Thing 9: it's easy with Evernote

At last a thing I can promote to the rest of my team at work!  When I first told my line manager I wanted to do cpd23 he asked me that if there were any 'Things' that I thought might be useful for the rest of the team to know about then I should demonstrate them in one of our fortnightly team meetings.  This is definitely one of them.  I have been using Evernote for a week now and I love it.  Before Evernote if I came across something interesting on the web I would 'printscreen' it and paste it into Word, email it to myself or save it in my internet explorer favourites.  However with Evernote I will be able to access all my saved searches in one place and from anywhere.  Over the next few weeks I am going to explore more of its functionality including emailing notes to my Evernote email address and accessing my notes via my phone. 

Thing 8: Google Calendar vs Outlook

Having failed to catch up with the Things since I got back from holiday I thought it might be better to skip Things 6 & 7 for now and go straight on to Thing 8 Google Calendar as there is something nice about the feeling that I am exploring these tools at the same time as everyone else.  I've spent more time this week reading other peoples blog entries thanks to the RSS feed bundle that I have subscribed to, and it seems fellow cpd23ers are split when it comes Google calendar: they either love it or hate it.  There are several re-occurring factors that influence this including:

• whether your place of work already uses an online shared calendar
• if you have a smart phone  
• if you prefer to use a paper diary/calendar

Where I work we use shared Outlook calendars, we have a shared 'site' calendar and I don't know what we would do without it!  It's primarily used for timetabling desk slots so it is therefore a way of recording everything everyone is doing: meetings, annual leave, staff training sessions or drop-in sessions for students.  Each person puts their initials and the activity on the calendar so that the person doing the timetable knows when each person is free to do a helpdesk slot.  I find it particularly useful when answering the telephone and the caller wants to speak to a particular member of staff - I can quickly bring up the calendar and see whether they are in a meeting or away on leave.  In addition to the site calendar we also share them on a team basis; I have access to my line manager's and he has access mine and the calendars belonging to the other members of our team.  See below for an example of a week view of the site calendar.

I don't use Outlook for personal appointments and instead tend to use a free paper academic diary we get given every year.  However I recently bought a smart phone and I think I may try using the 'private' option in Outlook to record personal appointments.


So where does this leave Google calendar?  I spent some time playing around with it and I like some of the extra features and gadgets it has.  However I'm not sure I want another thing to have to log into on top of using Outlook.  Nevertheless it is definitely something I will come back to if in the future I am in a job that doesn't make use of Outlook.




Home work this weekend:
1) Catch up with things 6 & 7
2) Create an account with LinkedIn and add basic information with a view to building up my profile slowly over the summer.

Thing 5: Reflective Practice

For Thing 5 I thought I would use the opportunity to reflect on a recent cpd25 event that I attended.  The event was held at Kings College London and was entitled: 'Supporting our users: current trends in academic liaison and outreach'.  The two presenters Michelle Blake and Nicola Wright, both from LSE, were clearly passionate about this topic. 

The session started with how the role of the subject librarian has developed over the years.  It was explained that a subject librarian was traditionally defined as someone who was a subject expert or specialist (and more often than not held a degree/post-graduate degree in that subject) who was primarily concerned with creating and building a physical collection to reflect the research/teaching being carried out in their institution.  In contrast the subject librarian of today has a much bigger communication role, including: being the point of contact for academics on all library/department issues, taking an active role in teaching and managing various 'relationships' both within the institution they work for and with outside stakeholders such as publishers and book suppliers.  This means if you are an aspiring subject librarian you must have excellent oral communication and presentation skills - something which I know I must work on!

Next we discussed what we call our subject librarians; it highlighted the vast range of job titles people have even though their roles are essentially the same.  This in turn emphasized the importance of being careful about what job titles we use.  For example, if you told a lay person that you were a Information Advisor, as we do in my institution, would they know you worked in a library?  Probably not.  So why do we insist on using it?  I feel that sometimes we seem too pre-occupied with our image; we need to be bold enough to state exactly what and who we are!  

In discussing the role of the subject librarian the presenters touched upon something I had come across before: the Future Libraries project.  It is a scenario-based strategic planning project with the aim of imaging how our academic libraries and the wider society might look in the year 2050.  The three scenarios discussed in the report were: Beehive, Walled Garden and Wild West.  You can find out more about the project here: http://www.futurelibraries.info/content  

Reflecting on the event as a whole has left me with some questions and things to think about:

• What value do subject librarians add to their organisation?  I am particularly interested to find out how other universities structure their subject staff; where I work we have a separate subject team dedicated to each faculty allowing specialist knowledge about the subject to be built up.  However another attendee at the event explained they have one liaison team who do this work.  It would be interesting to compare the services offered between these two types of structures.
• How will the role of subject librarian evolve in the future?  What will be the impact of new technology?
• The two presenters stressed the importance of telling people what you are doing and making them aware of what you can do for them, in other words, use every opportunity to market the service you offer and the skills you have.

This was the first cpd25 event that I have attended and I would recommend them to anyone wishing to share ideas and gain knowledge on a particular library practice/theme.  More about cpd25 can be found here: http://www.cpd25.ac.uk/About-Us/index.php 

Thing 4: Current Awareness

Twitter
As I mentioned at the end of my last post I have been meaning to join Twitter for ages and I have now finally signed up.  You can find me at @laurasletters.  However although I have managed to tweet a couple of times I find the interface confusing and it's not very intuitive to use; a work colleague who is an avid Twitter user has kindly agreed to give me some pointers this week so hopefully I will soon be wondering what I was so worried about. 


RSS feeds
This looks like a really useful tool although I'm a bit overwhelmed about the sheer number of items to read after I subscribed to the bundle of CPD23 participants.  I fear that I will keep hitting the 'mark as read' button and never actually have the time to read any of them.  I maybe need to set aside some time during the week (maybe when on the bus to work) to keep on top of this.  Another option may be to delete the bundle and instead build up slowly the blogs/websites that I want to follow.


Pushnote
I had not heard of Pushnote before and I am finding it hard to understand why you would want to use it!  I have decided not to join but I may be persuaded at a later date to sign-up if I come across fellow CPD23ers who have found it useful.

Thing 3: Personal Brand

I have been extremely busy this week after two weeks away: catching up with emails, attending a cpd25 training course, learning how to use our new library management system which goes 'live' next week and going on an organised Harry Potter walk in London in preparation for seeing the last film next week!  All of which I will write about soon when things have settled down a bit at work. 


As a consequence I have fallen behind on the 23 things programme but have lots of plans about how I want to re-brand my blog.  I feel my blog doesn't look very professional, so although it's colourful, the background picture of jellybeans will probably be the first thing I will want to change!  Instead I hope to add colour by uploading some pictures, I will also add my real name and a recent picture of myself and in addition I want to be more consistent with the fonts and style of headings used.  This will keep me busy for the next few days!


One of the activities for Thing 3 was to Google your name and look at the results.  I couldn't see anything relating to me on the first couple of pages which is not surprising since I have quite a common name; most of the hits were for an American actress who shares my name and an American author who has published a book called: 'Clever letters: fun ways to wiggle your words!' which I am definitely going to look up :)


I am looking forward to setting up a Twitter account for Thing 4 as I feel I should have done this a long time ago.