New Professionals

Building your professional reputation. Library adventures in Cape Town part 1

In October I was invited to South Africa to speak at LIASA 2013, the 15th annual Library and Information Association of South Africa conference. It was in the fabulous City of Cape Town and it was incredible; I just haven't had a chance to put my thoughts down in a blogpost until now. But I know not everyone is particularly interested in a 'here's what I did' type post so I've put that separately in Part 2. There's also a Part 3 to follow about the differences between UK conferences and international ones. I was asked to do three things at the conference - a marketing workshop (half a day on strategic marketing and half a day on emerging technologies), a session for the Higher Education Library Interest Group on induction / orientation here at the University of York Library (the presentation is here, although it doesn't make much sense without me talking over the top, I'm afraid), and a talk aimed primarily at new professionals on building your reputation and professional brand. It's a tiresomely controversial subject, this; what it comes down to for me is that people fairly new to the profession can sometimes worry about being some sort of super librarian and DOING ALL THE THINGS, but actually you don't have to be like this at all. You just have to get involved with the areas of librarianship which correspond to your goals in the profession. So the talk was about that, and about different ways to be part of the wider community.

Below is the talk: it consists of my slides, the audio of the talk (recorded from my iphone in my jacket pocket!) and a couple of pictures to look at while I talk about some things I wasn't intending to talk about, at the very start.

It was fun doing this talk, it was different to the normal things I do. The room was bigger - this is the first time, outside of the webinar environment, that I'd talked to several hundred people at once. Speaking to a room that size is very different to speaking to 30 people - my usual very conversational presentation style wouldn't have worked. Presenting is a bit like drawing a picture in that the further away the audience, the broader the strokes needed for the picture; the detail gets lost.

The atmosphere was different in SA that from conferences I've presented at in the UK, too - people were laid back, ready to laugh. I was one of only three international speakers so everyone was very welcoming. And also, this talk is a version of something I'd originally delivered at a New Professionals Day back in 2012 which was designed primarily to address an anxiety about branding I'd heard many new professionals express - an anxiety which, having arrived in South Africa and been at the conference for a couple of days already, I'd found to be largely absent! So I felt a bit like my talk didn't match my slides - certainly I was trying to manipulate the slides to tell a slightly different, more widely applicable story, as I went along. But anyway I really enjoyed it and I've had some genuinely touching feedback about people feeling inspired.

Parts 2 and 3 to follow!

 

10 reasons why YOU specifically should apply for the SLA ECCA prize

Hey you, yes you! You may not think you are eligible for the Special Library Assocation's Early Career Conference Award, but there's a good chance you are. You may not think the SLA is relevant to you because you don't work in a 'special' library, but it IS, trust me.

Winning the ECCA award could change your whole outlook. It could be incredibly beneficial. Here are 10 reasons to apply:

  1. You don't have to be THAT early in your career - it's within 5 years of obtaining your Masters. So in other words, I could apply! (Former winners can't actually apply but the point being, I qualified in 2009 so I am eligible in that sense.)
  2. It's probably the best single prize it is possible to win in librarianship. To quote SLA-Europe's website: "Each Award is worth about $4000. It covers the full cost of Conference registration, hotel lodging, economy return airfare to Vancouver, and meals and appropriate incidental expenses." I mean, come on! I should just copy and paste that for the remaining 8 things. It's a ludicrously good prize by any measure.
  3. Whatever your sector, the SLA has relevance to you. The SLA isn't all about special libraries. There is, of course, a lot of good content (both in the conference and the organisation more generally) if you're a legal, health, business or pharma librarian - but a huge percentage of members are from the academic library world, for example. There's public librarians too. But the information you can glean from the talks will apply to any sector - it's just really high quality speakers talking about really relevant things.
  4. The SLA Conference is completely and utterly brilliant. It is SUCH a good event. I have only been once, but by all accounts it's amazing every year. I am going in 2014, I have FORCED myself to find a way back* because it was the single greatest experience of my professional career. It's on an epic scale but it's focused - you come away inspired, no longer gripped by whatever existential crisis is wasting our time in the profession, buzzing with ideas, and equipped to be a better information professional.
  5. The SLA Conference is made more brilliant by experiencing it with the other ECCA winners. There will be 3 winners this year, from different divisions. The three of you will form a little gang and roam around Vancouver together and it is SO much richer for that. I won't labour this point because people told me about it before I went and I didn't really appreciate what they were going on about until it happened - but basically you make friendships and you have this great communal experience in a sort of ECCA bubble and it's ace. Also, everyone is incredibly friendly and welcoming to the ECCAs.
  6. There is a very flat hierarchy at the conference. There aren't cliques of senior people and junior people. Everyone mixes with everyone, everyone has time for everyone else. It's a great opportunity to actually exchange ideas with very high-up people and be treated as an equal. You are, as Penny Andrews put it, valued. She also points out something I've mentioned a lot - the LMD (Leadership and Management Division) is NOT just for senior people, it's for people who want to become or learn from leaders and managers.
  7. You get to travel and interact with the international community. Every time I've had the chance to go abroad I've found the international perspective on libraries and our profession invaluable. And you get to hear amazing speakers like Stephen Abrams and Mary Ellen Bates who rarely come to England (and then chat with them afterwards - see number 6, above).
  8. You will become an SLA member if you aren't already. Becoming part of SLA is awesome. Everyone I know who is a member values it enormously. I've written before about how being part of the SLA gives you confidence. There are plenty of relevant events in the UK too. Also, you tend to go on to get involved with the SLA in some capacity or other - for example Sam Wiggins who won an ECCA the same year as me is the Chair of SLA-Europe next year, I've served on the main SLA Online Advisory Council and as an ECCA judge - the list is endless really. The ECCA is just the beginning.
  9. There is a serious emphasis on fun. The SLA take the profession seriously but they take their fun seriously too. There are events and parties every night, there is a ludicrous amount of booze, and you have to really go out of your way to actually pay for anything. The conference never really stops the whole time you're there. It's intense, overwhelming, but, as Simon said, you still feel like you're buzzing a month later.
  10. If you win the ECCA, then on June 11th 2014, you'll be on a plane back home, a more knowledgeable, creative, inspired, happy, confident and future-ready information professional.  It really is that good. .

Notice that none of the above are 'it's good for your CV'. Of course, it IS good for your CV, to win a prestigious international prize. But it's really not the winning itself which matters, it's what you get from it - and you get so much from it, that the CV is just an afterthought.

Finally a couple of quick tips for your application (speaking as a former judge):

  • You will be representing SLA-Europe as an award winner. Remember that - it's not just about all the amazing things you've done in your career so far, it's about actually being in Vancouver as a sort of ambassador for the division.
  • On a related note, your letter of recommendation matters too. The judges want to know what your referee things about you - they also want to know what they think about you winning this prize and going to Vancouver, interacting, networking, learning and so on.
  • Part 2 of the application - "What specific benefits and knowledge do you hope to gain from attending the 2014 SLA Conference and working with SLA Europe and your chosen SLA Division in the future?" - is important. There are a LOT of very good applications for these awards, so it's really nice for the judges to be able to filter out a whole bunch and put them on the pile marked 'apparently just fancies winning an award / going on a free trip abroad'. You need to talk about the relationship you are entering into with the SLA and how that will develop over time.
  • If you've applied before and not won, don't let that put you off. I didn't get it the first time I tried, I know other winners who were second time lucky. .

If you have any questions, leave them in a comment and I'll endeavour to answer them. Basically I can't recommend applying for this highly enough - it will make your life awesome if you win.

Finally, you can read my own reflections on the 2011 ECCA experience on SLA-Europe's blog, and embedded below is the video I made at the conference. GOOD LUCK!

 

(Here's that application link, one more time.)

 

*It's amazing how many ECCA's find a way back. Many have gone most years since they won. Despite the massive logistical effort it constitutes, and having to find ways of paying for it, it's so completely amazing that you find a way back.

A letter to a younger me

I've not been blogging for a month or so due to the arrival of baby Grace! But I'm back at work on Monday so I'm gradually easing back in to the world of librarianship, starting with some stuff I meant to blog links to ages ago but never got around to... I was delighted to be asked to write a post on the Letters to a Young Librarian blog run by Jessica Olin. It's a really good blog and one that I read a lot anyway, so it was really nice to do something for it. Here's my post.

I tried to really honestly (and at the risk of embarassing myself a bit) write a letter to the me that was about to start his first day in libraries, aged 25-and-a-half, back in 2006. I also tried to make it as relevant and useful as possible to a new professional today, so check it out and and tell me what you think. It includes a list of things I think we really should be doing in our profession:

  • Communicating our value PROPERLY at every opportunity.
  • Embracing informality.
  • Trying to inspire people rather than placate.
  • Understanding that work-life balance is important enough that it should not be considered with reference to what ANYONE ELSE IS DOING. 
  • Libraries have always been product orientated, but now they need to be market orientated. .

Each of these is expanded in the post; it was fun to think about this stuff. Thanks to Jessica for asking me and the reader of her blog who requested the post!

I've written quite a lot of stuff on platforms other than here (or the Toolkit blog) in recent months - there's a complete list in the Guest Posts On... section down the right-hand side of the website (you'll need to scroll down!) but here are the most recent:

Normal blog service will now be resumed!

Is it the end of an era for librarian blogging?

traffic lights  

Update: the day after posting this, I'm adding a little disclaimer: I am NOT saying blogging is finished! I'm saying a specific era is possibly coming to an end. And I still think blogging is, for information professionals, still extremely useful, very rewarding, and a great thing to do. Okay, glad that's sorted.

Recently Andy Woodworth blogged about how he wasn't blogging that much any more, and today @tinamreynolds sparked a debate on Twitter about whether the library bloggging community was slowing down, and if so, why?

I've definitely noticed this. There was a set of around 10 blogs that diverted into an 'Essentials' folder in my Google Reader which I read all the time, and there was at least 30 more that I regularly caught up with. But hardly any of the bloggers in question are producing regular articles in 2013. I don't really use a Reader any more - I just pick stuff up via Twitter. I don't blog nearly as much as I used to - and when I do it tends to be about things which happened ages ago (my last post, published late last week, was about an event which happened in February, 3 months back).

Lack of time is the biggest reason given for not blogging these days, and that makes a lot of sense. But I think it might be a changing of the guard, rather than an overall slow-down - a bunch of new professionals becoming older professionals, and newer ones attacking the biblioblogosphere with a fervor in their place. If we interact online in loosely defined sets (in my case, it's largely 'the people who were new professionals in 2009 when I went to the new professionals conference') then it stands to reason that there would be a collective ebb and flow in our activity. As we get up the career ladder we become busier and have less time to blog, and we're on similar cycles of activity, commitments, and enthusiasm...

I really, really enjoyed being part of a thriving, dynamic online community of info-pro bloggers. But I don't miss it now it's gone.

For me though it's not just lack of time - it's lack of energy for the profession itself. I think I'd make time if it was all as important to me as it used to be. Which isn't to say it's not important - I'm quite passionate about libraries, and still very passionate about librarians and our community. But I said a LOT of things on this blog in the first 3 years or so I wrote it, and that level of momentum - that fire - wasn't really sustainable. There are librarians whose CPD is seemingly never subject to atrophy - I admire that, but don't aspire towards it, weirdly.

I just don't have that much to say anymore. I used to write posts like this one, about the state of play - I used to love it when lots of people commented and we had a big debate about stuff. But now when I write things on here it tends to be more focused and specific: the last four posts have been about an online tool, a marketing idea, an event, and a presentation. These kinds of posts don't get as many views as the old debate type posts, but the blog gets more views overall because there's now so much of it for Google to find!

So if you blog, do you blog less now than you used to? Is it the end of an era for librarian blogging? And if so, to what do you attribute this - is it just lack of time, or are there other reasons too?

p.s just as I was about to hit publish on this, I saw this tweet from @barlowjk which sums up one of the problems very nicely - we have finite mental real estate! And SO much stuff filling it up these days...

 

 

Work-life balance - it's a fluid concept

 

 

Recently I've read a good few posts about work / life balance. I also get asked about it sometimes.

This post has turned out quite long, so here's a one sentence version for those whose work / life balance doesn't give them enough time to read the whole thing... The balance changes over time, which is fine, and so is having bursts of intense work activity balanced out by longer periods of 'life', but you need to keep a hold of what you're doing this for and where it's taking you.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here's what I think:

1) Whatever the balance is like now, it needs to be FOR something. If you feel that you're working too hard, it had better be because this is helping you achieve something - in other words, it has to be a means to an end not an end in itself. Personally I like to be either happy with the balance (with 'life' very much in the ascendancy) or comfortable in the knowledge that if the balance is wrong, it's getting me somewhere I specifically want to go, after which I can relax again.

2) Work / life balance isn't static over time. I wonder if people look at everyone else and just assume their balance is a permanent one? As in, person X is at SO many events, they must be 'always on', or person Y really seems to spend a lot of time with their family, how do they do it? But presumably we're just seeing a snapshot of a particular time. Good work / life balance is fluid.

In my view, it should be as in favour of 'work' as it will ever be, at the start of your career. The period on which an info pro is defined as a 'new professional' is often said to be the first 5 years, and that's a nice marker. You do a LOT of work in those five years, in order to expand your horizons, add to your CV, find out what you really like, and get noticed, get into the kind of job you want. Then after that, the balance can shift much more towards 'life' because you've put in the hard work to build some kind of platform, and then you're on the platform.

If you're a new professional reading this (see this, also; it might be useful) and you're thinking 'all the papers I'm writing and conferences I'm helping to organise, and presentations I'm giving - this isn't sustainable' then that's probably fine - it doesn't have to be sustainable. Just make sure at some point you do actually cut down or stop. Which leads me to...

3) Sometimes it's okay temporarily putting the balance out if it's going to be worth it in the long term. So sometimes, you can take on a really big project that you know will make things difficult, as long as you know when the end of the project is and that things will become a lot easier as a result. The key things here are taking things on which actually have an end! And not just chain-smoking right onto the next big thing when they do end. It's fine to stop. I know people (you know who you are!) who simply don't stop, even though they know they should... (This is, as you can imagine, a self-perpetuating cycle. Librarian Z takes on lots of things, so a: becomes expert in a lot of fields and b: gets a reputation as being helpful and receptive to being asked to do stuff, and so gets asked to do ever more stuff, etc etc, forever.)

4) Saying no is excellent. In my experience it feels good to say no when it's the right thing to do. Obviously it's better for the person asking if you can recommend someone alternative to do whatever it is instead. But the key thing is, once you've got yourself into a position where you're asked to do things, saying no doesn't mean you get asked any less in future. (Sometimes people feel like they ought to grab every opportunity, even not overly suitable ones, in case eschewing results in the opportunities drying up. But this isn't the case in most people's' experience.)

5) There are two types of balance - short-term and long-term. The day-to-day stuff is the detail level - doing that talk or not doing it, getting a sponsored place at that event which involves writing a report afterwards, or not. That can be managed, and can be fluid.

But then there's the long-term which is basically your job, which is a little harder to be in control of after a certain point. Some types of job really DEMAND an enormous amount of work hours. This post from the always honest and readable Jenica Rogers literally made me not want to be successful. So you have to think about where you're going, about what all your hard work is ultimately for.

I used to do a LOT more stuff in my own time (see 1, 2 and 3 above) because it would help me get a job where the same stuff was relevant to my work, so I wouldn't have to do it in my own time anymore. I'd use annual leave to speak at a conference. I wouldn't do that now - I did it then because it was a short-term thing and it was worth it.

The job it all resulted in is not the kind of job where you have to work 50 hour weeks, and nor would I want one of those (even for twice the salary). Also, I have to work where I live, because my work / life balance approach is that you live where you want to and then find work there - as opposed to going where the work is. So if someone says 'I'll give you £150k a year to do your ideal job in London' I say no without hesitation. That's the long-term balance.

6) You don't have to the best that you can be. I've said this before and I'll keep saying it to anyone who'll listen. If being 80% (or whatever) of who you could be makes you HAPPY,  that's what you should be aiming for. Society is blindly accepting of the notion that doing one's best is the be all and end all, but it's only worth it if that'll make you happy!

7) Focus on things you're naturally good at so you can make more progress in a shorter time. You can make more time for life if the work comes easy to you, so as much as it's nourishing to challenge yourself, don't take that idea so far that you always have to work doubly hard on everything because everything you take on is out of your comfort zone.

***

Everyone is different, but the above is what works for me. I'm really happy with the balance I have, I'd recommend it - but to people who are a bit like me, not to everyone... A lot of people have a lot more drive than I do, and this approach probably wouldn't suit them and their own quest for happiness and contentment.

When I wrote the book, the balance was wrong. I was working on weekends, I had a young child, and it felt awful. I felt like I'd done the wrong thing. In fact, I probably HAD done the wrong thing - I certainly wouldn't recommend it. (Again, that's just me - Beth did much the same thing at much the same time and coped a lot better than I did.) But I can't regret it now because we got through it and I am where I want to be, doing freelance work for the BL among others, as well as the job I love. I do freelance training about areas I already know about and have a natural affinity for, so I don't have to spend much of my free time preparing them. I obey number 7, above - if someone came to me and said 'could you run a workshop  for us, on managing change' I'd say no, call Lisa Jeskins. It would take me too long to put together the materials to keep my work / life balance as I'd want it be (but Lisa's done such a course before, and in any case is a full-time trainer). I obey number 4 too - of all the interesting offers I had in 2012 to do stuff at conferences, I didn't do 13 of them, even though I really wanted to. People often say 'it's the things you don't do that you regret' and I understand that, but actually I don't regret saying no to anything, even if, at the time, it was really hard to do.

I am a very reflective person; I spend lots of time analysing stuff, processing stuff. So I am very aware of what works for me and what doesn't, which is how I've arrived at the above, which is basically a description of my life as much as it is advice to anyone else. I think the key thing is to do your own analysis of where you are, what you're doing, and where you're going, as objectively as possible, without reference to your peers or accepted norms. It's easy to be influenced by what librarian X is doing, or to feel we 'should' be more like Y. But actually that's not relevant, it's all about you and only you.

What is going to make you happy?

P.S [added the next day]: I meant to say, all the extra stuff we take on should be so fun it doesn't feel like work anyway. (This partly why it's easy to get overwhelmed by it and out of balance, because it's enjoyable.) If you're taking things on which feel like work, or things which were previously fun start to feel like work, that's a sign that it's time to cut down - either getting rid of some long-standing responsibilities, or saying 'no' for a long period of time, or both.

The message is (and this post is aimed primarily at information professionals - this may not be true in other industries, I don't know) - there should be enough relevant and interesting opportunities out there for you never to have to feel like all this stuff is a drag. Seek out the good stuff. :)