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!

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...

My blog list

You may have noticed that I've now updated this. The original blog list was created when I began this blog, as part of the 23 Things for Professional Development course. This meant, of course, that a number of the blogs on the blog roll (if not all of them) hadn't been updated for some time. Not that there was anything wrong with the posts on these blogs; I just thought that it was worth removing references to blogs that hadn't been updated in 3 years.

You may notice that the blog list is now somewhat shorter. I do read rather less blogs than I used to, but I hope the ones listed will be pretty informative if you do want to take a look. Most are connected with Open Access in some way or another, because that's the focus of my work, but there are a couple of more general library blogs. Of course, I'm open to suggestions if there is an amazing blog out there you think I should be reading!

Actually reviewing my personal development plan

A month and a bit after I wrote about it, I have finally got around to reviewing my PDP (for those who don't know, that's a Personal Development Plan). My old one was written in Oct 2011, so the actions were rather out of date.

It hasn't actually taken me too long to come up with a new PDP. Having been back at work for three months now, there are a number of fairly obvious things I need to do to develop myself - not least of which is learn more about research data management (for some reason, this is the thing that springs to mind first - probably because it's the thing I feel I know least about, and the thing that keeps sneaking up on me on my to-do list at work).

Overall, I've managed to come up with eight new PDP goals. Admittedly, three of these are very similar to previous actions, but I believe they are still incredibly valid. And eight goals might see a lot, especially when some have more than one action attached, but I have given myself a year to achieve them all.

I've also already made a start on a couple of the goals - namely learning more about research data management, looking at referencing management software, and keeping this blog up-to-date. But more about each of those separately at a later date, perhaps after I've made a little more headway!

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...

OR2012: Being there when you can't be there

This was my first real experience of 'attending' a conference without actually going to the event. In previous years I have been aware of the Open Repositories conference, but because it's always taken place in a foreign country attending it has never been a realisitic option. This year OR2012 took place in Edinburgh, so I was paying more attention to the build-up than in previous years. Initially I was planning to attend in person, but being 7 months pregnant meant I was less than keen to spend a week at the other end of the country.

So whilst a colleague went for a couple of days in my place, I still wanted to know what was happening. Which inspired me to look online to see what was going on. During the week, the best ways to keep abreast of what was happening (at least for me personally) were to keep up with the Twitter feed and read the live blog posts. These are both social media platforms I'm used to using, and not having to learn a new platform was a big bonus! I have to say a big kudos here to the conference organisers for putting all this together, along with a bunch of other social media options. Not all conference organisers are so proactive.

I was amazed, and quite pleased, to find that doing a search for #OR2012 on Twitter, and following the comments as they appeared, turned out to be my preferred way to follow the conference. Because it works like a conversation, you get access to the parts of a conference that you'd usually miss out on by not being there - namely the conversations around the talks, rather than the talks themselves. You can usually catch up with the talks themselves via e-mails or future blog posts after the conference has taken place, but not attending conferences means you miss the immediate reactions from attendees. With Twitter, this doesn't happen on quite so significant a scale. You can even ask questions of the attendees, and get immediate answers (I have to admit that, for me, this was a step too far for my first experience like this, but I like that you can. I did retweet some of my favourite tweets though)!

Interestingly, it was the live blog posts that I found least useful. I'm a relatively avid blog reader, and tend to find posts helpful and a good way of keeping very up-to-date with the latest developments. But live blog posts take away the element of reflection, and/ or explanations of how people have put certain things to use, that I find to be their most useful qualities.

Of all the OR2012 live blog posts I've read so far (there are a lot and I still have 5 or 6 to read from the last couple of days), I did find the one on Name and Data identifiers (a Weds 11 July session) most useful. I think this was primarily due to the fact that I already knew most of the information, having read about it previously - and, in one case, participated in one of the projects (if nothing else, the post acted as a reminder that I need to chase that particular project and see where things have got to, because I've heard nothing since March...). But when it came to the final talk on creating citable data identifiers, which I have less knowledge of, I still got a little lost. I found a more reflective post, written by a UKCoRR member after he left the conference on the Wednesday, much more readable and meaningful.

One final thought on keeping up with conferences in this way - make sure you give yourself the time to do it. My decision to keep up with this conference online was pretty last minute, and it took up a lot of my working week. Luckily I was able to do this as it wasn't a particularly busy week at work, but if something major had come up I would easily have fallen behind with what was happening. Just because you're not travelling away from the office, this doesn't mean you don't need to ensure you have the time to 'attend' it. Obviously this is less of an issue for a day-long event, but OR2012 is a big, week-long conference - the biggest annual one for repository folk that there is. Because of that, there's a lot of information to take on board. Just keeping up with tweets alone took up a significant part of my day, especially mid-week (when the majority of the talks happened). All this is proven by the fact that I still haven't finished reading all those blog posts yet!

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!

Catching up

It's been a while since I posted on this blog, and I've been feeling a little guilty about it. I know it was one of the actions on my PDP that I put together as part of Thing 23 for the cpd23 course, so I had a look at the PDP to see how far I had got with the other actions...

I was relieved, and a little bit surprised, to find that things aren't as bad as I thought! Whilst I haven't completed any of the actions, I hadn't planned to by the end of the year. I must have been having one of those rare moments of realism I get occasionally when writing the PDP.

One of the actions that I am working towards is preparing part of a library staff development hour on open access using Prezi. Another action is to create a screencast for an e-learning object.

Once I've delivered the staff develoment hour session I'll put a link to the Prezi on the blog, but at the moment it may well still need some tweaks before the session itself.

Although I won't be using Jing to create the screencast, it should use similar skills and get me started on the right track to create future screencasts.

I'm doing less well with keeping this blog up-to-date, and using Twitter more. Whilst I'm pretty good at reading tweets and taking away useful bits of info (often things I wouldn't have known otherwise), I'm totally rubbish at tweeting myself. I also tend to only up-date this blog when I have something specific to say - which I guess is OK, I just wish I had specific things to say a little more often! I'll try to be a little prolific in the New Year.

On an unrelated bright side, I've now had the results of the Information and Management Leadership Level 3 course confirmed by an external examiner, and I passed. I'm feeling quite smug that I got 100% on one of the three essays...

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 #5

Looking back over the past 4 weeks, a couple of things stand out for me. The first is Thing 2: Reading and commenting on other people's blogs. As I've said before, I like reading blogs and have been doing it for some time. But I'm less good at commenting on those blogs, and feeling like I have something useful to say. Thing 2 really got me thinking about what comments I could make to introduce myself to other people, and that they would find helpful. It also meant that I got a number of comments on my blog, which was a really nice feeling as I knew people were reading what I had written. I hope that I'll continue to read and comment on other's blogs, as I did find it very rewarding. I admit that the amount of comments I leave has already dropped, so this is something I'll have to work hard to achieve.

The second thing is part of Thing 4: setting up a Twitter account. If you read my original post, you'll know that I was really quite sceptical about the whole thing. Well, I can admit when I get something wrong - turns out Twitter is looking pretty useful. I don't follow many people yet, but those I do have left some tweets I've found very interesting. I have to say that they're usually the tweets that link to more in-depth articles - as I said previously, I like there to be quite a lot of detail when I'm reading information. I also quite like having a couple of personal contacts on there - it means I get some "fun" tweets in with all the work-related info. The one problem now is that yes, it's another place to look for all that info. Although I did find this blog post really useful for giving me some practical advice on how to use Twitter. More on that in a future post!

One final point is that I really appreciate having a week for some reflective practice. Over the past few years I've spent a lot of my time thinking reflectively, and I don't think I'm too bad at it. Although if you're struggling with reflecting I think the "What-So what?-Now what?" model (see the cpd23 blog post for a fuller explanation) is a really good, simple one to help you understand what it's all about. I do really appreciate having the time to think over things reflectively - I think it's important to know what's happening and how you'll use it in the future. I also think we all need time to assimilate all the new things we're learning. Taking the time to reflect means that the things we are learning about are more likely to become a useful part of our workflows, rather than being used for a month or two and then put down and forgotten about.

23 Things for Professional Development: Thing #2

Initially I found the thought of reading and commenting on other people's blogs quite daunting. This was mainly for two reasons:

1) I like reading blogs and learning about new people and things. However, I'm not great at commenting on those blogs, unless I have something really definite and specific to say. I find it hard to just say "hello". I can be a bit like that at conferences too, which is why I find networking tough!

2) I didn't really know where to start. Initially I looked for people working in similar libraries to me (university ones) in the UK, but there are a lot of them. And they are the people I'm most likely to meet in other places.

A couple of things spurred me on and gave me a bit more confidence. Firstly, people commenting on my blog (thanks younggeekylibrarian for being the first!). It gave me a reason to look at other people's blog and say hello - and thanks. Secondly, the thought that if I was going to comment on somebody's blog, it'd be good to say hi to people I'd be unlikely to meet in other circumstances. So I said hi to some bloggers in other countries, working in different types of libraries - as well as some more local bloggers of course.

So far I've said hello to, and begun to read blogs by, an administrator for a study skills support service at the University of Glamorgan, a young American librarian, a librarian in Brisbane and an HR practioner in a small public library. I've started to include these guys blogs on a blog roll, and as I find more I'll add them in. I'm hoping to follow these guys (and others!) as we work our way through the cpd23 course, and hopefully we'll get plenty of support from each other.