Tales of a Librarian

Hi. A really useful article from Freepint on writing content for the web. Looks like I don’t need that training course after all!

This is a really insightful and useful article about preparing content for the web. It’s not something that I am responsible for in my day to day work, and it probably doesn’t apply to blogs in the same way as web pages, but it is really interesting to hear how content needs to be presented entirely differently than one would write an essay, etc.

It contains really useful and practical tips, so if you are interested, it is well worth a read.

Along similar lines is the plan english campaign - a campaign to eliminate jargon and establish a culture of writing public information in plain, easy to understand english. This is a far cry from what we were taught in University, and indeed what I am used to. I know that people within my work have attended plain english courses as a requirement for taking part in projects with clients, so as a movement it really seems to be gaining momentum.

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