Thing 6: Virtual Networking

Linked In.

I joined LinkedIn a few years ago but have never been very good at using it professionally. Most of my connections are friends and even former colleagues insisted on referring to themselves as friends (despite my best attempts at being nasty to them all the time to stop this happening!) However, thanks to my time recently spent playing around with the website I have discovered that these relationships can be re-edited to make my profile more professional.  I have now also edited the URL to my name and changed my headline so it is no longer just a repeat of my current job title.

I have always been unsure about how LinkedIn could help my career. I have yet to hear of a librarian being headhunted or any examples of high level nepotism (please let me know if you’ve heard differently!)  However, as librarians have to justify themselves more and more to an economically minded world, you never know when our industry will be become as cut throat as businesses in the City. It is not thinking optimistically, but in such a climate I can see LinkedIn being a positive statement about my career.  I therefore asked a former colleague for a recommendation in order to make my profile stand out and show some of my personality. She wrote lovely words so even if her recommendation is never needed professionally; it has been a great confidence boost!

LISPN

Sadly, in September it will be ten years since I became a librarian so the description of ‘new professional’ would have to be extremely loose to be applied to me!  I was interested in going undercover and looking at the downloadable resources on offer. However LISPN had obviously sussed me out as, despite two attempts, the confirmation code was miraculously never emailed to me!

LibrariansAsTeachers Network

My work in public libraries included a lot of teaching (from computer skills to pensioners to local history to children. I always felt that it would be really useful to have somewhere to share ‘best practice’ information and methods so that fifty librarians around the country weren’t all trying to come up with an idea to link Easter to the Dewey Decimal Code (for example!) At the moment there isn’t much in the ‘resources’ section of this site but hopefully promoting this network through schemes such as cpd23 will encourage more librarians to share their worksheets, lesson plans and crazy ideas with others. Sadly all my resources stayed with Wandsworth when I left.

CILIP communities.

I actually left CILIP a couple of years ago in frustration with their lack of action about the library closures. While I am still slightly wary of the vagueness of some of their recent activities (such as the ongoing debate about volunteers in libraries ) it is clear that librarians do need a formal organisation to maintain their profession. Plus, it made me feel clever when they posted me materials because they used all my academic qualifications on my address label!  I am, therefore, thinking of rejoining.

While browsing through the CILIP communities website, it seemed as though their forums are not overly popular (three posts so far for June.) Their member’s blogs landscapes is a useful, focussed version of Google Reader gathering together…erm…..the blogs of their members?! I’m not sure how often I would check back here once I am a member but it is good to see the potential of this area.

As someone who is attempting to complete a career development course online, I can obviously see the positive effects of virtual working.  For me the power of online networking became clear a couple of years ago as Councils started announcing huge swathes of public library cuts. CILIP seemed mired in bureaucracy and (to me) it seemed that without disparate people joining forces as ‘Voices for the Library’  the campaign would not have been given the organised push needed to save some branches.

There is huge potential within these resources (not including LinkedIn) to really help those in the profession to spread ‘best practice’ but in order to achieve this more interaction in these networks is needed.

In honour of the ‘virtual’ theme of this week’s thing, today’s photo was taken outside Hiroshima Library- somewhere that had to be completely rebuilt and reorganised from scratch and where technology is incredibly advanced.

Thing 3 Proper: Considering my personal brand.

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

I have chosen to link cpd23 to my work account and have included it in my objectives for 2012-13. This was because I thought it would be beneficial to focus on the new area of librarianship that I am currently exploring. Having seen the number of blogs of people who had to drop out of last year’s course then I think it is probably a good idea to have the impetus of my end of year review to finish this myself! However, this does mean that I could be slightly limited by what I can say.

In the last blog post I mentioned that I would try to have my twitter account rolling alongside this blog but I have decided that that would not be a good idea. As an evangelical librarian many of my tweets are about libraries, but they also include random conversations with friends as well as retweets of remarkably mundane things that celebrities have said. I also have a fondness for retweeting @librarianclock who enjoys exclaiming statements such as “by jove, it’s gin o’clock’ at 5.30pm everyday. This is sadly something which jars with the RCN’s policy on alcohol (they are correct- it is very bad for your liver!)

I am quite lucky in a way when it comes to having an online presence because I have such a boring name. I keep my facebook account strictly personal (although seeing as my personality is as a librarian I am a member of certain related groups on there) and the improbability of tracking me down (linked with high privacy settings) means that prospective employers should never be able to find too many photographs of me enjoying gin o’clock!

When I Google “’Rebecca Jones’ library’ my linked in account  is the fourth option but there are more hits for a Dr Rebecca Jones who is an award winning school librarian and (understandably) far more important to search engines than me!

My usual name online is hipporebecca (you’ll never guess what I collect!) Searching for this online takes you straight to my twitter account but you also see much more of my personality- from my ebay. Google Plus and Amnesty accounts through to my obsession with music. Although I have done this before, I was surprised to see just how often random jokes between friends on twitter are popping up as a search result.  Worryingly, the result at the bottom of page one links to a page where I’m rated on ‘Hot Tweeters.’ I guess another advantage of using my work account to do CPD23 is that I don’t dare click through and see how I’m rated!

I decided to call this blog ‘Bex Without Spex’ rather than hipporebecca because I wanted it to be more professional (although I don’t know if I’ll be continuing this blog once I finish CPD) and, more importantly, my work colleagues thought that it was a better name. I suppose it shows my continuing interest in the image and stereotypes of the profession. It also makes me feel like a bad rapper when I ever I say my blog name in my head, but that’s by the by!

So should I be worried about not having a personal brand online? I’ve been very impressed, reading the cpd23 reading list and other blogs, how seriously some librarians are being- from having consistency in logos across all online platforms to printing business cards for conferences. I don’t think that approach would suit my real life personality or work ethic. I left my previous job because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed- either as someone who only worked in public libraries or only worked with children- and am using this course and the online resources to explore my transferable skills. I am happy to cross reference the different aspects of myself. Feel free to follow me on twitter- I’ve started to follow people on this course (although mostly I just copy what my friend @nicololosaurus does)  and I might refer people on twitter over here if there’s anything (perish the thought!) that can’t be expressed in 140 characters. I think I would like to use these platforms to gain skills and knowledge and then just force my personality on people who are [un]lucky enough to meet me in real life.

My one constant- here is another photo of myself outside a library – this time in Cozumel, Mexico.