Thing 15: Attending, presenting at and organising seminars, conferences and other events

In my years as a librarian, I have had the opportunity to attend a number of professional events. The most recent one was for #RiLIES which I wrote about here. As with so much these days, attendance is linked to the financial situation and I was really lucky that this half day at CILIP was offered for free. JISCmail listings seem to be the best place for advertising conferences and I found out about #RiLIES from a posting at LIS-LINK@JISCMAIL.AC.UK.

As part of the CHILL CPD group, I am currently helping to organise a conference about social media which will be held at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. A major objective of this is to be able to offer it for minimal pricing, so people have been asking friends and colleagues to speak for free. Once we have organised the speakers, I will be involved in advertising the training and organising the attendees. So keep your eyes peeled for more details of that!

So far I have never spoken at an event. However, there is nothing scarier than speaking at school assemblies (how do they get their eyes so big?!) and since I have done so many of these I feel I would be able to stand up and speak professionally, Although I’m not sure how many librarians would want to listen to my witterings!

As a very tenuous link, here I am outside San Diego library. San Diego hosts Comic Con every year which looks amazing- and is surely one of the few conferences that could outgeek a library event (and I mean that in the best way possible!)

Thing 14: Zotero / Mendeley / CiteULike

I’ve been putting off writing this thing because I didn’t know how to relate it to my work. It has been ten years since I had to write my dissertation. Although at work we have a number of students using us, they have never asked (me) for any more information on the topic than confirming they had their citation in the correct order. However, I really liked how The Wandering Librarian was able to reference his library tour around London here http://thewanderinglibrarian.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/a-london-thing.html . It’s an imaginative way of looking at this Thing while also making me not feel quite as geeky for all my sad librarian photos!

Suitably inspired, here goes......

14a) Zotero. An application that needs to be downloaded and only works with Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Therefore can’t be used at work.

14b) Mendeley. Would also need to be downloaded and so can’t be used on staff PCs here- although at least it would work with our Internet Explorer.

14c) CiteULike. Yay! Something I don’t have to download and so can write about! However, after signing up to the website I was thoroughly confused. I looked at different areas but couldn’t see any instructions for what I was supposed to do. I then tried to import a journal article about Mary Seacole but it just came up as loads of gibberish (ok, computer language- see just part of it below) and crashed. Oh dear. Librarian fail.

I'm skipping whatever remains of this entry
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: ½/éêëºޞ­_+‹~dR«ÿÿÎè²yH†P™Œ â( ỵ„\ éz5´l ý?¸0xMÂu ‑ pd¦ÒJÒoJ®•ºu¯ý_߭oÿÈÄR3«:Ÿ¦?ÿ•´Ck›gF™A ¢Œæ``ç„

---

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: áúè¸z 6oK†ÚAź鴛[mjÕ뫭*z~·ªuÿºÿ§ÿó @ƒ 0ƒÉj;žSÿÿ•V][1](vGÌÈÓ0Ëæ àÁ „¸A„ a Ÿ£C ·z.­¢íº>86ÐA´m

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The photo for today was taken outside a library that could easily be misunderstood. Here I am outside the Hemeroteca Library in Lisbon.

Thing 13: Google Docs, Wikis and Dropbox.

I have only really used Google Docs once. My friend and I were planning a holiday around California and he shared a spreadsheet so that we could figure out which town we were going to be in, when, what we were going to do, what hostel we had booked and transport. Other than that occasion I’ve never really worked on anything that needed to be shared in that way. At work we have a shared drive that we can access documents through. A good job because staff computers aren’t allowed to access sites which are deemed Personal Network Storage and Backup (see also my struggles to look at Storify, Evernote etc.)

I was inspired by one of the cpd blogs I read (I’m such a bad librarian for not noting which one!) where it was mentioned that this site could be used by library members who had forgotten their USB stick. I have just been out into our library and could access Google Docs from their PCs. However, unless said member already has a Google account (or is particularly on the ball!) then I think it could be too complicated to use in this situation.

Dropbox is also banned on work computers. I have been inspired to download the app onto my posh phone to have a go though. Now I just need to remember to turn on my home PC and put it on there and actually start sharing (my inability to do this is just one reason why this thing is so late being posted!)

I really like wikis. At my old job I set one up using WetPaint. The idea behind this was for all the children’s librarians to be able to post their ideas for events so that we weren’t having to think up new things (e.g. for Easter) each year. However, I couldn’t get any of the others interested so it quickly died a death.

In contrast, at my current work we have two wikis. One has all the procedures so that we can quickly double check what to do in a particular situation. However, this hasn’t recently come into some trouble as the wiki was linking to Google Docs until access was denied. The other wiki is a place for library staff to share news/ stories/ ideas that could be of interest to others. Looking at the associated word cloud now I can see that the most popular tags have been web2, Xmas, party and Google. I’m not sure what that says about us!

In honour of Google Docs, here is a photo taken on my tour of California.Here I am at Alamitos Library in Long Beach.

Thing 12: putting the social into social media

Thanks to cpd (and a new smart phone); I have been attempting to use twitter more. However, I find that a major problem is that big news stories often happen during the day while I’m working. Unless something happens while I’m checking my phone on my lunch break, then I’m commenting on a story or tweet hours after the fact.  I’m now signed up to LISPN and have befriended an old colleague but to be honest haven’t really looked at the conversations in the forums yet to offer my two pennies worth. I am trying to comment on blogs though as it seems weird that so many people have looked at mine but then not said anything (although I suppose if you can’t think of anything nice to say then you shouldn’t say it!)

So- are these statements true?

Social networking can lead to better communication. I think social networking can be invaluable in widening the horizons of people in the profession as well as alerting them to up and coming news stories. Coming from a public libraries background, the ongoing work of Voices for the Library is proof of how well social media can be used to unite people in a common cause.  But better communication? I’m sadly too old to use LOL or :) although people older than me (or those more grammatically correct ) would argue about my excessive use of exclamation marks!

It creates a more collaborative working space where people are encouraged to share their ideas. As mentioned before I’m a huge believer in good/ best practice and sharing ideas. There are some networks at the moment (e.g. librarians as teachers) which have massive potential for enabling this although there don’t seem to be enough people collaborating so far.......

It aids in building online communities. I’m a bit confused by this one- surely all online communities are examples of social media?

Social networking can also provide easy access to other areas of the profession. Very true- by following certain people on twitter and reading the cpd blogs I am able to stay aware of what is [depressingly] happening in public libraries as well as getting some sort of idea of what it is like to work in other aspects of librarianship that I have no experience in.

Today’s photograph was chosen for how the name of the library fits with my attitude to social media. Here I am outside the library in the Wellcome Collection