Tales of a Librarian

Well folks, I’m back again. I thought I’d just write a little more to update you on the progress that I have made over the past couple of years in my post and compiling my chartership submission has really given me cause to think about all that I have learned and what I still have to learn!

Looking back over the posts that I have made over the years since joining my present employment, I can definitely say that I have become a lot more confident in pretty much all of the areas of my work that I do on a regular basis. For example, there was a post on search skills, and how I felt that I had a long way to go before I was able to undertake complex searches for people. I now feel that I am more able to do these, and do not need to rely on the advice of my colleagues and/or manager to undertake the vast majority of searches, even those that often involve fairly complex search terms/concepts. Of course, there are still going to be a few times when advice is needed, as users have a habit of always surprising us in this regard! But it’s good to be kept on your toes, and learning new places to search and finding the information for users is very rewarding, particularly if it is hard to locate somewhere. I think that is one of the main benefits of the service for users.

Even searching the planning appeals, which often involve very specific terms or legislation, has become a lot easier, and I’m far more confident in doing this than I was even a year ago. I think my subject knowledge in all of the areas that we cover has improved greatly, through the process of reading/scanning the journals and websites, and through abstracting documents. It’s amazing the amount of information that you can pick up. Obviously we’ll never be specialists in all areas, but you get the general feel for what is happening in each area, pick up trends and buzz words that are in use, and get to know and understand the various terms and concepts relating to each subject.

Becoming involved with the journals collection has been great for me, it is very motivational to have my own responsibility for their management and to make the improvements that are sorely needed to ensure that the process is as efficient as possible. One complaint that could be made is that the process is very ‘bitty’, there are always things cropping up, such as overdues or unpaid subscriptions through our subscription agent, but identifying new journals to add to stock, and liaising with suppliers and publishers is very interesting. It definitely keeps me on my toes! I also enjoy working with the two ladies who deal with the check-ins and trying to ensure that everything is up to date and running as smoothly as possible. There are a few changes I would like to make, such as rejigging the database in which our subscription details are kept, as I feel this is quite outdated and would benefit from having more information on it, such as the format of journals. A lot of journals are now both print and electronic, and there are also an increasing number of electronic subscriptions. Being able to record this in the database along with the rest of the information would be a great help, and adding username and password details would be fantastic. I will have to look into this as I’m not sure at present whether the database can be changed to incorporate this. I’m also in the process of updating our e-journals access information, which is currently held in a seperate spreadsheet, no doubt left over from when there was only a small collection of ejournals to manage. Given the increasing number of journals available online, I think it would be sensible to have all of this information in the one place, as it would increase accessibility and make it easier to keep up to date.

As I am now fairly confident in the basic duties of my work as an Information Officer (abstracting, literature searching, stock selection etc) I feel that the area that I am developing most at the moment is in project work, which we are commissioned to carry out by various agencies, both on short-term and long-term projects. Generally, these involve identifying suitable material for inclusion on electronic databases/libraries, abstracting said material according to the various house standards employed by the contracting organisation, and publishing the material to the web. As well as improving my skills in a variety of abstracting formats, I have also been given experience in managing projects, through my role as deputy for two current projects that we are doing for government agencies. I will slowly learn how it is done and will hopefully be able to take on more responsibility as my skills develop.

In terms of my own CPD, I have a couple of courses lined up (which I mentioned briefly in my previous blog). The first is ‘Copyright for Information Professionals‘, run by CILIPS. After discussion with my mentor we agreed that this course would be useful not only for letting me understand the wider copyright context as it relates to libraries, but will also be of use with my work as journals manager. Our situation as a private subscription-based library with remote users means that our copyright situation is complex, and involves a couple of different licenses with the CLA. Any extra information I can gather on this front will be put to good use!

The second course that I have applied for is the ‘Introduction to first line management‘ course, also run by CILIPS. After looking at my PPDP and my development over the past couple of years, it became clear to me that I had not had much experience in directly managing others, so this course will be a good introduction to the basic principles involved in this.

I am also going to attend a ‘roadshow’ run by Dawsons (a bookseller, from who we buy pretty much all our hard copy books), where they will be demonstrating their new e-book platform, dawsonera. As you might be able to tell from previous blog posts, I am very interested in the development of electronic sources of information and their usage, so I am looking forward to see how it works and whether it will be of relevance to our service. We will need to ask a variety of questions relating to the copyright situation of the ebooks available, whether users will need separate usernames and passwords, whether we could incorporate it into our online database in anyway, and the amount and subject matter of the books that would be available online. Our service has seen a notable decline in the number of hard copy books that are sent out on loan, with users tending to prefer information that can be downloaded directly from our online database. If we could provide a number of books in electronic format, this may help to increase the number of ‘loans’ that we receive for these titles. It will all of course, depend on whether it can be integrated with the service as it currently is without too much inconvenience for users. For example, asking them to use a seperate site and username and password would probably be too complicated. Also, the search facility would not be integrated across the two platforms, unless there was some way to amalgamate them. There are also a variety of copyright issues to consider, given that our users would not be accessing the material from our building, but from their own, giving rise to the need for access from multiple locations, which may not be allowed by the terms and conditions.

I guess you can but ask though! I will be able to chat with a representative about our needs and feed this back to the rest of the staff for consideration. I’m quite excited about it!

And finally, I stumbled across this online through the CILIP mailing lists, the Hollywood Librarian! It looks fantastic, and I would really like to see it. I mentioned it to a couple of colleagues, and one of them who is involved with the Career Development Group is looking into arranging a viewing of it at some point in the near future. I hope they manage, as it looks like a really great film!

Howdy! Why, it has been a while, hasn’t it? I’m afraid the daily grind of work and life in general has caused me to let this blog slide over recent months, however, I thought it would be worth posting to say that I am now back on track with my chartership with renewed vigour!

Indeed, there is in fact a light on the horizon, shining away and beckoning me towards the finish line. I have been rather distracted along the way, a little detour which probably could have been avoided, but now that I am back on track and will hopefully submit before the end of March 2008, I feel a lot less stressed about it and also really motivated. It’s like the final burst of energy to get to the end of the race!

When I first started out on my chartership, I was determined to get it within a year. I had my PPDP all sorted out and kept detailed notes of everything I was getting up to. I actively sought out training courses which were either relevant to my work or which filled training needs that I had identified. After so long in the job though, various time pressures piled themselves on and the chartership was unfortunately pushed to the back of the pile for a while. I suppose this happens with a lot of people, the demands put upon them to get the actual job done has to come first, but it is so important to not forget about your CPD, as I have realised, and I regret letting this happen over the past year.

I feel that attending training courses, thinking about your development, and knowing how you want to improve gives you something to focus on, something to work towards, that gives you direction when you may feel like you are just trundling (is that even a word?) from one week to the next doing pretty much the same thing. So I feel really motivated at the moment, have taken on extra responsibilities at work, and sorted out a few training courses for myself in the not to distant future.

And more to the point, I have started to draw together my portfolio for submission. It’s amazing how many pieces of evidence you gather over the process of just doing your job! I guess that’s the point of the chartership really, actual work experience, but combining this with reflection about how you have progressed, the performance of the organisation, and of yourself, and how you intend to develop in the future.

The process of chartership can be daunting, but for anyone in a library/information related job, the pieces of evidence seem to come together fairly easily, even though it may seem like an impossible task at the moment.

So hopefully I will have mine together soon, there are a few really good examples on the CILIP website which have given me guidance about how to structure it etc so I’m feeling more confident about that now as well. Just need to get all the extra documentation, finalise what is to be included and finish writing up my evaluative statement and then create a contents page! Sounds simple when you say it like that, but it can be quite fiddly and will no doubt take a fair bit of time.

But you heard it here first, my deadline is set and I intend to stick to it - the end of March people. It will be submitted. Or I’ll buy you all a drink. Maybe.

Hi there, thought I would write a little bit about a couple of days that I have had out of the office recently, which were both very enjoyable. The first was a couple of weeks ago now, a practical project management course, which was presented by JISC Infonet on behalf of CILIPS.

I found the course to be a very good introduction to the main principles of project management, and whilst I don’t feel as if I learned everything there is to know (a pretty impossible task in one day at any rate!), I do feel slightly more confident in my ability to plan ahead for projects, if I were ever asked to undertake one. I feel as if i could even use some of those principles learned on a smaller scale within my everyday work. A couple of other people from my work were also there at the training course, however, they both have quite a lot more experience than me in managing projects. I think that they both found it to be of use to them too.

The course itself had quite an educational focus, but was transferable to other areas, although some of the principles might be different, e.g. when we undertake projects it is often on behalf of others (paying customers) and so we don’t generally need to justify the project to management in the same way that someone in an academic or public library might need to.

They also provided quite a lot of material for us to take home, and directed us to a range of materials which are available for free on their website, all of which would be of great use to anyone undertaking a project of pretty much any size. There are also other infokits (as they call them) related to other aspects of management, such as change management, which I might also have a look at, as management is one area of my chartership where I feel that I might perhaps be lacking in experience slightly, due to the nature and organisational structure of my current employment.

The second day out that I have recently had is to the CILIPS Branch Group Day, which is normally held in Peebles, but was this year held in Dundee. I think this was to make access for people who live in the north of Scotland easier access to the event. I met in with a few people that I already know there, and also was introduced to other people. Funnily enough, I bumped into my previous dissertation supervisor and co-author of my recent article (mentioned below) on the train on the way there. It was nice to get out of the office and to network with other people who have sometimes vastly different roles to my own. I was chatting for a while to a woman who works in a health library, and it seems to be completely different to my own experience, and is something that I would be quite interested in experiencing, perhaps only as a work shadowing day though, rather than as a future career path!

I sat through a number of interesting talks provided by the different branches of CILIP. I was quite conscious to pick talks which were quite different from one another, so as to get an insight of library related issues in areas that I am not so familiar with. The first talk was on digitisation of local and national heritage materials, and the main issues surrounding this. I felt that much of what was said had already been covered in my ILS degree, as we did a digital libraries course, but it was still interesting to hear about it from a different perspective. A number of interesting sites with digitised materials were also discussed, such as the NLS, and examples of good practice shown.

The second talk that I attended was on Google and whether libraries and librarians will be able to evolve in order to keep up with technology and changing user demands as a result of this. There was a lot of emphasis on the library becoming less important as a place, and less visable in the provision of resources and services. How libraries and librarians could improve their libraries so as to stay relevant to people, particularly young people in higher education was a main focus of this talk.

The third talk was about the establishment of student centred learning at Napier University, such as the use of blended learning through a VLE and the importance of providing support for the users of such services.

Hey folks, it seems like a long time since I actually wrote anything for this blog (probably because it has been a long time since I wrote anything for this blog). So i thought i should fill you in about what i have been getting up to library-wise over the past month (or two)…

Well, I have recently taken over responsibility for the journals administration within my organisation, which i am really enjoying. I’ve made up a couple of spreadsheets to keep track of things, and have had the annual renewal form in from the subscription agent that we use to supply many of our journals, so i have had lots to keep me amused. The person who previously did the journals has now left the organisation, and the journals supervisor is on maternity leave, so its really just down to me and the two lovely women who deal with the check-ins, invoices etc.

We have been thinking a lot about cancelling journals in order to save both money and time. In our organisation, people will probably be shocked to hear that there is no real budget for books/journals which is set for the year, but even so it has become important for us to consider journals which are not representing value for money and are wasting the time of the Information Officers, and not really benefiting our members.

This has really been my first experience of weeding out stock, and making judgements about which items to continue stocking and which to cancel. We are currently seeking everyone’s opinions on this, based upon data which the deputy manager has compiled from the database. We are looking at journals which cost a lot of money, those which we have not abstracted much from, those which no one has really requested, those which have not contributed to the weekly bulletin that we produce, as well as those which are increasing in price this year.

A few recommendations have been made already, but it remains to be seen what will stay and what will go. It is remarkably difficult sometimes to decide what is most important, when all the journals have such different articles, quality, number of issues, costs, subject matters etc.

It would probably be really useful to draw up some kind of ’score sheet’ to assess journals by, which could then be used as a basis for cancellations. I guess people looking at the data produced by our manager are doing something similar mentally though, as I know I was.

I wonder how other libraries etc. decide upon what stays and what goes within their organisation? It would be quite interesting to find out, as this is something which I have very little experience of, as like I said, we don’t really have a budget, and are currently not too affected by space contraints which might merit such weeding of stock.

I attended the AGM of the Library and Information History Group (LIHG) yesterday afternoon through in Edinburgh, which was very insightful indeed.

It was held in the Signet Library, just off of the Royal Mile, in West Parliament Square, an area of the city so steeped with history that it seemed to be the ideal location for a group that are interested in the history of libraries and of the library profession.

My interest in attending this event was primarly to attend the talk and tour of the library, which is a very important law library within Scottish Legal History. The talk that we were given detailed the development of four of the legal libraries within the area, from the 1600s, which i have to admit left me feeling a little bit dizzy with numbers, and also very appreciative of modern fire prevention and fighting techniques, as the frequency of fires which these libraries seem to experience in the early days of their history was quite astonishing!

The library itself was a Georgian masterpiece of a building, with sweeping staircases, enormous pillars and walkways, and stained glass windows. How very different to the modern constructions of libraries today! The library itself was an exercise in preservation, nevermind the books that it held. Much of the original furniture remained, and rugs which would cost upward of £0.25 million to replace today. How extraordinary!

The library contained both legal and non-legal texts, most of which were kept in shelving behind glass or metal screening. I do not think that i saw a single person using it in the time i was there! Their situation regarding cataloguing is that only three quarters of the books in the lower library (law related) are electronically catalogued and available in an online opac, the rest are included in a card catalogue (held within the most magnificent mahogany cabinet!). The upstairs library has not been catalogued for the online opac due to funding restraints. Indeed, until only a few years ago they kept a hard copy loans record!

The building is really very impressive, but i have to admit that i was a bit confused by all the technical legal type information, i.e. the different users of the library and courts and such. There was not a great turnout for the event, most people there were already members of the group and of the committee, but they were very welcoming of me, the little outsider who knew very little, if anything, of library history.

Most of the people there really seemed to be very interested in library history as a research subject, and seemed in that sense to be as much historians as they were librarians. They seemed to realise that there was a real problem for their group in getting people interested in the history of libraries and that most librarians and library staff had very little knowledge about the history of the libraries in which they worked and of library history in general.

I think that the experience gave me a real insight into a view of librarianship which i had not really considered prior to attending. Understanding how the profession has developed and how it has been regarded by the public over the many years is of interest to myself, but i do not think that i would join the group as yet - if anything, i do not feel as if i know enough about the history of libraries to merit joining.

I will certainly in the future think more about the profession from this angle, and perhaps next time I visit a library building will think not just about what it currently offers and what it will offer in the future, but also about what it has offered in the past and how it has shaped and influenced the lives of the people who have used it and has grown and changed with the community in which it is placed.

UPDATE: I forgot to also mention one of the most unusual things that i discovered on the day - that the speaker who gave us the talk and tour of the building had been only the second qualified librarian to work in the library since it first opened (hundreds of years ago!)… what does that say for the recognition of the profession!?? Also, she was the first woman to work as a librarian within the library too….. (16th June 2006)

Technorati Tags: history, libraries, agm, meeting, tours, legal libraries

Hey there. This week i attended my first Career Development Group Chartership Event, which was being held at the Mitchell Library. It really was very enlightening. I think the two key words that i came away with burnt into my consciousness were EVALUATE and REFLECT!!

There were a few different speakers at the event, a couple of which were recently chartered members of CILIP, who very kindly offered to stand up and give us an overview of how to get ourselves through the chartership process, and gave us ideas on what kinds of things could be included as part of our portfolios. There was also a woman there who was a board member of CILIP, which means that she is responsible for assessing people’s portfolios and deciding whether they are suitable to be passed. It was also really interesting to hear her talk about what things people usually do wrong, and what kinds of things she is looking for in a portfolio. I’m not going to go into too much detail here as I have agreed to do a write up of the event for the Career Development Group newsletter, Focus, so all will be included in there.

I also met up with a friend and couple of other people i knew from the library course i did last year which was really great. It was fun to exchange stories of what we are all getting up to since we have been released into the big wide world. It was also good to have the focus on chartership and the talks that we had been given too, and we could discuss different things that we had been planning together. It would seem that out of the six people from the course that were there, three are working in school libraries, so it was a little insight into that world as well! What different issues they have to face compared to what goes on in my work. It was also strange to think they all ended up in school libraries as i had never really thought much about it before. I think that the major difference with their work is that they pretty much work by themselves, and from what I could gather, this has both its advantages and its disadvantages. I personally could not decide whether this was something that I would like, or whether I would go insane with the isolation. Hmmm. It certainly would be interesting to spend a day or so in a library such as that to see how it all works. I can only vaguely remember my high school library and to be honest i don’t think that i used it all that much. What i do remember though is that they had a card catalogue and little cardboard things with your name on that they put the slips of each book inside to keep track of what you had out. How things must have changed!

Anyway, I came away from the meeting feeling very motivated towards my chartership, and with a head bursting with ideas for different kinds of ‘evidence’. I must try to write it all down before it leaves me forever. I am looking forward to doing the review of the event, as i have not really done much writing since i left university. I doubt, however, that the academic style will be appropriate for a newsletter, so i had better spend some time looking over past articles in order to get the tone right.

I am also planning to do the ECDL again - I have pretty much forgotten about it since i left uni last summer and started working, but i have found a college that does the tests only and I have ordered some course material from my local library so I will arrange another couple of tests as soon as possible. Again, I could review how this has helped me develop ICT skills and how this has helped me in my work as, yup, you guessed it, more ‘evidence’!!!

Technorati Tags: CILIP, chartership, newsletter, writing, event

I have been paying attention to some of the entries on the LIS-CILIP-REG mailing list (as usual of course!) of late, which have been discussing the value of visits to other libraries, how many should be made, which sectors etc. and it got me thinking that it would perhaps be something of great use to my development if i were to arrange something similar. So, having thought about it, i realised that beyond a couple of contacts that I have already, i didn’t really know where to start with regards to contacting someone to arrange a visit. I have previously visited a languages library at Glasgow University for the day, which was very insightful, in fact, that was my first introduction to the LIS-CILIP mailing list.

So, I made a post asking people for ideas about how to go about it, and to hear how others’ had arranged such visits. What a response i got! I never cease to be amazed by how quickly, and how many people take the time out to reply to the queries i post on that mailing list. I got a whole range of answers, all of which were helpful, and which I will summarise at some point both for this blog and for the list. I even had two people offer to help arrange something (one through Glasgow City Council and one through the Career Development Group) with me, which was really nice. I will definitely have to speak to my manager and see what she thinks about it - i’m not sure how the whole time off would work for something like this, so I will need to discuss it with her before arranging anything else. But I do think that it would be a really great way to assess my library’s position within the wider scheme of things, to see how other libraries operate and what their client base is, and what kind of systems they use for organising things and measuring performance and so forth. I guess that I could then do some kind of comparative/evaluative essay/report on the whole experience, including discussion of all the different libraries i had visited, as this would probably be more relevant than a simple description of each of the libraries and what i did there… I’ll keep you updated.

Hey there. Yesterday evening after work I attending a meeting/focus group which was attempting to analyse the changes which have occurred and that are continuing to occur in e-information job roles. It was being held by another part of my company, but the other participants that were there seemed to come from quite a diverse set of occupational backgrounds, yet all working within what could be termed e-information roles. There were people from media, various public sector organisations, education, business, academia…

We were first given a brief presentation about the research that had been conducted into this subject by the researchers so far, and that which had already been gathered from the literature. It was quite interesting to actually sit and think about the variety of occupations where e-information work is becoming increasingly important as well as increasingly common. Areas such as e-government and e-learning seemed to be particularly prominent, but in addition to this there is a whole variety of areas involved in this which I had never really thought much about, particularly enginneering and construction and such, sectors which to be honest, i really don’t know very much about. There was also an increased awareness of e-information in business, not simply as e-commerce, but where the information is itself the product, for a variety of different uses and purposes.

After we had been given an outline of precisely what constituted an ‘e-information role’ in the context of this research, and an outline of the project that was being conducted, we broke off into groups to discuss things in more detail, drawing from each of our own individual experiences. The questions we were asked to discuss involved numerous different facets of the same theme - which sectors did we believe e-information roles were most prominent in, what skills did we believe were neccessary to do such roles, examples of job titles, particularly ones that had changed to reflect new e-info roles and so forth. It was interesting what others had to say. Personally, i felt a like my youth was a slight disadvantage in this instance, as for as long as i have been interested, things have pretty much all been electronic, and i felt as if i could not really comment on how job roles such as my own had changed (as i have only been in the job since November!) - although i could make some informed guesses. It was also quite difficult to think ‘outside the box’ as it were, beyond my own individual job and sector and into that of others’. It opened my eyes to see how information professionals were viewed and utlised in other areas, such as business, by those that had not neccessarily done the ‘typical’ qualifications, such as the postgrad ILS course or IM degree etc. In fact, among some of the group there was a general belief that such training was unneccessary as a prerequisite for many e-information roles, particularly those that were more management orientated and did not involve any kind of technical knowledge or speciality. I can understand where these people are coming from in a sense, as being older and more experienced they themselves confessed to having entered the profession without such qualifications. Indeed, i presume (although do not know for sure) that such degrees such as the information management etc. are probably fairly new and were not available, say, 20 years ago. Similarly, i can imagine that ILS courses were most likely fairly centred upon librarianship back then too - creating a divide between traditional librarianship and information managers that is gradually growing closer these days.

However, i think that there is still something to be said for the ILS courses etc.! ( although i have to say that) in defining the profession. But it has made me think more widely about how i define my potential career - do i think of myself as a librarian? (I think that, in general, yes, i do - and i am quite happy with this identification). But is this really a true reflection of the roles that many similar people end up doing when they leave such courses? Hmmm…

Other small points of interest: A lecturer from my old course was meant to turn up but didn’t, which was a shame…; someone raised the very interesting (and related) point about where on earth are jobs such as that we were discussing to be found on websites such as monster and s1jobs etc.? - i’m glad someone else seems to have noticed that we fall through almost every classification - although it was also pointed out that s1jobs used to have a category called ‘librarianism’ (a disease?); finally, a researcher whose work i had used during the lit review and research of my dissertation was also there, but alas, i did not have a chance to speak to him. Oh well, maybe another day…

Technorati Tags: e-information, job roles, work, change, librarianship

Hi folks, i’m just in the process of conducting a SWOT analysis of my skills and development so far in my current employment, as part of the my CILIP chartership. Hopefully, this will go someway towards my portfolio, as the plan is to conduct another one in six months time before i submit my application for chartership.

It’s really hard to think objectively about yourself! I found that looking at my original PPDP helped, as I could simply assess each item and place it in the appropriate place on the SWOT analysis. It is really helping me to stand back from my everyday work and assess just how much i have done towards acheiving everything that I set out to on my PPDP, and just what I still have to do. I think that I am doing okay in most areas, although, i could improve more. As always! But i feel that I have come a long way in the six months I have been here - although it just does not feel as long as six months! - particularly in the everyday type skills of the library - such as my abstracting and enquiry work. My subject knowledge also seems to be improving to a certain extent, although i do feel as if i have much to learn in this respect - the topics we cover are so broad and detailed that i guess i can’t expect to know everything in just six months, but i do feel as if it is becoming easier to choose what is relevant for inclusion and what is not, and what subjects things should come under and so forth. Again, i think the best way for learning about this is through reading the material that comes in to stock when selecting items for inclusion, newspaper scanning in the mornings and abstracting. I have also noticed having a more general awareness of relevant things occuring in the news, such as on the bbc website, which also increases my knowledge and understanding.

Areas in which I am lacking seem to be management skills - there just isn’t any requirement for me to ‘manage’ someone in the traditional sense in this role - so i will have to make up for that through readings and training. You would think that a degree in HRM would also help to some extent, but I think that it was so long ago now (or at least, it seems to be!) and so theoretical that it doesn’t really provide me with any really practical guidance. Oh well, better keep an eye out for those courses then!

One thing that is in my favour is that the company have a very good stance towards training etc. and are very supportive of this. So, there shouldn’t be a problem in that area.

I will forward my SWOT on to my manager as it may also be useful to get some objective feedback about it, in case i have misjudged anything or left anything out!

Just a quick note because i forgot to mention that i have also lined up some training/cpd activities for the coming months, which i am looking forward to attending. The first is a meeting/debate about an information project that has been carried out by researchers involved with our organisations, looking at the changing roles of e-information professionals. This is something that i clearly have an interest in (perhaps coming under this title myself) so it should be really interesting to hear what their research has thrown up - and to comment on it if i am in a position to do so. Obviously, being newly qualified and all I can’t really compare my role with many years ago, but even over the course of my education, roles and technologies etc. have changed dramatically.

Without seeming a bit stupid, I often wonder what it must have been like before the days of einformation, databases, computers and the wonders of the internet. For practically all of my adult life these things have been easily used and accessible. In fact, even in high school we used computers (although nothing like what is used today). I can even remember my first computer lesson… using Microsoft Word 6 or something (maybe even 4?). And the teacher told me if i shook the mouse when the little hour glass was showing, it would make the sand fall through faster and make things happen quicker. And I believed him. Hmmm.

But, it really must be so different for people who initially trained many years ago, and it just makes me wonder if such radical changes will occur between now and when I am an older and more experienced information professional.

Sorry, that was a bit of a diversion… back to the main point - so the roles of e-information jobs are changing. I’ll write a bit about what is discussed at the meeting after i have attended. It will also be nice to be involved in some real research again (albeit, only discussing it!)

The other courses that I have signed up for are two in my area, one on records management and one on metadata. Both look quite interesting, and I will have to take plenty notes and do a write up or something that can be included as part of my portfolio. There was also another training event that I was interested in attending about information literacy - but i missed out on that one coz i was too slow (i think that it has been and gone!). One of the presenters was someone whose research i had used a lot in my dissertation, it would have been nice to have met him. He works at a university where i spent some time on placement, but at that time i had not been involved with his work and therefore had not met with him.

So, i’ll have a good few events to look forward to over the coming months, and something to report back on as well. Have a nice weekend!

Technorati Tags: training, courses, cpd, research, meetings