i'm a bit late to the party here, but i'm going to attempt to catch up with the things i've missed as quickly as possible. this blog post is going to be all about me! more precisely, this blog post is going to be about my career at the moment and what i hope to gain from taking part in cpd23.
my career thus far
i graduated from library school quite recently (look! there's me looking like an idiot over here! <<<<----) so i don't really have much of a career to talk about at the moment. i combined studying for a full time degree with a part time job and a volunteer position in a library and somehow managed to get a 2:1, which i'm quite proud of. i've been volunteering in the rnib's national library service in stockport since february-ish and have gained lots of useful experience. they're currently paying me (on a temporary basis) to help them with some cataloguing in the run up to them changing library management systems. my job title, at the moment, is 'cataloguing assistant', and i'm having a great time. i think many people see cataloguing as a necessary evil, but i find it dead interesting.
despite the fact that the last three years has been libraries, libraries and more libraries, i still feel like there's a lot of stuff that i don't know about. i probably wasn't the best student and i wish i'd worked a little harder, but there seems to be lots of subjects that i've either forgotten about or only have a basic understanding of. volunteering and now working in an actual library is helping to fill some of these gaps, but i'm more aware than ever that i need to continue to learn if i want to have a successful career and that.
what do i hope to get out of cpd23?
a kick up the bum! i read quite a few library blogs and i'm in awe of the people that write them, really. my employers recently paid for me to go to umbrella 2011 and, while managing to avoid networking with a single delegate, i overheard conversations that totally brought it home to me how little i know about anything. obviously i don't have very much experience at the moment, but the idea that i'd be able to talk/blog so eloquently about libraries seems impossible. hopefully, by engaging with the library community more/at all, i'll be able to soak in some of this knowledge, experience and expertise by osmosis or something.
at the very least i hope to be able to make myself more employable, more connected with my fellow information professionals and more on the ball when it comes to new developments in libraries. there's lots of 'things' that i'm looking forward to doing, like the stuff about networking, advocacy and job hunting. i'm actually looking forward to blogging too! i've started a few blogs in the past and never got beyond the first post. it'll be interesting to see if i actually make it past this one!
i'm going to go and explore other cpd23 blogs in preparation for doing thing 2 at the weekend. see yer!
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