Tuesday 1 November 2011

Thing 16 - Advocacy

Whoops, have stepped a little out of order here, and got my posts mixed up, so I'm going back in time to thing 16 before moving on.
Advocacy is becoming increasingly high profile in UK libraries at the moment, and rightly so. These are worrying times. I must admit that I find the idea of a lot of the things involved in advocacy a little scary and in the public eye, but I would hope that on a smaller, more personal scale, I advocate for libraries when I can. One area I would like to work on, though, is to do more to let people (at a personal, organizational or professional level) know the value of the professional area I am involved in - cataloguing and knowledge organization.
It is an area whose results can be taken for granted, and the skills that are involved are not always recognized. This is definitely one of the areas that I'm most passionate about, which seems to be a good starting point for advocacy. The added value that good quality metadata can provide in information retrieval is crucial to the user experience - it's just not always that obvious to the user that behind their search success lies a well-structured set of consistently applied data.  I think one of the keys to advocacy is having a good range of examples to hand, so this is something I need to arm myself with - it's all very well saying and knowing that your work is important, but you need to be able to demonstrate it persuasively in order to really make an impact.

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