Realia

Archive for October, 2011

Wow, I actually made it to the end of CPD 23! Thing 23 asks us to sum up our experience with the program, starting with a 6-word story. I suppose my 6-word story would be “Lots to think about and do.”

As I said in one of my earlier reflective posts, the most interesting part of the program for me has not been trying out new tools and technologies, but getting the chance to stop and think about my career – how it’s gone so far and where I might like to go in the future.

So I’ve done the “lots to think about” part already, as part of the program; however, now I have to make sure the doing part happens as well. I want to keep the things I’ve thought about as part of this program in mind and make changes in my life and current workplace in order to help me make progress toward some of the things I’ve talked about while reflecting on my career.

Thing 22 asks us to talk about volunteering to get experience in the library field. I did do some volunteering while I was in
library school. In the beginning, I started out volunteering mainly to get an idea of whether or not I would like the library environment; I had never worked in a library before I started library school, and I thought that getting some practical experience would help reassure me that I hadn’t made the wrong educational choice. I started out by volunteering to shelve books at the local public library.

Later on, when I was in my last year of library school, I did some more volunteer work, this time in an attempt to explore a particular area of library work, cataloging, that I thought I might want to work in. I volunteered for a local museum, cataloging their library collection. This served two purposes. First, it was again a way of getting real-life experience to make sure that I would like cataloging as much as I thought I would. Second, it was a way of getting solid cataloging experience that I could put on my resume. When you are just starting out, it can be hard to get a paid position in exactly the area of library work that you want to focus on, so volunteering can be a way to demonstrate that you have skills in your preferred area of work. At the time, I did have a paid library job, but it was in reference, and I wanted to get some cataloging experience to put on my resume.

My library science program also required a practicum, and if you are in a program that does not require a practicum or internship, I highly recommend doing one anyway, if possible. It is yet another way to get some practical experience before you finish school.

Somehow, I found Thing 21, which asks us to talk about our strengths and interests, the hardest one to do so far. (I’m not sure what that says about me.)

One interest that I’ve discovered because of my current job is training. I couldn’t have anticipated that delivering training sessions on cataloging topics would end up being my favorite part of my job, but it has. (Since I am someone who hated public speaking while growing up, this really is a surprise!) Even though I greatly enjoy training, I realize that I am not a natural born presenter, and so I work hard to develop the skills to make me better at pursuing this interest of mine. I try to improve my delivery techniques and the way I present information on my slides when I talk. I subscribe to several public speaking and training blogs, so I can encounter new ideas relevant to this interest. And I do think that taking the time to work at these skills is turning my interest into a strength of mine. I have received a lot of positive feedback on my training sessions and presentations, which only encourages me to continue to work on my skills in this area. So I definitely see the connection between your interests and your strengths.

I also think it’s important to know your own interests and strengths in order to think about your future career path. I’m not looking to take a new job anytime soon, but I still keep an eye out when I see announcements for jobs that look interesting to me. If a job sounds like something I might like to do someday, but somewhat different from what I do now, I take a look at the qualifications for the job and take note of which skills I have already and which skills I would need to develop in order to have a job like this. Then I think about ways in which I can gain these skills.

For Thing 20, we are supposed to participate in the Library Routes Project. I think I covered how and why I got into the library profession pretty well in Thing 10, so I’ll just talk a little bit about the career path I’ve taken so far in the library world.

When I started library school, I had never worked in a library. My first library experience, while I was in library school, was volunteer work shelving books at a public library. During my last semester of library school, I finally got a paid job in a library, working as a reference assistant in an academic library. During most of library school, I didn’t know what type of library I wanted to work in when I finished, or really what type of library work I wanted to be doing, but when I took my cataloging class, I knew that it was something I wanted to pursue, so even though my paid library job was not in cataloging, I found other ways to get experience in that area. I did my practicum (which was required as part of my graduate program) in the technical services department at the same academic library where I worked, and I also volunteered at a local museum, cataloging their library collection.

When I graduated, since I was not able to be very geographically flexible in my job search, I applied for pretty much every librarian job I heard about. Even though I wanted to be a cataloger, I would have taken a job in any area of library work. However, about 4 months after graduation, I was hired for my current job, cataloging librarian at our state library agency, and I’ve been here for three years.

I spent some time looking around at the other entries on the Library Routes wiki. The stories that I read there echo my experiences with librarians I know in real life; most people kind of stumbled into librarianship and didn’t originally intend for it to be their career. Librarianship definitely seems to be a career that not a lot of people think about early in life.

Thing 19 encourages us to take a minute and think about the Things we’ve looked at so far and how we might integrate them into our lives.

Many of the tools that we’ve explored are things that I’m familiar with already and for the most part, I’ve already made the decision about whether or not to integrate them into my life. However, I do have a renewed interest in Evernote after exploring it in Thing 9. It is a really useful tool, and I’m going to make a point to use it more often.

So far, for me, the most valuable part of CPD 23 has not been learning about tools; it’s been the Things where we are asked to reflect on certain aspects of our careers. I’ve enjoyed taking the chance to think about how my career has gone so far and about things I would like to do differently in the future. I’m glad that this program gave me the chance to take some time out of my normal schedule and think about these things.

Thing 18 asks us to take a look at screen capture tools and podcasting. I am a fan of using screen capture tools to create videos for training. In previous jobs, I have used Jing and Camtasia. At my current workplace, we have GoToWebinar, and while it is meant to be a webinar tool, since it involves screen sharing, if you record a session without an audience, it basically accomplishes the same thing as a screen capture tool. I’m sure it is missing some of the bells and whistles (the ability to highlight things, etc.), but it works pretty well for my purposes.

As far as podcasting goes, I have never been involved in making a podcast. I also have to say that listening to podcasts is not my preferred way of consuming information, either. I have subscribed to podcasts in the past, but I never make time to go back and listen to the episodes. I think I just prefer to take in information by reading it, rather than listening to it.

Thing 17 asks us to explore Prezi and Slideshare. I’ve heard about Prezi for a few years now, but I’ve only recently tried it out (for a presentation for the grad school class I’m teaching this semester). So far, I can’t really say that I like Prezi that much. I was really impressed by the first few Prezi presentations I saw, just because they were so different from PowerPoint presentations, but now I feel like all Prezis have the tendency to look the same. I’m willing to admit that I probably haven’t spent enough time with it yet, because I can tell that there’s somewhat of a learning curve before you really feel like you’re taking advantage of all of the features.

One thing about Prezi that I do think is a plus is the fact that it really makes you focus on telling your story with less text. It is very easy to overload PowerPoint slides with bullet point after bullet point, effectively putting your whole presentation on your slides. Too much text in Prezi just looks weird, so I do think it is an effective way to really think about highlighting the most important points of your presentation, rather than including every single word that you want to say.

I am much more familiar with Slideshare than I am with Prezi. I have used it for a few years now; every time I give a presentation, I upload the slides to Slideshare. This makes it easy to share my slides with the attendees, as I can simply give them the link and they can access the slides on their own time. It also has the benefit of getting my presentations out there; I have been contacted on a few occasions by people who found my slides on Slideshare and then contacted me to see if I would give a presentation for them, so Slideshare has been beneficial to my career. I also like to search Slideshare to draw inspiration from other people’s presentations, both presentations on topics similar to those I talk about, and presentations that have nothing to do with my areas of expertise but have really nice slides.

For Thing 16, the assignment is to talk about advocacy in the library profession and to think about publishing professionally. I have to admit, I feel like I am probably a little bit lacking on the advocacy front. I do care passionately about libraries, but I am not as good at advocating for them as I should be. I think that since I work at a state library agency, providing services to other libraries in the state, instead of on the front lines, so to speak, at a public or academic library, interacting directly with patrons, it sometimes feels like it’s hard to find ways to connect with people who don’t work in libraries and make them see the value of library services. That is something that I should probably work on. Even though I don’t interact with patrons in a way that allows me to say “Let me show you what my library can do for you,” I can still talk to non-librarians about libraries in general.

I was also interested in this Thing’s take on publishing as a method of advocacy. I do think that it is important to get pieces that advocate for libraries published outside of the library literature. So far, I have a couple of articles published, but they are definitely aimed toward a library audience. I do want to get better about posting to my blog; it’s an easy way to share my ideas, and I should try to do it more often.

The assignment for Thing 15 is to talk about our participation in conferences. The only library conference I have attended is the Nebraska Library Association conference, but it is something I look forward to every year. Aside from learning new things at the conference sessions, I always enjoy informal conversations with librarians from across the state that I don’t get to see very often. I guess that would be my advice to people who are new to attending conferences – don’t forget to allow time for some informal learning outside of the actual conference sessions.

For the last few years, I have also presented at NLA, and I really enjoy doing so. It’s a nice small audience, and I know a lot of the people attending, so I feel very comfortable presenting in front of them.

This year, I was also involved with the planning of the NLA conference, as one of the co-chairs of the registration committee. It was interesting to be on the other side of the conference experience. In my pre-library life, I used to work for a nonprofit organization where I was involved in planning their annual seminar, so I have had event planning experience before. I didn’t particularly enjoy doing it on a full-time basis, but so far, I have enjoyed conference planning in a volunteer capacity. It’s nice to feel like I am giving back to my professional organization.

In the future, I would like to attend larger conferences and interact with people from around the country, rather than just my own state. I’d like to attend an American Library Association conference one of these days; I’d also like to go to a code4lib conference sometime. Eventually, I’d like to present at larger conferences as well, since I’ve really enjoyed giving presentations at the state level.

After taking a lot of time off, I’m going to attempt yet again to catch up with CPD 23. The assignment for Thing 14 is to explore citation management tools. I used to use Zotero when I was in library school; lately, I suppose I haven’t felt the need for a citation management tool, I suppose. Since I wanted to look at something that I hadn’t used before, I chose
to explore Mendeley.

I like a lot of the features of Mendeley, like the ability to upload the PDFs that are already on your computer. (I assume that Zotero probably has this feature too; I just haven’t used it in a while.) I don’t think I’m really in a position to use a citation manager a lot at this point in time, since I’m not in school or seriously researching any topics, but Mendeley is definitely something I’ll keep in mind for the future.