Thing 23 - Reflection

  by  Auntie P 

23 Things - all done and dusted! I've really enjoyed the 23 Things for Professional Development programme, both as an organiser and as a participant. It's certainly been useful in assessing where I am with my professional development, and where I would like to be. It's encouraged me to find out more about CILIP Chartership, which I hope to start next year.

I'll be completing the evaluation survey after I've published this blog post so I've been thinking about which elements of the programme I have found most useful. For me, it's been the 'thinky' posts that I've got the most out of - particularly Thing 3 on personal branding, Thing 5 on reflective practice, Thing 11 on mentoring, Thing 21 on evaluating your skills and areas of development. Many of those things I have wanted to work on for a while but it's been really useful to have them included in this so that I had to dedicate time to them. Thing 5 on reflective practice has been the most useful to me - I'm now trying to evaluate all my professional development activities with the 'What? So what? Now what?' model and will be doing this on my main blog when I write about the 23 Things for Professional Development programme.

Another positive outcome is that I've also started commenting on people's blogs more and I'm really pleased about that as I know how great it is to receive comments and how the conversations that happen in blog comments can be really useful to all involved.

I've recently completed my first annual IPR (Individual Performance Review) at work and as part of that I worked on a personal development plan so I decided to wait until I had completed that process before blogging this final thing. I looked at what skills I needed to improve my performance at work, and I now have a series of targets and areas to focus on which I hope will also be the areas to focus on in my Chartership. These include:

• Networking
• Presenting
• Formal writing (e.g. academic writing)
• Organisation skills (including project management, event management, time management and delegation)

Some of these I have already been working on developing, but I think I can improve on each of these areas. Some I have specific targets for, others I hope to incorporate into my professional development activities in the future. I plan to continue with the committee roles I am currently active in for both CILIP and ALA, and next year will be involved in the ALA Emerging Leaders program (January-June) which in addition to helping me understand more about ALA and how I can get involved,  I hope will include developing most of the skills I need to (particularly networking, organisation skills and presenting).

I found this activity really useful for helping me focus future professional development - I sometimes find it difficult to prioritise activities and as I take more on, I have to sometimes turn down opportunities that I can't fit in due to time commitments or that aren't within my current scope. I think knowing my areas of professional development focus should help me prioritise in future which will definitely be beneficial.

23 Things for Professional Development has been an incredibly useful process and definitely something I'm glad I participated in. Three cheers to all organisers and participants!

  by  What What 

This will be the last blog post on this blog (though it will remain online and I will still chack comments) - if you want to continue following my professional development activities, including CILIP Chartership and ALA Emerging Leaders, please subscribe to my main blog, Joeyanne Libraryanne (you can subscribe by RSS or email from the links in the top left above my photo). Hope to see some of you over there and on Twitter :)

Thing 7 - Professional organisations

I'm a strong believer in the value of professional organisations and I invest a lot of my time into them. I'm a member of CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) in UK, and a member of ALA (American Library Association). I also recently discovered that being a member of CILIP also means I'm an IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions), though I don't yet know much about this organisation (though I do follow the activities of their New Professionals group, NPSIG). I'd definitely like to learn more about IFLA; I think I'll be using my Twitter contacts (including IFLA staff) to discover more.

Both CILIP and ALA are member-led organisations, so they rely on members to support their development. They do both have staff, but any decisions essentially come from members (through committees, council and voting). So each member pays a membership fee, and in exchange for that they get lots of information though emails, magazines and journals, but the real value of the organisation is the membership and it does take a little bit of effort to make the most of that.

Our organisations can lead but they need us (their members) behind them

  by  å§’儿喵喵 

My involvement in CILIP

I volunteered to help out our local CILIP branch at an exhibition a couple of years ago, and when they were looking for committee members a couple of months later I decided to give it a go. I became Marketing Officer for CILIP West Midlands, a position I have held since January 2010. Through this I have supported the local branch committee through meetings and emails; communicated with members (online and face to face - I manage our social media presence but also like to chat to members at events); and organised events for the branch. Highlights over the last year have been the Library Debate we organised together with a local debating group, the election hustings (where we livestreamed the event and took questions from the room and also from those watching the video), and the recent Members Day where we heard about some innovative new library buildings being planned/built in the region. I've also set up some informal networking opportunities - we've started going to a local quiz night, which we won when we went for the first time earlier this month!

Photo from the CILIP West Midlands/Birmingham Salon Library Debate

  by  CILIP West Midlands 

Shortly after joining the branch committee, I was invited to join the West Midlands division of the CILIP Career Development Group committee as branch liaison. I attend the group meetings, share information between the branch and the group (at meetings and via email), help to make relevant links between the groups and share resources when possible. The Career Development Group (CDG) is interesting in that it has a number of regional divisions and also a national committee - this has some advantages but also presents challenges. On a related note, CILIP branches and groups are currently going through a period of transition so their structure and organisation may well change in future. One region is currently trialling a merge of the branch and their CDG division for example, something which I support in theory so I'll be interested to see how it develops.

My involvement in ALA

I decided to join American Library Association last year - they offer international membership for anyone outside the US. I'd been thinking about joining for a while as I was interested to learn more about the organisation and also get a wider perspective on the profession, so when a couple of friends recommended it as international members, I joined. I've been really impressed with the information I get from them and the different ways I can get involved. After attending the ALA Annual Conference this year I was even more keen to get involved, so have put myself forward for a committee liaison position linking two of my membership groups: NMRT (New Member's Round Table) and ASCLA (Association of Specialized & Cooperative Library Agencies). I'll hopefully be starting that role soon and am really looking forward to being able to learn more about both groups and help facilitate communication between them.

My ALA conference badge with ribbons for membership groups

  by  joeyanne 

I've also applied for the ALA Emerging Leaders program which aims to introduce people to ALA and help them get involved in helping the organisation. It sounds like a really great program but I think there'll be a lot of competition so I'll have to wait to see what the result of that is. Even if I'm unsuccessful, I'd still like to get more involved with ALA if I can.

Committee work for me is one of the most rewarding professional activities I'm involved in, and I certainly hope to continue to support our professional organisations in this way. Now that I've finished my MSc dissertation (finally! - I've been studying since 2006), my focus is definitely going to be on supporting the development of professional organisations such as CILIP and ALA. If you're interested in getting involved (or wondering why you should), I'll be posting a further post later today explaining my thoughts on this.

Thing 5 - Reflective practice

Cookie cat reflected in the kitchen window

It's taken me a while to write this post - I think I've been reflecting too much it's taken over the actual writing! I'm a serial planner so I spend a lot of my time reflecting on where I am, where I want to be, and how I'm going to get there (in all aspects of my life). I'm not sure that I'm so good at sharing this or writing it down though.

I read Emma's post with interest, as I really enjoy reading her blog posts on Librarians on the Loose. She writes in a very conversational way which I like, but I also really admire the way she reflects on everything she does and thinks about how she can apply lessons she has learnt in practice.

My blog, Joeyanne Libraryanne, was always intended to be a reflective blog. I write the posts primarily for myself (though sometimes I like to stimulate conversation in the comments on a certain topic), and my blog post tend to discuss either things I have done or things I have been thinking about. However, I've realised recently that many of my posts aren't exactly very reflective, they're more of a descriptive nature.

So what am I going to do about it?

Well, I'm hoping to start the CILIP Chartership process next year, so I definitely want to develop my reflective writing skills in preparation for developing my portfolio. I really like the model described by Emma originating from Borton in 1970; a cycle of What? So what? Now what?

I think when I'm recording future things which might be of use for my portfolio, I'm going to use this structure. I'm hoping to set up a wiki to support the Chartership process and I think I might use these 3 questions as the basis for each activity I do.

I'd also like to try to incorporate more reflection into my blog posts, so I'm going to try to think about including the lessons I have learnt into my posts, as well as recording planned future actions. I'm a user of the GTD system (more on that in a later thing!) so discrete actions to follow up the lessons would be good for me to record in my to-do list app. Hopefully this should help catch the follow-up actions that I often miss due to not allowing enough time for reflection before moving on to the next thing. And by reflecting on reflecting I've definitely got some points to add:

• Use the What? So what? Now what? model for reflective practice in Chartership wiki and blog posts
• Attend a training session on reflective writing (often organised by CILIP)
• Include follow-up actions for relevant blog posts