resuscitating the blog

hello! it's been quite a while since i abandoned the 23 things and gave up on this blog. real life got in the way for a bit, but i'm going to make a concerted effort to post more/at all from now on. let me give you an update on what i'm up to!

- my contract at the rnib national library service has been extended, thankfully. i still enjoy it very much and i still feel like i'm learning, which is the most important thing.

- i've been accepted on to a distance learning masters degree at the university of borås. the course is called 'digital library services' and i start at the end of august (i think). i already have an undergraduate degree in librarianship and many of the masters degrees at uk universities look as if they go over similar ground. and they're expensive!

the borås course looks really interesting and a bit technical too! i am usually a bit rubbish at that kind of thing, so i'm looking forward to filling large gaps in my knowledge. and also the course is free. and also also, the once a year trips to sweden will really help me improve my swedish. hopefully.

- i'm planning on doing some cataloguing volunteering with the north of england mining institute in newcastle. they have a lot of marc records that need cleaning up and you're able to do it remotely, so i'm going to use it as an opportunity to get more practice.

- i recently bought anne welsh's excellent 'practical cataloguing' and was very excited to see that something i wrote had been referenced! amazing. it was a terrible article i wrote for catalogue and index, cilip cataloguing and indexing group's journal. i'm still pleased though, as long as nobody looks up the article. i'd definitely like to try and write more stuff and do a bit of presenting, but i just need to think of something to write/present about first. i don't feel as if i'm enough of an expert yet!

- i'm on the committee for cilip north west branch. i'm currently assisting with events and we have a couple of things in the pipeline that i'd like to get involved with, so that's something to look forward to as well.

so all in all, i should have loads to blog about. it'll be interesting to see how much time the masters course takes up. i'm both excited and nervous about it! i managed to do a full time undergraduate degree while working an almost full time job at the same time, but it was extremely hairy at times. this is only a part time course so it should be a doddle! time will tell.

anyway, hopefully i'll have lots to say on here from now on!

bye!

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!

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!