CILIP New Professionals Day 2012: You Better Work(shop)!

Yesterday I attended CILIP’s New Professionals Day, an exciting opportunity to eat burritos with other newbies and then go to the pub! Apparently there were some important speakers and useful workshops going on too (?!) – here’s my take on the ones I saw, with more reflection on the main speakers to follow.

“Why’d it have to be snakes?” Kenny Louie on Flickr.

Game On: Cataloguing and classification in the 21st century

The day’s workshop on cataloguing and classification saw a good amount of representation from the UCL contingent, obviously. It was great to see Debbie and Jennie-Claire further smash the cataloguer stereotype of being introverted, and it was also really interesting to take part in their Lego classification exercises having done something similar at library school previously. The range of experience in the room gave a variety of opinions on how to go about organising things, with some even noting that scarcity and the production numbers hidden on the underside of pieces could be useful factors in organisation depending on the user group and function of a collection.

Most interesting though was their game of giant snakes and ladders, representing the highs and lows of the jobbing cataloguer or acquisitions librarian. During my trainee year I saw the panic that last-minute reading lists caused, and at UCL we’ve been exposed to cataloguers dealing with foreign language items, so Jennie’s take on those kinds of situations was great to hear. And basically it appeared to be that yes, frightening and stressful things disrupt your workflow, but rising to the challenge can have huge benefits for your collection (the acquisition of rare foreign language texts, for example) or your library (producing the goods despite adversity is great inter-departmental advocacy).

All in all, this was a nice start to a day of workshops and brought @HVCats to my attention, which means I’m probably going to lose even more time to nerding out about cat and class.

Just the Job: Working in careers information

Of all the workshops at NPD, this one wasn’t exactly standing out to me on the timetable as a super fun time that would give me much food for thought. Careers information struck me as something that would drive me into a jealous rage, resenting users’ ambition to pursue exotic careers in sloth training and time travel while slowly but surely learning to hate being surrounded by uninspired pamphlets (“have you considered a job in the exciting world of supermarket produce aesthetic engineering?”).

An embalming career might have been taking my maudlin teen phase too far. Lady_K on Flickr.

I only say this once every few hours, so soak it up – I was wrong. Megan‘s workshop was such a welcome experience because it helped highlight how a job that sounds so far removed from what you love can actually be spot on in terms of what it offers you professionally. I had never considered the kind of non-book materials a careers service librarian might be faced with cataloguing, nor had I stopped to think about the classification schemes they might use (three!). In my mind the role was an endless parade of sad students being told to get jobs as receptionists, but instead we heard stories of cat psychology and ship captains. Amazing.

What I found most interesting about the workshop was how even on the fringes of what we might think of as librarianship, the same core skills are being honed and the same battles are being fought. Megan talked about the need to remind your employer why your qualified status is important to the organisation and why a librarian shouldn’t be replaced by a person on a desk handing out leaflets, and it was obvious that the set-up of the team is conducive to a sleek operation, with a triage system directing users to the relevant help desk and resources rather than leaving them to bounce between members of staff getting nowhere (I was especially intrigued by this and would love to hear anyone else’s experience with triage in libraries).

Above all else, for someone such as myself it was heartening to see a speaker value the chance to be a generalist and all-rounder, with Megan’s small team allowing staff a variety of responsibilities that make it an ideal environment to test a few different waters to see if you prefer cataloguing, enquiry work, or something else. There were a few mentions throughout the day of finding your career’s endgame and working backwards to ensure that you get there, but I do wonder about the relative value of wandering the woods of one’s career and instead going where you’re needed, where you’re effective, and where you can test how set in stone your career goals are.

(True story alert – I once did use a quiz in school to help us think about the variety of jobs that would suit our interests and skills, and presumably I did something very wrong because the only jobs I got a high compatibility rating on were stained glass window maker and my top rated job, embalmer.)

Have you tried logging out and then in again?

Abby and Simon‘s workshop was one I was really interested in seeing because I think the need to be able to work with e-resources is becoming central to more and more job postings. If they’re not in the job title itself, e-resources are cropping up in job descriptions and specifications and they can be quite frightening. I do actually have experience of enquiry work relating to them and I’ve experienced things such as patron-led acquisition and the perilous (but ultimately fantastic) move to single sign-on e-resources, but I sometimes feel that because I wouldn’t feel comfortable mucking about in the server room with microchips and ’80s robots I might not be suitable for jobs dealing with e-resources.

Wrong!

Love a good beard, me. PhotoGraham on Flickr.

Abby and Simon did a fantastic job of allaying tech fears and talking us all through the kind of enquiries they face on a daily basis, and it was pleasantly surprising how well we all did to handle the sometimes vague, sometimes panicked enquiries of students in e-trouble. What was noticeable was that the best way to field these queries isn’t necessarily to be some android IT mastermind, but rather to understand where your users are coming from by testing resources yourself and getting to know typical user behaviours.

Abby also had beautiful shoes. Actually, everyone was really well-dressed. Great beards, new professionals! Great hair. Well done, everyone.

CPD23 Thing 1: “It is happening again…”

It is happening again. Source: Timothy Appnel, Flickr.

 This is not my first time taking part in CPD23, having almost made it to the halfway point last year before the approach of library school and the end of my first library job took priority and forced me off of WordPress and into a frenzy. I’ve talked about my limited history with blogging before, so I think I should take this opportunity to update on where I am and why I’m picking up the slack and re-entering the fray.

Hello, nasty – where you been?

Packed like sardines in the briny tin that is London. You knew that already – I’m currently finishing up my MA in Library & Information Studies at UCL. As I said last time I blogged, it’s been full of surprises, some pleasant and some less so, and it’s been as useful for the opportunity to reflect as it has been for the opportunity to train. I’ve discovered that I love cataloguing and classification, that I write a surprisingly competent collection development policy, and that you probably need more than a few hours with Rosetta Stone Farsi to make a Middle Eastern Studies subject guide a less daunting task. I’ve become a little less sure about where I want to be in 10 years time and even where I could be, which is equal parts blessing and curse.

So what’cha want?

Studying has given me a lot of freedom of choice and it’s given me the luxury of time to explore my options, but as I predicted, it’s also had me caught up in a cyclone of assignments that’s stopped me from making the most of this freedom. In order to nullify the curse that this kind of freedom can become, I’m hoping that CPD23 will help me gain more clarity of purpose as a librarian, as well as put me in touch with a stronger network of people with similar professional and personal interests.

What are those interests? I’m gearing up for my dissertation this summer, and my proposal involved folksonomies and user-generated thesauri with a focus on the awesome time-wasting tool last.fm but a hope that I’ll look at the wider applications of tagging and the challenges and opportunities arising specifically with non-text items and abstract concepts such as genre or mood. I’m also increasingly interested (as everyone should be) in the social, cultural and political contexts of libraries and information, and what the current and future climates spell for the profession and its associated services – I was very appreciative that one of the essay questions in our recent Professional Awareness exam let me rant about the Big Society, Localism, and the problem (and boon) that volunteerism can be. And where would my pinko “power to the people” sensibilities be without a passion for information literacy and an interest in empowering users?

This post was brought to you by two Beasties references. RIP Yauch! Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Those are my big three today. That might change tomorrow. And I’m almost always willing to raise my blood pressure by discussing Open Access, the absolute mess that is digital copyright, and why e-publishing could be a lot better. I spend a lot of time in the pub or on friends’ sofas ranting and debating and throwing jargon around with little grace, and I’ve realised that blogging allows me to refine those rants into something a little more useful.

So that’s me and those are my things. Do join me for my summer of study stress and trying to get back into the real world of work. It’ll be fun! Maybe!

Is it too much to ask to just be whelmed?

I've been a ghost of a blogger, far too excited about autumn! Credit to abakedcreation on Flickr.

So.

It’s kind of been a couple of months since I blogged. In fact, there’s no “kind of” about it. I’m a bad blogger.

Part of the problem with hitting the blog dashboard again has been figuring out where to even start with what’s happened since I last updated. Library school has pumped me full of so many ideas and opinions and discussions that my head is swimming. I could write about my modules! About Popular Meedja (‘futures past: the library in Doctor Who’)! About activism! About leaving a job or organisational restructuring! There are so many things I could write about it’s overwhelming.

I will write about all of these things. In time. For now I think the most important thing is to just post something, anything, and get the creative juices flowing back into the blog instead of into the kitchen with Hugh and Nigella. So here are the two shockers from UCL’s Department of Information Studies.

1. I think I may love classification. It satisfies the parts of my brain that thrive on logic, organisation and debate (there’s certainly a lot of conceptual bickering and philosophising), and the indefinite volume of things requiring classification allows for a great deal of wacky scholarly investigations and amusing anecdotes.

2. Somewhere deep inside me is a techie (the doctors say if they operate to remove him, I might die). I’ve been thoroughly enjoying wrapping my head around the Principles to Information Technology lectures despite thinking that they would be the bane of my existence. Binary shot pangs of fear through me a week ago, but today I was cackling at jokes about it and Really Quite Enjoying the idea of hexadecimal.

I’ll come back to these points and more later – I need to dedicate at least one post to dealing with my initial impressions of the MA, because it has been both predictable and entirely unexpected in its strengths and weaknesses. It’s an incredibly odd experience and I hope I’ll take advantage of it.

In other news, today I visited Occupy London outside St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was interesting, though I chickened out and found the group slightly impenetrable during their 6pm downtime: with the sun setting and the hardcore tent-dwellers having their tea and winding down, I wasn’t brave enough to speak up or join in to any great extent. They have a library, however, so I intend to go back tomorrow and ask them how I can help. Other librarians and library students have been making our services visible across the globe in similar situations, so I figure that it’s only right that I fly the flag for London. Given that Oral History is one of my modules next term, I’m wondering if that can be of any use.

Hey, it's those guys! Queer Friends of Bradley Manning were at Occupy London today too.

Anyone else out there getting involved in the occupations within a library context? What words of advice do you have? If you’re involved in London I’d love to hear from you. In the meantime I need to bone up on Radical Reference.

(I’ll also be playing catch-up with cpd23 – congrats to everyone who finished on time!)

For The Childrums

Credit: Thomas Hawk on Flickr.

As a break from CPD23, I’d like to do a quick post applauding all of the folk in public libraries and the incredibly heart-warming Circus Stars reading programs they’ve been running this summer. I’d also like to gush about the young adult books I’ve been diving into this past fortnight.

For the uninitiated, Circus Stars is a summer reading activity for children that challenges them to read 6 books, and then some more, and then some more. They’re rewarded with stickers (because children love stickers) and bragging rights (because children especially love bragging rights). A quick look over the official site will show you what a cute initiative it is, and the comments are adorable and incredibly heartening, a spoonful of sugar to help you swallow the bitter pill that is the constant barrage of news about how children can’t read, hate books, and live lives bereft of any kind of literature.

But don’t look at the site for too long because “this website is intended for children aged under 11″ and you’ll feel intensely creepy, even if you’re a well-meaning librarian interested in services for children and young people.

I think there’s something to be said here about ensuring that children don’t come to see reading as a competition or an exercise in intense speed, particularly in a world that increasingly values instant gratification. I’m not sure if this article was a joke or not (I sincerely hope it was), but The Huffington Post recently bashed several well-loved classics which they dismissed as overrated. The books were too long, they said. Nobody cares about Herman Melville blathering on about the whaling industry or what that means within the context of Moby Dick. And why is Albert Camus’ The Stranger so boring? It looked like it was going to get interesting (guns!) but then nothing much happened and it was difficult to relate to the main character.

Like I said, I hope the article was written merely as a joke to bait people like myself, but I can never be sure about these things now that Facebook reminds me just how many people apparently hate having to read (never mind that many of these people read constantly without realising). If people aren’t willing to read, perhaps it’s a bit much to expect them to engage with literature or begin to scratch a text’s surface. Perhaps it’s only reasonable then to expect articles to be written steering people away from the classics rather than towards them (hint: it isn’t!).

But I’m getting away from myself here – things like Circus Stars are still incredibly admirable and, indeed, rather amazing feats given the large number of participants. Go kids! Evidently, you’re doing much better than most adults.

In Defence of The Young Adult Section

There's more to Washington than rubbish vampires! By joiseyshowaa on Flickr.

I am a snob.

I just felt like I should get that out of the way.

But – and there’s a huge but here – I can’t truly bring myself to abhor the bottom of the young adult barrel. Because when you consider how many adults hate reading, perhaps it really is good that kids are reading anything at all, regardless of quality. I’ve ranted to anyone who’ll listen in the past about how I think Twilight is a laughable, poorly written tract that warps its readers’ minds until they start getting all moon-eyed over total psychos. “Do I dazzle you?” asks Edward. Sure! With your idiocy and creepiness. I’ve argued with people about how we should urge kids away from the evil clutches of Ms Meyer. We must stop them from filling their heads with such garbage! But when I’ve met secondary school students on library tours and in extended project classes, the ones who love Twilight have been the ones who have gone on to voraciously devour anything else even mildly related. “Sir, have you read Wuthering Heights?” asked one girl. The Brontës! From Meyer to the Brontës! Surely that proves the worth of such literary hokum? (I won’t dwell on the fact that she then went on to talk to me about how dreamy Heathcliff is, proof of what a strange influence Twilight is)

And it’s not as though I didn’t revel in trash as a kid. It’s not as though I don’t still revel in trash. I own Aisleyne Off Big Brother’s memoir (it was an ironic gift!). Shogun remains on my ‘to read’ pile. When I was in primary school I owned all of the Goosebumps books. The end of Phantom of the Auditorium still gives me chills! Talking to my mum, it’s clear that she felt the same way about R. L. Stine as I do about Stephanie Meyer, which is “well at least they’re reading.” And boy, were we reading. I remember taking all of my prized Goosebumps and Fear Street books into school one day and plopping the pile in the middle of my table, allowing everyone else in class to take one and inviting swapsies, and if the trash I roll my eyes at now inspires a new generation of kids to play librarian and stay up late finishing books, then maybe it’s not so bad.

In fact, some of it is rather fantastic. I never really got on board the Hogwarts Express – though I did enjoy reading The Goblet of Fire when it was published – but I can’t deny the inventiveness of platforms like Pottermore or the sheer delight that Molly Weasley’s last stand inspires in me (“not my daughter, you BITCH!” is very Sigourney-esque, isn’t it?). And I have nothing but love for Daniel Handler’s Lemony Snicket stories, wonderful quick reads teeming with wordplay and hilarious puns.

At the moment I’ve hopped aboard an airship – The Jenny Haniver – as I read Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines Quartet for the first time. It is amazing. If you’ve not read it, let me explain to you the world of Mortal Engines. It’s a world where cities wheel across a decidedly dead world, getting into scraps and trying to eat each other (i.e. consume their resources and reduce them to scrap). London is a multi-tiered giant, there are a number of high profile guilds coming to blows over their individual interests, airships and sky pirates take to the Bird Roads, and also there are killer robots! I especially like the killer robots. It’s all decidedly weird, deliciously good, and so easy to love.

I love that the Guild of Historians fight so passionately to archive artefacts and information (much of which has been warped by generations of Chinese Whispers). I love the care that has gone into naming characters – from the fishy Lost Boys to the likes of Dr Twix. I love that aviatrix Anna Fang is so badass. I love that the Stalkers represent a truly menacing force not unlike Doctor Who’s Cybermen but far better than what the post-2005 series has had to offer. I love how much of a joke the upper classes are, but how even stereotypical princess characters are written with warmth and go on such life-changing journeys that challenge their perceptions of their worlds. The stories of so many of the characters are heartbreaking, and the size and scope of the world of Mortal Engines is ambitious and challenging. It’s astonishing that a writer could come up with a concept like Municipal Darwinism and make it a central issue in a book aimed at teens.

Mortal Engines explication by Julia Zhuravleva. Image links to Julia's DeviantArt portfolio - some spoilers!

If you have kids, and those kids like sci-fi or they watch Doctor Who or enjoy pirates or robots or love stories or Star Wars or tales about thieves and underwater towns and espionage, if they like just about anything, I can’t recommend these books enough. I’m 24 and I find them so exciting, so full of wit and wisdom, that I can’t imagine how mind-blowing they must be to young readers. These books are ongoing proof that not only does the young adult section form a bridge over to more “high brow” climes, it contains a great deal of literature that is fascinating and intellectually stimulating in its own right and deserving of a readership that extends far beyond such a restrictive age range. Books like Mortal Engines are what make me want to #savelibraries. For the childrums, and for me (I’ve been getting all of these books from Northamptonshire libraries!).

So here’s to you, public librarians! Here’s to you, children’s library services, and here’s to you, school librarians. If there’s one thing that Twilight has taught me, it’s that you can dig up gems like Wuthering Heights from steaming piles about vegetarian vampires who sparkle like go-go dancers. And that requires hard work, perseverance, and a lot of digging about in crap, but it inspires young minds and it keeps us all going. And if there’s one thing that Philip Reeve has taught me, it’s that a young person encouraged to think is a powerful thing. So thanks for existing, all you library workers and school staff who keep kids reading.

#CPD23 Thing 11: Mentors

From Phaedrus to Pink Friday: mentors have come a long way, baby. Credit to nikotransmission, Flickr.

Thing 11, as you already know, is all about mentors. This is something I have no experience of (yet), but I do keep my ears peeled for any interesting tidbits because I admittedly find the idea of mentors quite exciting on a level that brings quite unrealistic expectations. I think of William Carlos Williams inspiring legions of poets, of Socrates mentoring Plato mentoring Aristotle, of Lil’ Wayne taking Young Money under his wing and thinking deep philosophical thoughts with Drake and Nicki Minaj. That sort of thing.

And it is with this preamble that I take you into my post on Thing 11, a messy affair with mixed metaphors and Beats and Star Trek. I’m sorry.

A lot like mentoring

I suppose the most experience I have so far is as a student with a personal tutor and a dissertation advisor. My personal tutor in my first year was all kinds of amazing, the charismatic academic with a book-filled office and tea brewing constantly. His specialism was the immigrant experience in American literature however, with a focus on Jewish American writers and Arthur Miller, and I love me some Miller and some Yekl, but this is probably a far cry from what I need as a young upstart of a librarian.

My dissertation tutor was something similar, though he had a stronger hand and came to notice my struggles at the time, egging me on and ensuring that I kept on track despite flagging after four years and becoming a bit hair-brained in the final month as I neared the finish line. (his specialisms were Modernism and post-Modernism, everything always came down to sex, and his dress sense was legendary, all nautical with splashes of lime green and a boater hat – I do consider myself extremely lucky to have studied with such an odd cabal of tutors in my time)

Desperately Seeking Mentors

Yes, it’s everyone’s favourite Madonna movie, in which the young starlet romps her way through an ’80s adventure of amnesia with Rosanna Arquette in a trendy jacket.

No, wait, what I mean to say is that I should probably start thinking about mentors now even if I might not plan to take on any offers in the near future. But then who is appropriate as a mentor? Library school tutors and supervisors? More experienced students on your course? Librarians you’ve met during your trainee year? Or someone completely new to you?

The mentee is a gentle creature, sometimes mistaken for the dugong. Credit: psyberartist, Flickr.

I’m grateful to have been told by one of our Academic Support Managers that she’s happy to be an informal mentor when the time comes, and I intend to take advantage of this and keep in touch – but this doesn’t mean I’m not still accepting any offers! As always, I think variation is the key here, and I also think there’s a lot to be said for more relaxed models of mentoring: for instance, I learned at LILAC that McGill’s library services run a reverse mentoring scheme where new professionals mentor their colleagues, passing on fresh knowledge and filling any gaps in current awareness. I also feel as though our profession’s sprawling networks – both online and off – serve loosely as an ersatz mentoring program of thousands.

But then there’s the issue of the shallows versus the deeper waters that a mentor can guide you through. All of our networks are fine and well, but that’s about extending your reach and paddling across a shallow expanse, occasionally diving into deeper potholes where appropriate. With a mentor I think there’s the opportunity to dive into a well much deeper than anything you’ve yet experienced, and to take someone’s advice and expertise and synthesise it with your own and with the crowd-sourced smarts of your networks.  You benefit from having a direct line to someone you admire and who can help you to progress as a professional, hopefully while fostering an individuality that then pays back dividends and allows you to give something back to your mentor. What we end up with are long lines of professionals with constants connecting them despite vast amounts of variation between them – mass development across the board where people branch out from each other, the library Borg cubes becoming stronger and more diverse.

Give us another sloppy metaphor about mentors, Andrew

So okay, it’s probably not the be-all end-all – there are other ways to develop. But this, to me, is the value and importance of mentors. Mentors take you from William Carlos Williams to the Beats, from a red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens to the banana king and Sal Paradise. You have Walt Whitman exploring America in Leaves of Grass and then you have Allen Ginsberg exploring the supermarket while following his ghost. It’s all the same, but it’s all so very different. And that’s what I hope I can get out of a mentor, and what I hope I could one day pass on as a mentor – this reciprocal relationship, one line of many running through libraries and myriad related workplaces and sectors, little bits and pieces of knowledge and useful attributes trickling here, there and everywhere. I think for many of us coming into the profession there’s a need to make our own mark and our own contributions, a desire to revolutionise and innovate. And why shouldn’t we? But that doesn’t mean that we should avoid mentors to our own detriment. It doesn’t boil down to a choice between either going it alone or passively receiving a whopping great hypodermic needle of wisdom, and it seems like you can have your cake and eat it. The one thing I am resolute about is being an active manatee mentee, a student who speaks up, a follower who questions. William Carlos Williams didn’t mould his mentees into carbon copies of himself and nor should we fear that the same will happen to us: Williams’ various fledglings came to represent a light refracted through him, a multitude of unique new voices that had listened to his and now had something of their own to say.

Knowledge is light, mentors are prisms, the result is happy rainbow funtime. Obviously! Credit to refeia, Flickr.

#CPD23 Thing 10 – Routes Into Librarianship

I recently went to the amazing Out of This World exhibition at the British Library. It looks at science fiction texts and how they fit into our past, our present, and our future – the TARDIS sits comfortably next to a looping video of Margaret Atwood, while around the corner the Brontes cook up distant fantastical lands and Asimov considers the laws of robotics. It’s a nerdy feast for the mind, and I highly recommend you pop by before it closes in September.

Steampunk K-9! Credit to Loz Flowers, Flickr.

As we were leaving, having been slightly stressed in the week preceding our visit, my partner asked if I felt better now that I was “at the mothership.” And it’s interesting, because yes, I did, I felt a lot better and I got to touch a TARDIS and listen to robots tell me about their fictional counterparts. But it’s a slow journey up that tractor beam to the mothership, and much like the way The Doctor experiences time, it’s all wibbly wobbly and the journey never ends, because sometimes you’re wet behind the ears and sometimes you’re an old pro, but not necessarily in that order and not necessarily for long.

(that is a terrible paragraph, I’m sorry, I just wanted to mention that exhibition)

Anyway. My experience so far? The indulgent thing would be to go back to when I was but a rugrat with a penchant for Birdseye potato waffles and a moth-eaten stuffed toy called Doggie. And I am indulgent (they call me The Teal Deer)! But I’ll reign it in and do little more than remind you of my LGBT Pride post where I discussed how inspirational libraries were to me as a teen. Prior to that I remember going to the Whitfield library in Dundee at the weekend with my granny Beulah, grabbing books on things like Norse mythology, then heading home with her to have a piecey, her legendary lentil soup and an iced biscuit. Amazing.

And then I moped about in libraries as an angsty teen (see Albert Camus, Sylvia Plath) before heading off to uni.

TV shows are never the same once they go to college

My undergraduate degree was in American Studies, undertaken at the University of Hull. It’s never dull in ‘Ull, and I took an awesome array of classes covering American presidency, Native American spoken literature, sci-fi movies, the growth of the American West, immigrant literatures, postmodern architecture…the American Studies department in Hull is just swell. I still keep in touch and I miss the course.

During my time studying, I spent a year in Seattle at the University of Washington. Simply put, UW is sort of like dying a very pleasant death and appearing on a higher spiritual plane where they serve coffee all over campus and the professors are your best pals (and meet with you in coffee shops to discuss George Saunders and Brass Eye) and the buildings are beautiful and the libraries are so brilliant that all you can do is sigh over and over again, wide eyed and munching on cheap U-District teriyaki and slurping bubble tea.

I miss this. So much. Credit to theloneconspirator, Flickr.

What stands out to me about my experience, and what partly inspired me on my way to librarianship, was the difference between the library services in Hull and Seattle. Hull’s library was great, and it had a strong history (Philip Larkin was the librarian for a while). Its initials were rude (the Brynmor Jones library). And its opening hours served me fine. But UW’s libraries were astounding – beautiful buildings with neverending stock, available computers (!), and a great wireless printing service (you could send to print from your dorm!). Your ‘Husky card’ covered dining plans, entrance to dorms, library services, printing services. Everything was seamless, and I’ll admit that this was when I became a midnight library dweeb, sitting in a study carrel watching Korean movies for class while sipping Tully’s coffee. Fancy!

The one thing I never took advantage of? Actual librarians. I loved self-service and I wasn’t even aware of what enquiry desks and academic librarians could do for me. I do wonder how much easier my experience would have been had I actually used the library to its fullest potential, but I like to look on the bright side – my ignorance as an undergrad is a constant reminder of how underused academic libraries are by many students.

Post-graduation blues

After graduation I felt quite lost. I hadn’t taken advantage of the student union job shop’s dwindling hours and resources, and I wasn’t entirely sure where I would go. I moved back home while I conducted endless unsuccessful job searches: copy writing, administrative work, the kind of desk work a humanities graduate might gravitate to when they’re not really engaging with anything. Eventually I cracked and realised I needed employment – any employment – to fill the time, feel vaguely useful, and look pro-active. To the shops!

"It's got jasmine and ylang-ylang in it, which makes it well good, innit." (from banger1977 on Flickr)

Swallowing my pride, I spent about 9 months as a sales assistant with a well-known company that sells smelly things. I continued the job search, but for a while I enjoyed the work I was doing and liked interacting with the public. Eventually retail wore me down, however. I couldn’t happily take part in such aggressive selling of luxury goods, and besides that the smells were giving me headaches and the glitter was getting in my eyes. I still like some of the products, but I didn’t like people recognising my workplace when I was nearby because I smelled so strongly of it. Things got worse and I entered…my darkplace.

I won’t say it wasn’t a useful bit of work. It was high pressure, especially during holidays, and the level of customer service was expected to be of the highest quality. You had to engage with customers and, because of the niche that the store catered to, build relationships and ensure that customers felt the value of your input. To an extent, it was the kind of work that could segue quite well into a customer services role in libraries.

Apparently I still have a faint smell of the shop to me.

In which Andrew gets on with it

I did try to get some library experience. I ‘d been trying all year. The situation not being as severe as it is now, there wasn’t even any voluntary work going in my area and I was turned away by public and academic libraries alike. Not to be dispirited, I decided to apply for graduate traineeships regardless of my work experience, hoping that my enthusiasm, skill set and attributes would get my foot in the door. And what else did I have to lose? I wanted a genuine vocation and I wanted it bad, and having lingered on the prospects.ac.uk pages for librarianship jobs over the years it just made sense. I loved libraries, though what I thought a library was then might not have been anything like what I think a library is now.

The first place I applied to gave me an interview, though I kept up with the applications elsewhere and kept an open mind. That said, I was fairly sure that if I was offered a job I would take it in the first instance. I hopped on the train down to Northampton in my good suit, sifting through notes about the university, about current events in the academic sector and in libraries, and about some of the projects going on at the institution. I also remember my life being so hurried and manic that week that my lunch on the train was a peanut butter and banana tortilla wrap. Truly the food of champions.

The interview, in my mind, went abominably. Pressed about answers and discussing things that seemed alien to me, the one thing I now remember is of the painting of a firing squad hanging behind the panel. Nevertheless, 30 minutes later, as I was getting back to the train station forlorn and ready to start the search anew, I got a call offering me the job and promptly went mental in public. The moral is “do your research”. Or perhaps it’s “when asked what you’d do if the network went down, say you’d panic, then laugh like it ain’t nothin’ but a thang”.

My life got flipped, turned upside down. Credit: Sarah Murray, Flickr.

It feels like that was just yesterday – timey wimey speedy weedy! – but over the past year I’ve achieved so much and laid so many career foundations that it’s as though my life had barely begun prior to my graduate trainee post. It’s not until I sit down and write this out that I realise there was life before working in libraries, and I’m still a newbie!

I wholeheartedly recommend this route for anyone looking to become a librarian (though I’d be quick to add that the routes into libraries are myriad, as this Thing has proven across the board). Speaking with other trainees throughout the year, it’s been noticeable that some traineeships are more varied than others, but most seem utterly fantastic. I’ve been lucky to have been stretched and put into a very delicate HE environment undergoing a lot of changes under a lot of stress, but trainees elsewhere have been equally lucky to have entirely different experiences in libraries facing different problems. Unfortunately the trainee post at my institution is gone for the time being, lost in budget cuts, so in its place I can point you towards the great network of trainees at the University of Cambridge if you’re looking at this option (I’ve visited them and they’re switched on and loved up with their libraries, it’s true, certifiable!). The beauty of the CILIP trainee scheme is in its variety of posts, though, so it’s best to keep your eyes peeled and consult the CILIP website: think about where you’ll feel comfortable, where you’ll feel challenged, and where you’ll be useful. It doesn’t need to be representative of what you want to do forever, though – there’s always wiggle room. Plenty of it!

The role itself? In my experience it is far from a passive trainee role, so don’t expect a cushy ride. I get experience of the front line help desk, of the enquiry desk (we’re an open office – terror!), cat and class, repositories, taking stock of donations, the Archive, marketing and promotions…the possibilities are endless. Another thing that I think is vital when deciding where to do your traineeship is to assess the opportunities it offers for getting out of the office and going on visits – Northampton’s greatest value, to my mind, has been its willingness to send me on visits (HE, FE, a hospital, a prison, public libraries) and to conferences, including big scary affairs such as LILAC. It’s in keeping with how many library and information workers will readily accept you into the fold regardless of your level of expertise, and it’s been exactly the kind of heartening reception I’ve needed to chivvy me on towards the next step.

CILIP Accredited Masters of the Libraryverse

The next step for me will be to complete the MA Library & Information Studies at UCL, starting in September/October of this year. I’ll be in good company – several other CPD23 participants are going to be on the course, and as more people speak up and say hello, it becomes obvious that once again if you fill a room with library folk they’re likely to have had vastly different experiences. I’m hugely excited to get to know everyone and to get going with the course – so much so that I already have some of the recommended reading out on loan from a library up here! I’ve yet to have a proper look though (I’m too ‘busy’ with Donna Tartt – trashy goodness).

I’ve heard a lot of people suggest it’s just a piece of paper, or an expensive guild membership, but I’d like to think it’s what you make of it. I’m viewing it as more than a series of classes and assignments and seeing it as a way to exchange ideas with peers, a way to get voluntary experience and join in with all manner of things. I won’t lie – I’m looking forward to being a student again too! But I’m trying to see it as a fuller experience, an important year rather than an important course. I have high hopes for the program too, though.

We we we so excited about UCL. Credit: SomeDriftwood, Flickr.

The (not so) final front ear

Wait else awaits me? One of my colleagues has recently sent off a very large package containing a very large folder that she’s submitting as part of the chartership process. Before it hit the mailbox, I asked to have a leaf through it and see what awaited me. The answer is “a lot more work and a lot more reflective practice.” It’s not called continuing professional development for nothing. A lot about chartership is still a bit of a mystery to me, but what has become clear – from my poking about and from some wonderful commenters – is that this is not a career where there is an end point or damning stagnation. It is, as I said, wibbly wobbly, and it throws you about a lot. It really can be a continuous journey, and have I mentioned how much I like hiking and wandering? If librarians are after a new slogan, I might recommend “librarians: intellectual wanderers.”

#CPD23 Thing 9: Evernote

Or, ‘How I learned to stop worrying and love an elephant.’

Evernote is the business. It is the dog’s proverbials. But it really only comes into its own for me with the smartphone app, which unlocks a whole load of interesting features that make the service so flexible and multi-use that I delve into it for almost anything. I think of Evernote as I might think about my fondest of notebooks and journals, except I can speak into the Evernote elephant’s ear or show it a picture and it remembers it (and more).

What do I use Evernote for? A mix of personal and professional things, with a few notebooks set up to organise things quite nicely. I have a notebook where I add on-the-fly ideas for this blog and for the CPD23 program. I have a notebook for household memos. I have a notebook for work musings and the little things I need to keep track of around the library during the day. I also have a recipes notebook which is utterly fabulous, an easily accessible cookbook on my phone. And I can share all of these notes and notebooks with interested parties!

I cannot wait to make these chicken wings.

But as I’m coming late to this Thing I’ll focus on a few less used features that I think are really nifty.

Snapshots

You’d think this wasn’t hugely beneficial, but it is! Evernote for iPhone and Android allows you to take a picture that is instantly uploaded to the notebook of your choice. I’ve used this recently to document some problems with our flat so that we know what needs fixing and have picture evidence of damage. The shots went into a neat little folder which I’ve then shared with other relevant parties and downloaded to my hard drive at my convenience.

There’s more to this feature than that, though. Evernote snapshots are text-searchable. As in you can take a photo of a block of text – a handout at a conference, say – and if you search through your notes for a keyword included in that block of text, the photo will be pulled up. I’ve tested this out a few times and it’s generally accurate with printed text (with a few fonts and pages confusing it somewhat), and often accurate with handwriting too. Examples, you say?

An Evernote snapshot of a page from the Research Information Network's Annual Report. Joy!

This highlighted the problems of the search as it currently stands. A search for “SHEDL” or “impact” was fruitful, but any smaller text yielded no results – too small? Bad font? Bad colour? Either way, it’s handy enough that you can search for a few key words and then add tags to improve your search results when you come looking for the shot later on down the line.

My wonky, tired handwriting in Evernote.

“Example” and “handwriting” brought this up – “wonky” did not, though I suspect my looped ‘k’ and incomplete ‘o’ are the problem here. I also wrote with more clarity and with more of a childish print than I might usually, and I removed my slant. It’s not ideal! But it is useful and reflects technologies that are no doubt improving.

And because your photos are generally text-searchable, the idea of taking photo memos becomes so much more palatable. Photographing a set of timetables, or a recipe from a magazine, or a handout in a seminar gains far more use when you can quite easily find these photo memos at the drop of a hat by searching not only for their tags but within any text present in the photos themselves. It may not be an indispensable feature and it may not be perfect, but it’s definite added value and it’s something that I’m already taking advantage of.

Evernote as a voice recorder

When you have Evernote on your phone, you can click on the delightful microphone icon in the widget and record a memo (this is also an option when you go into the app to add a new note). There are limitations – you can only upload a certain amount of data each month unless you go pro, and pictures and audio files chew into this considerably. That said, I can foresee this being hugely useful for recording important snippets of lectures, memos to myself, announcements, and meetings. It’s basic and it’s no professional voice recorder, but given that it’s free I can hardly complain.

What next?

Without a doubt, Evernote is one of my most used apps. Remember when you used to write short notes on your phone? Just me? Well this makes making those notes worthwhile, and it ties together all of your random little thoughts across multiple machines.

A couple of other apps that make use of Evernote have caught my eye, so I’d quite fancy playing around with them. The first is StudyBlue, a web app that allows you to turn your Evernote notes into flash cards and study aids – this could be very useful at library school come October, and because you can share your notes it could have collaborative study purposes too. The second is yaM (“yet another meeting”), a tool for planning and holding meetings where participants can add to the agenda and upload files – any of these changes are then pushed into other participants’ Evernote accounts.

Have you used either of these tools with Evernote? How did you find them? What other uses have you found for Evernote?

And finally, because elephants make me think of Rolos, here are some Rolo Sticks.

Rolo sticks! Sticks! That are Rolos! By Like_the_Grand_Canyon on Flickr.