thing seven: face to face networks and professional organisations

so much for catching up. i now appear to be more behind than ever. well done, me! before i do the seventh thing, i'll just give both of my readers a little update about my career and that. i had my job interview at the university of leeds a couple of weeks ago and completely crumbled and made a fool of myself. i was reasonably confident when i went in. well, i didn't think i'd get the job, but i didn't expect to make a complete idiot of myself in the interview either.

i'm trying to make myself write a blog post about the interview experience so i can reflect on where i went wrong (it's going to be a long post), but until then you'll just have to imagine how bad it was.

i think i'm getting a six month contract extension here anyway, which is good. that'll be full time too. but i don't really know very much about what i'll be doing and things seem to be taking a long time so i'm not going to count my chickens.

thing seven, then! this is actually a topic i can talk about a bit: face to face networks and professional organisations.

cilip

let's start with the basics. i have been a member of cilip for a couple of years now. it was encouraged when i was at university and, at least while i'm not earning very much money, it's still just about affordable. i'm not sure how i'd feel about paying more for my membership though.

i often wonder whether i gain anything from being a member of cilip. i think it looks good when applying for jobs that i'm able to say 'i'm a member of the chartered institute of library and information professionals, therefore i am kept up to date with what is happening in my profession'. theoretically this is true, but i'm not sure cilip offer much more than this. they no longer provide training events of any kind and even before the training department was more or less axed, the courses were ridiculously expensive anyway. i could never afford to pay several hundred pound to attend a one day event.

the main thing i use cilip for is for the lisjobnet site, which, to be fair, is excellent. you don't have to be a member to use that though. i also quite enjoy reading update every month, but i'm still unsure as to whether that's enough. maybe if i ever get to the stage of doing chartership i'll find cilip more useful, but at the moment they're not doing that much for me to justify the membership fees.

as i've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, i went to cilip's umbrella conference this year. it cost my employers a lot of money and, while it was very interesting, i don't feel that i got as much out of it as i should have done. i didn't network for a start. this was before i really started thinking about myself as part of a wider profession and, as a lowly cataloguing assistant, didn't feel important enough to bother more experienced people with my thoughts and opinions. i probably still feel that way but if umbrella was next week i think i'd try and make myself talk to people.

sla

i became a member of the special libraries association a month or two ago. i haven't really engaged with them at all, so far. i plan on watching some of their online seminars, but a lot of what they do seems very america-centric. i think i need to make more of an effort to try and use some of the resources that they have on offer, but at the moment i'm not really getting very much out of my membership.

linspn

i think i spoke about linspn in an earlier post, and yes, i do use it. it's a very handy resource for a new professional like myself and i'm always thinking of things that i'd like to ask people on there. but not that many people use it and i don't want to be the person who clogs up all the boards asking for people to make decisions for me! i'll continue to use it anyway.

the end bit

i'm going to try and get more involved with cilip, especially my local branch and the cataloguing and indexing group. i recently emailed the cilip north west branch to ask about getting involved with committee work but didn't receive a reply. rejection! i'll try again though. my email was probably completely moronic. i'm also going to look into what i can gain from my sla membership too.

i've also been looking at the ifla, especially their section for libraries serving persons with print disabilities, which is relevant to my current job. this is an area that i'm getting more and more interested in and it's generally neglected when people are advocating library services. maybe i'll post about that later on, but i've signed up to the section's mailing list and i'll think about joining the ifla when i have a bit more money.

many thanks,

bye.