Thing 19

I've been having a long think about this thing - at least that's my excuse! A lot has happened in the last month, and time has just flown past. I've turned a year older, moved into a new house and started my 'new job'. I've also started studying with Aberystwyth by distance learning, and that is taking up a fair bit of my spare time. It's a different kind of study to anything I've done in a long while (actually having to read something?!) but it's turning out really interesting. My first essay is on censorship which to be honest is not something I have ever given a great deal of thought to, but now I am worried about how I am going to keep to the 3000 word limit! I have begun using Mendeley, and I hope it will of great use to me over the next couple of years.

I don't know how much more I have to talk about, but one thing that is definitely relevant has been the starting of a St John's College Library twitter account. Proposed at our recent 'Away day' we (YiWen, the new Graduate Trainee and I) worked towards having it up and running for the start of term. Tweeting a minimum of once a day, I hope we provide useful information to students and others who are interested. We also invite visitors to follow us on the College Library website http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library/ with a mini live feed appearing on the right hand side. So far the number of followers has gradually increased and I do hope that as people realise how useful we could be to follow the numbers will go up even more (follow us - StJohns_Library). I have to say that this project has made me use Twitter more to keep up with what is going on.

The Penumbra Shadowing Scheme

Visiting the Judge Business School (JBS) library on Wednesday was a fascinating experience for me, in complete contrast to my day to day work at St John’s College. When we were first contacted about the Penumbra scheme back in March, visiting JBS stood out as an option to me - from a little research I quickly appreciated how much they promoted e-resources and social media to help their students. Through the ‘23 Things for Professional Development’ programme I have learnt a lot more about the use of Twitter, Facebook and other online mediums within a library setting and I hoped that the staff at JBS would be able to show me how they apply these ideas.

Prior to my arrival in the JBS Information Centre the team at JBS kindly drew up an itinerary for my afternoon, covering a wide range of areas. To begin with Claudia (Information & Library Assistant) gave me a tour of the building, highlighting their plans to gradually reduce the number of printed journals as more and more become available online. The main reason for doing so is to create more study areas for the students, as I was assured that during term time the mezzanine area gets very crowded! I found the area a bright and airy environment, and I am sure a comfortable place to work. The small (but growing) DVD collection was highlighted to me and finally we took a look at the rather terrifying (but very colourful) twin-screen Bloomberg terminals, showing one of the world’s leading financial databases.

Next I spent some time with Meg (Projects Officer) looking at all the different aspects of their website. Set up using an online blogging website, the Information and Library Services website is colourful and interesting to explore. With various blogs on the left hand side, the team spends a great deal of time putting them together and selecting eye-catching images to accompany them. Meg emphasised how important they find it to ensure the blogs are about relevant and fun topics, steering clear of simply blogging opening times! The grey ribbon along the top lists the five key things that students may want to do when using the website, and in the centre of the page you can see meebo, an online messaging service which allows students to speak to staff in real time .

With Claudia again I spent some time looking through the slides placed on the plasma screened situated both outside and inside the library. Aside from giving useful information, the team also pick out some key business and finance facts and figures for users’ interest. I also had a look at the Microsoft Access database they keep to record all enquiries, time spent on them and their replies. I found this a particularly interesting idea, especially due to my experience with this database software with the Biographical Office, and can definitely see the use when receiving the same enquiry again.

Moving onto social media with Sarah (Information & Library Assistant) allowed me to come to grips with the use of Twitter, and since this I have spent some time placing my Twitter feed onto my blog. I am also going to try and tweet a little more about what I have been up to! We also explored how they use Pinterest to show a very visual pin board of e-books, new books, funny quotes and numerous infographics on subjects from plagiarism and business to how to study. Ange (Deputy Information & Library Services Manager) told me some more about how she creates infographics, and what their aim is. I found them colourful and amusing, and a great way to get across statistics in a very engaging way. This lead on to us discussing how JBS aims to personalise their customer service, and finally a review of the afternoon. I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and went away seeing in action one way in which libraries can adapt in this technology driven world. The fact that the staff at JBS strive to know the names and faces of all the students they provide for, and the way they deal with individual research enquiries, showed me how personalising your service to cater for each and every student makes you so much more accessible.

I would like to say thank you to Claudia, Meg, Sarah, Ange and Nataliya for all the time they put in to showing me around their library, it was an enlightening experience!

Thing 6

This Thing starts out looking at two social networks that I am (relatively) familiar with. At least Facebook is something that everyone my age has at some point used, and is seen as vital to be a part of whilst at university. For me, now I am no longer a student I feel I use it less. I still enjoy being able to see what old friends are up to, looking at photos and reading their posts, but I don't reveal so many aspects of my life anymore. I do believe that Facebook should be kept separate from your professional life, and I have to say that I have never quite understood why businesses use Facebook - it doesn't quite make sense to me! Taking a library for example, I think using Twitter and a blog to keep followers up to date on news and opening times would make more sense.

I have spoken about LinkedIn previously, and I do think it is a really interesting network. It is particularly useful to me in this job as I frequently come across the profiles of Johnians (members of St John's College, Cambridge) which I can use to update their record in the Biographical database that I work on with the Biographical Office based here in the library. As to helping me find work... it had not yet been useful... but I hope that when people search for me they can find out a lot about my background using this network.


Finally I took a look at the LIS New Professionals Network, which as I had never used it before I decided to sign up and have an explore. There seemed to be alot of different areas to look at, and it was particularly interesting to see all the posts about graduate trainees such as myself, with questions like 'Graduate Trainees 2011-12 where are you going and what are you doing?' I think it will be very interesting to look at other peoples feedback to questions such as this, and to put my own views forward.

Thing 5

This looks like it's going to be the toughest post yet for me to write, reflective thinking is not something I think I do a great deal of! To start me off I began reading over some of the most recent posts for Thing 5 on the 23 Things for Professional Development blog. Thank you to Emma, Wendy and Polly for your help!

I am going to take the systematic approach, as I have always found that works best for me. Making bullet points under headings and planning exactly how to approach something is usually the way I go for whatever task I have to complete.

1. Recall it

Over the last couple of weeks I have learnt a great deal whilst working my way through the first five Things. Firstly we started out by setting up a blog and then beginning to use it to express our efforts and thoughts about each Thing we came to tackle. Secondly we spent some time expanding on this by looking at the blogs of our fellow bloggers. Thing 3 brought us to consider our personal brand, spending time finding out what information we could access about ourselves online and whether it portrayed the image we wanted it to. Thing 4 involved lots of parts, learning about Twitter, RSS feeds and Sporify. And this brings us up to this, learning the importance of reflective thinking (although it's not quite complete yet!).

2. Evaluate it

I feel so far I have learnt a great deal in the last few weeks, and been encouraged to use those Things I had used before more frequently. Blogging is an art that I feel I will take some time to gain confidence in, but what has definitely helped is having this structure to persuade (force being a too strong a word!) me to log on and blog. Having a 'project' to complete will always help me to keep doing something, and hopefully after this years 23 things programme has finished I will have gotten in the habit of coming to this page every week or so. This is why I think my blogging on the CATALOG website has been so successful, I have made myself the task of ensuring at least once a month I write a piece on what I have been upto at work. This is of course giving me a great record of what I have been doing during this one year scheme, and hopefully will be helpful to others considering librarianship as a career. In Thing 2, looking at the blogs of others has definitely helped me to understand what blogging is about, especially as some people have been working on them for a great deal of time. I have always felt learning from example is an efficient way to absorb ideas, and this approach definitely helps me there.

I began looking at Thing 3 thinking what a strange idea! I had never thought about how I appear online, aside from ensuring I don't share any information I do not want the world to know. This task definitely encouraged me to fiddle around with this blog - although still not satisfied with the design I do love the flowers! One day I shall get out with a camera and take some semi-decent photos of myself and come up with an idea for a more personalized background.

Finally Thing 4 was the task I enjoyed most so far - particularly using Sporify as this was completely new to me. As I said previously I have never been sure about Twitter, partly because I don't know many people who use it themselves. Maybe if all my friends were tweeting about themselves it would interest me more. Sporify was great to play around with, but I don't know if it is something I would use much at this stage. Maybe I just need to learn more about what it can do!

3. Apply it

All these things I have learnt about could be very useful to a modern library - I especially enjoy reading Polly's blog for Newnham College Library. I will be going to the Judge Business School library (Cambridge) in a few weeks as part of the Penumbra shadowing scheme, and particularly requested to see how they use technology such as this in their library.

Over the next few months I am going to make a particular effort to blog, and keep up with the 23 Things (I am now on track! On to Thing 6 next week :-)). Twitter is something I plan to experiment with, and again with Sporify, I hope I can come up with more excuses to use it on here.

As to reflective thinking, I hope this hasn't bored you to senseless - it is rather long!

Thing 4... the important bit

This is a bit late, but I seem to be behind on all my things at the moment!

Okay, what did I do yesterday? I am not new to Twitter, but it must be said that I am not a big tweeter. I find Twitter a little strange, as I never feel I have anything to share with everyone that takes up such a small amount of space! At university I did find it useful though, following organisations such as the university library and computer services. I also like to check it occasionally to see what is going on with friends who are more avid tweeters than me. So it does have it's uses. I do feel it would be more important to me if I had some medium to use it, that wasn't a laptop or pc, so I could it on the move and quickly. Having to turn this on, find the website, log in and then post is not terribly easy!

Again, I feel the RSS feeds would be particularly useful on a phone! I have been using these for a while, without really appreciating what they are and learning what it is an abbreviation for amuses me. I guess SS would be too short? I do think this is an interesting tool to see everyones blogs though, which definitely helps when it comes to figuring out what I should write. Now I can use it more than just for looking at the BBC news on my Google homepage. I subscribed to 'Infoism' which I think will be good reading. It was also interesting to note a blog he wrote on the subject of volunteering in libraries, which I had been reading more about earlier in an email LinkedIn had sent me due to my being a member of the 'CILIP: Library, Information and Knowledge Professionals' group. I would definitely recommend joining it if you are on LinkedIn (which you should be!).

Finally on to Sporify - something completely new to me. A little tricky to get my head around at first - but I did have fun playing around! I was sad to see some people had not posted their 'stories' in their blog, though it did take me a while to figure out how to! I did enjoy looking at all the photographs in The Wandering Librarian's blog of libraries he will be visiting in Chicago, again I find it amazing how many different people are taking part in this.

All in all I have found these (3) things fascinating to play with, and I know I have barely scratched the surface. I look forward to meddling a little more, when some time allows.

Here's to Thing 5...