thing 4: current awareness

i think i may have covered some of what i'm going to discuss in this post in the last one. that could either be legitimate crossover or me just going completely off topic for the last thing. anyway, i apologise if this is a bit repetitive. who am i even talking to? is anyone reading this?

twitter

as i mentioned, i set up a twitter account a while ago and use it semi regularly for personal stuff. i tend to go through phases of using it a lot, and then i don't bother for a while, and then i'm back using it again. in any case i do tend to check it regularly for stuff that other people are saying. i find it useful to keep up with what people i know are up to and what they think about things that are happening. i have only used it once for 'professional' purposes and that didn't go particularly well.

let me explain. as i think i have mentioned previously, my employers were generous enough to pay for me to attend the second day of cilip's umbrella conference last month. i went with the intention of live tweeting the sessions that i went to, providing those who weren't as fortunate as myself with an opportunity to hear about the inspiring stuff that was going on. i completely failed. during the first session i tweeted a couple of quotes from the speakers about the future of libraries. i read some other people's tweets about the session too. then i froze. i had no idea what to say! i retweeted a couple of things that other delegates had tweeted, but that was about it. my phone went back in my pocket for the rest of the event.

this, i think, was partly down to one of the problems i identified in the last thing. my twitter account is my personal twitter account. i had visions of the people i know that follow me reading my tweets from the conference and thinking 'this is incredibly boring, why do i want to know about this?', while people at the conference looking for posts with the umbrella hashtag would be thinking 'why is this '@jamonbreadyay' guy just aimlessly repeating things that other people have said?'. i think next time i go to a conference i need to think carefully about how/why/if i'm going to try and tweet about it. or maybe just get a 'professional' twitter account. i still haven't made a decision about this.

in the mean time i'm going to follow more library people on twitter. i've looked at the list on the 23 things blog and chosen a few people that i recognise from various places. i've also followed some people who work in the kind of jobs that i'm interested in. i'll keep you updated on how useful this is for me!

rss

again, i mentioned this in the last post, but i do follow several lis blogs using google reader. i check this every day and i enjoy keeping up to date with people's views on library related stuff. the list of lis blogs on the 23 things site was really useful, though, and i've added a few more to my subscription list. i've also shed a couple of blogs that weren't really interesting me or that i didn't think were completely relevant to my needs. sometimes you have to be brutal.

pushnote

i had a look at this and i don't think it's for me. i can't recall a time when i've read something on the internet and thought 'i want to comment on this and get into a discussion with other people about it'. maybe that comes back to my lack of confidence in my ability to articulate my opinions properly. maybe i'm just thick. or maybe i just think my friends are thick. whatever it is, i'm going to hold off on this one until i can see a situation where it might be of more use to me. i'm not ruling out using it or anything, i just don't think i need it at the moment.

that's it for this thing! i'm doing my best to try and get through all these and catch up. if i can do the last thing along with everyone else then i reckon i'll feel like i've achieved something. to both of my readers, thank you for taking the time to wade through all of this.

ps. in other news

there's talk of my contract being extended here! i can't really say much about it yet, though. if it happens, it'll be doing something that isn't catalogue based and may actually involved speaking to library users more. this is a bit nerve racking but i'm excited about a (possible) new challenge. i'll keep you updated! see yer!

thing 3: my personal brand

(photo by phil elverum used with no permission whatsoever)

this isn't something that i've really thought about before, to be honest. my online brand, if you want to call it that, is completely inconsistent. if you google my name you get a wide range of stuff, none of which is anything to do with libraries.

names

a lot of my online branding is music related. i used to make music under the name 'jam on bread' (BUY MY ALBUM PLEASE) so i have a twitter account under that name. if you google my real name you get a number of reviews praising my music for being inoffensively mediocre. on lisnpn i'm using the name 'steve' (dead original, like), on linked in i'm 'stephen carlton' and on facebook i'm 'steve carlton'. i have no idea where the catabloggin name came from, but i already regret it. i dread the day when i have to introduce myself by saying 'oh hi, i'm steve/stephen carlton, i do that catabloggin blog that everyone seems to be going nuts for'.

i should probably try and make things less all over the placey, but i'm not sure how to go about it, really. i want to use twitter more for professional type stuff, but i can't be doing with the hassle of maintaining two separate twitter accounts with two different personas. i think it'd be confusing if i started tweeting library people with the @jamonbreadyay twitter account though. i'll think about it.

photo

i don't think i have any photos of me where i look smart and professional. i have different photos across the different online presences i have. my lisnpn photo is my graduation photo, which is creeping people out a bit i think. i WILL change this at some point soon. i'll try and get someone to take a nice, sensible portrait of me at a time when i a) don't have dead greasy hair and b) am not pulling a weird face.

task list

i'm gonna set myself a list of things that i need to do to fix my online brand here i think. here's what i'm going to change!

• make some kind of decision about the whole twitter issue
• change the photos i use in various places so that i could potentially be recognised at networking events and such like
• have more things written about me than the baseball player steve carlton. he's taking up pretty much the whole first ten pages of google results, aside from my twitter, a couple of the aforementioned damning with faint praise music reviews, and a couple of things i've written about bands in the past. like this and this. cringe.
• get some business cards made! my flatmate is a freelance front end developer (whatever that is) and he had some printed and it was great. he entered loads of them into competitions you can do at restaurants when you give them your business card and he got a tenner off a swanky chinese meal. i'd have no-one to give my business cards to but i'd feel more professional and i might get discounted chinese food.

i think that's probably enough for this thing, innit? i posted on lisnpn for some advice today and i got some very helpful responses. thanks people who replied! thanks!

thing 2: investigating other blogs

okay, so thing 2 is about other blogs. there are lots of excellent lis blogs out there and i'm going to talk about which ones i like and i might even try and explain why i like them too.

before cpd23

before i started doing this i didn't even have a google reader account. i had a fairly large folder of lis related bookmarks that i would check every now and again, but had never really considered using an rss reader. now i finally have one and i'm not sure how i ever lived without it! i'm really enjoying spending half an hour or so a day looking through different library related blogs. you can see a list of ones that i like over on the right somewhere, but i'll pick out my favourite couple and talk about them on here if that's alright with you?

obvious choices

so i've probably chosen the obvious blogs to subscribe to, haven't i? well, i'm still quite new to this, so if anyone happens to be reading this, please give me some recommendations please! okay, here's a list of blogs that i like and, most importantly, why i like them:

• the wikiman - i'd bookmarked ned potter's blog before, but since i've been involved with 23 things and have been looking on lisnpn, i've been reading it lots more. he always manages to stimulate interesting discussions in the comments sections of his posts too. he seems very approachable as well, so much so that i almost sent him an email the other day. i was going to ask for advice about a job application i was working on but i chickened out and decided not to bother him.
• self-plagiarism is style - a lecturer at university talked about dave pattern as if he was some kind of library god. i imagined that if they were writing something about him they would have capitalised the first letter of any possessive pronouns they used, such was their apparent reverence for his work. i wrote about him quite a lot for a couple of essays and his blog was always very useful. he's a systems librarian at huddersfield university, which means that he's about 100 times more intelligent than i'll ever be. i don't understand some of the techy stuff, but i do enjoy posts like this one.
• bethan's information professional blog - i've only recently started following bethan's blog, but i've looked back through the archives and found some really useful stuff. guides on how to do presentations and things like that. her posts are nicely written, too. not full of intimidating jargon like quite a few lis blogs (although obviously it's difficult to avoid it sometimes!).

i'm quite an ambitious person, i suppose, and reading relatively new professionals' blogs is inspirational, really. i want to achieve things! i want to be considered an expert in my field! hopefully by engaging more with the lis community, reflecting more on my own skills and knowledge and gaining experience of working in libraries, i might have a chance of doing all that. probably not though!

obviously there are loads of other excellent blogs that i haven't mentioned by name, but i'm sure you know about them already. if you'd like to leave me some suggestions for other blogs to subscribe to, please leave a comment underneath!

i didn't actually get around to commenting on anyone else's blogs. i don't feel confident enough or feel like i have anything of value to contribute at the moment, but i think my confidence is growing. maybe i'll pluck up the courage to say 'yeah, i agree!' or 'this is a very interesting post' under something this week. i'll keep you posted!

i might get to work early tomorrow so i can work on thing 3. hmmm. laters!

day in the life

as with the 23 things, i've managed to avoid hearing about the library day in a life project until it's very nearly finished. as a result, this is a kind of retrospective look at what i've been doing at work this week. luckily, as i'm only a lowly cataloguing assistant, there isn't that much variation in my job and i should be able to remember what i did on each of the days. also, i only work three days a week so that gives me two less days to try and remember!

a bit of background

as i've mentioned previously, i work at the rnib's national library service which is just outside stockport. it's the largest library in the uk for readers with sight loss and has thousands of titles available in braille, giant print and audio formats. best of all, it's free! (well, you have to pay a very small yearly subscription to the talking book service but this can sometimes be subsidised by local authorities). braille and giant print titles are sent by post to library users and it's pretty fantastic really. you can read more about it byclicking on THIS LINK HERE.

anyway, i really enjoy working for a charity. it makes me feel good knowing that what i am doing is, in a very small way, helping people whose needs are often overlooked by traditional library services. i'm sure i'll probably do a post about this issue another time, so you can, uh, look forward to that. i'm here until the end of next month but there has been talk of a contract extension. it's a bitup in the air at the moment, but whatever happens i've enjoyed my time here and i'm sure it'll look very good on my cv. i'd continue to volunteer until i could find some other kind of library based employment somewhere.

back to the actual point of this post now, i think. as i said, i only work three days a week at the library (wednesdays, thursdays and fridays) so this will be a fairly brief summary of what i did on these days. i'm aware that i've written quite a lot already and still haven't started talking about a day in the life yet. let's go, shall we?

wednesday

i get on the 8:04 train from manchester piccadilly to rose hill marple and get off at brinnington. it takes about 15 minutes on the train and then there's a short walk through a housing estate, over the m60 motorway and into an industrial estate

to get to the library itself. i get there about 8:30am and get cracking straight away.

wednesday was mostly spent amending holdings data using a combination of different software. the library service are switching to a new lms in 2012, and the data that's held on the current lms needs cleansing (i suppose that would be the best way to describe it) before that happens. the library has been using a couple of different systems for different things, from what i can tell, so some information that is on one system isn't necessarily on the other system. the data from one of the systems is being used to populate the new system when it comes in, so gaps need to be filled in. i'm confusing myself now, but maybe it'll become clearer as i go on. someone from the libary is probably going to read this and say 'no, that isn't what is happening at all'.

so i spent most of the day entering data (mainly prices and order numbers). i do data entry as a part time job somewhere else, so while this might be mind numbingly boring for many people, i actually quite enjoy it. i have to use another system to occasionally check for records that can't easily be found, which is a bit of a challenge but it's quite rewarding when i manage to get to the bottom of the mystery. example: the wrestler mick foley's autobiography 'have a nice day!', after much searching, was found under the title 'mankind: have a nice day!'. thankfully i have a passing interest in wrestling which came in handy here.

thursday

i did the same thing as wednesday, really. i had to help with shelving in the afternoon as there are a couple of people on holiday. this gave me a chance to stretch my legs and test my knowledge of the alphabet. it always surprises me how much you (by which i mean i) have to think about where letters come in the alphabet. it's quite embarrassing.

friday

friday was a little bit different! i had to remove erroneous marc fields from the catalogue using a very archaic piece of software. it was character based, which i quite liked, so i felt like i was one of them computer hackers that you might have seen in them thriller films you have. maybe 80s ones anyway. this made me feel like i was an actual librarian, in that i was doing something that looked vaguely technical and an outsider might have thought that i needed some kind of expertise to be able to do it. the librarian that i share an office with leaves early on a friday so i listened to a bit of music, which was nice.

so that's your lot! sorry this hasn't been especially informative. i think i've managed to describe the job that i find very interesting in the most dull way possible. hopefully you saw past that.

bye!

first thing's first: thing 1

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!