I have enrolled onto the Framework Five as a fun way to do CPD, and although I wasn't sure about the time commitment, I'll see how far I get.
Your task for Thing 1 is to write a short, reflective paragraph on what informs, and contributes to, information literacy in your context.
Think about some of the types of information you deal with as part of your job. This could be metadata, student information, statistics on anything from borrowing to social media, budgets, lists of holdings, palaeographical information, etc. Try to narrow your thinking down to a specific information-based task that you feel particularly fluent in or confident about.
I thought about what I felt most confident about, and decided cataloguing was a good subject for me. I started brainstorming where I picked up all my cataloguing information, and it started to become quite a long list! Initially, I learnt on the job when I first started in the Fitzwilliam Museum Reference Library, then I went on half a dozen courses run at the University Library. The training uses a variety of resources, which do inform what I do - using Library of Congress Subject Headings, for example, or making sure that the catalogue meets minimum ISBD requirements involves knowing what those requirements are. I've also attended training run by other groups for specific types of resource - exhibition catalogues, maps and music are all treated differently, for example. And finally I had to learn the theory behind cataloguing as part of my library degree (and did an exercise in cataloguing computer games, which was a lot of fun).
But the learning only begins with the formal training, and my cataloguing now looks very different from the cataloguing I did when I first started, even after I'd completed this training. Since then, new guidelines and specifications have been rolled out, and new software has been made available (and obsolete software has been retired). I've made new connections with relevant communities - the Cataloguers' Forum is one, and talking to colleagues and volunteers about our work means we share information with each other. Twitter is a helpful tool to extend communities of practice beyond the immediate workplace, and can lead to useful advice and articles - for example although I'd learnt that there were limitations to the world view espoused in Dewey and LC classification schedules, the problematic language still used by these world views was something I learnt much more about through the Twittersphere. And finally, my cataloguing is informed by the people I catalogue for: the readers who want to access the books I'm cataloguing. If they can't find something, then the record hasn't served its purpose.
Now write a short paragraph on how fluency in this activity is defined, and where that definition emerged from. Think about whether fluency in this activity has changed, why it changed, and how you incorporated those changes into your practice. Consider too the community within which you developed your fluency with that activity, and if and how it influenced you.
So my fluency in cataloguing is going to be different from that of someone who is a cataloguer, I suspect, but there are various ways I think fluency is defined, again some formal and some not so formal. Formal ones include the software we use to catalogue, which won't save a record if it thinks it's not correct, or will flash up warnings of varying degrees of severity (some let you save a record, some don't). Then there's also the bibcheck that the UL runs to check some of the machine-readable data. Fluency changed dramatically for many of us when we switched from one library management system to another and had to learn new ways of working, and that was where I saw the community of librarians change too, to become more collaborative rather than hierarchical - as we were all finding our feet some of us were finding workarounds to solve problems instead of waiting for the fix from 'on high', and sharing these tips, sometimes upwards as well as across.
That's my reflection on Thing 1 - hope I've managed it correctly!
Thing 1: What is Information Literacy?
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| magnifying glass Image by geralt CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay |
I thought about what I felt most confident about, and decided cataloguing was a good subject for me. I started brainstorming where I picked up all my cataloguing information, and it started to become quite a long list! Initially, I learnt on the job when I first started in the Fitzwilliam Museum Reference Library, then I went on half a dozen courses run at the University Library. The training uses a variety of resources, which do inform what I do - using Library of Congress Subject Headings, for example, or making sure that the catalogue meets minimum ISBD requirements involves knowing what those requirements are. I've also attended training run by other groups for specific types of resource - exhibition catalogues, maps and music are all treated differently, for example. And finally I had to learn the theory behind cataloguing as part of my library degree (and did an exercise in cataloguing computer games, which was a lot of fun).
But the learning only begins with the formal training, and my cataloguing now looks very different from the cataloguing I did when I first started, even after I'd completed this training. Since then, new guidelines and specifications have been rolled out, and new software has been made available (and obsolete software has been retired). I've made new connections with relevant communities - the Cataloguers' Forum is one, and talking to colleagues and volunteers about our work means we share information with each other. Twitter is a helpful tool to extend communities of practice beyond the immediate workplace, and can lead to useful advice and articles - for example although I'd learnt that there were limitations to the world view espoused in Dewey and LC classification schedules, the problematic language still used by these world views was something I learnt much more about through the Twittersphere. And finally, my cataloguing is informed by the people I catalogue for: the readers who want to access the books I'm cataloguing. If they can't find something, then the record hasn't served its purpose.
Now write a short paragraph on how fluency in this activity is defined, and where that definition emerged from. Think about whether fluency in this activity has changed, why it changed, and how you incorporated those changes into your practice. Consider too the community within which you developed your fluency with that activity, and if and how it influenced you.
So my fluency in cataloguing is going to be different from that of someone who is a cataloguer, I suspect, but there are various ways I think fluency is defined, again some formal and some not so formal. Formal ones include the software we use to catalogue, which won't save a record if it thinks it's not correct, or will flash up warnings of varying degrees of severity (some let you save a record, some don't). Then there's also the bibcheck that the UL runs to check some of the machine-readable data. Fluency changed dramatically for many of us when we switched from one library management system to another and had to learn new ways of working, and that was where I saw the community of librarians change too, to become more collaborative rather than hierarchical - as we were all finding our feet some of us were finding workarounds to solve problems instead of waiting for the fix from 'on high', and sharing these tips, sometimes upwards as well as across.
That's my reflection on Thing 1 - hope I've managed it correctly!
