Networking sociably pt 2 - Thing 7

Thing 7 was all about the face-to-face networking. I kind of missed the boat with activities last week in relation to in-person networking. I kept seeing mentions of it on Twitter, but just didn't have the time to look into it. I really liked the sound of the online 'meet-up' for those who didn't live near anywhere that had something organized, so will keep a look out for another one of those. 

But in general, I enjoy the face-to-face aspects of networking, although I have realized that I don't do it very much! 'Events' used to terrify me when I was starting out, through fear of having nothing intelligent to say about the subject of a presentation/meeting, but as I have progressed, I've found it's sometimes easier to just chat rather than having an agenda of points to be made, and that getting to know faces and people is the biggest benefit. I've found the Cataloguing and Classification Group Cilip events/visits I've attended both interesting for their subject and very useful for meeting others, and have developed contacts in this way.

This has also made me think about my local Cilip group, the South East Branch. Many of the cataloguing events of Cilip are either London based or at least not in my neck of the woods. So, one way to increase my networking might be to get a bit more involved in my local group. Having taken a look at their website, they seem to have a lot going on, so I may investigate further.

The CPD blog has a huge list of professional organizations that can be used for networking. I didn't get chance to look at most of them, but one that I liked was the Library Society of the World, who are 'a world-spanning group of library professionals and library advocates, dedicated to furthering the role of librarians, archivists, information professionals, and information educators through communication and collaboration'. Their most recent posting is the LSW colouring competition, which makes me think that I must join this group immediately.

Thinking about networking as a whole, both on- and offline, these tasks have definitely reminded me of the importance of getting and keeping in touch with people both within my profession and outside of it, who are interested in similar issues to myself. I suppose as with most things, the more you put into this, the more you get out of it, so my mid-year resolution is going to have to be more effort on this front, I think.

Networking sociably pt 1 - Thing 6

Just when I thought I was catching up, things 8 and 9 got published today! So, will get onto those post-haste.
But for now, things 6 and 7 were networking - online and face-to-face.

Online
I'm not a natural social networker, so the CPD program has really pushed me to address this. As already posted, I rejoined Twitter and am trying to pursue this. It has definitely reinvigorated my interest in new developments and let me find lots and lots of cataloguing people, which is great. I use Facebook, too, but as I've said before, keep this solely for personal use.
I also took a little tour of a few of the other networks mentioned on the CPD blog:

I joined up for this but after a short time clicking around, quickly lost the will to continue. I really liked the look of the exemplar profiles posted on the CPD blog, but they also made me feel a bit inadequate too! I didn't want to create a poor profile, so haven't added anything yet, to give myself time to think about it. I couldn't quite get to grips with the whole thing tbh, so obviously need to devote a bit more attention to it. I also got a little confused about registration - is it enough to just sign up without paying, or do you only really get the benefit if you subscribe?

I have dipped in and out of Cilip Communities in the past, making the odd posting. For some reason, I find the logging into and navigating round the Cilip site more of a chore than I do for most other sites. But for this 'thing' I followed the short cut to the Cilip Communities sub-site which is perhaps what I should do in the future. I like the scope of coverage in the communities - you never quite know what you are going to find a comment on. I probably should visit this more often than I do, or at least investigate the RSS possibilities to see if I can view it through my blog reader instead.

I also recently signed up for Google+ after receiving an invite from a work colleague. My first thought, particularly as I've been signing up for a lot lately was - another network?!?
I’m sure there’s a lot more to this than I've been able to explore yet, but even so, I don’t feel convinced it’s enough to make me want to switch from the networks I’m already using.  I like the idea of circles of types of contacts, but I have been developing a pattern of using different sites for different purposes in any case, which seems to have suited well enough. And I think the crucial ‘problem’ for me is that I can’t find that many people I know on Google+ yet.

I have a feeling that it may be one of those things that I make a jump to in the future but only when it reaches the tipping point and everyone is using it. It makes little sense to be trying to network alone on a different site to everyone else, after all - slightly defeats the purpose, doesn't it.  I believe that you no longer need an invite to join, which makes me feel slightly less special already, but might mean that some more people that I know join it. So, we will see…

Reflective practice - Thing 5

Finally getting round to Thing 5. Hopefully Things 6 and 7 from this week won't be too far behind.

Reflective practice as a concept has always been fuzzy for me, and I think that I have maybe subconsciously put off starting this task as I had an idea in the back of my head that it was incredibly time-consuming and therefore a bit of a chore. So, I approached this hoping for a moment of clarity and a plan for the future.

What have I done?

I enjoyed reading the blog entry on the CPD23 website. It took away a lot of the aura surrounding the subject for me and left me feeling a bit more confident about how I could apply reflective practice to my professional life.

What have I learnt?
I liked iterative 'do-review-plan-do' cycle but recognize that it's probably a bit simplistic. I need to do further reading/exploration to really get to grips with the concept in a meaningful way. I have always kept a log of 'what I am doing' to help with appraisals and identify professional development needs, and have in my mind considered and analyzed and drawn conclusions, but have been missing the structure of writing and planning actions based upon this. I have already found with this blog that it is good practice in focussing the mind and trying to convey my thoughts succinctly (not altogether succeeded with this yet!). I'm not sure that I would want to use it for all future reflective writing though, as I don't know that it's necessary to publish my thoughts on everything I do at work to the world. But I definitely can see that the format is useful.

So, having reflected a little, how am I going to apply this in the future?

Plans
I hope to make more time for reflective writing and ways of working in the future, but will need to be pragmatic about this, of course. Having made time for the CPD program itself, I have learnt that time is there, but it takes discipline and self-motivation.

I'm going to investigate some online tools to help with reflective writing, and have also identified a few books on our library shelves from the CPD further reading list. Ideally, I may be able to develop my offline work log into something more reflective, building upon descriptions of what I have done, to include written evaluation and action points.

Current awareness and more networking - thing 4

I am on slightly more familiar ground with at least some of the tools up for discussion in Thing 4 - Twitter, RSS feeds and Pushnote. Well, 2 out of 3 anyway.

I had tried Twitter once before and given up on it, but have reregistered with the start of this course, and have already started following some interesting folks. I can see it will be beneficial for current awareness and networking, and it's great to see there are so many other cataloguing and metadata bods out there. However, in just a couple of weeks, I have already found that time is an issue for me. I think that following even a small number of people, assuming they are active twitterers (tweeters?), can mean a lot of mental interruptions if you keep twitter on in the background. Or trying to catch up with ongoing conversations becomes impossible too. I definitely need to start joining in a few more conversations, too, if I'm going to get the most benefit from it.

 I moved to Google reader last year, having previously used and loved Bloglines for organizing my RSS feeds. I made the move when Bloglines looked like it was about to be axed, although it got rescued at the last minute. I felt a pang of treachery at leaving Bloglines for evil Google, but once I had jumped ship, decided to stay put and give it a go, and found that google was actually just about as good as Bloglines was.
I am slightly addicted to my blog reader. I love the fact that I don't have to go seeking out updates to my favourite sites/blogs, and that it satisfies my inbuilt need for organization in all things I do. I don't currently do anything as social as sharing with it. I do suffer from too many RSS feeds, particularly as I combine professional and personal interests within the same account, but haven't found it too much of a problem. I think that long-term I may stick with the rss reader for general awareness, and keep Twitter for breaking news type events.

Before moving on, here are a few of my favourite feeds...
CPD23 (of course!)
Karen Coyle's InFormation
Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog
Everything is miscellaneous
and if the Well-dressed librarian ever comes back from their extended break, I will be most happy

Plus for good measure a few non-work related:
EPBOT - geekery, girliness and goofing off
Curious places (for when I'm dreaming of escaping)
The girl who ate everything (for when I am dreaming of food and my next trip to New York...)

So, on to Pushnote. I had never heard of Pushnote before this, and tbh, I wasn't all that impressed with it. Perhaps because I had trouble finding anyone else who is using it. Or maybe because I already use and am pretty happy with delicious for bookmarking. I gather it had Stephen Fry pushing it to everyone at its launch, which is exciting, I guess. I don't know that being able to see comments from others for websites is a huge attraction for me. I like being able to check out what else someone who shares similar interests to me has bookmarked, but I can do that on delicious already. And friends/colleagues already tend to share links to the good stuff via facebook/twitter, so that angle is covered too. Perhaps I am missing the point somewhere. Also, I am now stuck with an irritating star browser addon on my Firefox browser at work, and don't know how to uninstall it - any help would be much appreciated!

Personal brands

This week's task is about personal branding and image. I must admit, I didn't think about this too much when setting up the blog, and now I look back my blog name is a bit wordy rather than being short and snappy. I also have different names for my blog and the twitter account I set up, but I guess that they at least both have my real name attached to them, so I'm going to continue with that for now.  
In terms of a style, I think I have been quite honest, but I have always been pretty careful about what I post on the internet, and luckily the internet didn't properly exist for my 14 year old self to leave a trail of embarrassing stuff for the world to come across today.  My rule of thumb is that I don't post anything that I wouldn't want my boss or mother to see. Perhaps due to my mistrust, I don't really have much of a web presence right now. I am on facebook, but other than that had never done much online social stuff. I have recently joined twitter and might take a look at linked in. I really like the idea of a 'profersonal' style, as Jo suggests on the cpd23 blog.  
I haven't added a photo of myself. Perhaps I should consider this, but that would be a bigstep for me, so may just stick at the considering stage! I will also revisit the branding and look, as I set the whole thing up quite quickly, so didn't really give it the thought I maybe should have.  
So, what is already out there about me - well, I've recently changed my surname after getting married, so was interested to try a google search and see what came up. I have only quite recently (past couple of years) started using the web for much that I have put my name to, so wasn't expecting too much. My previous name is the same as an actress, so I had to add first 'library' and then 'solent' to get anything near me. There weren't many surprises - a link to a work portal with my contact details, a few postings of questions/comments to library related mailing lists, and that's about it.  
My new name is unique enough that there wasn't too much worry of mixing me up with other people. I first searched at the start of the week, but just did it again today and found that my new twitter account is now top of the list, which is great. But it did make me realize that I would need to be super careful for the future, as I am an easily google-able person and cannot hide amongst lots of other pages! 
Most of the first page related to me - other results included one related to a charity poster I bought via a Bluetones band blog, an institutional repository record I created for a journal article (just the one - presumably it was one that has done well for itself in the citation rankings), blog comments, and a couple of facebook 'likes'. This was pretty good - I can live with people knowing that I have a soft spot for 90s indie pop and give money to charity, and the rest were pretty innocuous, though was interesting to see the facebook likes. I verge on the obsessive of keeping my fb locked down as much as possible to my friends only, as I really view this as personal only, but obviously those sites I have liked share their data so something else for me to be aware of. 
I suppose that I now need to start thinking not just about what I don't want the world to see (not that there is lots to hide!), but what I want others to find online about me, and how that puts 'me' across as a person/potential employee/contact etc. So, lots more to think about, but a pretty positive experience all the same. Next week, keeping in 'the loop' and current awareness!