Thursday 29 November 2012

Thing 23

What next?

Well, I've finally got here! Due to being really busy at work I have found that I haven't done one "Thing" per week, more like I've done about 5 in a week to try to catch up! It would have been better to try to dedicate an hour or so a week to the program but that is easier said than done at the start of term in particular!

We are just about to do appraisals and CPD plans at work so this is quite timely, I've identified some training that I need for in college projects, hopefully the training will be sorted out after Christmas. I will be having a look at the Professioanl Knowledge and Skill Base before my appraisal to see if there are any other thingsto work on.

I think the 23 Things for CPD has been a really good program to work through, I have learnt about lots of new tools to use and has been a chance for reflection, I would definitely recommend other staff to do the course if it "runs" again!


Wednesday 28 November 2012

Thing 22

Volunteering

I haven't done any volunteering in libraries before, I was lucky enough to get a full time job as a Library Assistant in a public library before doing my Masters degree so didn't need to volunteer to gain experience of library work. I have done some volunteer work in the past when I was at university studying for my BA - I helped out at my old first school for approximately 3 years as part of a scheme called the Millennium Volunteers. This was a good experience, at the time I was wondering whether I should study to become a primary school teacher. I enjoyed the time I spent at the school, I helped one day a week with using computers. I helped the same teacher for the period of time I was there and she taught Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 students over the three years which meant I worked with a variety of ages of children. Even though I enjoyed it, I decided that teaching wasn't for me! I think volunteering is a good way of finding out whether or not you enjoy something and hopefully it is of benefit, however I'm not sure I agree with volunteers taking over day to day running of libraries. Some in our local areas are open a few hours each day and run by volunteers. Admittedly, these libraries are small and do not have that many visitors but I think it demoralises staff and surely it is tricky to manage volunteers as they are not paid to be there? However, on the other side I imagine a lot of these smaller libraries may not open at all due to the costs involved if we did not have volunteers willing to keep them open for working for free.


Thing 21

Promoting yourself at job applications and interviews


It has been a while since I applied for a job, I have been to an interview since getting my current job but I wasn't successful and on reflection I am glad that I didn't get the job as it was further to travel to than my current job and that is already over 20 miles in total that I have to travel per day.  Activities and interests...reading books, newspapers, surfing the web, using social online networks, going to the cinema, swimming, walking,  playing unusual board games e.g. Agricola and more usual board games e.g. Scrabble! Work related activities - I like editing our Library pages that we have on Heritage using basic  HTML knowledge, also enjoy finding out books and online resources for students/staff who are looking for particular topics, this is the part of the job I enjoy, the actual enquiry side! Over the past couple of years I have had some experience of doing appraisals of staff, along with other members of the Senior Library team. I frequently have to do user education/inductions for students which involves having a knowledge of all our online resources and being confident to stand in front of classes and disseminate the information. This is something which I have recently become more confident at doing, though still find I get a little nervous. I do find preparation is the key to feeling more confident which is also the key to interviews. I like to know about the place that I am applying for, when I applied for the job I didn't get I made sure that I had notes with me about different experiences as a reminder for me to look at whilst in the interview - unsure if this looked good or not but made me feel better! Also I did some research on their website and found out which online resources and journals they subscribed to and general things like opening times.I always think that having a question to ask is useful too, perhaps asking what a typical day might involve if I got the job.




Thing 20

The Library Routes Project

This is similar to Thing 10 so not going to repeat all of it again here. However, I did try to add my details to the Wiki but I wasn't sure if I was doing it right as I couldn't find 'Insert name here' when I clicked on the edit button...unsure what I was doing wrong! I ended up copying a pasting an existing entry and then putting my details in instead but then didn't seem to show up when tried to look at page. However on recent changes it shows my username and that I've done something...?

Thing 19

Catch up week on integrating "things"

There have been lots of useful and new things that I have learnt so far. I used to have a  Twitter account and am trying to use that a little more though I don't ever post anything on it, just read the posts from other people. I follow Phil Bradley and find his posts are good to read. 

I do like Prezi, that was a new one for me, never heard of it before doing this course. I think it is an interesting idea and will be spending some time looking at it and having a go with the very basic one that  I started. Unfortunately, as I have been so busy in September and October - the perils of being part time and not having a job share partner - I am only allowing a limited amount of time to each Thing. However, I will be exploring a lot of the links I have found and this is top of the list at the moment! 


Thing 18

Screen Captures and Podcasting

A member of Library staff created some screen captures over the Summer to help our students and staff use our resources e.g. searching our catalogue and Britannica. I had a go at doing screen captures and it seems easy to use. The worst thing is when the page you are trying to open goes slow when you are recording!

I haven't ever done any podcastin, interesting to have a look at it. I think it was talked about at College for lecturers to use podcasting so students would be able to listen to lectures again and again for revision!




Thing 17

Prezi and Slideshare

I have now spent about 20 mins on Prezi and think it's great, I haven't even looked at how to do it yet but just been engrossed with looking at the examples! This is a good library example I found by doing a Google search:

http://tur-www1.massey.ac.nz/~wwliblog/loud.php/lets-get-going-library

I am interested to see whether we can change any of our Powerpoint presentations into Prezi presentations however I wonder whether it may take a while to make it look as good as some of the examples that I have seen. I have had a go at making a prezi, it was very basic, but I inserted some images and had 3 frames, was good fun and seems quite easy to use. I am not sure whether the College would want to pay for a licence and so we could only use it using the free option so not sure how many people would use it. We could put some of our general Library information on it which wouldn't be a problem but couldn't put any information such as usernames and passwords to our online resources on it which is a shame. Possibly it would be good for Open Day though would want to spend some time creating it. The other problem with it being online and free is that there is no guarantee that it will be here for when we want it whereas a program like Powerpoint we can buy and have working on a computer without having to rely on the internet.

Slideshare - have only briefly looked at this, we have shared space at College so unsure whether we would use this. I imagine it is useful for conferences and courses as all the PowerPoints from the speakers can be uploaded to it.

Tuesday 27 November 2012

Thing 16

Advocacy

I have had a look at some of the links relating to FE - I chose the shortened list and found it was still quite long! I haven't had a chance to look at many of the links in detail but would like to come back to the document at some other point as I think it looks like there will be some useful articles on there to read. I noticed links to the ToolKit - our College has run through the Toolkit twice. We found it really useful as it highlighted areas where we could improve our services and gave us a structure to work with. The second time we ran through it we could see where we had made improvements over the past 12 months and again came up with more improvements to make. We have made use of completing the Toolkit in our Service Review and have involved other members of staff from within the college to help to give us feedback regarding the Toolkit therefore helping to raise our profile. We try to raise our profile within college in various ways, we started a student focus group a few years ago which has been successful in helping to gain feedback from our users and also helps to raise awareness of resources that we have for them which they may not know about. We are now part of something called "Skills for Success" which all students must complete as part of their course. In their booklet is says that they have to complete the Library induction which is on our VLE, Moodle. We offer teaching staff the opportunity to book a session with a member of staff to complete this part of the Skills for Success booklet. We have have run  nearly 200 sessions since the end of September 2012 which has helped to promote the Library to students but also to staff members who may not have know about all the things we have to offer.

The Love Libraries campaign for public libaries is a good way of advocacy, I do use my public library quite a lot, it helps that I used to work there! Now I have a young son I do tend to visit perhaps more frequently than when I did not have any children as there are so many great events for babies/toddlers that they run.

Thing 15

Attending events

I've attended several events through JISC though recently they have been more online events than face to face events. I have attended some events relating to new online resources which have been free events run by JISC and include a very nice lunch! The last couple of times I have realised that I know people from other colleges as I have either studied with them, they have also attended similar events in the past or I've visited their college as part of staff development. This is quite nice as it instantly gives you something to break the ice! I think often people go on their own to events like these4 and it can be awkward to begin with as nobody knows anyone but as we all have something in common - libraries or similar places of work then you know you can't go wrong with asking a few questions about where they work and you usually find some common ground. I like the face to face events though they are trickier to get to as I'm part time and we do have less staff working in the library than a few years ago due to people reducing their hours, mysefl included! The Umbrella Conference always looks interesting but haven't got to that yet so maybe that should be something I could attend next time it comes round. I haven't ever held any events, perhaps this is something to think about for the future!

Thing 14

Referencing software

We don't use any referencing software that I know of at the college though we do promote Cite this for Me http://www.citethisforme.com/. This is quite a good website, doesn't have all the bells and whistles that the paid for ones have but is useful as it provides the reference in the correct format. There is a subscription service available but we haven't used that, we've just stuck to using the freebie!

I have had a look at the Cite U Like site and it looks interesting though not sure we would use it at College as mostly we have FE level students and I don't think they would be as interested in using it at this level. For HE students I think it looks really good and I like that it is free and easy to set up an account.


Friday 16 November 2012

Thing 13

Google docs etc.

I've had a look at Google drive, formerly Goog docs and I can see in some places it may be very useful. At work we use a shared drive on on our server which means we can put all our documents in a folder and everyone in the team can edit and view them. We even have set up some folders which can only be seen by a particular group of staff e.g. senior staff so I don't think we would have the need for Google Drive or Dropbox particularly. I guess if I wanted to have access to files at home whilst at work then that might be useful, perhaps if I wanted to update a list of Christmas presents to buy at lunchtime then that could be when I'd use it!

Thursday 15 November 2012

Thing 12

Putting the social into social media

I have to admit I do tend to lurk on blogs, especially for work related things, though occasionally I will make a comment. I commented on a blog the other day as I thought it was a really interesting blog post about a library event in Birmingham and the writer of the blog had also recently posted on my blog! I think I probably should offer my opinion of things more and I think it is nice to have a comment on a blog, I'm sure others also enjoy having posts on their blogs so maybe I will try to do it more often! We'll have to see now if I actually do it!

Wednesday 14 November 2012

Thing 11

Mentors....

I had to select a mentor for my Chartership - forgot to mention that on the last Thing entry - anyway, I was lucky as realised I sort of knew one of the people on the mentor list. She worked for Worcestershire authority which is who I used to work for so I contacted her and luckily she agreed to become my mentor. We had some good chats (in the pub!) and she was useful whilst undertaking my chartership. It was good as my chartership portfolio was based on my current job but as I'd worked for public libraries as well it was interesting to compare notes on the different areas and my mentor was a good sounding board as she was not  involved in academic libraries  and gave a fresh perspective on things.

Thing 10

Qualifications and courses....

I wasn't sure what I wanted to do for a job when I was 18 so I decided to do a BA (Hons) in IT with English Literature. I had looked at specific undergraduate degrees for Librarianship but thought it might be better to do a less specific degree. Whilst doing my degree I got a saturday job at a local public library and then I decided that I wanted to carry on and become a qualified librarian. However, just to make sure and also to save up for the MSc course in Library and Information Studies I gained more hours at the library and took another job in a neighbouring library. This was useful to have done as I needed to have at least a year of work experience in a library setting before going on the course. I completed a course on Dreamweaver during the year between my degrees which has been useful later on. I completed my MSc and then not long after applied for a slightly more senior position at a local college and actually got the job! My role involved looking after the library intranet pages using Dreamweaver so my knowledge of Dreamweaver came in handy! I had also covered HTML in my IT degree so this was also really useful. Since working at the college my role has moved away from dealing with Library intranet pages as they once were as now we have moved all of the library information to our LMS, Heritage. I now manage the content on Heritage and still use HTML occasionally to customise certain things on the interface. Whilst working at the College I have undertaken ECDL which was interesting though now we have moved to Office 2010 I feel that I might need a refresher in certain areas! I do believe that if you don't use it, you lose it and I feel that certain things that I learnt on ECDL I have now forgotten e.g. I don't use formulas in Excel very often and really have to think about what I'm doing whenever I have to do something a bit more complicated than usual on a spreadsheet! I have also had quite a lot of training in other areas such as Moodle VLE, presentation skills, dealing with difficult students and a CILIP run classification course. Mostly all the training has been useful, I do enjoy learning new things which is one of the reasons why I'm doing this course! However, I have slowed down a bit with doing courses, I think this is mainly due to changing from being full time to part time earlier this year as I am now a Mum and want to look after my son a couple of days a week instead of having to put him in childcare every day.

Thing 9

I'd never really come across Evernote before so this was a new one for me. I had a look at it and initially it wouldn't download so I had a look at some of the help pages and decided I'd try the online version which worked well. I have only had a limited look at the resource and can't say I'd necessarily use it but I guess it would be useful for some people. Perhaps I need to spend more time using it, it would be useful if wanted to use it on a smartphone as well but as I don't have one (probably not many people would admit that...) then I wouldn't be using that facility.

Thing 8

Google calendar - seen a link to this before but hadn't ever clicked the link! I have now had a go at using the calendar and setting up the weather feature as suggested -  I do like that as I like looking at what the weather might be doing especially as we get nearer to the weekend! I don't think I would personally use it very much as I still like to have a proper diary for personal events and we use Outlook at work so we use the calendar feature on that software for our shared work calendar. If we didn't have the Outlook calendar, the Google calendar would be a really good option for work. Maybe one day I'll move on from my traditional diary for personal appointments but for now it works well so unlikely to change it!

Thing 7

Real life networking....I am a member of CILIP bit haven't really done much face to face networking except for going on a couple of courses that have been run by CILIP. I have also been on courses run by JISC in the past and have talked to other people on the courses which I always find useful and interesting as many of the same problems crop up in different library settings, useful to compare notes! I have been to several colleges over the summer as part of staff development which was good to see how other similar institutions are doing, sometimes we have picked up ideas and used them in our own library.

I've been clicking on some of the links listed on the main site for this course, I hadn't heard of some of them before e.g. The Library Society of the World - I had a look at the site, looks very informal which is good! I might have to explore it a bit more at some point and see if  I want to join.