Realia

Archive for August, 2011

Thing 12 asks us to reflect on social media in the context of professional development.  I do think that social networking creates a genuine sense of community among people in the same profession. The librarians that I interact with on Twitter are definitely part of my professional network, and when they all talk about getting together in person, for example at an ALA conference, I feel kind of left out if I’m not able to attend. One day, I’d like to be able to meet some of these people in person, but for now, I’m content to call them part of my online professional community.

I do feel like Facebook has the potential to create somewhat superficial personal relationships. I feel like I’m “in touch” with a lot of people I knew in high school and college because I can see their status updates and know basically what is going on in their lives, but I don’t have in-depth conversations with them, and sometimes I think that’s kind of a shame. I think that I don’t have the same expectation for in-depth interactions with professional contacts online, so I don’t see this being as much of a problem for professional social networking.

For Thing 11, we’re supposed to talk about our experiences with mentoring. I participated in a formal mentoring program through the American Library Association about a year ago. My mentor and I emailed back and forth a few times, but I feel like it was hard for either of us to make it a priority, and I don’t feel like I got that much out of the experience. I’m not sure how I feel about formal mentoring programs in general. They seem like a good idea, but I think the mentoring experience can feel somewhat forced in these situations, and it really takes a commitment from both parties in order to make it work.

Personally, I have benefited much more from informal mentors. I can identify two people who I feel are really good mentors to me, and the mentor-mentee relationship has just grown naturally through our interactions with each other. I feel comfortable turning to either of these people for career advice, and I really feel that they have a genuine interest in watching me succeed in my career. I don’t work with either of these people, and in some ways, I think that can be a good thing when it comes to a mentor-mentee relationship. Talking to someone who is removed from your workplace can be a good way to get perspective on career issues.

The assignment for Thing 10 is to “tell us about why you joined the career, where you are now and how you got there and what you are planning to do next.”

I think that I covered the “how I got here and where I am now” pretty well in my very first post on this blog, so please go read that if you’re interested.

As far as what I’m planning to do next, well, who knows? I’m actually going through a pretty reflective period, career-wise, so this assignment is well-timed. I know that I don’t want to make a career move any time in the near future, but I’m at a spot where I’m starting to feel like I know what I’m doing at my current job, and so I’m starting to think just a little bit about what I want to do in the future and what I can be doing now to help facilitate those things, should I decide I want to make a change.

I’ve taken some online continuing education courses on things like taxonomy development and metadata. I think that eventually, I would like to move away from cataloging according to rules that are already set up and move toward work (perhaps on digital library projects) that involves starting from scratch with making decisions about how to organize a collection, setting up metadata schemes, and perhaps even creating original controlled vocabularies to describe a specialized set of items.

I’ve also taken on some work as an adjunct instructor for graduate library science classes through the University of Missouri-Columbia and the University of Nebraska-Omaha. I really enjoy teaching, and sometimes I think about pursuing a career path that would allow me to do more of that.

But for now, I’m happy where I am, so I’m content to simply contemplate the future of my career.

The assignment for Thing 9 is to try Evernote. I signed up for an Evernote account a while ago. I really like it in theory, but for some reason, I haven’t really incorporated it into my daily routine yet. I’ve installed it on my home computer, I have the app on my iPod Touch, and I access it from the website at work. Now, I think it’s just a matter of remembering to use it. I absolutely can see the value of it, and really want to make it a habit to use it. I put off writing this post for a very long time because I wanted to use Evernote more before writing about it, but I haven’t yet. Since I’m obsessive enough to not want to go on to the next thing until I’ve written something for this one, Evernote is currently preventing me from progressing with the rest of the 23 Things. Therefore, I’m finally just going to write this post, declare that Evernote is a useful thing I’m glad to have been reminded of and plan to use more often in the future, and move onto the next Thing.

Google Calendar, the subject of Thing 8, is something that I’ve tried several times in the past, but I just don’t feel like I’ve totally figured out how to make it work best for me (this is totally my fault, and not a complaint about Google Calendar). My Outlook calendar works fine for me at work, and I’ve become that person who puts personal events in my Outlook calendar and work and marks them private, just to have everything in one place.  I have tried using Google Calendar for personal events in the past, and it just never quite became a habit for me. I think that it could be useful for sharing events with my husband; that is something that we’ve discussed in the past but never really done anything about.

I guess the conclusion that I’m coming to is that Google Calendar just doesn’t seem to be a priority for me as far as professional work goes. If I ever become a regular user, it will probably be for managing my personal events. However, I can see how it would be nice for a collaborative calendar at work for scheduling vacation time, special events, etc.

Thing 7 is about face-to-face networking and professional organizations. I am currently a member of the Nebraska Library Association, the Mountain Plains Library Association, and the American Library Association.

I find that NLA, the state library association, was the easiest to get involved with. I have served as the organization’s webmaster, I’m currently on this year’s conference planning committee, and I have also held offices in both the New Members Round Table and the Technical Services Round Table. I also enjoy attending the NLA conference every year. I feel that participating in NLA has for the most part been worthwhile for me. I think that the connections I have made through NLA have helped me to become a part of the Nebraska library community.

As far as ALA goes, I have not attended any conferences. I hope to do so at some point in the future. I have, however, managed to get appointed to virtual positions on 2 ALCTS committees, and this committee work has helped me to make some good professional contacts and get a chance to work on some interesting projects. I know that some people think that ALA is too large of an organization and that it doesn’t really accomplish anything, but I feel like I’m too new to the profession to give up on ALA just yet.

Oddly enough, even though it is a smaller organization, I have been even less involved with MPLA than with ALA, although I will attend my first MPLA conference in 2012, when it is held in Nebraska in conjunction with the NLA conference. Perhaps the moral of the story is that three professional organizations is a bit much to be actively involved with, and I participate the least in MPLA simply because I joined it last. I also think that maybe the regional professional organization is kind of an awkward size for me. It’s big enough, geographically speaking, that participation is not as convenient as participation in the state association, but it’s not as big as the national association, so the benefits of participation don’t seem as worthwhile in terms of making connections from across the country. I don’t know if that even totally makes sense, but it’s a thought that just occurred to me. Perhaps if I actually tried to become more involved in the organization, I would be proven wrong on that.

I do, on occasion, think about dropping my ALA membership in favor of either the Special Libraries Association or the American Society for Information Science & Technology. They both seem to have interest groups that are related to some areas of information work that interest me, but I don’t feel like I’ve investigated them enough yet in order to make the switch.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone has joined professional organizations that are not library-specific, and what the experience has been like for those who have done so. I joined the Lincoln Young Professional Group last year, but I haven’t really gotten involved or attended any events, and I’m trying to decide if this is something that I should pursue.

Thing 6 is about online networks. I have to say that in general, I do agree with the quote from LinkedIn’s founder mentioned in the CPD 23 post: “Facebook is the backyard BBQ; LinkedIn is the office.” I am active on Facebook, and while I am friends with some professional colleagues, the things that I post on Facebook mostly have to do with my personal life. I enjoy using Facebook for keeping in touch with family members and friends from high school and college. Since I do have some professional contacts on Facebook, I keep that in mind, and I don’t post things that I would mind them seeing. I do belong to some more informal professional groups on Facebook, such as the Troublesome Catalogers and Magical Metadata Fairies group, or the RDA Cafe.

I use LinkedIn as well. For me, LinkedIn is different than Facebook in that it’s not the type of online network where I feel like I have to check it every day. (Maybe Facebook shouldn’t be like that for me, either, but that’s another whole subject…) I update my profile when I have something to add, like a new job, and I add people as contacts after I meet them at a conference, work with them on a project, etc. I don’t feel that I’ve truly tapped the potential of LinkedIn; I always feel like I’m kind of missing something as to how it’s supposed to work. Of course, I really haven’t been actively job searching in a while, so perhaps LinkedIn will be more useful in that regard someday. I do enjoy the discussions that take place in some of the groups that I belong to on LinkedIn; I’ve found it to be a good way to do some exploratory reading on areas of information work that I might want to explore later in my career. One aspect of LinkedIn that I haven’t really explored is the Recommendations feature. I haven’t been recommended, and I haven’t recommended anyone else. I’d be interested in hearing from others who have used this feature to hear what they think about it.

One thing that I’ve done on LinkedIn is feed my Slideshare presentations into my profile; it’s an easy way to add content to my profile that represents my particular areas of interest and expertise. Speaking of Slideshare, I know it’s not a social network in the same way that Facebook and LinkedIn are, but it has been really useful to me professionally. I put my slides on Slideshare every time I give a presentation. It not only makes it easy to share the slides with the people who attend the presentation, but I have also gotten invitations to speak at conferences and other events because people looking for speakers on a particular topic have found my slides on Slideshare, so I would definitely say that it has been useful to me professionally.

For Thing 5, we are supposed to think about reflective practice. I think the last time in my career that reflective practice was really emphasized was when I was in graduate school for museum studies. When planning exhibits or programs, we were taught to do both formative evaluation (before the exhibit was planned, the event was held, etc.) and summative evaluation (after the fact to assess how things went). I think that in real life, these evaluation processes are not carried out as often as we were taught that they should be, because really, it’s not always easy to take the time to reflect on the things that you do.

Currently, the area of my work that is most conducive to reflective practice is the training that I do on cataloging-related topics. After each of my training sessions, whether it’s an in-person workshop or an online class, I ask the participants to fill out evaluation forms. Reading their responses not only lets me get valuable feedback about how they think the experience went; it also reminds me to take a moment and reflect on how I think it went. I always write notes to myself on things that I will do differently the next time I teach the class.

Other areas of my work are harder for me to apply reflective practice to, but I think it would be a good idea to take more time to reflect on the non-training projects that I work on. I will try to incorporate this into my work in the future.