Tuesday 4 April 2017

CPD catch-up

I emailed our HR recently, because they were asking what courses and training I'd been doing. When I made the list of things I'd done/attended/learnt over the course of the last 15 months, it actually came to quite a lot. As in, nearly attachment-worthy-size!
I've done some stuff, I'm planning on doing more.
I guess you could say I've been pretty busy. To my utter delight, I've also been pretty organised about it. Turns out I'm not the best at Bullet Journaling, although I am the king of To-Do lists. I've got a bullet journal, and I take it everywhere. I don't use it for keeping appointments, or as a diary, and the idea of trying to keep track of my frequent targets is one which is slowly falling by the wayside (though it does force me to look back and say "no I really do have to do that someday...just not now"). But it's brilliant as a notebook, and I've found writing everything in there from meetings, courses, training, lectures, etc etc etc...it just keeps it all in the one place. I know damn well where my notes are now, and I don't have to look in one place for CPD notes, then in another for meetings (and hope that I've remembered right). And it's chronological, so I can just check the dates on the index, and list everything there. So I did.
Goals for the month: 1. Write a list of goals for the month.
Since the conference I haven't let the grass grown underneath my feet. First of all we presented to CLAG, then FDL and CCLF, about the conference, how it went, what went on behind the scenes, and our thoughts for the future. You won't be surprised to know we're already thinking about next year's conference, and how to make it even better than this year's! But in addition to this I've gone to two training sessions; one on fundraising for library projects, and one on writing engaging content for blogs (This is the bit where you're supposed to say "But why would you need that? You're entertaining already!" Guys? Helloo?), and I've just started a 4-part library carpentry workshop.
In addition to this (but completely non-work-related) I've just finished a 4-part session on sewing, run by our local children's centre. I must really like learning stuff!
I made these!
Fundraising for Library Projects was really interesting. We had talks from three people, one who works to raise funds for library projects at the UL, one who became a bit of an accidental fundraiser for King's College Library, and one who has to try and convince people to spend fortunes on a database which equates to a cost of nearly £800 per user! Each had some really interesting points to communicate. For me there were several take home messages, such as: come at the fundraising from the donors' point of view - their reasons for giving can be quite diverse and may not perfectly line up with why you're trying to raise the money, which means adapting your message to suit them. Another is to really consider whether the return on investment is worth the effort - there is a lot of failure involved, so is it worth you losing your time to fundraising efforts instead of spending it on your regular work? Also helpful was talking to the other attendees, who could share their experiences of fundraising and finding suitable projects. This was a great session, and I would recommend it if it's repeated.
Aligning aims with those of the donor is very important; I look forward to advancing and perpetuating humanistic inquiry with my digitisation project.
The other session I attended was Writing Engaging Content for the New UCM Blog. UCM is the umbrella which covers all the university museums and the Botanic Garden, and their blog is about to be relaunched. I thought there would be a lot I already knew, but there were some surprising gems I'd not thought about before, such as coming up with lots of titles in order to find the perfect one. It was interesting learning from someone who doesn't come from an academic background, as there are some practices prevalent (and useful) in academic blogs that she encouraged us to eschew for communicating on the UCM blog - such as citations, which I think are often necessary! Was it a good session? Well, yes, I guess. I have to admit I felt a bit flat when we shared our blogpost ideas - the course leader was very enthusiastic about most of them, saying things like "I definitely want to read this!" and "Please write that one!" - and when she got to me her response was "Can it be linked to anything else?" But there was another librarian there, and she told me how much she'd enjoyed the Cambridge Libraries Conference this year, so that cheered me up.
Apparently letters from Queen Mary aren't blog-worthy unless there's something more interesting they can be linked to.
So there's a lot to come. I'm going to be presenting a lightning talk at ARLIS in Dublin this July, which is so far out of my comfort zone I can't even see the zone anymore. I'll have to write that, then I still have IAML in Exeter (maybe), and Library Carpentry homework to do, and I've just sent out a survey to the staff here about what to put on our quick reference shelves - I was surprised (in a good way) by the number of responses! Maybe there's hope for UX in this library yet..

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