Thing 4: http://mathomhouser.com/2011/07/20/cpd23-thing-4/

Thing 3: http://mathomhouser.com/2011/06/28/cpd23-thing-3/

Thing 2: http://mathomhouser.com/2011/06/27/cpd23-thing-2/

Thing 1: http://mathomhouser.com/2011/06/24/cpd23-thing-1/

CPD23 Thing 5 is ‘Reflective Practice’:

http://cpd23.blogspot.com/2011/07/thing-5-reflective-practice.html

 

(Reflective practice) provides an opportunity to review the experiences we have, learning from them and applying what we have learnt.

http://cpd23.blogspot.com/2011/07/thing-5-reflective-practice.html

A post recently became available in my building: assistant subject librarian; fixed-term until early next year; emphasis on teaching students and liaison with academic schools. This prompted me to reflect on my current role (senior library assistant) and progress on my MSc ILS (finishing line in sight, personal finances permitting). I had to make the decision whether I could legitimately apply for the post without embarrassing myself. I weighed up my progression on the course (there were fully qualified candidates out there) with my experience of teaching and liaising with external colleagues (this is where my CV shines). I made the decision to go for it!

My first step was to trawl my old CVs. My last job move was almost three years ago: the longest I’ve ever stayed in any role! More relevant were my appraisal forms, which go into horrendous detail about every single training event or project I’ve been involved with. I am a tedious monster when it comes to appraisal forms, and cast aside my usual self-effacement in favour of pedantically listing every minor scrap of experience and achievement. I have even made (solicited!) suggestions to our head of service as to how the appraisal forms could be altered to make such self-aggrandisement even easier!

The next step was to reflect on which tidbits to pull from this catalogue of experience. Of course, this is made easy when filling in a job application form: I use the person specification for section headings; plug in examples of how I fulfil each requirement; and finally go through the job description and make reference to it throughout the whole. This is a very rewarding experience because it forces me to cut out and throw away huge chunks of experience that were really valuable for my last job application, or even during a recent appraisal, but in the current context are just not relevant. What remains had to be ranked in order of value for answering a given requirement, with some examples being cut simply due to space restrictions. I actually enjoy this process of reviewing my experiences: the odd sense of pleasure when I realise that something that seemed of huge importance just a few months ago has now been surpassed by something even more impressive, or is just not relevant to the current landscape.

I got an interview, but didn’t get the job. Since this experience, I have used reflective practice to think about what I said on my application form and in my interview. I made a lot of noise about the importance of helping users learn library skills, and about how much I enjoy teaching students, making presentations, and working in groups. If these are my strengths – or at least, my interests! – I should build on them. I am now looking at the project group that I chair with this in mind. How can chairing a project group benefit me personally, in terms of practising the skills I enjoy exercising?

The experience has also made me question those aspects of my working life which are going untended. At appraisals, we discuss opportunities to gain experience outside my usual work, but I keep putting them on the back burner, trusting to my qualification and my chosen experiences to carry me forward. This job application process – really an exercise in reflective practice – has made me realise that there are areas of experience that I need to engage with if I am to have success in the future.

Thing 3: http://mathomhouser.com/2011/06/28/cpd23-thing-3/

Thing 2: http://mathomhouser.com/2011/06/27/cpd23-thing-2/

Thing 1: http://mathomhouser.com/2011/06/24/cpd23-thing-1/

CPD23 Thing 4 is ‘Current awareness – Twitter, RSS and Pushnote’:

http://cpd23.blogspot.com/2011/07/thing-4-current-awareness-twitter-rss.html

Twitter

Done. I tweet as @MathomHouser and have done so for a while now. I started out following comedians, actors and directors, then started a new account that would be more professional, then got tired of maintaining the two. I eventually deleted the fun account and just started being more easygoing with the professional account. Accordingly, the number of people I interact with personally skyrocketed, as did the quality of those interactions. My advice: sign up. Use a fun name. Follow people. Don’t be sillier or ruder than you would be in ‘real life’. And if you think you’re too shy or uptight to use Twitter, that’s a massive reason why you should.

RSS

I already knew about RSS, but had never got it to work properly. I think this was mainly down to the platforms I was using to view RSS feeds. Which is a shame, because I have always liked the idea of having all my most-viewed websites on a single screen. At the moment, I access all my usual web pages via link buttons on my browser, but this involves opening new tabs, and the buttons don’t necessarily follow me from computer to computer.

I recently started to use more of the Google tools, and so was happy to use Google Reader as suggested by this Thing. I also signed up for iGoogle. It’s good (so far!). It gives me widgets for all the web-based stuff I want (like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, blogs). I like that I can move the widgets around freely. I don’t like that I can’t re-size them. I don’t like that adding new gadgets messes up the layout of my existing gadgets. I don’t like that changing my ‘theme’ only alters the picture at the top and not the look of the main body. But it does what I want it to, which is surface all my favourite web content in a single place.

Pushnote

What a great idea. I like the idea that whenever I visit a new website, I can see what other people think. I’ve signed up and will start commenting on pages as I use them. I’m quite boring though, and don’t actually view new websites very often. I think I’ll be using RSS more than Pushnote! Although maybe I can use Pushnote to comment on everyone’s CPD blogs… ;)

I wrote a conference report that has just been published in my library service’s Staff Development and Engagement Group Newsletter (Spring 2011).

My report can be read below, and colleagues can view the full newsletter at http://tinyurl.com/ulssdeg.

I was pretty keen to go to the Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference (LILAC). Every year LILAC offer a free place to anyone enrolled on a relevant information studies course. I was second choice to attend last year’s conference in Limerick, but unfortunately there are no prizes for second place! This year my 500-word statement on why information literacy was important to me and my career impressed the judges and I was lucky enough to be selected. I won a cash award to spend on travel and accommodation, and a full delegate pass for all three days of the conference.

This year’s LILAC was being held at the British Library and the London School of Economics (LSE). The idea of attending a library conference, attended by librarians from across the world, in the island’s biggest library, seemed a more or less optimal use of the conference season. The fact that LILAC is about information literacy in all contexts made it even better. It’s becoming increasingly apparent, as I am inducted into the inner mysteries of librarianship, that the book-dust-and-cardigans thing is actually an elaborate facade, and what we’re really about is information: keeping it tidy, getting it out there, and making sure people use it effectively.

LILAC is all about information literacy, and this means more than just being able to read (although this is a useful skill and should be encouraged). I could tell that LILAC took info lit seriously from their preparation: a simple and intuitive conference website (http://lilacconference.com/WP/); an online session-booking experience that actually worked; and for your constant narrator, a stream of handy emails explaining what my student award consisted of, how to get it, and what to do with it. A second conference website, specifically for social networking, was set up at http://lilac.spruz.com/ . This allowed delegates and speakers to chat before the conference even started, arranging travel and accommodation with each other. Once I actually arrived at the conference, life was made just as easy: the LILAC team glided about, t-shirted and smiling: greeting delegates; answering every single question asked; and most importantly, showing the way to the buffet. This was information literacy in action. The presence of information literacy continued throughout the conference: most delegates seemed to be toting a notebook, tablet or other mobile device. Presentations appeared on multiple cinema-scale screens. Tweeting was actively encouraged, with many speakers adding their Twitter names to their slides, and even showing a rolling feed of tweets with the conference hashtag, #lilac11. An archive of tweets can be found at http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/lilac11. A conference account, @lilac_2011, provided frequent news and comment throughout the week. Twitter was being used to effectively minute the conference, allowing me to track what was happening in other rooms while attending parallel sessions. I myself used Twitter (@MathomHouser if you really want to know) to minute the sessions I was attending, with a view to turning my tweets (and those of the other delegates) into blog posts. Conversations were taking place throughout the room, and across the whole venue, before, during and after presentations. Some speakers replied to tweets after their presentation, allowing it to continue beyond the confines of a brief Q&A. The LILAC social site (http://lilac.spruz.com/) came in handy once again as a place to comment and exchange opinions, and post more substantial blog entries relevant to the conference. I posted a blog myself, at http://lilac.spruz.com/profile/Matt-Harvey/.

Social networking, and the web 2.0 phenomenon in general, turned out to be a major theme at LILAC 2011. The first keynote speaker, Professor David Nicholas, described the move away from researching in the library to researching online, anywhere in the world, at all times of day, and completely unsupported. Information professionals need to re-embed themselves in peoples’ research behaviour, and this means getting there first. The other keynote speakers broadened my awareness of what information literacy can mean outside of my familiar context of online research and university or public libraries. Nikki Heath, school librarian and human dynamo, reported that reading in schools can now mean reading web content and text messages: educators have had to accept that literacy, and information literacy, is now about more than just books. Jesus Lau brought an insight into information literacy sans frontières, with the use of information literacy indicators as signifiers of cultural development for organisations such as UNESCO. Worldwide, as at home, the challenge is to find ways of comparing literacy across the board, taking into account cultural and national differences.

Of course, it wasn’t all hard work (if listening to enthusiastic and informed people talking about interesting stuff can be called work). There was also food, and lots of it. The BL Conference Centre is a relatively small building, but it uses its space cleverly, and served as a neat and high-tech environment for the delegates to bustle in. The food was unbelievably good, with amazing salads and pastries and a large choice of cool drinks – much appreciated as we were in the middle of a heat-wave.

The final day of the conference we relocated to the LSE, and enjoyed another imaginative buffet on the 12th floor terrace, overlooking a park and with a view of St. Paul’s. The grand conference dinner and awards were held at Gibson Hall, with its gilt and marble dining hall. Awards were distributed, with ULS’ Sonja Haerkoenen being named runner-up for the Information Literacy Practitioner of the Year 2011.

So, in conclusion: LILAC, London, literacy, libraries and ‘lectronics: a highlight of this library year and a fantastic opportunity to meet future colleagues and collaborators. I’m definitely going back.

Thing 2: http://mathomhouser.com/2011/06/27/cpd23-thing-2/

Thing 1: http://mathomhouser.com/2011/06/24/cpd23-thing-1/

CPD23 Thing 3 is ‘Consider your Personal Brand’:

http://cpd23.blogspot.com/2011/06/thing-3-consider-your-personal-brand.html

My Name

The name I have chosen for myself is ‘Mathom Houser’. This is a play on words that has personal resonance for me.

‘Mathom’ is used by J.R.R. Tolkien to refer to small items that circulate as gifts in Hobbit society (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mathom). I like the idea of a small item that is not valued enough to be kept for onself, but is given freely in lieu of a proper gift. This is a very hobbity kind of well-meaning self-deception! ‘Mathom’ ties in to my own name, as I was always taught that my first name, Matthew, means ‘Gift of God’. As an atheist, I am less interested in the second element, but am more than happy to be considered a gift!

‘Houser’ is an attempt to convey ‘mathom house’, a kind of Hobbit museum. The practical reason for this is that ‘mathom house’ and its variations have already been snaffled as domains and blog names (although most of these appear to be inactive). Another reason for using ‘houser’ is to reflect that I am an individual person, not a large building filled with exhibits. To relate this element to my own name, ‘Harvey’ can be derived from words meaning ‘haven’, or place of safe keeping.

There are other resonances, of course: a mathom house is a kind of repository, and I work in libraries. I am also a natural hoarder and collector of junk I find in the street. I am also terrible at giving presents and generally give people (new) copies of books I’ve read myself.

So there you have it: Mathom Houser.

My Photo

I had this photo taken just before I went to my first library conference. I was creating a profile for myself on their website, and intended to tweet prolifically, so needed a professional-looking avatar.

I’m wearing full librarian traditional dress, consisting of an oxford button-down shirt and a tweed jacket with elbow patches (not shown). I wanted to pose with a pipe, but was talked out of it. I am standing in front of one of my bookcases at home. Behind me you can see my Tolkien books and some stuff on mythology and etymology. Mercifully,  my enormous moon-like head is obscuring most of my Buffy comics. The next shelf down contains Star Wars novels, so it’s a good job I’m not shorter than I am.

Professional vs Personal

I had a conversation with one of my senior managers the other day, in which I said that I don’t have the skills of deception to completely separate the professional and personal sides of my life. I hope that this demonstrates ‘character’ and ‘pluck’.

When I first started working full-time, I went through a phase of trying to be very professional, which for me meant not mentioning fun stuff I was interested in and avoiding conversations about politics and religion. It didn’t work. The people I worked with assumed I was some kind of robot sent from the future by senior management to infiltrate their office.

These days, I am making a concerted effort to promote a single, unified brand. The internet is helping me with this. I try to convey the same persona on Twitter, on this blog, in my library, at meetings, at conferences, and in my social life.

Having a unified presence in the world has turned out to be an enormous relief, and has made my life much easier. Professionally, people I only knew from meetings, and senior managers, have not only become aware of my geeky interests, but shared their own: I have been gifted a fantastic framed, signed Alan Lee Tolkien print by one colleague, and a set of 1970s Tolkien calendars by another. In my library, people I work with day-to-day seem to like me even though I’m a self-promoting, ladder-climbing little know-it-all, because they know it’s tempered by a ‘wacky’ human side. At conferences, people seem to like that I don’t hide my ignorance of the profession and my status as a library assistant and student: also, the geeky stuff serves as a handle for remembering individuals and starting conversations.

My Visual Brand

For this blog, I decided to go with a traditional library theme. One of the things that attracted me to librarianship is the opportunity to express cutting-edge technologically-savvy and right-on liberal views while incongruously dressed as a conservative peer. My home decoration policy is similar: traditional gentleman’s club, but with comics and sci-fi DVDs where the copies of Debrett’s Peerage should be.

I chose the ‘Quentin’ WordPress theme, with its drab tones and book-like appearance. I found a nice photo of a card catalogue via Flickr and uploaded it as my background image. Being a good informational professional, I gave credit where credit was due, as per the image’s Creative Commons licence: http://mathomhouser.com/2011/06/10/11/ .

My domain and email address

Shortly after setting up my WordPress blog, I treated myself to a domain name. This involved paying £15 to reserve the url ‘www.mathomhouser.com’ for my personal use. This way, I can direct people to www.mathomhouser.com, instead of the less personal http://mathomhouser.wordpress.com . I can also set up personalised email addresses such as mattharvey@mathomhouser.com .

Details of how to do this yourself may be found here:

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/your-own-domain-address-on-wordpress-com-absolutely/ .

Thing 1

http://mathomhouser.com/2011/06/24/cpd23-thing-1/

CPD23 Thing 2 is to ‘investigate some other blogs’:

http://cpd23.blogspot.com/2011/06/thing-2-investigate-some-other-blogs.html

I went to CPD23’s list of participating blogs here: http://www.delicious.com/cpd23/ . At the time of writing, there are 594 registered blogs. This is too many for me to read in one lifetime. I used the following tags to narrow my search to people in the same field (HE) and collection of fields (or ‘Britain’ as it is known):  ‘HE/university/college’ and ‘UK’. I considered adding another limit of ‘Wales’, but decided that I was already being frightfully reactionary in using geographic limits at all.

I scanned down the resulting list of 138 blogs and clicked on the ones that jumped out at me. If your blog title is just a variation on your name, or ‘cpd23’, or ‘why am I doing this?’, I’m probably not going to look at it. ;)

The Body in the Library

http://thebodyinthelibrary.wordpress.com/

Letty has correctly chosen the same blog platform as me, www.wordpress.com . She says she has used Blogger for other 23 thingery in the past, so hopefully I can get some tips on whether I made the right decision. Letty is already a proper librarian, at Cambridge no less, and is looking to use cpd to enhance her chartership.

Letty uses a photo of an eclipse as her avatar, which presumably is taken from Earth, and so shows our moon, which leads us seamlessly onto…

Girl in the Moon

http://maedchenimmond.blogspot.com/

My face looks like the moon, so Katie’s blog title spoke to me. Katie is part of cpd23 organising team, so I’d expect her blog to be a thing of beauty, which it is. She has illustrated her blog posts with carefully attributed images taken from Flickr: this is something I hadn’t thought of and will now do myself. It turns out that Katie knows my wife via Twitter, and has linked to her blog, which is also part of the CPD23 whatsit:  http://alisonharvey.blogspot.com/ . She also knits, which is another point in her favour.

Katie is the Girl in the Moon, which is a thing in the universe, which again leads smoothly to…

Libraries, the universe and everything

http://lyndseygoddard.blogspot.com/

You can’t go wrong with a Douglas Adams reference, especially if you want to catch my beady little eye. Lyndsey (I’m guessing from the URL here: she doesn’t provide  an ‘author’ widget) says she has just entered the world of Twitter, but already has a fairly established full blog. It’s not just libraries, there is love (her wedding), death (hamster) and tears (MA Information and Library Management). Caution: blog is pink.

Lyndsey lists one of her favourite books as The Body in the Library, which would link nicely to the first blog I looked at, but unfortunately must link to the next blog, which is…

Sian’s CPD23 2011

http://sianscpd23.blogspot.com/

Now, I did say I wasn’t going to be tempted by any blogs that are named after their author, or CPD23, and this one has both. However, I work with someone called Sian, who recently got onto the Twitter, so I thought this might be she. It isn’t. However, my colleague and fellow CPDer Gemma (http://www.fatfrocks.com/) is already following her, so there’s lovely.

This Sian works in the South East, I’m not sure of where, and has a stone painted as a cat for an avatar. She likes making ‘amigurumi’ in her spare time, which I’m not convinced is a real thing, so bear with me while I Google it.

Okay, amigurumi is the art of crocheting palm-sized cuddly toy things. Sian, you should get in touch with Katie (http://maedchenimmond.blogspot.com/) and Mrs. Mathom Houser (http://alisonharvey.blogspot.com/) to discuss this bizarre practice. I’d like to see some photos of your monstrous knitted brood: please post!

This thing’s writing itself. What are amigurumi? Monsters. What are monsters? Deadly. What else is deadly?…

World’s Deadliest Librarian

http://worldsdeadliestlibrarian.blogspot.com/

I would like to assume that World’s Deadliest Librarian has never been called on to prove her claim, but on the basis that she is anonymous, and appears from her avatar to be a giant cat, I wouldn’t be so sure. She seems to be up to date on the latest Twitter panflashes (#cliquegate) and has already posted handy tips on how to do clever stuff with her blog, so I’m definitely going to be following this murderous moggy, and not just because I’m scared of her.

Speaking of things I’m scared of, ‘that is not dead which can eternal lie’…

Blog of Chuukaku

http://www.chuukaku.com/blog/

My unconscious misread ‘Chuukaku’ as ‘Cthulhu’, which earns a red flag on my geekometer. The word is apparently a Japanese term approximating ‘nucleus’ (http://www.chuukaku.com/2007/11/chuu-what-dot-com.html), so nothing to do with Lovecraft at all. The author, Katie, has a very professional looking blog that links out to all sorts of stuff about her professional history, and very little in the way of knitted animals etc. In fact, I feel like a heel even including her on this pseudo-randomized list, give the tenor of her blog. It goes to show that asking people to blog about their work can lead to anything, from the straight-laced to the decidedly bonkers. But that’s why I love libraries. Maybe I need to add my own list of qualifications to my blog? Might help.

I’m coming to the end of this run-down now, a little bit older, and a little bit wiser. Just like a certain furry-footed wanderer I can think think of…

The Hobbit Hole

http://intothehobbithole.blogspot.com/

I hope nobody thought I was calling Annie furry-footed. Read my blog’s Terms of Use (http://mathomhouser.com/about/termsofuse/): no harm intended! Although of course, furry feet are a mark of distinction amongst hobbitry, so should be worn with pride. Annie is on the organising team for CPD23 so can presumably nuke my blog from the air if this isn’t the case. She is interested in books, music, and cooking, so is likely a fairly low-temperature frood and won’t mind. There’s lots of stuff on her blog for new professionals and not-quite-yet professionals, so worth a look.

And from The Hobbit Hole, it’s only a short walk to my own corner of the Shire, The Mathom House. So, gentle reader, as I add these curiosities to the shelves, I take a moment to reflect on what I’ve found during Thing 2. Looking forward to Thing 3.

http://cpd23.blogspot.com/2011/06/thing-1-blogs-and-blogging.html

I describe myself as an apprentice librarian (when questioned as to why I am wearing tweed un-ironically). I work full-time in a university library while studying for an MSc in Information and Library Studies. I am a senior library assistant and the full-time IT support assistant for my building. I have a lot of books, most of which are not about libraries, but are books nonetheless and so still count.

By the way, all of this happens in Wales, the leftmost bit of what are currently called the British Isles. Increasingly, though, my work is happening on the internet, which is much better because it allows me to work with everyone lucky enough to have access to the web, not just the people who happen to have been born on / moved to the same bit of the planet as me. Fortunately, my meteoric rise to prominence has also coincided with what is apparently called social media, or web 2.0, or ‘the internet’ as we will call it in hindsight. The internet is approaching the form that I had been taught to expect by a lifetime of science fiction. More and more people are interacting with each other in more and more different ways, and I am giddy with delight at having the opportunity to make the most of this phenomenon.

Social media, like blogs and Twitter, have done me proud. I’ve had a Twitter account for a few years, and have slowly ditched all the comedians I was following in favour of librarians and tech people. I was fortunate enough to be awarded the student place at this year’s Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference: see my report here. I probably wouldn’t have heard about this opportunity were it not for Twitter. I also got to go to this year’s CILIP Cymru (CILIP Wales) conference, for free, by providing IT support on the day. Again, I heard about this opportunity by following the organisers on Twitter. I even applied via tweet. That’s social media, linking me up to peers online, and linking me up to peers in meatspace: all of which will presumably pay off throughout my career. I have also used social media to demonstrate to senior management types within my institution that I am (a) a professional, (b) a wally and (c) don’t let either of these character flaws get in the way of being a terrific employee.

My library service is a part of a wider information services department, serving two campuses and 18 libraries. Because we’re so big, there are opportunities for plucky fellow like myself to get involved in working groups and committees. I am a member of a distributed IT support group, which has allowed me the opportunity to contribute to library IT projects and present at internal conferences. I am also a member of a library technology group, which gets me involved in introducing new technology to the libraries. I have recently been made chair of a subgroup of this group, dedicated to engaging with social media. I’m hoping that we can improve the flow of content on our library service’s blog, and supplement it with a coherent Twitter and Facebook presence.

That’s why I’m engaging with 23 Things for Continued Professional Development (CPD23). I’m a potential librarian, engaging with librarians via social media, and with a new responsibility for bringing social media to my library service. It’s high time I got my own blog in order, and I think 23 Things can help me. Blogs aren’t new, and I don’t want to spend ages trying to work out the best way to do something if others have been there already. As well as learning from the organisers, I’m looking to learn something from the other people in the 23 Things Class of 2011. I’ll be looking at all your blogs and borrowing your best ideas. If you’re reading this, please leave a comment just to say ‘how do’, and I’ll come and do the same for you. See you for Thing 2!

Please take a moment to answer my quick poll, and help make the Twitterverse a better place!

http://mathomhouser.polldaddy.com/s/new-survey

You can read my report for the Journal of Information Literacy here:

http://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL/article/view/CC-V5-I1-2011-1/1545

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ragesoss/2401473931/

courtesy of Sage Ross

http://www.flickr.com/people/ragesoss/

A few factors have come together and made it untenable for me to continue without a blog of my own.

I have recently started attending lots of tech conferences, tweeting like an addict, and promoting social media in my workplace. This has coincided with lots of interest in my organisation about 2.0, Twitter, Facebook, blogging etc. I have also signed up to 23 Things (http://cpd23.blogspot.com/), a professional development thingy which will teach me how to blog.

Weirdly, I’ve been pseudo-blogging for years: board game websites, Facebook, Twitter, and I spent rather too long in the chatrooms as a teenager in the nineties. I think that because I was so active in other areas, it never seemed worthwhile to create a blog where I was the centre of attention. Well, here you go.