Thing 3

I'm using my blog site for both professional & personal blogs - which I've distinguished by using different templates/colours but I now need to choose a picture for my profile (temporarily using a pretty landscape shot). I want my profile to look professional but also 'personal' & friendly. Does anyone have any advice on whether it's best to go for some super formal photo (e.g. graduation photo) or where you draw the line on informality?

The best laid plans....

I had planned on writing a blog post about my professional visit to the Imperial War Museum, & how what I found out could help both my professional & personal research. Unfortunately thanks to the lightning storms yesterday I had a hellish train journey & never made it past slough. And it got me wondering what is the worst situation anyone has put themselves through in the name of professional development?

Thing 2

I've started looking through some of the other blogs on here & have even commented on a few & already I know this is going to be a great resource for networking - I've just 'bumped into' a few old friends from library school & found some potential new professional contacts who are interested in some of the same areas of research as me including 'the fate of the physical library in a technological world' (Ha! They'll never get rid of us no matter how many new gadgets or gizmos they create we'll always find a way to turn them to our advantage). I'll keep digging through the blogs as the course goes on but if anyone knows of any blogs relating to my other areas of research - trade literature collections in libraries; professional writing & methods of LIS research - could you point me in the right direction. Thanks.

Welcome to the blog

I joined the 23 Things course because I wanted to expand my professional knowledge & learn more about how to make use of the available technology for things like marketing, networking & a lot more. Although I completed my masters in information & library management & have since spent 3 years actually working in a library & archive & have taken on a lot of new professional skills there are some areas that are still largely theory in my experience, such as blogging & ways of making full use of the interent. I'm hoping that this course will help me to learn more about what's available & how I can use it in my own professional development or to benefit my library.
Step one will obviously be to have a closer look at the options for designing a blog & give this a more professional appearance.
I'm also hoping that my involvement in this course will help to illustrate my level of professional commitment & give me the opportunity to begin 'publishing' on a professional forum. Publishing professionally is one of the areas of professional development that I'm having a problem with - it seems to be something of a chicken & egg situation, every time I send in papers or articles for consideration or apply for inclusion in conferences (either as a delegate or a speaker) a lot of the responses seem to give the impression that while interesting my articles don't have the right kind of .... professional profile or something, because I haven't been published. Leaving the question of how do you raise your professional profile in order to get published if no-one will publish you. So I am really hoping that this course gives me the opportunity to begin to raise my profile & hopefully find new forums for publishing as part of my continued professional development.