Tom Roper's Weblog

CPD23: Thing four, current awareness, and a pun, for pun-loving CPD23-ers

Irrelevant witticism: I have often wished I worked in a library for bakers. Then I could launch a currant awareness service.

For thing four we're asked to think about how to use Twitter, RSS feeds and Pushnote for current awareness.

Twitter

I joined Twitter on 30 November 2006, I see. I must confess that I didn't use it very much at first; indeed I didn't quite see the point. But, after this false start, I use it, as @tomroper, for lots of things, including for current awareness. I find it very useful to follow events, conferences, seminars and so on, that I can't attend in person. This week I've been following the #eahil2011 hashtag for the EAHIL 2011 workshop in Istanbul, and was pleased to see the British delegates leading the live tweeting. So, if I attend an event, I feel a duty to live tweet it. This sometimes annoys my non-librarian followers, who wonder why they're being bombarded with salvo after salvo of irrelevance; it can even, at certain events, provoke hostility from fellow delegates. There was a notorious meeting last year of a certain organisation within CILIP where the old guard affected to suppose that those tweeting the event were not paying attention to the speaker. I think we've moved on now, and most event organisers realise that live tweeting will enhance their online profile, offering wifi as a matter of course, suggesting an official hashtag and generally making us comfortable. More could be done, and I for one would appreciate free drinks, with refills, served to me at my seat by gorgeous waiters and waitresses. Maybe at Umbrella (#ub11) next week? I sometimes find professional reading on Twitter, and of course news.

RSS

I've been using RSS feeds to keep up to date for at least seven years. Indeed [produces own trumpet from inside jacket pocket and starts to blow] I believe I was the first person in this country to use them to provide a current awareness service, one I set up for medical educators while at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in December 2003. So successful and timely was it, that it was taken up as a national service by what was then LTSN-01. now MEDEV, the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine [/end trumpet blowing]. My preferred feed-reader is NetNewsWire, which syncs with Google Reader. It has a very handy SmartList feature, which means I can run pre-defined searches on all the posts in all the feeds I subscribe to and quickly find the relevant ones. So, for example, one searches for the strings, library OR librarian OR libraries and quickly finds mentions in the hundreds of feeds I take from news organisations. NetNewsWire has just been taken over by Black Pixel so I and other users are watching with interest and a certain apprehensiveness to see what happens. I've tried alternatives like Reeder and NewsRack, but they aren't nearly as fully-featured. I use RSS feeds from professional journals too, and, as well as feeds direct from the journal publisher, I find Roddy Macleod's ticTOCs service invaluable. ticTOCs aggregates feeds, and allows users to subscribe to subject bundles. Update: as Roddy points out in the comments, ticTOCs is now JournalTOCs.

Pushnote

I'm afraid, like many other CPD23 participants, I can't see the point of Pushnote. Stephen Fry may endorse it but, though he may be a national treasure, it is not yet compulsory to do everything he says. Pushnote is another rating and commenting system for webpages, and heaven knows plenty of those have come and gone over the years. I prefer to use Delicious, which does a great deal more. Quite possibly I'm missing something; do comment and tell me what. After all, my usage of Twitter was light and infrequent for the first year I was on it, so maybe I have misunderstood.

Next week we reflect.

Thing 3: a brand from the burning

'Consider your personal brand', says the rubric for this week's activity. I type the word 'brand' with disgust and contempt. The cult of the brand is responsible, in my opinion, for so much that is wrong in modern Britain. If multinational monopoly capitalists are stupid enough to part with lots of money to bogus consultants who preach the gospel of brand, let them. The scandal that taxpayers' money goes to support this tosh in the public services should be condemned; but to apply it to the complexity of a human being seems to me absurd.

Now I've got that off my chest, let me tackle the tasks of this week's exercise.

I use my own name. Sometimes I think this is very unimaginative of me, and perhaps I should call myself ArtichokeBoy or some other modish handle. The only complexity is that I was baptised Christopher Thomas, but am universally known as Tom, to the confusion of banks, passport offices and the like. By my family's standards this is only modestly eccentric. My father, whose names were William George, was Tim all his life. As for the names we gave cats and dogs...There are no famous Tom Ropers that I know of; I come from a long line of Cambridge physicians, and the most eminent was perhaps my grandfather George, who was both anatomy demonstrator and Latin teacher early in his career.

I was far-sighted enough to register the roper.org.uk domain a long time ago, which I suppose is a plus. I used it for a pre-blog personal website which I started, I think, around 1996.

Occasionally I wish for anonymity, but the amount of work involved in staying anonymous on the internet seems to me to be not worth the candle. I hope I don't censor what I say; if anyone doesn't like a post, they are free to stop reading. I am adopted and know my birth name. If the Iron Heel ever takes over and I have to go underground, then I have a ready made nom de guerre. It may not have the same ring as Ulyanov's Lenin or Djugashhvili's Stalin, but it will fox the secret police.

For a photograph, I used to use one taken by a splendid photographer who I worked with during my time at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. Because of her talents, she was given the task of taking website pictures of us all, and I rather liked mine. She went off to a career in fashion journalism and photography, I believe. I decided it would not do anymore, for it was at least six years old and for the photograph I vainly removed my spectacles, which these days I have to wear all the time, so it was misleading. At the moment I use a photograph of myself as a child, hoping to project an image of sweet, innocent youth, rather than crabbed semi-senility. I ought to swallow my vanity and use something that would allow people to recognise me in the street.

I have said before that I do not respect the conventional divisions of life between the professional and the personal, so on this blog you will find all the aspects of my life that are fit to print. The only exception is that I post my running activity on a separate blog, and the Cravatomancy project, an attempt to divine the future through choice of tie, seemed to deserve its own place.

My visual brand isn't that well thought out. I've adapted a TypePad template for the blog, but I'm conscious that some of the side-bar elements are inconsistent with the overall look; that's usually because they are widgets designed by external content providers, and I lack the skills to make them more visually consistent. I chose the name a long time ago, and it is pedestrian but descriptive. I sometimes wish I had reversed title and strapline, so that it would be known as, An Evergreen Tree of Diabolical Knowledge', but it's too late for that now. Or I might have used the quotation in the sidebar, 'A Librarian of Some Kind'.

If I Google myself, the results are good. The first hit is my Google Profile, and the first ten also include this blog, four times, and my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. There are some false positives, a lecturer in mathematics at Leeds, an Australian politician with an interest in climate change, a square dance caller and a schooner sunk by a German submarine in 1917.

If anyone would like to have a look and tell me what they make of my 'brand'. please do, and I'd be delighted to reciprocate. Please leave a note in the comments.

CPD23: Week One, Thing the Second

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.

 

CPD23: week one, in which Saturn devours his children

Today CPD23 starts, though I suspect many participants are off at the New Professionals Conference. As I'm about as far off being a new professional as its possible to be without being in one's grave, I shan't be there.

Nevertheless, as they're all in Manchester, perhaps I can steal a march on them and be one of the first to complete my assignment.

The CPD23 project is best explained at the project website, but in a nutshell, it's a sixteen-week  online self-directed programme of professional development, exploring how library and information services can use social media. It has its roots in a programme run by Charlotte & Mecklenburg County Public Libraries in the USA, which has been adapted all over. I ran a version of it (in an afternoon; it was very much cut-down) at a CPD event at South Thames College two years ago, and Cambridge University  librarians, who seem to be leading the profession in so many ways at the moment, ran a version called 23 Things Cambridge.

This week is about blogging, and we are enjoined to do the following:'To start off your cpd23 blogging write a post about why you're taking part in the course. You could talk about where your career is now and where you'd like it to go, what you're hoping to learn from cpd23, which of the Things you're most (or least) looking forward to, how you feel about being a new blogger or how you'd like to improve your blogging, or anything else that relates to why you're doing this!'

Where is my career and where would I like it to go? Good question. I've been working in libraries for thirty-three years, and I've worked in most sectors in my time. The sector I've spent most time in is health,  working in District General Hospital libraries, a regional library unit, a Royal College, and a new medical school. I've been unemployed since the end of March and economics dictates that I must find work, any work. I have reached the point where it looks as if I must leave the profession. I've had some interviews, but no offers, and it's hard not to conclude that candidates as old as me look very unattractive to recruiters. So right now I would take anything, but, given a choice, I enjoy most working in environments where one can see a direct link between what one does and the creation and dissemination of knowledge, in other words, supporting research, in a learned society, a university or the NHS. I have been a service head, but I'm not fussy about my place in the hierarchy, and would accept any professional or non-professional role. I sometimes think recruiters don't understand or believe this, so don't appoint me using the excuse that I'm over-qualified or over-experienced.

But I haven't spent my time in the pub and the bookies. I organised, with Emma Illingworth, the Brighton LibTeachMeet; I've been doing some work as part of the Voices for the Library team, and I've been going to professional conferences and meetings. I have a place at Umbrella.

What do I hope to learn from CPD23? Lots. I like to think that I know a fair bit about this area; on blogs for example, I've been running this blog since December 2003, and was the first in the country to use a blog to deliver current awareness services. I blog elsewhere on my running; I'm currently taking part in Juneathon. And last year I ran Cravatomancy, a blog about ties. However, things change, and change quickly. There's always more to learn, new skills to acquire and old ones to update.

What am I looking forward to? I think learning from the other participants. The syllabus looks great, and I can't see any part of it that might make me think, 'ho-hum, this isn't very relevant'.

How could I improve my blogging? Well, I could try to be more serious, and not post my racing selections. But to me, a blog is a place where conventional barriers between personal and professional break down. I think the crucial thing would be to post more regularly. I have a backlog of posts on various events I've been to, which I still want to write up, though I'm conscious that they have lost their immediacy. To give a flavour, and perhaps to shame me into writing them, they are the CILIP in Sussex AGM, where Phil Bradley spoke, a symposium on Art and Medicine at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, a meeting at the British Academy on New Light on Ancient Medicine and a conference on patient information, Patients First (pdf).

If I'm nervous of anything about CPD23, it's that I'll be the oldest participant, and that perhaps people will think I am Saturn, there to eat his own children to prevent them from taking over from him.

Painting by Peter Paul Rubens of Cronus devouring one of his children, Poseidon. From Wikimedia Commons