Thing 19: Catch up week (or How I spent my summer vacation)

It’s hard to believe that we’re up to Week 13 of the 23 Things project.  When we started this back in June, 23 things seemed like a huge undertaking, and now we’re only 4 things away from finishing.  Quite a feeling of accomplishment, I must say. 

This week we are to think about what we’ve done (in a good way) and any changes that we’ve made in our work lives as a result.  As Julie Andrews likes to sing “Let’s Start at the Very Beginning”.  Or rather, I was going to look at each Thing, but decided that would be far, far too boring to be a good blog post.  One thing that I’ve noticed in checking out the next Thing each week is that the cpd23 blog works much better with Safari and Firefox than it does with Internet Explorer.  Can you tell that I’ve been converted to an Apple person at home?

Thing 2-                Check out other 23’ers blogs  

Along with thinking about libraries and writing blog posts about them, this has been the fun part of the program, reading how other librarians here and in the UK are responding to the same topic each week.  Some of the blogs have been greatly amusing and I have found quite a few people with similar senses of humor (humour).  Reading about the latest developments in citation software might not be the most exciting topic in the world, but by sharing their views and engaging the reader, we become interested in the topic.   That humor extends to the title of your blog post as well.  I find this is true of blogs that I read on any topic.  If I see a title and it looks entertaining, I’m more likely to read it.  I’ve tried to incorporate that in a blog that I contribute to at my library.

Thing 3-                Personal Brand

I’ve standardized an email address, blog and twitter feed, but I don’t spend a lot of time working on marketing myself.  Networking has always been somewhat of a four-letter word for me, but I understand that it can be useful if you are looking to get better-known in your profession or looking for new opportunities in your field.  

Thing 4-                Twitter, RSS and Pushnote

I’ve found more 23’ers blogs to read through this project and have added them to my Google Reader.  No one wants me to pontificate about Google, so I’ll leave it at all.  I haven’t spent a lot of time using my Twitter feed, but tech-savvy husband (TSH) uses it and the Twitterific App to keep up on events/random thoughts from a lot of people/organizations.  Even with the App it seems that there is a lot of fluff to scroll through in order to get to useful information (and of course everyone’s idea of “useful” is different).

Thing 6-                Online networks

I can now check LinkedIn off of my “to-do” list.  It’s early days for this one but so far so good.  One thing that I notice about a lot of the online networks is the lack of documentation on how to use the service.  Not every service is easy to understand and just because Facebook is so popular, doesn’t mean that it’s intuitive to use it. I’m talking about you privacy settings!!!!

I use the social networking site Ravelry for information about knitting, patterns, projects, stash listings, and it doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles that some of the other sites do, but it’s much easier to use and the smaller the learning curve, the more likely I am to keep coming back to the site.

Thing 10-              Graduate traineeships, Masters Degrees, Chartership, Accreditation

I’ve enjoyed reading about 23’ers traineeships and the chartership process, though it really doesn’t apply in the States.   Librarians should always be inquisitive and want to learn about new things, and this is one area that I am very interested in, as I have enjoyed doing training for librarians and wish there was more of this available at the local level.   Smaller conferences might be a way to do this, as we have been doing at our staff development day.   With shrinking staff, it is difficult to find the time to have people leave the building to attend programs.  Webinars are a help as you can attend one at your own desk and don’t need any travel time away from the office.

Thing11-               Mentoring

I guess that this ties in the Thing 10 (isn’t it amazing how that works) as training and mentoring are two things that are appreciated by the librarians lucky enough to have them, but there isn’t always support for them.

Thing 16-              Advocacy, speaking up for the profession and getting published

I feel like I just wrote about this.  Ah yes, I did!

Thing 17-              Prezi

I took a quick look at this in advance of getting the “official” assignment and it looks interesting.  There is an iPad App for this one, so TSH might be interested in it.  The iPad2 doesn’t have flash available; so some of the fancy, smancyness of it might be lost.

Thing 18-              Jing, screen capture, podcasts (making and following them)

Jing might be a way to highlight a specific part of the library collection or service.  Podcasts might work for something like a regular book feature (new books, treasures from the backlist), but wouldn’t work as well for a lot of the new technology as it would work better as a video.  The Columbus Metropolitan Library has some great videos on the Overdrive eBook service.  

 http://www.youtube.com/user/ColumbusLibrary

General notes:

I remember reading on a New York Times blog that if your site has misspellings, Google is less likely to list it at the top of the search results and if you are lost to Google, you are basically not going to be found online.  This can be a problem in the instant-gratification world that we live in, as people want to be the first to post on a topic, grammar and spelling be damned.

Thing 16: Advocacy or It’s Root, Root, Root for the Home Library

I’ll avoid the discussion of my home team at the moment until I’m sure that they’ll make the playoffs (Go  Sox!).  Perhaps Arsenal will start winning and I can start watching “proper” football again.

Today, we’re here to talk about advocacy for our profession and getting published.  I think that academic librarians have more of a “publish or perish” concern- those who are lucky enough to get a tenure-track position.   In terms of getting published, that hasn’t been something that I’ve particularly sought out in my career.  This blog could be considered part of getting published, and it’s been a great experience and given me an opportunity to think about the profession at the macro level, which I’m not able to do often in my everyday work.

In New York, we have a “Lobby Day” in March when librarians and customers/patrons from across the state come together in Albany (our state capital) to talk about libraries and the value that they provide to the public.  I’ve gone to Lobby Day and it’s amazing to see the turnout of customers who share their stories with the assembly members and senators.  It’s that enthusiasm for libraries by patrons that are so effective, rather than just hearing numbers from library staffers and trustees.

Public libraries are a rare group that isn’t for a specific group or membership, rather they are open to everyone, whether or not they hold a library card.  They serve all constituencies and do outreach to the community to make their services known, but it’s always difficult to find the people who don’t use the library.  It’s fine for us to promote our services in brochures in the library and social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, but you are “preaching to the choir” as they have to find library in order to follow your feeds or read your brochures.

When our library was planning a vote on a new building, our Friends group mobilized the community and offered to have supporters go to people’s homes to explain about the need for the building and the budget proposal.  This allowed people to ask questions in a comfortable setting and have their specific questions or concerns answered.  The Friends did mailings, printed up lawn signs supporting the vote that were distributed to high profile locations throughout the community and had a phone bank to make sure that people remembered when the vote was being held and where.  Because of a record turnout the year before, the budget vote was moved to a local mall where turnout was even higher than it had been in the previous year.    The Friends group is wonderful and a huge supporter of our Library, which has the annual budget vote this coming week.  Our library is a tax-district library and registered voters from the towns that we serve vote on the budget and elect members to the Board of Trustees. 

The Friends have a great quote from Eleanor Crumblehulme, in the library display case this month.  “Cutting libraries in a recession is like cutting hospitals during a plague."

Thing 18 : Jing - Coming soon to a computer near you

Though it sounds like Bing (not my favorite search engine), Jing is actually a tool that you can use to do screen captures and videos to highlight your library's resources.  This past summer at our library, we were lucky enough to have a girl scout working on her Gold Award do some videos of our library's collections and programs which we've added to our YouTube channel along with another great Summer Reading Club introduction from our children's librarians.  The one from last year featured a friend of mine approaching the circulation desk in her wetsuit.  You'd have to see it to believe it.

I've used Jing today to highlight some of my favorite podcasts that I subscribe to through iTunes.  I read and respect greatly the TV critic, Alan Sepinwall, formerly of The Newark Star-Ledger and now with HitFix.com  Alan introduced tech-savvy husband (TSH) and I to The Wire, David Simon's fantastic show about cops and drug dealers in Baltimore. Definitely worth catching on DVD, perhaps available at your local library.  Jing works very similarly to the cropping tool in Word 2010 and Paint Shop Pro that  I've used in the past, but has video capability that neither of these tools have included.

TSH also has his own podcast of his radio show that he does at a local university, which is great as we live too far from the station for me to be able to listen to on the radio, but I can stream the show live and/or listen to the entire show as a podcast.

Lastly, as summer ends in the Northeast, I get back into one of my favorite sports, curling.  Yes, like the Olympics.  Growing up in Canada, curling is huge.  I'm a member of a local club and am looking forward to getting back on the ice and listening to Dean Gemmell's "The Curling Show" podcasts.

Thing 14 Mendeley Not So Much

Working in a public library, I don’t have the same need for reference or bibliography software in the way that my colleagues in academic or special libraries would require.  I read through quite a few blog posts from other 23’ers and decided to try Mendeley.

So what did I learn?  Oh, the name comes partially from Gregor Mendel.  I seem to remember something from high school biology and pea plant- Mendelian genetics.  Doesn’t seem that relevant to the task at hand though.  

I picked a subject and found articles from a database at work and saved them as PDFs.  So far, so good.  Once I added them to the folder, I was able to add the folder to Mendeley.  For some reason, there weren’t many details on the articles listed that I had selected and I had to add the author, article and journal title, etc.  This doesn’t seem like a real time saver.  Perhaps if I had a real need for this type of research, I might spend more time learning the idiosyncrasies of the software, but for the time being, “it’s been nice visiting” Mendeley, but I don’t want to live here.