, maybe this is the ideal time to sign up to a project designed to keep evaluation and reflective practise front and centre? A reminder not to let the bigger picture slip out of view amongst all the busy?

So here I am - a solo librarian in a small academic library, serving 3 cohorts of undergraduate students each year, always looking for ways to improve the services that I can offer my students and my colleagues. Hi.