Connecting Librarian

Its my fourth anniversary of blogging, my blogiversary.  On the 29th July 2005, I posted my first entry to Connecting Librarian, at that time at blogger.com.  Four years later and wow, what a ride!

I’ve been thinking about blogging for a while now.  Even considered stopping altogether, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.  Although I’m not blogging as regularly, I still feel I have something to say and that this is one of the places I can say it.

Some of the reasons I have been blogging less, are that I am twittering more (most days and for most of the day usually) and I have been more writing away from the online, in the form of conference papers and articles, as well as continuing to do book reviews for ALJ.  I have 1 article and 2 conference papers on the go at present too.

I’m feeling less pressure to blog too, probably because of my increased presence on Twitter and Facebook – now I try to blog at least once a month, if not once a fortnight, but only when I have something to say, not just for the sake of it. Maybe I’m finally maturing as a blogger.

And just when I think about blogging less, I find the content to do 3 blog posts in 4 days.  Figures!

I’m far from being the only one thinking about how blogging is changing.  Iris Jastram (Pegasus Librarian) in her post The ebb and flow of my online communities talks about how, between chat rooms, Twitter and her blog, she is having trouble finding her centre.  I can relate to that.

Connecting Librarian was intended to be the centre of my online presence, but its now one of three main locations you will find me.  Its now becoming where I do my deeper thinking, whilst Twitter is where I have more of my interactions and conversations and Facebook is mostly just about connections.  Are others experiencing the same?

Meredith Farkas (Information Wants to be Free) in her post Whither blogging and the library blogosphere? laments what has happened to blogging in the face of micro-blogging.  I too miss the depth of content that comes with blogging and I have noticed a marked decrease in the frequency of blog posts arriving in my RSS reader.  On the other hand however, I love the immediacy and the contact that micro-blogging brings.

I twitter and then feed my twitters through to my Facebook status.  When I write a blog post, I twitter that.  So a blog post can be seen by people who read my blog, who follow me on Twitter or who have friended me on Facebook.  It becomes even more interesting when you start getting comments back on a blog post at each of these places as well.  So where is my centre?

I think that for now, my centre is Twitter – that’s where I spend most of my time in terms of an online presence, but I am not giving up my blog.  I still have many things to share and this is the ideal forum for that. Facebook is just another means of spreading the news from the first two and connecting with people that I can’t connect to otherwise.

So Happy Blogiversary to me and thanks to all my blog subscribers and readers. I am still amazed that you are following me and am grateful that you do.  Be reassured that there will still be blog posts, in the next year, although maybe not as often as I have in the past. I still want to blog though because I am still learning and discovering and find I still want to share all that I do, whilst “connecting new ideas and technologies with library service”.

Today, July 27th 2009, was the 2nd Annual Library Day in the Life and as it was actually one of my work days, I thought why not.  I am not going to give you the minutae of my day from waking to sleep, one because I can’t remember the details of this morning and two because the day’s not over and I’m not going to stay up that late… (well that’s the plan anyway).

Before I begin, I am an Information Librarian for a public library service in Australia and on Mondays I work at our Headquarters, doing regional type work.  Usually that is focused on the library’s virtual services, but my manager left 2 weeks ago, so today was a little bit different to normal.

My desk is at bottom left

So what did I get up to at work today – Monday 27th July 2009.

8.20am

• Answered email queries received from our users – mostly what’s my PIN, how do I get this item etc.  They seem to save them all up for first thing Monday morning.

8.40am

• Checked RSS feeds and printed off articles I was to focus on later.
• Read memos.

8.45am

• Some quick catalogue changes to a few old reference books. Helps to keep the hand in.

8.50am

• Adding websites to delicious for future reference. Some for website development, some for proposed research, some for ammunition.

9.00am

• Adding events to our Google calendar – love how easy it is, although wish it would let me incorporate some HTML, eg. links.
• Creating and adding slides promoting said events to our website – this is such a fun thing to do, although it can be time consuming.
• Removing old slides – nothing lasts forever.

9.30am

• Dealing with my former managers mail – got a little backlogged
• Preparing handouts for this week’s eBay seminar

10.00am

• Touring the rearranged floor plan of the library branch to which our HQ is attached – looks great and is a huge functional improvement.

10.10am

• Reference stock work, dealing with superseded editions and making reallocations and withdrawing old stock.

10.50am

• Morning tea time and there is food for morning tea – leftover from working bee to rearrange branch – promised to be good with my food intake today, so didn’t take advantage of it.

11.05am

• Killed the shredder whilst disposing of old outdated documents. Despite assistance and a range of tools, were unable to resuscitate it. Have to call in a specialist.

11.35am

• Gathering feedback forms from Information Services seminars for evaluation of this year’s programs.  Need to make recommendations for next year’s programs to management team meeting in a few weeks.

11.45am

• Quick look at SOPAC in action.  Love how it looks and what it can do, don’t know if we will be able to implement it.

11.55am

• Touched base with my next level up manager – checking that bases are covered and that current projects are moving along OK.

12.35pm

• Out for lunch with partners in crime, former manager and current desk side buddy. Good time catching up with what manager has been up to and catching her up on the gossip (there wasn’t any….)  Succumbed to chocolate mousse for dessert – diet slipped a little there.

1.30pm

• More email information queries, including a doozy that took a bit of time.  Very enjoyable to be able to get my teeth into something a bit more solid.

3.00pm

• Meeting with senior managers about proposed blog survey.  Going to research how and why our users do or don’t use our blogs.

3.30pm

• Catch up on 3 sets of emails, only one of them directly mine.

3.45 til 5.00pm

• Website updating. Including adding new booklists content, linking in to our catalougue, fixing spelling and grammatical errors and more.
• Find one of the holds my husband has placed, in amongst the 27 boxes of them that have just arrived at HQ.
• Make notes to send a few emails when I get home and have been able to think about some of the things that have come up during the day or after I have checked my calendar.

5.05pm

• Pack everything up and head towards home and a whole different list of things to do and done.

Just another day in the life of this Information Librarian. Hope you had a good one.

I highly recommend you check out some other Library Day in the Life stories as well and maybe think about adding your own at some stage.

I am about to celebrate 4 years of Connecting Librarian and its interesting that it is coinciding with an interesting time in my life, when my professional and personal balances are concerned.

Since I attended the Aurora Leadership Institute in February this year, I have been thinking more seriously about my profession and where I want to go with it. I absolutely love being a librarian and love my job. I also love my family with all my being. I have been able to balance these two passions quite successfully by working part-time for the past ten years – since my eldest was born.

But now I find I want to do more with my profession. Not that I have been quiet or anything (lol). I have presented at lots of seminars, a few conferences and am starting to get a few things published and I’m enjoying all that immensely and have made a lot of professional contacts and good friends out of that. But that’s feeling like its not enough anymore. I want to do more as a librarian, see if I can make more of an impact on our profession and in a library service and I can’t do that as well as I would like, working part-time at a lower middle-management level position. So that means going back to full-time work and all the impacts that would have on me and my family.

I love what I do, let’s make that clear. So I guess it seems a bit selfish to want more. Maybe that’s one of my struggles.

The other is my family, in particular my kids. I made a decision after Aurora that I would start looking for full-time employment, at a more senior level in 2010. That would give my husband and I time to adjust to the idea and for me to help get the kids ready for the change. The problem is that they’re already keen for the change (although I’m sure they don’t understand all the implications), its me that’s struggling with the concept.

We have been getting the kids ready by letting them take some more responsibility – in the main, in getting to and from school by themselves.  When I don’t work, I had been dropping them and collecting them from school – they in now doing that for themselves (with a lot of checks and balances in place of course – I’m still a neurotic mother ).  They are loving it. They keep asking me when they can go to the next step.

I’m the one who is holding back, because I’m going to miss this so much.  I know its going to change anyway as they grow older and become more independent, but I find that I am trying to hold onto this moment in their lives as long as possible. Again, what you would expect from a mother, but not what I would have expected of myself.

Although I have the greatest respect for stay-at-home mum’s, I knew early on that it wasn’t something I could do. By the time I had been home 6 months with my newborns, I was going stir crazy.  Working part-time has given me the best of both worlds and allowed me to be a better mother as a result. For that I am truly grateful, to both my husband  and my workplace for giving me the opportunity to do this.

So 10 years on, its time for a change and time to deal with all the struggles it entails. I know I can make a difference in my profession and I know there will be differences at home, I just hope that we can all adapt to it as we have done in other situations before.

Anyway, as ever, this blog has been a place to help me get my thoughts straight on something I have been mulling over.  If you have gone through a similar process, I would love to hear how you have managed it and whether it has worked out for you and your family – both personally and professionally. An encouragement or a caution if you please – either way they would be much appreciated.

In the first post, I revisited how we came to be building a new website and how we ended up with Drupal. And now to be continued ………

Initially learning Drupal was harder than I thought it would be. We couldn’t get our heads around how it worked, as it was so different to anything we had ever used before. We knew it would be challenging, particularly in choosing Drupal over Joomla, as it was known to be so. However, there were some frustrating moments early on, whilst we struggled with unfamiliar concepts.

Our plans to learn all about Drupal first and then build the website once we had, soon changed as we continued to struggle with the unfamiliar. In the end, we started transfering content over and learnt how to do things as we did so. When we came across something we didn’t understand, we looked for answers, in the books we had, on the Drupal forums, on other websites and on the odd occasion, from our ISP and more often than not, from my husband who has done work with Drupal.

As the new site continued to build, we became more comfortable with everything, the way Drupal was structured, how it all fit together and how to get everything working the way we wanted it to.

Of course, the things we wanted the most, the bling to make it all look lovely and appealing, were the hardest things to get working. It took weeks and trying out different methods and modules before we succeeded with the first of our trilogy of stumbling blocks – the Upcoming Events. Our new books images and events slideshow were the next and once we had the first, the second followed quickly. Our biggest struggle there was working out how Drupal works with images – the answer there: it doesn’t do it very well.

So anyway, it took 22 weeks from installation of Drupal on our web server to the point where we had a website ready for testing. We posted to the existing website, asking for users to check it the new website and provide us with feedback.

Our users were wonderful, happily giving us feedback, all which was constructive, encouraging and reaffirming of what we had built for them. Staff were also supportive and gave us some great suggestions and input. After a few weeks of leaving ourselves open to these responses, we closed down the test site and got ready for the official launch.

In Library Week 2009, we quietly launched our new website, with little fanfare (allowing for Murphy’s law of course) but with great results. We have continued to receive positive feedback from our users and as expected, have continued to refine and tweak the new site. There are still some bugs to be ironed out and there is a continual update process required with Drupal, but its not onerous.

Next step is to add some more features and to get some other staff editing and adding more content to the site. We will also do some more investigation into how the website is being used and by whom.

It’s been a challenge and an awesome learning process, which at times has been so incredibly frustrating, but ultimately very rewarding. Its not been easy, but with the resources we were able to find – print, personal and online, we have done it. A very satisfying result all round.