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!

Working whilst on maternity leave

This will be a relatively quick post, because I'm currently at home on maternity leave with a 7-week old baby (and a toddler, just to make life easy for myself). Oddly enough, my brain hasn't really been in work-mode. However, I have just managed to read over and comment on the first draft of a mentee's Chartership evaluative statement. How good it feels to do something that uses my brain again! Especially as it was a pretty good statement, and quite enjoyable to read. Although I'm pretty sure I've gotten a little stupider in the last 3 months...

Whilst adding this activity to the CILIP VLE to go towards my next Revalidation submission (Look! It's like I'm almost on top of things! Some days...), I also realised that I had done something else I could add to the VLE. Back in March I acted as a judge in the first round of the BBC 500 Words Competition. God knows how I managed to achieve that with a week-old baby, but somehow I did. I just hope I did the kids who wrote the stories justice, and wasn't too harsh on them!

I'm really pleased that I'm managing to do some work-related activities whilst I'm on maternity leave, even if it's only little bits here and there.

Development plan and CV update

In my last post, I mentioned my awareness of the fact that I hadn't yet managed to update my CV or write a development plan for the coming years, even though I was due to do it in January. Well, in a fit of enthusiasm (or perhaps boredom - I've been on maternity leave for 3 weeks now, and no baby yet...) I finally spent this morning updating everything.

I actually found the task really enjoyable - as long as I'm in the right frame of mind, I find thinking about my future career goals quite aspirational. It also reminds me that, for the most part, I love what I do!

I began by writing a personal development plan (or PDP) stating what I would like to achieve generally. This included things like increasing my understanding of research support, improving my staff management skills and seeing one of my Chartership mentees successfully Charter. For each goal, I wrote two or three ways in which I hoped to achieve it. All of this is pretty similar to the performance and development review (PDR) I do at work every year, which I could use. However, I like to make this one a bit more personal and include things that I might, sometimes, choose not to mention at work!

Once I had written the PDP I wrote a basic 1-year, 3-year and 5-year action plan. The 1-year plan is a little odd this year because I know I'll be on maternity leave, so the list is relatively short. However, it doesn't mean I can't do things like keep in touch with my team at work and continue to mentor Chartership candidates. From past experience I know that I want to maintain an awareness of what is happening at work and in my general area of expertise - I really missed having so few work links for a full year last time, and don't want to repeat that experience. But  my personal situation does mean that, in contrast to previous years, my 3-year and 5-year plans are more in-depth.

The next two tasks were writing a Personal Statement and updating my CV. These two took a bit of work, as my job changed in November, so there was a fair bit to say and update. But it is great to have an up-to-date CV, so I know that, if I need it (not that I have any plans to swap jobs in the near future), it's there and ready to go!

Finally, I even put a little bit of thought into what will need updating next year. I didn't bother to write a review of my previous action plans this year because they were so out-of-date (I will admit that the last time I wrote an action plan was January 2012, when my job was very different. It has taken me a couple of years to get used to life with children, and find time for things like this). However, I plan to write a review next year. As I have also changed the system I use for recording my continuing professional development since revalidating, I will start to include my training logs from January 2015 (when I have some)!

All this did take a while to put together (about 3 hours in total), but I really believe that it is worth the time if you can find a spare morning or afternoon. It really does give you some focus, and it's a great way to figure out what YOU want to achieve in the next few years (rather than your employer/ your husband/ your dog informing you). The great thing is that it's personal to you, so if you don't achieve it or change your mind, it doesn't matter! And even if all you do is update your CV, how much less work is that if/ when you apply for a new job?

Recording continuing professional development (CPD) progress

Back in October 2014 I wrote a post detailing how I would record my continuing professional development (CPD) in preparation for submitting my next Revalidation application in the autumn of 2015.

This follow-up post aims to reflect on how well that is going.

Firstly, having set up an iDoneThis account has really helped - those weekly Friday e-mail reminders to record any CPD done that week have forced me to spend some time (usually no more than half an hour on a Friday afternoon) looking back at what CPD I've done over the past week, recording it in a Word document and then e-mailing it to my iDoneThis account. In all honesty I don't really need to add it to the iDoneThis account - it's the e-mail from them that is needed to prompt me to write the thing in the first place. The Word document is clearer and easier to refer to, which is why I continue to use that. [NB: Having said all that, I've just discovered that I failed to transfer the file with my CPD activities from my work PC to my home PC. Being able to refer to iDoneThis on-line to check what CPD I have undertaken in the past few months was actually really helpful. So perhaps the extra e-mail is worth it after all].

I have also managed to, once a month, go through the activities I've listed weekly and add them to the CILIP VLE. This is up-to-date as of the end of December 2014, which I think is pretty impressive given that Christmas got in the way, and I headed off on maternity leave in mid January! I've managed to list between 2 and 6 activities per month since Sept 2014, when I began recording CPD activities for my next Revalidation. This is likely to peter out over the next few months (what with me now being on maternity leave), but I'm hopeful I can add a few activities to the list - like (hopefully) helping my first Chartership candidate to finally Charter!

The things I haven't done are those that I've suggested I'll do annually. I'm fully aware that about now I should be updating my CV and development plan for the coming years, and it is on the to-do-list, but quite honestly, it's not at the top. If I get to it before the imminent arrival of a certain somebody, great. If not, it will have to wait. I'm being pragmatic here because my to-do-list is quite long (if decreasing)!

Luckily, completing the PKSB (Professional Knowledge and Skills Base) and submitting my Revalidation CPD log are September activities, so I've got a while before I have to worry about them too much. Hopefully by then life will have settled into enough of a routine so that I feel able to do both! If nothing else, I am keen to at least have submitted my Revalidation log - I think getting into a habit of doing it annually can only be a good thing.

PS Acronym reminder time:

CILIP: Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals
CPD: Continuing Professional Development
PKSB: Professional Knowledge and Skills Base
VLE: Virtual Learning Environment

2014 Personal development plan update

Back in November 2013 (I can’t believe it was a year ago now, but it was), I reviewed my PDP (Personal Development Plan) to ensure that it was up-to-date. Well, in the last year things have moved on, and the plan needed reviewing again. My first job was to review the 2013 plan and see what I had (or hadn't achieved):

Of the eight goals on the list, I’ve fully achieved five of them, and partially achieved three. The five I’ve fully achieved are listed below:

1) Prepare an updated staff development hour session on open access, research data management the repository
I prepared this with my line manager in preparation for a session in May 2014. Whilst I wasn’t able to help run the May 2014 session, we updated it again for Open Access Week in October 2014, and this session I did run. I was able to learn more about research data management, learn how the newest version (version 5) of Turning Point works, and gain confidence in my ability to both present and discuss open access and research data management in detail with my colleagues.

2) Determine the best referencing managing software to store and organise my references (assess Zotero, Mendeley and RefWorks)
Not longer after I wrote my last PDP, I investigated a range of reference manager tools, and came to the conclusion that RefWorks was my preferred tool. I have been using RefWorks since, although admittedly somewhat sporadically…

3) Understand more about the new CILIP (Chartered Institute for Library and Information Professionals) rules and regulations
Reading the new CILIP website, talking to colleagues and attending an online training event have all enabled me to understand the new CILIP rules and regulations in relation to both Chartership and Revalidation. You can see the proof of this in goals four and five…

4) Become a CILIP mentor with 1 or mentees
As of January 2014, I have been a CILIP mentor. I am currently mentoring two Chartership candidates, and hope that at least one of them will successfully Charter in the next six months.

5) Register for Revalidation
I have not just registered for Revalidation, but actually successfully Revalidated (as of November 2014). I’ve written more about my Revalidation experience (albeit before I discovered I was successful) at http://www.annaslibrarythoughts.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/recording-continuing-professional.html.

And the three goals I’ve been a little less successful with:

1) Keeping my cpd23 blog up-to-date
I wasn’t doing too badly with keeping this blog up-to-date. I was trying to write at least one post a month and, on the whole, I was succeeding. Or at least until August of this year I was. Since then I’ve only written one post (in October). This has largely been due to the nature of what’s been happening at work and in my personal life (more about that in a minute).

2) Engaging more with Twitter
I have actually been using Twitter more, but primarily for keeping up-to-date. I read a lot of other people’s post, and have begun to tweet and re-tweet more often – but certainly not once a week. It’s more like once a month on average. Some weeks I go mad and tweet four or five things; other weeks I’m deadly silent.

3) Learning more about research data management
I’ve certainly learnt a fair amount about research data management, both through working with it more closely on a day-to-day basis at work, and through a range of reading I’ve done (for example, reading Graham Pryor’s book Managing Research Data). I’ve also begun the RDMRose training module, but I’m barely half way through. And whilst I have found some other training materials, I haven’t had the time to work through any of them.

So, what next? Well, there are a couple of things affecting what now appears on my updated PDP. Firstly, I have a new job. I’m still working in the same team, but I’m now Research and open Access Librarian, rather than Research Repository Support Librarian (better know as the Repository Manager). Basically it’s a promotion with our Library Research Support Team. So my responsibilities have changed a little - I now have more of a focus on research data and open access generally, and less of an exclusive focus on the research repository.

Secondly, I’m due to go on maternity leave again in January 2015. So whilst there are plenty of things I’d like to do in the next 12 months, I know I need to be fairly realistic about what I’ll actually be able to achieve. Therefore, there are only six things on my PDP this time around – most with timescales somewhere between six and fourteen months away. In some cases, I’m also relying on partnerships with others to achieve the final goal. For example, one goal is to determine how the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) OA (Open Access) policy affects our current repository workflows, and update these accordingly. Whilst I can advise on our current workflows and whether or not the policy means they need changing, I’m unlikely to be in a position where I can oversee any changes.

I'll aim to come back and review the PDP on this blog next November at the latest - and write related posts about specific goals in the mean time...

Recording continuing professional development (CPD) for Revalidation

Having just submitted my application for CILIP Revalidation (after Chartering in 2011), I figured now would be a good time to look at how I record my continuing professional development, and see if I could make any improvements. (Yes, a year ago may have been a better time, and being that I don't know whether or not I've successfully revalidated yet, perhaps I am doing this too late. Either way, hopefully it will help me with either a resubmission or a future Revalidation in a year or so's time).

Having recently read the CILIP Revalidation posts on the Joeyanne Libraryanne blog, I figured these would help to give me some inspiration about what I could improve, and how.

The first stage of revalidating is to record what professional development you have. My current submission includes things like attend conferences, participating in department and university-wide meetings, mentoring, professional reading, visiting libraries in other sectors and getting involved in staff management and recruitment. All of these are valid professional development activities, as are many others.

Jo suggests recording these on a daily, monthly and annual basis. This is where I fall down. I record my activities periodically, but not in any sort of organised manner. This makes it easy to miss activities, or forget what I have gained from them. So, in an attempt to get a little more organised, I have combined some of the advice on Jo's blog with some of the things I already do:

Weekly (every Friday)

I have set up, as suggested, an iDoneThis account. Whilst you can be e-mailed daily from this (you choose a question, then send an e-mail in reply, which gets added to your iDoneThis calendar), I have opted to just be e-mailed once a week, on a Friday afternoon. I only work 3 days a week, so getting a daily e-mail seemed a bit excessive. Whilst I might do development activities every working day some weeks, this is rare - and it's equally like that I won't have done any in my 3 working days during a week. I'm hoping that one e-mail on a Friday afternoon will prompt me to complete the calendar every week with any CPD I have done, but not feel overwhelming.

Monthly (last Friday of the month)

I am better at updating my CPD on something like a more monthly basis. I tend to go through my Outlook calendar, figure out what CPD I have done, and then add it to a Word document, detailing which of the three CILIP assessment criteria it meets. This helps me determine which activities to bother adding to the CILIP VLE as part of my development log. In future, I'm hoping to do something of a combination of what Joeyanne suggests on her blog, and the above. I will aim to:

1) Ensure that my iDoneThis calendar is up-to-date with all my development activities (whether or not I plan to add them to the CILIP VLE)
2) I may continue to add things to a Word document in order to determine which assessment criteria it meets. Not having used iDoneThis properly yet, I don't know whether or not I'll find this necessary. I may skip this step; the point is that I will use this time every month (if I don't end up doing it weekly) to determine which activities I want to add to the CILIP VLE.
3)  Add the relevant activities to my CPD log in the CILIP portfolio

Annually

Jo also suggests updating your development plan and profiles (such as your CV and publications page) on a monthly basis. I have to admit, I'm rather more ad-hoc about this. I haven't published much at all, and I tend to have something of an 'it looks good and is relevant to me right now, so I'll do it' approach to development planning. So, for me, the following are more annual activities:

January
1) Update my CV (to be fair, I do need to add a publications section to this) - every Jan
2) Update my development plan (this usually takes the form of a 1-year, 3-year and 5-year plan, and the broad activities I need to carry out to achieve this) - every Jan

September
3) Complete the PKSB (Professional Knowledge and Skills Base). I've actually only done this on an ad-hoc basis in the past, but the new PKSB is actually much easier to use than previous CILIP iterations, and I believe it could be helpful with future development planning
4) Submit Revalidation CPD log and supporting evaluation statement

It may seem odd to split these four activities into two separate sections (one at the beginning of the year, one in the middle), but I know how much time I have, and am fully aware that trying to get them all done at the same time just won't happen. Only having two activities to do at any one time gives me a fighting chance of actually achieving the above.

****

The rest of Joeyanne's blogposts in her CILIP Revalidation Hints and Tips series focus on writing the supporting statement and compiling and submitting your Revalidation. I'm not going to focus on these in this blog post (primarily because I haven't successfully revalidated yet, and the advice Jo gives is perfectly good - I wouldn't have anything extra to add). However, they're great blog posts, and the one on compiling and submitting is especially helpful if you're trying to use the CILIP VLE and feeling a bit lost. I may well be coming back to it as a reference tool in a year or so.

So, the next thing to do is to set up reminders for myself in Outlook so that I know what I should be doing at any one point in time. I'll let you know how I get on!

PS Acronym explanation time:

CILIP: Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals
CPD: Continuing Professional Development
VLE: Virtual Learning Environment

Finding mentees

That might seem like a really odd title for a blog post, especially amongst all you Chartership mentees out there.

But having signed up to become a Mentor earlier this year (how is it February already? How can there already be an 'earlier this year'?), I discovered that getting Chartership candidates to find out that there's a new mentor available isn't as simple as it sounds.

I began by doing what CILIP told me to - adding my name to the spreadsheet of mentors that sits on the CILIP website. But as many of us know, that's not always that helpful. Because the list is massive. And out of date. So, as a Chartership candidate, you approach, say, 10 people on the list (of the ones you can find that are willing to take people in your area on and aren't full yet). All of them aren't willing to take you on, or have a full list. So you stop using the list as a source of information.

So where do you go? Where do I, as a new mentor, go to let you know I exist? My next approach was to tell anybody and everybody in my workplace that I was now a mentor. And tell them to tell everybody they knew. This had positive and negative outcomes. I did find a mentee - but they already worked in my organisation. I'm fine with that, and this particular mentee hadn't worked in my organisation for long - so I thought mentoring her seemed pretty sensible. But it hardly helps either of us to learn about the wider professional context (one of CILIPs criteria assessment, as you'll discover if you ever try to Charter) now, does it?

I then tried promoting the fact that I was looking for mentees on Twitter. My post got retweeted a couple of times, but it didn't get me any more mentees. It may be that I have the wrong people following me, but I follow a lot (mostly) library-based people and organisations, and I can't force them to follow me. I could tweet more, I guess, and make myself a more vocal Twitter user but, well, I don't, and I haven't, and I'm not sure I will.

The thing that finally got me a full mentee list was one of my colleagues, who is part of the CILIP South West Members Network Committee, responded to a query on a mailing list asking if anybody knew of mentors with spaces. That has led to me mentoring somebody in an entirely different sector to me, and even to a couple of requests for a mentor I have had to say no to, because I don't feel I have the time to take on any more people.

So, true networking at work there. But not exactly an obvious, and transparent, way for new mentors to get their names out there. I have had to put in a lot of effort to get this far, and I've only just begun to mentor people. All this when I know there are loads of people looking for a mentor out there, because in the past I've seen requests time and time again. Yes, it may be that there aren't enough mentors to go around, but it may also be that there aren't enough channels of communication that both parties are aware of, and are pointed towards.

Reviewing my Personal Development Plan

If you've been a reader of this blog for a while, you may remember (if you have a really good memory) a post I wrote back in October 2011, two years ago. It was the final post I wrote as part of the 23 Things course (the reason, in fact, that this blog exists in the first place). In that Oct 2011 post, I talked about a Personal Development Plan (PDP) I had put together, and how and when I hoped to achieve the goals on that PDP.

Then, in December 2011 I wrote a brief update post, stating that I hadn't yet achieved any of those goals - but that according to my timescale, I wasn't yet due to, so that was OK.

A lot has happened since then. Not least of which is the fact that I spent from Aug 2012- Sept 2013 on maternity leave, and didn't really think about work all that much during that period. However, now I've been back at work for a month or two, and I'm starting to think about this sort of thing again. So I've gone back and had a look at that original PDP...

... and was relatively happily surprised. Sure, there are some actions I've totally failed to complete, but others that I've actually completed, and even moved on from a little. Here they are, in order, with how far I've progressed:

1) Prepare a staff development hour session for library staff on open access and the repository using Prezi. Due to complete by Jan 2012.

The preparation for this was actually completed on target, in Jan 2012. However the actual sessions were delivered between Jan and March 2012. I did also write a blog post specifically about this at the time, just after I ran the first session. Things have moved on a little since I created that Prezi, and I suspect I will be creating something similar, but updated, in the not too distant future.

2) Keep my cpd23 blog up-to-date. Review Feb 2012.

I've had partial success here. I was doing relatively well with this up until July 2012, usually managing to post at least once a month, and often more than this. Then I went on maternity leave and the blog died something of a death, there being no posts between August 2012 and Sept 2013. In some ways I feel I have a valid excuse for this (and certainly didn't have enough work-related things to talk about), but now I'm back I'd like to keep the blog going!

3) To engage more with Twitter. Review Feb 2012.

Nope. Utterly failed here. Again, I was doing OK up until July 2012 (although I was posting more like once a month than once a week, which is what I had specified). Since then, I've tweeted once. Apparently that was 117 days and it wasn't even work related. I do still read Twitter posts, so perhaps I need to make more of an effort with this one.

4) Engage more with the LISNPN site. Review Mar 2012.

Sorry, failed again. I haven't actually looked at the LISNPN site in a very long time. This was clearly one of those 'seemed like a good idea at the time' actions which I was, in all honesty, probably never going to do. Perhaps one action to remove, I'm afraid.

5) Create a screencast of uploading an item to the repository using Jing. Due April 2012.

Yes! Something I've done! [And even blogged about a little - although I've just discovered it's still appearing as a draft... I'll update it to make it clear when it was written, then post it after this post and link to it!] Back to the issue at hand: Although the screencast wasn't completed until Aug 2012, and I didn't actually use Jing for it. I used Camtasia as that's the software we have at work, and it does offer a little more functionality than Jing. (Having said that, I did help another collleague use Jing for their screencast).

My colleague and I put together a screencast of uploading an item to the repository back in August 2012. To be fair, this then had to be updated by my colleague after I went on maternity leave becasue we updated the way the UWE Research Repository looks. His work, and the result, can be seen on the UWE Library YouTube channel. But I did show him how to use Camtasia! And we have actually just completed a shorter, one-minute, Quick Deposit guide. When that appears on the YouTube channel I'll probably blog about it...

6) Become a CILIP Mentor. Due May 2012.

Again, achieved. Although very late - and still in its very early stages. I made the decision not to become a mentor before I went on maternity leave, not knowing how much time or effort I'd be able to put in during the year. Looking back, I wish I had become a mentor at the time - it would have been a great way to keep in touch with the profession whilst being away from the workplace, and to give something useful back to people who needed a bit of my time. But then, seeing into the future is tough.

However, I have now sent off the form to CILIP (as of last week), officially stating I want to be a mentor. Whilst this means I don't, as yet, have any official mentees, I do have an informal arrangement in place with a colleague who is studying for their MSc. I've been helping out for a while now, since (I think) early in 2012. And I'm really enjoying being able to help - and hopefully the mentee is gaining something from this relationship too!

7) Use Zotero to store and organise my references. Due June 2012.

Nope. Not even looked at Zotero. I had intended to use this to add any references that might be useful to any Revalidation I chose to do, so it's not actually been much of an issue yet. I haven't read anything that might be valid to Revalidation... and as the criteria are changing now anyway, who knows if I'll need this or not? I have a suspicion it might still be useful though, especially as I'm currently reading Managing Research Data (edited by Graham Pryor), and have a few other books and articles on my reading list...

So, all in all, 4 of 7 actions completed or partially completed. And another one or two which I definitely want to work on. My next action, should, I suspect, be to go away and update my PDP. I can already think of a few additions: Learn more about the new Chartership regulations (I'll need to know these if I'm mentoring Chartership candidates); Register for Revalidation (when I know what the new regulations are, I'm allowed and have done enough CPD hours).

I suspect there'll be an update in the (hopefully not too distant) future...

UKCoRR Members Meeting

About a week ago, I attended the UKCorr 2012 Members meeting. I've been attending these meetings for the past 3 years now, and tend to get something useful out of them. The first meeting I attended back in 2010w as only a month or so after I started working with institutional repositories, so it was something of a baptism of fire. Since then, I've met a lot more Repository Managers and have learnt a lot more about open access and institutional repositories generally.

This meeting was no less useful than previous ones - although I was shattered by the end of it! It takes 2 1/2 hours to get from Bristol to Portsmouth (where the meeting was being held), so the 5 hours of travelling didn't make the day a short one. There was a lot here of interest to me though.

The day started off with a talk on the future direction of UKCoRR - with one of the questions being about whether UKCoRR should consider charging a membership fee in order to improve the services it can offer its members. It's currently free to join, but you have to work on a repository in some capacity.

I've had time to reflect on this a bit since the meeting, and I think that of the two professional bodies I'm a part of - CILIP and UKCoRR - UKCoRR is the one that is most relevant in my day-to-day job. The mailing list means I get answers to questions that are directly relevant to my work (sometimes before I even know I need an answer), and the meetings mean that I can always talk to other managers with similar ideas, thoughts and problems to me.

Being a member of CILIP means that I can officially call myself a Chartered Librarian, but I have to admit that I primarily use it to keep up-to-date on what is happening in the wider library world, particularly in other sectors. I do have other ways of finding this out - ex-colleagues, other people's library blogs, and Twitter are all good sources. And yet I pay CILIP a-not-unnoticeable amount of money every month.

So, in principle, I should be willing to pay UKCoRR some money every month for the benefit they give me in the workplace. In theory, I'd be willing to do so. In practice, I don't know if I could afford it. I don't want to let my CILIP membership lapse (having only Chartered last year, and putting in plenty of effort to do so), but I don't want to lose my UKCoRR membership either. So I probably would stump up the money if it came to it. But the point was made that this wouldn't be true for everybody - there are plenty of Repository Administrators out there for whom working on the repository is just a job, and why should they pay to be able to do their job? Which in turn might make UKCORR less useful for those members who were left... I don't have any answers, this is just where my thinking led me!

So onto the rest of the meeting... hearing from Repository Managers about the Kultur and Kultivate projects (both designed to improve repositories for art and design researchers), their marketing projects, and uploading etheses to their repository were all really interesting talks with some direct relevance to me. Whilst our repository is "Kulturised", I would love (and am planning) to improve the metadata elements for researchers in art and design. We're currently in the middle of a pilot phase for adding etheses to the repository, and marketing the repository is something that every Repository Manager is always thinking about!

The final talk of the day was on OERs, or open educational resources. This is something I have little experience in, and am unlikely to get involved in in any depth in the near future. I was pretty exhausted by this point and tempted to leave early, but decided to hang around for the talk. And I'm glad I did, because it was one of the most enjoyable ones of the day. I learnt a lot about what OERs are, what they hold and the (mass of) associated issues that go with this sort of repository. So if I ever do get involved with OERs, I'll at least have some knowledge about what I'm getting myself into!

Guess it must be true...

I've known for a couple of months now that I've been Chartered, but seeing it in print just made it that little bit more exciting! Excuse the odd boxes - CILIP Update, the magazine this was published in, is only available to subscribers, so I've hidden the other candidates names).

I also ended up using Jing to do the screen capture for this (although I have to be honest and say that the boxes were a trusty old Paint job), so I guess my new-found CPD23 skills are proving to be useful!

Complete!: Information and Leadership Management Level 3

This year I feel like I've done more than my fair share of studying. At the beginning of 2010 I hadn't done any studying at all for a while, so I was happy to take on some new challenges. But at the start of this year I was working pretty hard towards my Chartership, and it was taking up a fair amount of time. I was very pleased to hear that I had passed at the beginning of September, especially as it was my first submission.

But by then I had already started on the next challenge... at the beginning of May I started working towards my Level 3 Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) introductory award in effective management. The course appealed because it covered change management, solving problems and making decisions and time management - all things I had mentioned in my performance review as struggling with a little over the past year (in fairness, I don't think I'm that bad at dealing with change or managing my time - but last year was very, very busy and I had three line managers in the course of nine months. That's almost too much change if you ask me).

By the time I was having to write my second essay in three months, the course was appealing a bit less! But the training days were fun, there were a lot of insights amongst the group, and I did learn a lot. Writing the essays really did help make the theory seem truly applicable to my job, as the way the course is set up you get to write the essays about something relevant to your work. But it's still hard work!

Well, I've just submitted my final essay on time management, and am just waiting to hear the results. So far my marks have been pretty good, but they all need to be confirmed by an external examiner before I can relax. Other than that, I'm going to stop studying and enjoy the next couple of months - until something else interesting-sounding (and hopefully useful) comes along that I'm stupid enough to ask to get involved in...

23 Things for Professional Development: Thing #23

So, the final Thing. Just reflecting on the course generally, I'm really glad I joined in and gave it a go - some Things took a lot longer than I antipicated, but almost all were useful - I learnt a lot about things I knew nothing about, and a lot more about things I knew a little about. It was also great to learn about those Things that I knew I wanted to investigate, but had never quite got around to doing (reference manager tools and screen capture are two that spring to mind).

I've had a go at putting together a Personal Development Plan (PDP), and I have to say that it almost wrote itself. We use PDPs in our appraisal process anyway, and I'm pretty familiar with them after having to create one for my Chartership portfolio. But having gone through each of the Things, I was pretty clear on where the gaps in my knowledge were, and how I'd like to use some of the Things I had learnt to achieve specific goals. All that remained was to put in some time scales to force me to actually follow through with those actions!

The actions on my PDP vary from very definite actions with an obvious end-goal (prepare a staff development hour session for library staff on open access and the repository using Prezi), to things that do have something to measure their success rate but are more on-going (keep this blog up-to-date), to things that are specific but I have given myself a longer period of time to do (I'm keen to become a mentor for others wanting to charter, but know this needs organisation and training). I plan to complete the 7 goals on my PDP between Jan and June 2012, so I'll be back to blog about them once I succeed! Along with some other blog posts as well, I hope (that would be goal 2 then)...

And finally, my 6-word story: Jumped in, learnt loads, shared loads.

23 Things for Professional Development: Thing #11

During the course of my career, I've had two mentors. Like Meg Westbury, one of these has been formal and one informal. The informal mentor was my line manager in my first full time library post. She shared her experiences with me very honestly, and gave me advice on what she thought was best for me. It helped that we generally got on very well together, of course! I never sought out a mentor at that stage in my career, and never really thought of her in that role until now. But she certainly helped to shape my career, whilst listening to and talking over with me any concerns I had.

My formal mentor was the person I asked to be my Chartership mentor. At the time, it was nervewracking to ask - I was fairly new to my post, and whilst I was pretty sure we'd be able to work well together, I didn't know her that well. I ignored some of the CILIP advice by asking somebody in my own institution and sector to be my mentor, but I don't really regret that decision. She's been a great mentor, giving me good suggestions for my portfolio, being willing to listen to all my concerns and fears, and pointing me in the right direction when I've found things difficult. I've not yet completed my Chartership, although I've submitted my portfolio, so this is an ongoing relationship - and I hope that, even when the mentoring relationship comes to an end, we'll continue to work together well.

I hope that both my mentors have also learnt from me, as my experiences of the workplace have been quite different to theirs. With both my mentors I've certainly had interesting discussions about various elements of the library world, what we find difficult, what we enjoy, and how we'd like to develop professionally. I've certainly benefitted immensly from both my mentors' wisdom and enthusiasm, and hope that in the future I'll be able to give something similar back - I just hope I can do as good a job as they have!

23 Things for Professional Development: Thing #10

Like so many other librarians, I didn't really intend to end up being a librarian. I guess I should have seen it coming, as my very first job was as a Saturday Assistant at a small public library in Exeter. I really enjoyed the two years I spent there, but decided to go to university because I needed a degree (I studied Media anc Cultural Studies and English) in order to get a job in publishing. I don't know that I ever truly knew what a job in publishing would entail - I think it was more a case of having to make some sort of choice about my future because careers advisors told me I should.

Either way, I had a number of jobs doing a myriad of different things (post woman, office worker, shop assistant...), but I always seemed to end up back in a library. Whilst I was at university I worked as a shelver in my uni library, and then in 2004 I started working as a Library Assistant at a university library in London. It was a small campus, so although I never followed the traditional grauate trainee route, I did gain a wide variety of experiences while I was there.

Being a Library Assistant was meant to be something of a stop gap whilst I broke into publishing (yes, I was still hopeful at this point). But I enjoyed the job so much I started to wonder why I was planning on doing something totally different. I stayed there for 3 years in the end, and only moved away in order to complete an MSc in Library and Information Studies at RGU. This was where my career started to take the slightly more traditional route, as I'd finally realised I was happiest working in a library!

I did my MSc full time at RGU (and, yes, moved to Aberdeen to do it). I can't recommmend the course highly enough - I really feel as if it prepared me for working in libraries. At the time it felt like a lot of reflective writing, but now I'm very, very glad there was such a focus on it! And, although less of an issue for me as I'd spent three years working in a library, you get the chance to do a 4-week placement. Mine was in a college library so I got to see how that operated differently to a university library, but if you don't have any practical work experience it's a great place to start.

Great as RGU was, Aberdeen was a long way from home for me. So after the course finished I moved back down to Bristol, much closer to all my friends and family. I spent a year working part time as an Information Co-ordinator, but didn't find the work especially challenging. Working part time was a result of having to fight hard to find a job at all, so I was keen to find something full time and a little more taxing.

Which brings me to my job as a Repository Manager at the university library I now work in. Another benefit of changing jobs was that I was encouraged to start Chartering - something I had been keen to do ever since I moved down to Bristol. That all happened a year and a half ago, and I've just submitted my Chartership portfolio. I'm not sure what will happen next; hopefully I'll Charter, but for the moment I'm happy in my current role - there's loads more to learn and I certainly feel challenged most days!