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.

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

Revalidation

After a couple of months of contemplation, I have finally gotten around to looking into the rules of Revalidation, and how to achieve this according to CILIPs new guidelines. I had been delaying this a bit because I knew that the rules were changing, and I was waiting for the guidelines to be updated enough for me to understand what I needed to do. I was also spurred on to looking at the VLE as I had a meeting with one of my mentees (I now have 2, and a full list - that took all of 2 months) and wanted to have at least a basic understanding of the new CILIP website.

In fairness, I had actually attempted to look at the CILIP VLE just before Christmas. I could get so far, but for some reason couldn't log into the portfolio section - which is where you add details of any CPD you've been doing. I tried again last week, and it worked. I had e-mailed CILIP to ask them to give me access, and the very same day (but after I had managed to log on) I got an e-mail saying they had given me access. Whether this is coincidence or why I was able to log on that day, I guess I'll never know.

So, I guess there are two strands to this. Revalidation itself, and using the VLE.

Let's talk about Revalidation first. CILIP recommend that you revalidate annually, and I Chartered in 2011, so it's time! It all seems relatively simple - and I'm keen to do it at least once before it (probably) becomes compulsory in 2015. Basically, you log 20 hours of CPD on the VLE, and then write a 250 word evaluative statement to say how your CPD corresponds to CILIP's 3 assessment criteria.

I have two main worries with all this. Firstly, I could probably complete 20 hours of CPD in about a month, and I'd like my Revalidation to span a slightly longer timescale than this! You can log more hours of course, but I don't want to get too bogged down. So for the time being I'm cherry picking the bits of CPD that fit best with the assessment criteria, in the hope that it'll cover roughly a 6 month period or so.  This includes things like reading a book on research data management, attending planning meetings at work, and being on an interview panel. I also intend to include things like being a mentor. I did think about including some CPD from 2012 (from before I went on maternity leave)  but that seems so long ago now that I think I'd find it hard to speak to it. So all the CPD I've picked is from Sept 2013 onwards, when I returned to work. I'm going to aim to submit this summer. My second worry is that 250 words really isn't very many at all for an evaluative statement. I'm going to have to be so succinct!

And so, onto the VLE. Now I've had a go at using it (and been able to log in), I'm a lot less frustrated by it than I was a month ago. It's not particularly intuitive though, so it took some time for me to figure out where I wanted was. Having said that, if you can find the training videos (and they're pretty visible, thankfully) they are incredibly useful, and really will help you to figure out where things are.

So now I just need to get on with actually logging some of those CPD activities...

PS Don't you just love library acronyms?

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

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...