Thing 18 - JING & Turtles

I started looking at these a few weeks back but as was said in the blog-guide they take up a lot of time so I haven't really done much with them yet. I'm hoping to figure out a way of using them as part of the trade lit. tutorials for volunteers, & possibly even creating a series of captured "instructions" for trade literature users as well to run online alongside a set of reader guides explaining what's in the collection & how it can be used by different audience groups, but that's something that will have to wait until further into the TLC project when I've got a bit more free time. I would also have to discuss it with our IT department first to see if they would allow us to download the necessary software.
As practice I thought I would to try & use Jing to create a film explaining about how to use email functions, etc so in theory I would be able to avoid banging my head on the desk in frustration when I have to explain for the billionth time how to minimise (not close) the window or where the email address goes. I got about halfway through before I realised even if it came out ok it would still be a 'chicken & Egg' excercise in futility - if they need to be walked step by step through even a basic function like writing an email, they probably won't be able to download/set up the necessary software to allow them to follow the film, so you would have to write a film explaining how to do that, & then one explaining how to access that film, & on & on (William James was wrong, it really is 'Turtles all the way down! - sorry old American Lit. joke). Whe nI get the film finished I will probably test it out on family members before even thinking of inflicting it on the public or on our volunteers to get some feedback on just how far down the instructions need to go, at what point do we assume a certain level of pre-knowledge.

I've also had a quick look at the podcasting software available but I don't think it's anything we can use at this stage, as our various projects move on particularly once we get things like the INTL (International Network of Trade Lit.) up & running it might be something we would want to revisit as a way of sharing information between the various organisations, giving people the opportunity to speak on their specialist subject & most importantly creating a connected or group atmosphere despite their being hundreds or thousands of miles between the members. 

Thing 17: LGBT in Libraries or Adding Value to a Collection in Credit Crunch Britain

Example of a basic Prezi presentation

View Adding Value to a Collection in Credit Crunch Britain by CJ Crennell on Prezi.com or click the link below:
http://prezi.com/yya-pppznt2p/adding-value-to-a-collection-in-credit-crunch-britain/?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=shareprezi&utm_medium=email

Thing 17: Trade Literature: A Tool For All

I've been trying to use Prezi for a couple of presentations, 1 a very brief presentation on the benefits of LGBT in Libraries & the other one trying to condensed a collection level description into a very short period of time. I think as far as animation goes & being able to move around the screen definitely beats ppt but I do wish when you resize a box or shape or something everything else would automatically retain their proportions & resize themselves. The only other issues I have are a slight technical glitch with downloading the presentations to work on offline but that's not to big of a deal, & the speed which the finished presentation 'swoops' across the screen (I could see someone suffering from seasickness watching it, but I'm sure that with a bit more investigation I'll find a way to tweak the speed). Next time we're putting together a presentation for the library I'm definitely going to recommend using Prezi I just wish it had been around while I was at uni. Being able to expand my 'slides' to whatever size I wanted would have made it a lot easier to fit the right images & text in at the right size for people to read them.
View Trade Literature: A Tool For All by CJ Crennell on Prezi.com or click the link below:
http://prezi.com/tpza9z4rrh1q/trade-literature-a-tool-for-all/?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=shareprezi&utm_medium=email

One of the areas I'm considering using it in is to create a series of tutorials to show trade lit. volunteers what's happening & what they'll be doing at each stage of the project. So I will be spending the next few months looking at developing my Prezi skills to accomplish this. I'm also planning on taking part in some more group visits, talks & library forums as part of my PDP, & now that I have more time because I have (touch wood) finished my Portfolio (just the spell check & page numbers to go) so I'm hoping I'll get to use it a lot more in 'practice' situations. If anyone has any feedback on how they've found using it on talks outside their own service, where they've had to access it from a machine that doesn't have Prezi on it, I'd be interested in any tips for avoiding glitches - particularly after my last big presentation bombed completely due to Powerpoint going nuts.

Thing 16 - Advocacy & Publishing

Recently I've been working as an advocate for the LGBT community, particularly as represented in our public libraries. A small group of us have started building a project to create an 'alternative scene' for the LGBT community & we have been successful in convincing the local libraries of the importance of the library role in this type of project. The aim of the project is to make the LGBT scene more inclusive in itself as well as making public services more socially inclusive as a whole, to create cultural & community partnerships, to raise awareness of the Community's issues & needs within the "straight" community. Public libraries are therefore a vital element of this project, & it is just as important to the libraries to be involved. The public library is supposed to be one of our social & community hubs that can act as a base point or link for everyone, particularly those belonging to disenrachised or minority groups, through to a wide range of communities or information without bias or prejudice. It is also just as important for libraries, particluarly in the current climate of cuts, to be able to maintain their social inclusion infrastructure & enable themselves to build relationships with different audiences & generations.
Which is why we thought a library project might be the best place to start as it would offer us the chance to make contact with a wider audience as well as having the opportunity to take the project in a number of different directions.
So at the beginning of the library stage of the project we conducted a survey of the LGBT services & stock available - sadly I could've counted on 1 hand the number of gay/trans books/DVDs availble & as for lesbian literature (zero). Our first job therefore was to lobby the library to raise awareness of the lack of support & representation of the LGBT community & get them on-board to begin building our community project. So far we have created a whole new LGBT collection, inc. books & DVDs for all elements of the community, which was launched last Thursday with a film screening & drop-in session. As part of the project, & as a result of my being able to develop my blogging skills through this course, I was given the opportunity to be responsible for some of the marketing, including creating an LGBT in Libraries blog (http://lgbtinlibraries.blogspot.com/ ). Now that the collection is up & running the library part of the project will, hopefully, continue to develop to include new services such as LGBT reading groups that will not only bring more people into the library but will also (fingers crossed) bring more people to join the LGBT Community Project. Greater public support is going to be a big issue for the next stage of the project as it will involve working in partnership with the whole LGBT community to find out what they want in an alternative scene, as well as lobbying the local Single Equality Coalition & various council departments to help us begin to set it up & keep it running (gulp!). If there's anyone out there who has had any experience of convincing local councils to support community projects, any advice on how to persuade them to at least hear us out & hopefully come on-board gratefully received. Thanks.

Thing 13 - Google docs, Wikis & Dropbox

thingthing1CPI think the Dropbox is one I might suggest to our organisation - we're always having a problem with file sharing between people on different sites, often documents are too big to be sent by email, or they arrive & take ages to open. We do have a swap area on our hard drive, but more often than not the person who needs to have access to a shared document hasn't been given access permissions to the specific swap folders/documents so they have to go through the hassle of contacting IT to get them to change the settings, etc. The Dropbox could cut down on a lot of this & make joint projects a lot easier to oversee.
On the other hand, I'm not too sure about the wiki idea, probably partly because of wikipedia's complete open door editor policy - anyone can write change/update an entry even if their info is wrong & there's no real provenance for the "facts" on their, you just have to take things on trust & trust that people won't access your entries & write something completely horrific. As a result even without looking into the course links in too much detail I've kind of decided it's probably not for me. But I'm willing to have an open mind enough to at least look at the info on the CPD23 page & see if wiki's are possibly more secure & useful than I think.


mSuggestions for your Thing 13 blog postYou could write about your first impressions of any or all of these tools, or you could explore their potential uses within your library. If you are already using one or more of them, you could write about the kinds of projects for which they have been useful. If you wish, you could also compare and contrast the value of each of these different tools and consider how they could be used to further your own professional development.

Don’t forget to visit other CPD23 blogs and share your insights with other CPD23 participants!

Thing 15 - Events - attending, speaking, & organising

I've had some experience of public speaking mostly at university or in my previous role as a TEFL teacher (I think teaching is the most terrifying form of public speaking - standing up in a classroom full of teenagers, most of whom would rather be off doing something else especially in summer school!). Mostly though I've made presentations to other students either as part of assessed coursework projects or as part of student projects like Student Mentoring. For instance, while studying in America I had to summarise & present a series of ACLU law reviews to our American Civil Liberties class on a regular basis. I've also given assessed presentations on topics ranging from 'Native American schooling in the C18th & its cultural effect' to 'Thematic analysis in LIS research methods'. The discussion caused be the latter presentation was particularly helpful when it came time to create the research methods for my dissertation & arrange research events, including focus groups & market research surveys. Despite these scary, but ultimate good, experiences of speaking at & organising events I haven't had a lot of experience of actual 'professional' public speaking apart from a few talks given at forums such as the Oxford TeachMeet or the LGBT in Libraries launch which went off yesterday without a hitch, & with lots of interest. I have been involved in arranging various group visits at our library & talking to them about our collections & services but I am trying to gain more experience of arranging or speaking at professional events, in order to continue to expand my skills in advocacy & professional networking. As part of this I have been applying to attend various conferences & other events through bursary/grant applications, which not only give the opportunity to attend the conference but usually offer the opportunity to have an article published or give a talk about your conference experience. For instance, I applied for the recent CILIP Aspire Award as well as the last 2 SLA-ECCA conference awards, but so far I haven't had much luck. I am putting together a list of conferences, such as next year's Umbrella conference, & various workshops to investigate ways of finding support to attend them or saving up for them. I'm particularly interested in these areas:
Trade Literature
Marketing
Web Writing
Digitisation projects
Advocacy
National Policy
Diversity, Disability & LGBT
If anyone hears of any events in these areas please let me know so that I can investigate the possibility of attending.

One of the main issues I have found relating to attending events as a Swindonian or even setting them up is the affect of geography (we don't quite fall into any of the geographical categories of West, East, South or Central). Most professional events that are already in place are either in London or Bristol, or even further afield, & you have to factor in at least a couple of hours travel time. When it comes to setting up our own events the issue is finding like minded people, who are willing to travel all the way to Swindon. For instance, we launched our LGBT in Libraries project yesterday & in the run up we were trying to circulate information & invites to as wide a community group as possible - particularly as opportunities for networking with the LGBT Community in Swindon are slim, there is one club & one pub & that is about it, just one of the many reasons we've been trying to get groups like LGBT in Libraries off the ground. As part of the marketing we tried making contact with 'local'-ish community groups that are already in existence & while they were all happy to pass on details to their members on the day of the launch we were pretty much limited to interest from Swindon librarians & Swindon community members. Although the wider professional/social community might support a project in principle it can be incredibly difficult to actually get them to actually physically support it by attending events outside of their own geographical community. One of the areas we're currently looking at is linking our local events into national events/campaigns, such as the Green Carnation book award, not just to raise our profile but to hopefully forge links with other community groups across the country. As a result we will be looking at the possibility of setting up a new LGBT reading group in our local libraries to make use of our brand new collection. We're also looking at other ways we can get our local council or local equality coalition involved in supporting us to provide other community groups & services but there's a long way to go before we're anywhere close to arranging anything in that area.

As well as the LGBT community group work I'm also interested in looking at setting up a professional library network in Swindon & the surrounding area. I'm not sure what format it would take, whether it would just be a regular social meeting in a cafe or pub (perhaps even getting involved in regular events - pub quizzes, film nights, or anything else in the Swindon area) or a more structured series of events where we could invite guest speakers, or some combination of the two. At the moment I'm trying to find out whether there is anyone in the area who would be interested in anything like this but I've hit a bit of a brick wall in that as there is no existing networking group or local professional newsletter for the Swindon area it is very difficult to make information available or get feedback with colleagues from other sectors. I'm trying to figure out a way of getting the information out to more people on a local level, obviously I will at some point be making contact with CILIP's newsletter as a possible way of sending out information but there's no guarantees that all librarians in Swindon are members so I would like to find a way to make contact at the local level. Any advice at all on how to set up a local group, particularly making 1st contact with people would be very gratefully received.

For my part, the main piece of advice I would give to anyone who is planning on speaking at or organising an event may seem an obvious one given the topic - you must practise COMMUNICATING, with your team leader, line manager, colleagues, stakeholders & audience & anyone else you can think of. You can write the best speech of your life but if you've fall down when it comes to communicate with your audience & marketing your event nobody will be there to hear it. It's also very important that you don't assume that just because you wrote it or organised it it is automatically brilliant & doesn't need to be changed at all there is ALWAYS room for feedback & improvement.
The other thing that is helped by practising communicating, or even just proactising your presentation in front of your colleagues & getting their feedback, is your sense of self-confidence & your belief in the project which will be a massive boost when it comes time to actually get up & start talking particularly if you're trying to get other professionals to sign up to your project.

Thing 14b - Mendeley

I had a bit of a problem getting either of these set up - kiosk software strikes again. I managed to download Mendeley to my home computer but as a lot of the research I'm doing is  work-based I haven't been able to use it as much as I want. I think it is going to be a big help to me when it comes to organising my evidence, appendices & bibliography for my Chartership portfolio & also for future projects.

One of the things I like most about it is the "one-stop-shop" aspect - if I find an article or something online I can make notes on it straight away (& be able to access them later from a different computer WITHOUT cluttering up my email or trying not to lose fiddly little usb sticks), I can download the article itself, plus find the correct citation & other information without have to dig around even more.
I'm hoping that this tool will help me to create a more professional portfolio & to be able to illustrate the breadth of my professional knowledge on a wider scale. I'm also hoping that as I become more involved in specific research projects at work or as part of my studies it will help me to remain organised & better manage my time so that I can work more effectively & share my findings with my colleagues & the wider LIS audience.
In terms of actually directly supporting our library users however, I will be limited by the fact that it cannot be accessed on any of our work computers because of the Kiosk software settings. I can, however, use it as an illustrative example for students/academics who may need help in organising their research, referencing their work or sharing findings. I can also point them in the direction of other similar online tools & research management software. Our users tend to be split between the very academic & obscure research projects (Masters/PhD research/Professors/etc) & the general public working on specific research tasks, usually family history related - for many of the latter this can often be their first real 'research' project & the former may have experience of researching their very specific field but will need help in finding their way around the more general research options & tools available. I think that Mendeley would be a great way of signposting the research path for both groups.