Thing 11 - Mentoring

I have very little to say about thing 11 mentoring 

When I started my first librarian post I was working with another new professional. We tended to take a “suck it and see” attitude to doing things and the library manager seemed to just let us get on with it. So it was learning by trial and error. We had very patient and forgiving library assistants. This has more or less set the pattern for me. I suppose that I think I should be able to work things out by myself or at least as part of a team.

I have come across various librarians whose work I admire and I’ll gladly steal work methods, approaches and ideas from anyone willing to share.

Interesting comment from “anonymous” on the blog entry for this thing.

Thing 10 - Graduate traineeships, Masters Degrees, Chartership, Accreditation

So my Thing 10 looks into my journey into librarianship. Apologies for the length of this post – I’ve been around a while.

From A to B

Career 1 was a plan to work as a scientist – did science-based A levels and got a BSc in Chemistry from Bath University and did a one year placement with a pharmaceutical firm. Sadly by the end the prospective career spending years in labs didn’t appeal. So what next?

Career 2 was a plan to work as a computer programmer – was lucky to get onto a good graduate trainee programme with a large (then) public sector company. Had a pretty good career over 13 years, got the opportunity to work with a number of different technologies and develop lots of skills. But I’ve never had a computing-based qualification. For probably the last couple of years I was looking for something that dragged my head away from the code-crunching now and then. Action was needed when I was made redundant. So what next?

Career 3 was a plan to work as a librarian. This followed a fair amount of self-analysis – what can I do, what do I like to do etc. The Open University had some good tools that helped me along the way. The Internet revolution was in full swing, changes in availability, use of, presentation of information seemed exciting. So hopefully I could make the most of my IT skills along the way.

Graduate traineeships

I’ve never actually seen one of these. Are they good? Accredited in some way? Working for a year in either a traineeship post or as a library assistant didn’t really appeal in terms of the salary drop and time added to eventual qualification. I don’t think that I have missed out on anything by not being a library assistant first.

Masters Degree

So somewhere in my thirties I went back to university (at Liverpool JMU) to do an MA in Information and Library Management. It was a revelation! The changes since the first time I went to Uni were staggering. I enjoyed the whole experience (well except for writing up my dissertation – moan, moan, moan). My course did cover classification and cataloguing – hoorah for Keith Trickey! Absolutely believe all courses should include this – it is the basis for librarianship. And obviously enjoyed modules that dealt with electronic resources (I took the modules on business and healthcare resources) as well as creating web pages and Internet searching. My course included a 3 week placement, and I spent a lovely time at the University of Liverpool.

I do think a qualification is required for a career in librarianship. You get a good grounding in the ethos, theory and the basic principles; various elements can open your eyes to the possibilities out there. I also think that you need to have done a dissertation or some piece of research work if you are going to train users on searching skills.

The 5 Year Plan

OK so the MA won’t prepare you for every single job but it gives you the grounding. Then it’s up to you to make the most of your opportunities and take on that “continuous development” aspect.

Job1 – was subject librarian at an FE Library. This was brilliant in terms of exposure to a whole range of library-related activities – managing (small) budget, selecting stock, developing a collection, cat & class, training, creating leaflets, posters, displays, enquiry desk duties, dealing with reader issues. This was hard-going in terms of low salary, limited resources and challenging student behaviour.

Job2 – was assistant librarian at an NHS library. So this was a step into specialism. I really got to hone my literature searching skills, developed current awareness bulletins as well as delivered training. Our users were medical staff and nurses and they were absolutely wonderful.

Job3 – I’m the eresources librarian at a joint HE / NHS library, serving medical, midwifery and nursing students as well as NHS staff. I used to see the library from the A34 when I visited relatives here and always thought it would be great to work in a round library. It always looked so inviting. 

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I got the job at the second attempt. I admin our access to eresources, develop our website and get involved in all sorts on online-based projects.

Along the way I also did a couple of Open University short courses – beyond google and an introductory management course. To be honest I think that these represented better value than Cilip courses.

Chartership

I’ve mentioned before about this. It is off my radar at the moment, probably for good. I think so far my career demonstrates that I can develop new relevant skills and that I have an open attitude to change and new developments, so I feel this is sufficient for any prospective employers.

What is essential?

Yes I feel the MA was essential. As well as learning the specifics of the course this also demonstrates that you can learn new skills, be adaptable, analytical, self-reflective and have the ability to plan. I think my career choices have given me a range of experiences that all add to my ability to perform my current role. For any kind of career progression and service development I would think that these are all essential skills in modern librarianship.

Thing 9 Evernote

The topic for thing 9 is another organising tool – Evernote.

This is intended to allow you to gather together a range of items whether from your own notes to entire websites. So you can mix you own thoughts, documents, images and Internet links in one folder, giving you a more rounded collection of information than might be gathered say in a book-marking tool. This sounds good to me. I’m always emailing myself bits of information and have various “ideas” documents on the go – this sounds like a good way to keep info together whatever the format.

The problem for me was that it wasn’t available within the cloud and that you needed to download an element for it to work. This downloadable element was required on every device that you wanted to use Evernote with. I’m not entirely sure where your information was being stored but the details from the various devices were supposedly synchronised.

I work in a hot-desk environment so I don’t think that downloading the software on to up to 5 computers shared by a number of staff is a viable thing for me to do. People sometimes delete things that they don’t recognise.

By the way I inadvertently added something via the web login (ie where the software wasn’t installed) and it did then synchronise this with rest of my folder held on a PC with the software installed, though I wasn’t able to see my previous items from the web login. Not sure what is going on or whether this is supposed to happen. I can’t decide whether to persevere a little longer with this tool. I am tempted...

Thing 8 Google Calendar

Google Calendar is discussed in Thing 8 as a tool to help you to keep organised . This is basically what it says – an online calendar.

As I already have a Google account – in for a penny, in for a pound – I’ve followed the instructions and set it up, entered a few events and so on. However I’m presented with a bit of a quandary as I use Google with my home email account but the events are work-related. So I’ll need to keep a check on my home email for reminders about work events, hmmm!

This may all change as I understand that our work email system is moving to some sort of google-esc version and then I can keep work things all together. I haven’t shared anything though I understand that this is supposed to be part of the appeal so that work colleagues can easily keep up-to-date with where you are, what you are doing and join meetings. We still use a paper diary here and I doubt that there is any clamour to move online or even electronic.

I did investigate the facility to embed a calendar in a web page. For example I notice that our university events calendar is maintained in Goggle calendar and presented in a web page. I thought this looked quite effective and will investigate whether something similar is possible for our training programme schedule. This might be a way for the training librarians to update the latest dates without me having to change the webpages.

Thing 7 Real-Life Networks

Thing 7 is looking at real-life networks.

The idea of “networking” sometimes seems a little insincere and too much like the old boys’ club to me. The notion that you need a little notebook of introductory phrases with details of your “networkees’” latest project, son’s a level results or previous holiday location seems a little… icky!

I am a member of Cilip and have been since starting my MA back in 2003. Following graduation I got quite excited about chartership, attended various workshops and started gathering my evidence. However I didn’t really start the process and now I’m not terribly motivated to re-start. I’ve managed to keep my skills up-to-date and have a positive attitude to learning new things and training without it. 

I’ve started to wonder if it is worth continuing with Cilip. It still seems to be focused on public libraries and is very London-centric. I’m not really clear whether I’m getting enough for my money.

I tend to attend workshops, training events and “networking” opportunities less and less these days – perhaps the availability of information online and online networks means I don’t have to so much?

Thing 6 Online Networks

Thing 6 is looking at online networks.

Twitter

As mentioned previously I've been on Twitter as @libcheryl for a while now. This is in a professional capacity, linked to my current role. I mainly use it for current awareness and passing on relevant re-tweets to do with health, medicine, nursing and midwifery or librarianship. I haven't really found it to be a conversational place and the only question I asked was ignored.

LinkedIN

I've been on linked in now for a few years. I find that the groups are really useful - you can post questions and most seem to get some sort of response. It is also helpful to lurk - you can pick up lots of interesting bits of information. I've recently noticed that more spam posts appear to be posted which is starting to annoy. The email updates are also getting repetitive though maybe I need to investigate my settings more here.

In terms of contacts I have mainly re-connected with former colleagues. I'm not sure of the etiquette of making contacts. The advice seems to be don't connect with people you don't know but then surely the point is to build up a new network. A work in progress I think.

Facebook

I have 2 Facebook accounts - one is personal for family and friends whilst the other is used to admin our library Facebook page. We decided to set up a library page so that we had a presence in the largest and most likely used network. We have linked in our blog so that entries get posted automatically and we also add any news about new resources. 

Others

I had not heard of the other networks mentioned:

LISNPN - not sure how active this is, there seemed to be few replies to some of the forum posts despite lots of views

Librarians as Teachers - doesn't apply

Cilip Communities - hadn't heard of these despite being a cilip member, and I'm registered on the site too.

Summary

At the moment I find Linked IN most useful for connecting with other professionals via the groups. Twitter is most helpful to me as a current awareness tool. Facebook is either purely personal or used to connect with our user groups. I'm not sure how much I can expand on my use of networks - there is only so much time in the day.

Thing 4 Twitter and Paper.li

There was a great post from Jen Gallagher about Twitter that also referred to using paper.li

While I had started tentatively to create lists of people I follow on Twitter, after reading Jen’s post I definitely think this is a super way to organise your tweets and it is something I will be applying in the future. I split those I follow into different lists so I have a librarians list, librarianship issues list, Health Professional list, NHS orgs list and so on. I can also create a stream in hootsuite to follow each list. This means that I can separate out my health feeds from my library feeds, from my stoke feeds… and so on, which makes it all much easier.

I had also started to experiment with paper.li. I didn’t really seem to be getting the papers I was hoping but I’ve rearranged them now to follow my various lists. So I have Healthcare Today! which follows my health-related lists and Librarian News I’m not sure how the different sections are populated. I don’t think I’d use them to present information to users but I might try to interest some of my non-web2.0 colleagues.