Connecting Librarian

Its my 3rd blogaversary and I’ve been trying to think about what to post about to celebrate and decided its a good time to review the past 12 months of professional activity.  So here’s what I consider are my major achievements professionally, both inside and outside of work.  This is more for me I guess, to remind myself what I have been doing that has kept me so busy and to encourage me in the year ahead.  I don’t know if you will get anything out of it, but I hope you do.  I won’t presume however, to say what it will be.

This is my 176th post, so things were a bit quieter in the past year, mainly because other things were happening to occupy my time and engage my attention.  Comments are up to 270 for the three years and I thank all my commenters for leaving them. They are encouraging and sometimes thought-provoking and knowing how busy we all are, I appreciate the time you took.

So in the last year, I have given 6 presentations, ranging from 10 minutes to 6 hours in length (the 6 hours was a day long masterclass), of which 2 presentations were at conferences (only 1 of which I attended the whole time), I have written a chapter for a book which has now been published, have had a journal article and 2 other conference papers accepted, which will be published and presented in the forthcoming year.

I attended the VALA conference and Michael Stephen’s Hyperlinked Library seminars, listened to countless podcasts, read countless journal articles and even more blog posts.  Its amazing my head hasn’t exploded from all the information I have taken in and yet it is still only a drop in the ocean of what’s out there, even in my own profession.

In the past year I have written 52 blog posts for this blog, as well as blogging at Invisible Ink (nowhere near as prolifically) and at 2 of my library’s 3 blogs, one of them at least weekly.  So I get plenty of time to write and my confidence in presenting has improved dramatically.

At work I have helped 60 staff to being the Learning 2.0 program, I have created Google Maps for all our branches and mobile library stops, I have helped other library staff create and launch 2 new blogs, built up the team on our existing blog and written our library policy to support these endeavours.  I have done screencasts on using our catalogues, introduced a web poll, embedded a search box and direct account login to all our library webpages, all whilst doing minor tweaks and regular updates on our badly needing an update website (which will now happen in this coming year).

So its been an awesome and life changing year.  If you had told me, even a year ago that I would feel comfortable presenting, I would have laughed at you.  What a difference a year makes.  (not that presenting will ever be easy, lol)  I feel like I have developed as more of a professional librarian, rather than just a librarian doing a particular job.  I am proud of that distinction, just as I am proud to be a librarian and proud of the job I have done for my library.

The coming year brings two conference presentations, the publication of my journal article and I am part of the organising committee for the VALA 2010 conference.  And that just the things I know of.  Its a good time to be a librarian and I’m going to make the most of every opportunity that comes my way - I’m having too much fun to be doing anything else!

This week its web-based apps and although the program directed us to use Zoho writer, I took the option of going with Google Docs instead. The reason? I have been having enough trouble keeping up with all the various logins and passwords, but with Google Docs I use the same login and password for Blogger and Gmail. One less login and I still get the same experience.
So what can it do? All the usual word processing stuff as you can see!

I like the idea of having versions, so that if you need to revert to an earlier version (and I know I wish I had been able to in the past) - You Can!

Now its 5 days later and I have just come back to editing the text. Really cool! I could get to like this!

Now before I upload this to my blog from Google Docs (another cool feature), the other part of this exercise was to examine an award winning Web 2.0 tool. I chose craigslist - which I knew of but didn’t know enough about.

craigslist describes itself as “Local classifieds and forums for 450 cities worldwide - community moderated, and largely free.” It started as a small, free not-for-profit site, but is now 25% owned by Amazon and although definitely for profit, much of the site is still free. Although very heavily US and Europe centric, it does have an Australian arm, with centres for Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. On craigslist you can buy and sell goods, find a job and contribute to or read forums (over 70 of them). The traffic across all city points of craiglist is phenomenal, but coming from Melbourne, it is still pretty small at present with only 827 postings at the time of this entry. Still, now that it has a presence in our fair city and once people realise it, I am sure that it will expand here as it has overseas, at a phenomenal rate.

Back to Web apps and amazingly my Google Docs post on this topic published to my blog seamlessly. Very impressive - I’ll have to keep this in mind when blogging at conferences etc.