A little bit neglected...

OK, so looking at the date of my last post, this blog has been somewhat neglected. I don't think you're meant to leave 13 months between posts. Are you?

I seem to have put more effort into blogging about work whilst on maternity leave than I am now that I've returned to work. There are all the usual excuses of course - I spent 3 months in the US last summer; being on maternity leave got in the way of thinking about actual work; when I finally made it back to work I spent time catching up and fitting back in again; not to mention doing the actual work (rather than writing about it).

However, in this case I think the final excuse is actually true. It being a (relatively) quiet Thursday afternoon, I've had a think through some of my work-related achievements since May 2015. In an attempt to show that I've been doing something, I'm going to list the things I think are most relevant below.

• My first mentee became Chartered in September 2015
• I'm currently mentoring three Chartership candidates, all at different stages of their chartership. All of these mentee relationships began last winter (2015), and they range from a cataloguing librarian in an academic library to a school librarian in Bath and a school librarian in Bermuda.
• In February 2016 I reviewed my action plans for the next 5 years, writing additional 3 and 5 year plans and reflecting on plans I had written 1 and 3 years ago
• I was a judge, for the third time, for the BBC Radio 2 500 Words competition in March 2016
• I revalidated, for the second time, in May 2016

These are all things I achieved outside of my normal working day - now I've been back at work for a couple of months day-to-day ideas and projects are stating to take over a little. For example, ORCID (Open Research and Contributor ID) integration takes up a big part of my thinking space, as does working collaboratively with other teams such as subject librarians and the Research Office. I'm also back to attending a wider range of training sessions - in the past two months alone I have had PDR (Performance Development Review) refresher training, done online e-learning courses on fire safety and bullying and harassment in the workplace, and attended webinars on bibliometrics and altmetrics.

After that whistle-stop tour of my working life over the past 13 months, I'm  going to try and stay a little more on top of things with this blog, and actually update it when I have something to say, or have done something interesting - and not five months after the fact!