The second Thing of this first week, having set up one's own blog, is to explore other blogs and get to know some of the other cpd23-ers. I decided that, much as at a conference it makes most sense to talk to people you don't already know, for this exercise I would get mots out of it by seeking out blogs by people I don't know, either in the flesh or online.
The CPD23 Delicious pages were useful here, as each participant has been tagged by the type of library they work in (and more besides, but that was the most important tag for me) . My objective was to find, and comment on, six blogs. I looked at tag pages, first of all, out of a sense of solidarity, for the unemployed. But beforeI could find one to comment on, a comment arrived on my post on Thing 1 from Sally of More Adventurous (23 Things). So off I went and commented and commented on hers.
My next step was to look at health librarians, the sector I worked in most recently. On Tuesday there were 18 listed, there's now 28. I excluded people I know, which cut it down quite considerably. One of the good things about a small-ish profession like ours is that sooner or later you will know, or know of, a lot of people and, having been the Chair of the Health Libraries Group, I suppose I have a relatively high profile with my peers. That said, I wonder if being well-known may not be a disadvantage in my job search.
I also excluded people who hadn't yet written their first post. And by this means, I came to Life in the Fair-Middling Library Lane. Michael, who runs this, like Sally above, is a new professional, and a three-way discussion started, also including Alan who is one of the writers at the shared blog, the Health Informaticist. From our speculation about health librarians level of involvement in CPD23, Michael started publicising it in his network, and there's another ten signed up at the time of writing.
At this point life took over (writing job application forms, and going to a book launch to introduce Jeremy Page's reading from his new collection of poems after Catullus, The Cost of All Desire, highly recommended). I returned to the task on Wednesday morning.
I decided to look at one more health blog, and found Lucy Librarian, a library school student bound for a first professional post in health. She's very keen on blogs as a reflective tool, which I think is absolutely correct. There's nothing like writing about a question to clarify one's thinking. She also offers good advice on checking for unsavoury associations when choosing a blog name. I shall say no more, go and visit.
I went to look at some learned society librarians, that being another field I've been in, and would like to return to. I found Emma Davidson's Libraries, the Universe and Everything, where there was a conversation going on about the number of feeds it's necessary or possible to subscribe to. I subscribe to 1478.
Then I had a look at some rare books. special collections blogs, another interest of mine. Here I found Alison Harvey's Notes from the Basement. Alison is Assistant Archivist at Cardiff University, who has bloged about her allotment in the past, and hopes it may help her record developments for her professional registration and CPD beyond that.
For the sixth, I was tempted by the advocacy tag, but there's only one blog there, and its by my fellow Voices for the Library team member, Lauren Smith. So that was ruled out, though I love her adaptation of Rangathan's fifth law in her strap line. So I picked on Nouveau Librarian, who's moving from being a shambrarian to a librarian.
And that's Thing 2 done.
