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 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

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

I had my first performance review with my manager yesterday to discuss how I was getting along with all of my new tasks that I had picked up since starting to work here. I think that I am getting along okay, and she seemed to agree, which is great news. I also mentioned that I would like to take on a bit more work if possible because I seem to have the time for it at the minute, and so I hopefully will be getting to try my hand at a few other areas of the information service, which is all good news for my chartership and experience!

I really think that I need to start looking for some training courses to go on but there are just so many of them to choose from. I will have to have a really good think about what training I can realistically get from practical experience on the job and reading, and identify any gaps in my skills that I need to fill and base it upon that. I think that one thing that I may need to attend courses on is general management as I am not really getting the chance to learn things like that here (particularly managing people) due to the organisational structure of the information service (i.e. there ain’t really any library assistants that I am responsible for). So perhaps that’s an area that would do well to be covered by something like a training course. The other problem is that they all seem to be in London!! Hardly anything ever seems to be up in Scotland, so I will need to plan a little ahead if I am going to go to anything like that. I wonder what kind of training everyone else in my position is getting to do? I should count myself lucky however, that I am in the position to go to these if I wish, and that my employer will pay for it. I guess many people don’t have that kind of priviledge.

Finally, just wanted to say (again, think I may have mentioned it before but not sure) how great the LIS-CILIP-REG mailing list is (it’s for chartering librarians to keep in touch with each other/ask questions/compare experience etc.). I submitted a quick query about whether I should have received notification of my registration for chartership from CILIP (as i had not heard back from them) and within a couple of minutes I had at least five responses and an email from CILIP apologising for not getting back to me and saying that they would send something out once my application had been processed. Magic!

And how cute is the picture????

Technorati Tags: performance review, training courses, chartership, cilip, librarian, skills, development, mailing list

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