Thing 23

What next?!

I think this programme has helped me in several ways:

1. Getting me to actually write something
Writing isn't one of my strongest points, but I hope that getting me to actually put my thoughts into words has been very useful. As I progress through my masters I know that putting pen to paper is a huge aspect of it, and starting by just by writing a few paragraphs on here has to have been beneficial, even if not one of the aims of the programme!

2. Getting me to think
Mostly about what I am doing in my career, and where I hope to go, but also about the wealth of free online resources available to me. From Prezi to Mendeley, I feel I have learnt a huge amount about how many clever things there are on the internet, and how I can use them to make my life easier!

3. Getting me to consider my future
And how reflecting on what I am doing is vital to keeping a track of what skills I attain at work and outside, and how that can help me in my career. This is where I hope to do more work and actually try to keep a folder of what I have done and what it means - something they try to get you to do at school when it feels irrelevant and time consuming. I will start by making a list of all the day to day activities I carry out, and see what skills I gain from then, and then move on to 'extra curricular activities'. Already at work we have 6 month PDRs which help me reflect, and I complete evaluation forms for every training event I have been on, to help me remember exactly what I gained from the session.

I think working in a college library has given me vital experience but I appreciate that elsewhere I need to have different skills, such as maybe moving into the 'information society' a bit more! From looking at job specifications I know that getting my masters will be incredibly useful (in a couple of years when I've finished).I think it could be useful to me to gain experience in different types of libraries, and maybe the option of volunteering in a public library should be one to consider. But at the moment my masters and a full time job are pretty time consuming, and something for me to focus all my efforts on for the time being.

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.

Thing 14

Zotero/Mendeley/CiteULike

I've been playing about with this thing for the past couple of weeks, and have finally found the time (whilst manning the issue desk!) to write up my thoughts. This is something that I got excited about, I remember how much time I spent collating my references for my Masters project last summer, and how I wished there was an easier way to do it. Doing everything 'by hand' does allow errors to sneak in, and I have spent a great deal of my time over the last few years proof reading bibliographies for friends. It's amazing how much of a muddle you can get yourself in, for something that seems that it should be relatively simple.

I decided to give it a go with Mendeley (I liked the name :-)) and followed the instructions to download it onto my laptop, giving me a nice little shortcut on my desktop. I still had a selection of papers from my undergraduate studies on my laptop, so I set to work asking Mendeley to inport them. I was pleasantly surprised how many of the papers it could automatically recognise the details of, there only being a few from the more obscure journals that it got a bit muddled with (or gave up all together). I then got a little stuck, and this is something I need to work on, but I could figure out how to get Mendeley to create a bibliography list. Am I being dense? I think I will find it easier to play around with this software once I am studying again in September, and find that I actually need to use it!