A real mish-mash of miscellany, this blog post; all sorts of little things to report. Firstly, as part of a general improvement on the content of my website, I’ve added some stuff about the New Professionals Conference, CILIP Graduate Day, some CILIP Copyright Courses and HERON digitisation conferences to the Events page, and a couple of articles to the Papers & Presentations page.
The first is something which I’ve been meaning to add for ages – a PDF of my first ever publication, way back in 2006 when I was a fresh-faced young library person (literally fresh-faced – seeing the article again I was shocked to see it had the same picture of me as I have up on my site. I really must update the latter to show me gnarled and old as I am today). It is for the 2006/07 edition of Propsects’ (the careers organisation) Postgrad magazine, and all about how I worked during my first MA, the importance of getting work-experience as well as a qualification, and that sort of thing – little did I know that about a month later, I’d get a different job in the library and eventually conclude I needed to embark upon yet more post-graduate study to get an MSc as well. The article can be found at the bottom of the Papers page on my site.
The second article is about the Library Routes Project, as a sort of companion piece to Woodsiegirl’s Gazette article. It centres around this idea of whether anyone wanting to grow up working in libraries would find the job anything like they imagined it when they were kids, or whether the fast changing face of modern librarianship would have rendered it fairly unrecognisable in the interim period. It’s the top article on the Papers page. Thank you to Joel Kerry for inviting me to write it.
Also on the subject of adding, there’s been a Frippery page on my blog for a short while which I’ve not got around to telling anyone about yet – its purpose is to provide an outlet for stuff I want to say but which I’d feel guilty clogging up the syndicated feed with, so if anyone wants to read some Info-Pro related frippery they can do so by clicking the link in the Other Pages on the Blog section on the right of the blog's homepage or, because I want to cater for your every need, by clicking here. The current month’s post is about the absolutely crazy-hard job-at-Google Interview questions which were in the press recently, and what the library equivalents might be…
And finally, LinkedIn. Can anyone tell me a bit more about what’s going on there? Whenever you type an Information Professional’s name into Google, their LinkedIn profile always seems to be right near the top. It’s obviously a popular site, with good search-engine rankings, and lots of Info Pros signing up to it. But it looks fairly rubbish (as in, aesthetically it’s not up to the standards you might expect), and I’m not sure exactly what it is for. Is it a sort of purely professional social networking thing? Well okay I do know that’s basically what it is, but has anyone got anything positive out of it? I’d love to know more.
That's it for now!
- thewikiman