Realia

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.

Okay, so it’s been a very long time since I participated in a Friday Fill-In on Wife of a Sailor’s blog, but this week’s seemed easy – a series of either/or questions, so here goes:

Facebook or Twitter? Both! I use Facebookfor keeping up with people I know in real life; I mainly use Twitter for connecting with other librarians and other milspouses, most of whom I haven’t actually met.

Hard Tacos or Soft Tacos? Hard – tacos should be crunchy!

Gardening or crafting? Crafting, definitely crafting, a million times crafting! Gardening is work, crafting is fun!

Fruit or vegetables? Fruit – they’re sweeter, so you can eat them for dessert.

Motorcycle or bicycle? Bicycle – motorcycles kind of scare me.

I’ve fallen way behind on my CPD 23 posts, so I’m attempting to catch up. Thing 4 was about current awareness and keeping up using Twitter, RSS, and Pushnote.

I’ve been using Twitter for a little over three years now, and I have to say that it is one of my main methods of professional development. I use Twitter to find out about interesting things going on in the world of librarianship (cataloging in particular), and I use it to share interesting library-related resources that I find. (The fact that my non-library friend Chuck says that my tweets sound like rocket science probably means that I’ve shared a few too many RDA-related resources.) It took me a while to figure out how Twitter works best for me. I started using Twitter when I was in library school, and it took me a few months to actually find my groove. Initially, I didn’t tweet too much and I didn’t really find it all that compelling. I think what made Twitter “click” for me was when I graduated and found a job, I felt somewhat more settled in terms of what area of librarianship I should be paying attention to, and I found a bunch of catalogers on Twitter (most of whom can be found on the Troublesome Catalogers/Magical Metadata Fairies list.) All of a sudden, I had people who were sharing things relevant to my work, and people were responding favorably to the things that I shared, and I really started to like Twitter. So whenever I’m in a conversation where people are putting down Twitter (“Why do I want to hear what someone else ate for lunch?”) I tell my story of how Twitter works for me. I don’t think it’s for everyone, and I think that a lot of people use it in different ways, so my recommendation if you are new to Twitter is to give it a chance and explore a few different areas of your life in which it could be relevant.

RSS feeds are probably my other main source of professional development on a day-to-day basis. I use Google Reader to keep up with a number of library related blogs, and I usually start my workday by at least glancing at what’s new. Even if I don’t read everything right away, I like to take a moment to see what’s new in the world of librarianship.

Of the things mentioned in this Thing, Pushnote was the only one that was new to me. I tried it out, but didn’t find it that useful. From the other CPD 23 blog posts that I’ve read, it seems like a lot of people are having a similar reaction. Maybe it’s just too new to really have a “critical mass” of users yet. However, as I said, I wasn’t that impressed with Twitter at first and now I love it, so I’d be willing to give Pushnote another try in the future.

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.