Tales of a Librarian

I got word this week that my first journal article has been accepted for publishing in one of the really good library related emerald journals. I can’t wait! (though i will have to, as i don’t think it will be published until 2007). But at least it has been accepted, that is the good news. It will be great to see my name in the journal, as I get a copy to keep.

My supervisor at the university has also mentioned that he is taking over editorship of a different emerald journal and asked whether i would be interested in submitting some work to him for consideration. I would love that! I figured I would blend it in with the report/research i was going to do within my work as part of my chartership, so this way, I might get two things out of the one piece of research. I really need to think of a subject to investigate. My work has a number of characteristics that set is aside from your typical academic or public library, so I guess there is plenty room for a fresh, original perspective (ain’t that always what their looking for?) - so I will have to have a really good think on that one.

I have also been thinking about trying to get something smaller published in smaller publications, but I haven’t really done anything about it yet. I guess the first stage would be to source some potential publications and look at what kind of material they publish, and what they are looking for.

I came across a really interesting column within the pages of emerald written by Rachel Singer Gordon titled ‘Publish, don’t perish‘. It provides advice for librarians who wish to try and get some work published and has a number of interesting sections including: ’selling your work, selling yourself’; ‘banishing rejection’; and ‘to niche or not to niche’. It has been really useful and led me to some other interesting resources which have been of help.

Technorati Tags: publishing, writing, journals, chartership

I feel like I have been fairly busy in work over the past week or so, and I have noticed that I have been able to do more enquiry work. I enjoy searching the databases for relevant information for members of our information service, but I sometimes struggle with the key words etc. as some areas that we cover I am not overly familiar with.

For example, one enquiry this week asked for a detailed answer to a specific planning query, which I just had absolutely no idea about. Discussions with other members of staff, however, made me feel a bit better about this as it turns out it was a very awkward question and despite searching a number of resources there wasn’t really anything that provided a straight answer.

I feel as if I am becoming better at enquiries though, and quicker with them too. The more I do the more confident i become with them, as I become more familiar with the contents of our database and the key words etc used. There are also a number of other resources that we can use/access and I am gradually beginning to pick up on these as well, as they are of particular use for more difficult enquiries.

I was also given training in SPADS (scottish planning appeal database) yesterday, which operates pretty much the same as our other database, but has slightly different command languages and abstracts. It was quite confusing at first, and there are a lot of different elements that make up the appeal abstracts that I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I will be getting to see how others’ conduct SPADS enquiries next week so hopefully that will help me to remember and become more familiar with their layout etc. It is quite interesting to search for appeals that have occurred in areas you know! I will keep you updated on my progress with this.

Technorati Tags: search skills, work, training, enquiries, library

I’m absolutely gutted… I can’t access the Emerald journals any longer - not sure why I could in the first place but now it seems as if my magical access has gone. Sigh. How I long for those articles of scholarly goodness. Hmmm, now where am I going to get all of my professional readings for chartership from? Help!

Technorati Tags: articles, access, distress

Information Research blog points to an interesting article from Prentice Hall: Professional Technical Reference which discusses whether or not search engine such as google have made us into wonderful researchers or just ‘lazy googlers’.

The abstract of the article says ‘Every day millions of Internet searchers use Google or other high-speed search engines such as MSN Search. Are all these Googlers just doing the “search lurch”? Try a few key words, click a few search results, and maybe they’ll find what they’re looking for in a few seconds. Or maybe they’ll just give up and move on to something else’.

The rest of the post describes the advent of search engines and its implications for site navigation - do people still navigate within sites, is there a need for this, what implications are there for site designers and so forth, but also discusses the impact this has on users search skills and the time spent looking through each resource. Again, the dangers of electronic resources and easy access to auch a wide variety of information at the click of a mouse has already been widely discussed, with many claiming that such technologies will erode the ability of people to properly search and locate information, as well as reducing the amount of time spent studying a source of information, replaced instead by people moving in and out of websites within a few clicks.

This is relevant stuff - and really interesting! We are always striving at my work to promote the benefits of proper information searches conducted in a logical and efficient manner (to justify our existence!!) - as many people really do feel that it is all available on the first page of Google.

Technorati Tags: google, search skills, information literacy, information,

Hi there, I haven’t posted anything since earlier this week so I thought I’d better get something written - I’m trying to make the blog a bit more personal and reflective, so I think I will just discuss some of the current developments that are taking place at work, well, with regards to my own development anyways.

Tuesday saw me and around six other ‘new starts’ meeting to have lunch with the chief exec of the company - something we were given little notice of and I didn’t really know what to expect. We went to a nice italian restaurant near work and we all introduced ourselves by saying a few lines about what we do at work/spare time etc. It’s amazing how difficult it is to think up a couple of sentences that sums yourself up entirely - try it and see! My mind went a bit blank, but I am sure I managed to get by alright!! The CEO then discussed the three main objectives of the business, so that we could understand how these three elements merged together and headed in the same direction. I was amazed at just how enthusiastic he was about the company, so passionate about it, but I guess that when your the head guy you really gotta believe in what you are doing. The purpose of the meeting was really to discuss things that we felt we could change/needed to change within the department, with the notion that whatever we said would not be accounted to us. Quite a few people had a lot of ideas, and to be honest I felt as if I should have really thought of something to say, but there just isn’t anything that I feel was worth mentioning at the moment. I mean, I am still learning the ropes here, and feel that given that I have no real previous experiences to draw from, it would be kinda silly of me to start making up changes for the sake of it. I would rather learn what there is to know, and feel confident that I fully understand the information service and its members’ requirements, before I could really make comments that would benefit and improve it. So, I guess that’s my next aim - to try and learn all there is to know about my work - an enormous aim if ever there was one!!

I am also going to receive training in planning appeal searches next week, which I have not so far been able to do. I’m not entirely sure how this will differ from ‘ordinary’ literature searches but as far as I am aware it has something to do with the command language used to conduct the search - but don’t quote me on that! I’ll let you know how that goes next week.

I have also been told by my manager that I am to be trained as the deputy for the weekly bulletin that we produce, which involves co-editing the abstracts and catalogue data for bulletin items for that week, and sorting out that weeks abstracting and distributing it fairly amongst staff. So I am looking forward to that as well.

I feel like my skills are developing, particularly with regards to enquiries, as my confidence improves. I think the more that I get to do these and have experience of searching for different subjects/types of material the better I will become. I quite like doing enquiry work, and you can certainly learn a lot about a particular subject area when you have forty or so abstracts to trawl through to find relevant ones!!

Anyways, I’ll keep you updated on my progress over the next week, and any interesting news items that catch my attention.

Technorati Tags: cilip, chartership, cpd, training, mentoring, library

Two posts on ebooks from the same blog caught my attention today. One was pointing to another post which was discussing the need for library 2.0 to incorporate books into it methods as this is still one of the primary functions of the library. I’m sure that some of the things he mentions, such as user comments inside books, have been discussed and done before in public libraries (although i do forget the name of it). Anyhow, its still worth looking at and reminding ourselves that people still associate the library with books, and we must find ways of developing this primary usage of them to include new methods of service delivery and user experience.

The second post i have to admit made me giggle, it’s another pointer to a post which likens people’s scepticism and concern about incorporating hand held computing equipment (such as ebook readers) into education to resistance to other advances in technology such as paper, manufactured ink and ball point pens. I wonder what things that are thought crazy today will be totally normal and mundane in the future. Hmmm…

Technorati Tags: ebooks, library2.0, books, resistance, technology, advances

I have been giving quite a lot of thought lately to the ways in which I should collect evidence for my portfolio (which i need to submit for chartership). The guidance is vague, I think, however, that it is probably vague for a good reason, namely to allow for the diverse range of people/experiences associated with information work that would probably disallow a strict standard for submission, and it also is an exercise in professional judgement itself deciding what to include.

Of course, the sensible thing is to keep a copy of just about everything you do at work, which can then be looked back over and collated into a scrapbook/binder etc. of evidence. I feel the need, however, to approach it in a more logical fashion, knowing in advance what categories etc. I will include in the portfolio, range/type of documents, evidence etc. so that i do not have to wade through a mountain of (semi-)unorganised documents etc. I think that also I will need to carry out some activities primarily just for cpd which would not neccessarily be part of my everyday work if i were not pursuing chartership.

Of course, this blog will hopefully go some way to contributing, although I am unsure of yet exactly how that will be, perhaps I will draw together a number of the most relevant, interesting, reflective, most visited posts etc. to illustrate what I have been doing with the blog over the past year and how it has contributed to my understanding of both the use of this kind of technology, and also my understanding of my own personal work and the wider context of library and information services. I am also unsure of the format in which it will submitted, i will probably need to print out the selected articles for inclusion and then annotate them to illustrate my points.

In order to get more ideas of what I should be doing re collecting evidence, I put my first post up on lis-cilip-reg, the jiscmail mailing list set up for people who are currently pursuing chartership of cilip. I was amazed at the amount of responses I had, and how quickly I received them. It really was nice to know that there is a whole community of people who have either experienced, or are experiencing the same as I am right now, and who are willing to help out by giving as much advice as they can. The main advice that I received was:

• that there is no real right or wrong when it comes to gathering and submitting evidence
• that it is an exercise in professional judgement itself to evaluate the appropriateness of materials for inclusion
• copies of certificates for training/conferences, keeping a diary of these activities
• including in-house training as well as external
• including work appraisals and personal development plans
• writing reports specifically with the purpose of including them in your portfolio, particularly if the subject of the report is regarding something which you have little other evidence of
• including screen shots, webpages etc. that you have worked upon (if any) - maybe this blog comes under this??
• being honest about any skill gaps rather than hoping they won’t notice, and identifying ways of filling these
• keeping evidence to a minimum, e.g. only including the paragraphs of a joint report which you actually wrote, rather than the whole thing
• annote resources to provide the assessor with additional information
• anything that you consider to be appropriate is okay to include as long as it is reflected upon

This seems to be the main points that were covered at least, so I guess that it is still pretty much up to me to decide what to include. I noticed that quite a few of the respondents mentioned having gone to a chartership meeting, but I haven’t yet had the chance to do this, although I am keeping a look out for a mention of the next one in my area - it sounds like this would be very handy and gives a good overview of what is acceptable, as well as some good ideas about what to include. A couple of good ideas I have heard going around is a swot analysis of your skills and experiences in your role, and also keeping a timeline of all the important things you have done in your job that would be relevant for chartership.

I set up a project timeline this morning although I am still figuring out how to use it properly!! I also think it would be a good idea for me to consider conducting a swot analysis - this could then be compared with one at the end of my period of professional experience. I will mention this to my mentor at the end of the month when we meet…

Technorati Tags: cilip, cpd, chartership, experience, portfolio

The Spoken Word Matters blog yesterday pointed to the University of Liverpool library webpages, which is advising students of the benefits of subscribing to rss feeds of table of contents of their favourite journals (see page). They also provide information on installing an rss reader and a list of journals that currently have rss feeds. This is very similar in to the JISC-funded TOCRoSS project that I discussed last week (see post), however, in this instance the library itself does not appear to have been involved in the development of the feeds, simply the sourcing of those which are available and the promotion of the benefits of these to students. This will no doubt become increasingly useful as more and more ejournals distribute their ToCs by RSS. Currently I have only found one ‘academic’ publication (i.e. those expensive peer-reviewed ones!!) to which I have access that allows RSS feeds (the Journal of Information Science) and a couple of other electronic-only publications such as Ariadne and D-Lib magazine. I’m sure, however, that eventually, organisations such as Emerald etc. will develop RSS feeds as part of their subscription service for all their publications (eventually!). In the meantime, I think that the way in which the University of Liverpool is utlising the facilities that are already on offer and promoting them to students in this way is a really effective (and cost-effective!) method of increasing the usability and accessibility of their electronic collection.

Technorati Tags: rss, cataloguing, catalogues, table of contents, library, opac

Hey, have a look at the website of the Universal Display Corporation, and in particular, the concepts page, which lists a whole range of new devices that they envisage as being possible in the future. Just imagine what this could do for ebooks and the like… Reading it makes you feel like your in a science fiction movie or something! On the right is just an example of something they have imagined, which they describe as ‘the ultimate portable communications device’…

Technorati Tags: ebooks, design, displays, screens, computers, technology

There have been many news articles published today discussing the growth of the ‘blogosphere’, with a ‘State of the Blogosphere’ post yesterday on the technorati blog, which reports on the growth in the number of blogs, and developments that have taken place with regards to preventing spamming and increasing the use of tags.

According to technorati, the size of the blogosphere is doubling every five and a half months! Technorati founder, Dave Sifry comments “At that rate, it is literally impossible to read everything that is relevant to an issue or subject, and a new challenge has presented itself - how to make sense out of this monstrous conversation, and how to find the most interesting and authoritative information out there.”

At least I am not the only one who feels overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available through blogs etc.!! I think another problem in terms of searching through blogs using a site such as technorati is somehow sorting the wheat from the chaff, you know, finding a reputable, timely and intelligent source of information that is going to provide you with the information you want, and some guarantee of the quality of information presented and that the source of information won’t suddenly disappear.

There are a lot of really good blogs out there, and they are an amazing way of keeping up to date with a whole range of issues, themes, areas of interest etc. But at the same time there is also a lot of rubbish. Personally, I would like to see some kind of catalogue (or catablog!! heehee!) of reputable, reliable blogs in different subject areas. It would be great if someone could perhaps classify them as well, kind of like the way in which web resources have been catalogued by BUBL. I appreciate the difficulties that this would entail, but i think that the benefits could be enormous. I doubt somehow that my own wee blog here would be suitable material, but blog owners could apply to be included or something, and then they could be assessed in various ways and included if they were deemed to be appropriate and included enough content (and were likely to continue doing so). Users could comment on the timeliness, reliability, usefulness etc. of the blog so that quality could be gauged.

I guess something like this could be done more practically on a smaller scale, say for example, as part of a reading list for a particular subject at university, or items of interest for a library, hospital or any other organisation. In fact, it could be something that a library could incorporate into it’s catalogue of resources (again, quality of content would become increasingly important).

But well, it’s an idea, because i know from personal experience that finding blogs can sometimes be a really arduous procedure, and i think that most of the ones to which i have subscribed i have mostly stumbled across haphazardly in one way or another. So, as a librarian my natural tendency is to seek some kind of order and organisation!! I wonder if it will ever take off? if it does, and it hasn’t been thought of already, I’m calling dibs on the idea (and the profits!!)
;)

Technorati Tags: library, catalogue, cataloguing, blogs, blogging, blogosphere