Realia

Archive for June, 2011

For Thing 3, the assignment was to search for yourself and see how you are reflected in your search results.

I have a fairly unique name, so yes, all the results on the first page do refer to me, and they are things that I wouldn’t mind someone finding. The top three results are my pages on social networking sites (Twitter, Linkedin, and Slideshare), and the next result is my contact page at the website of my place of employment. Some non-work-related sites come up on the first page (such as my presence on Crowdrise, a fundraising site), but they are things that I wouldn’t mind professional contacts or potential employers knowing about me.

On that note, I generally don’t mind mixing my personal and professional lives in my online persona. On Facebook, I mostly post things relating to my personal life, but I do have professional contacts that I am Facebook friends with, so I am mindful of that, and I don’t post things that I wouldn’t want people in the library community to know. On Twitter, it’s much more mixed. I mostly tweet things related to my profession, because that’s how Twitter has been most useful to me – as a way to share and find professional information. However, I do also share details about my personal life on Twitter. For example, when my husband joined the Army Reserves, I found a fun and engaging community of military spouses on Twitter, and I enjoy interacting with them as well. (They might get annoyed with all my library-related tweets, but I enjoy reading their tweets, anyway.)

As far as a personal brand goes, I do try to at least use the same username on most sites (usually enimsakont). I liked some of the examples given in the lesson for Thing 3 of standardizing the colors, graphics, etc., you use across various sites, and I might play around a bit with creating a blog theme that matches my Twitter background, for example.

I do think that I struggle a little bit on the personal brand front because I’m kind of inconsistent about when I use my maiden name (which is legally my middle name now) as part of my professional name. I get different results if I search for just my first and last name than if I search for first, middle and last. When I sign up for social networking sites, I usually just use my first and last name, and this is reflected in the search results I reported above, which came from a first and last name search. However, when I publish and present professionally, I include my middle name, and a search for all three names skips most of my social networking sites (with the exception of Facebook), and includes some of my professional publications and presentations in the top results (along with a knitting pattern I designed seven years ago). I suppose it might be a good idea to try to standardize my use of my name a little bit and bring all of my search results together.

Here I am, somewhat belatedly completing Thing 2. I appreciated the motivation to comment on other’s blogs, because it is definitely not something I do enough of. I follow a number of blogs and greatly enjoy reading them, but I definitely do not engage in conversations with bloggers. Perhaps that will change over the course of CPD 23.

I looked at the Delicious list of other participants, and though I first started looking at people’s locations and what kind of libraries they worked in, in the end, the titles of the blogs were what convinced me to click through and look at a few of them. (Seriously, how can you pass up a blog with the title Optimus Prime Was a Librarian?) I ended up encountering people from a variety of locations, both experienced bloggers and newbies, and librarians from several different types of libraries. I definitely intend to keep exploring the blogs of my fellow participants and hopefully find some new blogs to follow.

I know I’m usually a pretty sporadic blogger, but get ready to see a lot more posting than usual on this blog, because I’ve signed up to take part in 23 Things for Professional Development. The assignment for Thing 1 is to introduce myself and say a little about my career, my experience with blogging, and my feelings about the CDP 23 program, so here I go:

I’ve been a librarian for almost three years. I finished my MLS in May of 2008, and I started my first professional position (cataloging librarian at the Nebraska Library Commission) in October of that year. Now that I’m starting to feel settled in at my job, I’m reaching the point where I’d like to start thinking about some long-term career goals, and I think that participating in CPD 23 will be the perfect opportunity for me to take some time to reflect on my career.

One specific thing I’m hoping to get out of the experience is to just get more comfortable blogging regularly. I’ve had this blog for over a year now, but, as you can see if you look around, I don’t really post that often. I had a knitting blog years ago that I gradually abandoned, and I’d like to keep this blog from meeting a similar fate. This program might be just the motivation I need to get used to blogging on a more regular basis. I’m also looking forward to having a group of other bloggers to interact with.

I’m also excited about exploring the other Things. Looking over the list of topics that will be covered, I see some tools that I’ve never heard of, some that I’ve heard of but not used, and some that I’ve used but haven’t thought of in a professional development context. I think this program will be a good opportunity to learn a lot of new things!

The Executives of the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, and the National Library of Medicine have issued a statement regarding the implementation of Resource Description and Access (RDA).

According to the statement, “the Coordinating Committee recommends that RDA should be implemented by LC, NAL, and NLM no sooner than January 2013.” The decision is also contingent upon the completion of, or significant progress toward the completion of, some particular tasks and action items.

The full Report and Recommendations of the U.S. RDA Test Coordinating Committee will be available before the ALA Annual Conference on the Library of Congress Testing Resource Description and Access Home Page. An executive summary of the report is available now in PDF format. A statement from the executives of the LC, NLM, and NAL is also available in PDF format.