High Visibility Cataloguing

High visibility, because visible is the first step to being valued.

Since Venessa and I first started talking about High Visibility Cataloguing, we’ve been trying to get the message out to as many cataloguers, metadata specialists, information retrieval officers, bibliographic data managers and other colleagues as possible. Our thanks to Alan Danskin of CIG for his support and for allowing us to post to the CIG blog and hopefully reach a wider audience there. We also managed to get a piece in the last ever issue of Gazette last week (needs Flash to view).

If you didn’t read my original blog post about this then you’ll find it here. Even if you did read it, you may not have seen all the great examples of self-promotion and cataloguers hogging the limelight that people have added in the comments so please do have a look (both here and on Venessa’s post). We’ve been talking about it on Twitter and getting responses from all over the cataloguing world so we’re trying to use the hashtag #hvcats (and have set up a twapperkeeper archive for it). We’re hoping that there will be more discussion and more examples/ideas in the comments on the CIG blog post too.

Venessa and I are really delighted with all the support for the idea and have been collating the various examples and experiences and will hopefully have a central home for them all and for this discussion to continue coming very soon (to save me having to add so many links for you to click on!). An exciting development to look forward to!

TeachMeet, Part Deux

I still haven’t posted properly about the Cambridge Librarian TeachMeet that we had at the end of September and it looks like I’ll never get round to it, because we’re doing serious thinking about the next TeachMeet. We hoping to hold it in the spring some time and have talked a lot about what we’d do differently, what we’d like to keep and new elements we’d like to add to the next TeachMeet. We did an evaluation of the first TeachMeet and I was pleasantly surprised by how many people responded (about three-quarters of the people who attended, which is a pretty good response by any standards). It was also extremely gratifying that so many people took time to write details responses to questions about the venue, their expectations of the TeachMeet before they attended and how it met those expectations, whether they had used any of the things they’d learned at the event. It has been a huge help to get this feedback and we’re going to try hard to incorporate a lot of it into the next version (main tip: don’t break for refreshments in the middle!).

I felt it was especially hard for me to get a real sense of how the evening had gone from the perspective of the participants because I was up at the front most of the time (just hosting/introducing/occasionally remembering to pick names out of a hat cup, the usual Bruce Forsythe type of gig but with less tap-dancing). I didn’t feel I had enough time to just talk to people and mingle (not that I’m a skilled mingler but I would have liked to try at least). I did think that overall things had gone well, the talks were well received and the post-it note questions were much more popular than I had anticipated. But we were surprised by the timing (after a few speakers dropped out at the last minute) and so our planned schedule didn’t really work out. I wasn’t happy with the ending, it kind of fizzled out early and we’d not timetabled in any discussions/q&a session or any extra time for socialising, having a drink, mingling (I’m not obsessed with mingling, honestly). That is something I’m keen to improve next time.

We’re hoping to get more people involved in planning and organising the next TeachMeet, so if you have any ideas/comments/suggestions/criticisms or just want to join us and see how we look when we’re doing “proper thinking”, then please do come along from 6pm Thursday 9th December, CB2 (which has wifi so we’ll hopefully have someone tweeting/checking twitter so you could join in virtually). Food, drink and camlibtm plotting – what could be better on a winter’s evening?

CIG conference report: Japanese management techniques and workflow analysis

At the CIG conference in September, there were a couple of talks about Japanese management techniques and their application to workflow analysis in cataloguing/tech services. I found this very interesting – I live with someone who does Six Sigma/LEAN workflow analysis as a job and who has often commented on how he’d love to apply the methods to the library! It’s almost too interesting a topic – I have too much to say and so have struggled to write up my report for the last 2 months. I’ve finally done a version for my institution’s intranet blog and am reposting it here, with a few extra examples, as I think it’s of wide interest.  Last year, we started a review of workflows and processes within my own department (which is why I have been talking about library workflows at home!), so I have spent a lot of time thinking about this issue.

Stuart Hunt spoke about “Improving performance in cataloguing and technical services workflows”, based on the experience of the University of Warwick. They contracted an external company (Processfix) to analyse and improve workflows throughout all University departments. The wider economic context of current and anticipated future cuts led to a need on an institutional level to consider all activities and see how they could achieve that holy grail of “doing more with less”.

Examples of  Rapid Improvement Workshops that took place in the Library were looking at how long it took to shelve a book (from being returned to being on the shelf ready to borrow again) or examining the entire acquisition process, from recommendation to availability of a book to the reader. At Warwick, the process used various different tools that Stuart Hunt described together as “Japanese management techniques” but included Six Sigma, LEAN workflow and BPR (business process engineering). This is a field full of acronyms (so very familiar ground for cataloguers) but contains some very intriguing ideas and techniques.

 Stuart’s presentation should have been followed by a talk from Robin Armstrong-Viner talking about the use of LEAN Kaizen (one of these Japanese management techniques) at the University of Aberdeen. However, he was unable to make it due to a family emergency, so instead his slides were used as the backdrop for a more general discussion, led by Alan Danskin who gave some examples of how these workflow analysis techniques have been applied at the British Library.

The start was to “brown-paper” a wall (yes, apparently “to brown-paper” is a verb) to create a process map. Everyone involved in the process from beginning to end takes part and, using post-it notes, writes down each step in the process (one step per post-it). These are then arranged on the brown paper to give a sequence of activities in the process, which can be divided into “swim lanes” (areas within the responsibility of a particular team or department). The process map is then used to identify areas of “waste”, defined as “anything that doesn’t add value to the process”. Waste can be  many things, for example waiting time is a waste, so it’s often crucial to look at the point of handover from one “swim lane” to another. Another waste is over-production, doing redundant tasks – the example given here was adding coloured slips of paper with tick boxes to each item received which essentially repeated all the information already contained in the purchase order on the Acquisitions system (and I wasn’t the only person in the room nodding and groaning in recognition there). Sometimes it’s worth asking “why?” of a certain step/process, and repeating the why until you get a sensible answer – saying “because we’ve always done it that way” isn’t satisfactory. I call this the “irritating toddler” method of workflow analysis.

Transport is another example of waste, so another technique was to take a scale plan/drawing of the library layout and use string to map the journey taken by an item from the minute it arrives in the building to the point it reaches its final home on the shelves. The length of the string would show how far the item has to travel and could reveal waste. This can be very illuminating, though obviously there are physical limitations placed by the building which can be difficult to overcome.

There was a huge amount of detail and interesting examples in the talks – Warwick were able to reduce the time taken to reshelve a book from 48 hours to 4 hours by changing the workflow. Alan told a great anecdote from the BL’s experience, where a huge amount disruption to staff working time could be cut out simply by deciding to stop locking the door of the stamping room while the staff were inside (I loved this and have repeated it to people since I got back, but it maybe losing something in the re-telling…). It is worth looking at the full presentations if you are interested in the ideas or want to see some photos of “brown-papered” walls with process maps on them:

Stuart Hunt’s presentation (PDF) and Robin Armstrong-Viner’s presentation (Powerpoint)

Stuart mentioned that he plans to publish about this (indeed, he made quite a strong argument about there not being a culture of publishing in the UK but that there should be, as the library qualification is a research qualification too), so I look forward to reading more about it.

Cataloguers, step into the limelight

I have always said that if librarians as a profession struggle with their public image and with public understanding of what they do, then cataloguers are the librarians of the library world.

When people talk about the “echo chamber“, where librarians need to talk to the wider public rather than to each other, I can’t help but think that cataloguers are stuck within their own little bubble inside that echo chamber, mainly talking to other cataloguers.

So, for a long time now, I’ve been interested in promoting cataloguing and cataloguers within our profession, to other librarians and information professionals. And within our institutions – there has been a tendency to describe us as “back room staff” and “back room activities”, tucked away in our fusty corners, poring over rule books, measuring things with rulers, preparing antiquated records fit only for card catalogues while the whizzy, modern, exciting work of whizzy, modern, exciting libraries takes place around us, even in spite of us. This isn’t the case, but we really need to get better and telling people the facts. And showing them what we do.

Biddy Fisher talked about library advocacy and the role of “cat & class” within the new heart of the library profession in her keynote speech at the CIG conference in September (the powerpoint slides are available here). It was a subject that came up a lot in general discussion, over tea, at dinner during the conference.

At the conference (and mainly due to us both being on Twitter), I met Venessa (who tweets as @scarlettlibgirl and blogs at Scarlettlibrarian) and since then we’ve been talking about our mutual interest in proactive advocacy for cataloguing and metadata. Talking about the new roles and activities for the staff traditionally called “cataloguers” (you will note that my job description places me in a “cataloguing” department whereas Venessa’s calls her a “metadata adminstrator” but that’s only the tip of the iceberg in what our various roles cover). We also interested in how cataloguers promote themselves and their work within the wider library, perhaps even the whole institution.

See Venessa’s call to arms on her blog. Our aim is to promote debate and discussion within the cataloguing world but also to encourage promotion to librarians who are not cataloguers. All of this is with the aim of making cataloguers more visible, we need to step into the library limelight and do more to promote our contributions.

We’re particularly interested in anything (official or not) that cataloguing staff have done to promote themselves or their cataloguing work to their colleagues. We’re working on raising our profile so hopefully you will hear more from us in due course (Venessa is working on this right now).

Please do get in touch, on Twitter or via our blogs. I think there’s a real groundswell of broader library advocacy and promotion going on from grassroots level in the wider profession and I really want to see the cataloguing community build on that.

I’ll be posting more about this shortly…

RDA at CIG: some rough notes

I seem to have let *cough* several weeks pass since I promised to write up more of my notes from the CIG conference in Exeter. Shame on me, I’ve been short of computer time and short of time at work to post this kind of thing. To start keeping my promises, here are some fairly rough notes on all things to do with RDA that came up during the conference. Be warned, there are a lot of acronyms coming in this post! A lot of the RDA stuff came up in discussions or questions so will not be reflected in the presentations on the conference website.

First there was a fairly informal talk from Alan Poulter, the new CILIP representative on JSC. He stated that, as an academic, he is very independent and happy to raise any issues, concerns or questions that people may have. He is keen to act as a real rep by gathering questions, comments and contributions. He is aiming to set up a website, maybe a wiki, to allow people to do this more interactively. He has had very little comment so far.

The questions discussed what will happen if some libraries adopt RDA and others don’t. Alan Poulter said this was something the library community has experienced before.

There was a question “If FRBR is the question, to what extent is RDA the answer?”, which Alan Danskin (CIG Chair and BL rep on JSC) answered basically saying it’s a move in the right direction. There was a chicken-egg situation where the cataloguing rules and the encoding (MARC) need to reflect FRBR, so the decision was taken to start with the rules which will allow the rest of the necessary changes to take place. He was at pains to say that moving to RDA will not be as big a shift (in the first instance) as the shift from AACR to AACR2. Very few headings will change. In future library systems, more work can be done at the expression level  and a FRBRised future is more attainable if this effort is shared. Someone else asked why we still didn’t have separation of description/display/coding in RDA but Alan Danskin felt that RDA did manage this separation (despite the fact that we’ll initially be implementing it in MARC) and that there is mapping to MODS as well as ISBD, etc.

Alan Danskin reported on the results of CIG’s RDA in the UK survey [Powerpoint presentation available online]. 78 responses, primarily academic libraries but a mix of other types. CIG feel the survey showed a generally low level of understanding about RDA, there is quite a lot of basic work to do on awareness and understanding. Feedback from BL staff also confirms that there is a big issues understanding the FRBR model, work-expression-manifestation-item, etc. Alan said that quite a few respondents to the survey were unclear what was meant by the questions on “percentage of materials catalogued in-house” and on authority creation.

 The survey also reveals a high level of concern about how non-professional cataloguers are going to handle RDA, it needs to be made straightforward.

CIG is planning to contact those respondents who offered help with training (venues, trainers, etc). They are currently looking at LC’s training materials and tailoring them to the UK audience. They aim to encourage discussion on the CIG website, invite new members to join the RDA Task & Finish Group, which aims to plan modules, delivery options and prepare training materials. CIG is aiming to make training available at as reasonable a price as possible. They are investigating free access, not charging for content at all just venue, catering, etc. They are investigating the Open University’s Moodle online course software with a view to developing something online which would be more accessible and reduce costs.

Alan Danskin confirmed that the BL are planning to make a decision about implementation next year. Interestingly, he said the BL has money in its budget for training and that it has been discussed with management how this will affect key performance indicators, though there were comments from the audience that this certainly will not be the case in other institutions (neither budget nor flexibility in KPIs).

 If the BL decide to implement RDA, they will have local policies to deal with RDA’s options and alternative rules, etc. They will probably follow most of the LCPS but not all, so there will be BL policies which will be added to the RDA Toolkit in time (with a link icon appearing next to the relevant RDA rule).

Also on a related note, during the Standards Forum Alan Danskin was talking about various MARBI proposals and said something in what he described as an “incautious moment” about MARC being at the end of its useful life. He said some of the recent changes highlight this as you find yourself working around the format to achieve what you need to achieve. When pressed on this, he said any predictions of the death of MARC should be taken with a degree of caution but that as long as we’re using MARC then we’re not talking the same language as everyone else. We need a schema based on a set of data elements (eg ISBD or RDA elements) that could be turned into XML. When linked data was mentioned, he pointed out that there was still a lot of stuff that had no URI to enable it to become linked data. The whole issue of MARC/encoding generally was a recurrent feature of tea break discussions and general chat, in fact.

Terry Willan from Talis commented that the information supply chain with all its interdependencies is a real problem, so many libraries buy in most of their cataloguing and the international infrastructure for bibliographic information is the real nut to crack. Maybe the only way to move away from MARC is a bottom up approach, starting small scale and gradually gaining traction. However, MARC is a very severe restriction on RDA.

Alan agreed that one of the difficulties everyone has with RDA is that it needs to be backwards compatible, so for example chapters 6, 9-11 have lots of elements to describe attributes of an entity (title of work, date of birth of person) but that this information then has to also be put into a string for a heading.

Someone asked whether there might be libraries which go for a “partial” implementation of RDA. Alan actually mentioned the example of what France was describing at the EURIG seminar (a “French profile” which only adopted certain “acceptable” parts of RDA) and said that if a library is not using the core set of RDA elements, then it is not RDA. It’s not good for the re-use of records. He also alluded to the issue of hybrid records, where they have been updated to RDA to some extent so that they are neither AACR2 nor RDA. He raised the question of a heading changing to RDA, what then becomes of the AACR2 records in the database which use that heading?

In a general discussion on the final morning, there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm when the question was asked how many people had looked at RDA Toolkit for more than 30 minutes. It is perhaps confirmation of what Barbara Tillett described as a “muted response” in the UK that only Cambridge University and the British Library had taken out a subscription to the RDA Toolkit for this year. Not really surprising given the cost and uncertainty about implementation/implications during 2010-11. LSE reported that they had explored the Toolkit quite extensively during the open access period and used the opportunity to create some sample records.

CIG Conference: report to follow

This week, I spent three very enjoyable days on the Exeter University campus at the Cataloguing & Indexing Group (CIG) conference. It was an extremely interesting and useful programme with lots of great conversations and discussions. I have lots of notes to write up and things to mull over so I intend to do that in a series of blog posts.

However, I’m off on holiday for a week and so won’t have a chance to do it for a while. In the meantime, I wanted to point anyone with an interest to the conference website (presentations should appear there soon). I couldn’t livetweet in the conference room itself (no wifi signal) but there were several of us tweeting from the conference, or adding our tweets since we got back so have a look at the hashtag #cigx for more information. I’ve tried to set up a twapperkeeper archive for that hashtag, but am not sure if it’s working yet.

The high points (apart from meeting lots of lovely people and the fantastic food) were a morning spent looking at how Japanese business methods (LEAN Kaizen, Six Sigma) can be applied to technical services workflows – or actually any workflows for those of you in libraries too small to have separate departments – with examples from the experiences of University of Warwick, University of Aberdeen and the British Library. Also a programme designed to look at the “wisdom of the crowd” in assigning LCSH. There were also discussions of RDA which I’m going to come back to in a separate post, as well as retrospective cataloguing projects. There was actually such a lot of useful content that I will definitely need several posts to cover it all. So, there’s some cataloguing goodness coming to this blog very shortly. Once I’ve had my holiday.

RDA in Europe: or the implementation domino effect

I have already briefly discussed the RDA in Europe seminar I attended last month. However, since the presentations have now been made available online, I wanted to return to add a little bit more detail to that initial report. The seminar covered a huge amount of ground so I’m just going to point to a few of the things I found most interesting or useful and then provide links to the presentations themselves for anyone interested in the full shebang. The most useful links were the ones I gave in my first post, since they link to real examples of how records may look using RDA and comparing differences between AACR2 and RDA for those (like me) who like practical examples.

For those who would like an overview of the reasons behind, history and overall development of RDA, the introductory talk by Alan Danskin (from the British Library chair of the Joint Steering Committee, JSC) is a useful starting point. One of the most interesting points he made was that RDA should be viewed as a floor rather than a ceiling – that cataloguers would be able to add to a record, provide more than is called for in RDA, as long as the record fulfils the basic requirements of RDA.

Providing a kind of bookend talk to Alan’s was Caroline Brazier, who spoke about the need for change in the governance structure that lies behind AACR2 and now RDA. Her presentation gave some helpful diagrams to explain the rather convoluted structure currently in place but this was all created when AACR2 were truly “Anglo-American” and the high level of interest demonstrated by the European countries attending the event show that there will need to be some more to become more inclusive of other countries and constituencies in future.

There is a huge amount of information about the various plans/discussions/activities going on in all the European countries with regard to RDA implementation/investigation/translation. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the various country talks was learning what cataloguing codes, authority files and encoding systems were used in each country at the moment. The level of enthusiasm for RDA and, perhaps more significantly, for a move away from the national and towards the truly international adoption of standards was very heartening. Whatever may happen with the implementation (or otherwise) of RDA, there is a real appetite now for people to create records that are interoperable, accessible, standardised. It makes me appreciate how far we’ve already moved in this direction in the 12 years since I first started cataloguing – it’s easy to lose sight of that but it is true.

The French cataloguers seem quite sceptical about aspects of the new code and explicitly stated that they feel it is still too anglo-centric. They were particularly unhappy with what they feel is ”loose, limited reference to” ISBD. Germany seems to have made the most progress towards a translation of the text of RDA (a major issue for all the European countries as well as Canada) as well as in their move towards possible implementation.

For those who mainly catalogue items in English, then the most useful talks were undoubtedly the ones about implementation in the various English-speaking countries and the overview of the US testing process.

Barbara Tillett of LC spoke about the plans of the various English-speaking countries: Australia (the only country to officialy state they will be adopting RDA), Canada (which requires a full French translation before they would be in a position to implement RDA) and the UK. I learned something new in the discussion of the UK: there had been some general beta testing planned in various UK libraries but now the BL is setting up its own test and will be making the results of this public. Barbara stated that the response in the UK to RDA has been “muted” and that the decision about implementation will not be taken on a national level but rather on an institutional level. Essentially, the BL is waiting to see what happens at LC and then everyone else in the UK is waiting to see what happens at the BL.

Beacher Wiggins presentation on the US RDA testing process is well worth reading if you have any interest in RDA. Not least because LC have created a vast amount of training material, examples, test files and documentation (linked to on my earlier post) which is publicly available and extremely useful when thinking about the practicalities of RDA. The test starts in October until the end of December. Then the test results will be analysed in the period January-March 2011, with the aim that the US national libraries will make a final decision about implementation in the period April-June 2011 – in time to announce it at the ALA Annual conference.

Possibly the most practical and useful session was the overview of the RDA Toolkit, presented by Troy Linker with Barbara Tillett of LC giving a hands-on demonstration of various features. This talk isn’t available online, sadly. For anyone who has taken out a subscription to the RDA Toolkit for this year (are there many who have? we have one here in Cambridge), here are some of the interesting features:

• Bookmarks can be added and can be made visible in the main text of RDA (or hidden from view). They are working on sharing bookmarks (either globally or across an institutional subscription) but this is still under development.
• There is a print function which will allow printing of whole sections of RDA if required
• The saved search function allows the user to set up a sophisticated set of search parameters in the Advanced Search window (selecting which documents to search, including/excluding examples, searching only certain work/issuance/media/content types or specific RDA instruction numbers) and then name this as a saved search to be retrieved on another occasion (it appears in My Profile).
• Workflows are worth investigating (Tools>Workflows). These are step-by-step processes for creating records using RDA. Users can create their own (copying and modifying an existing one to edit it if necessary) which can be shared either globally or with all users from the same institution. Good examples are the CONSER standard record workflow and all the workflows submitted by LC staff – extremely useful working documents and something I am thinking about adapting/building on as part of our local training if we end up adopting RDA in my library.
• As well as the ability to create workflows with links to AACR2 and RDA, there is also the facility to embed links to RDA from Word documents or intranet documentation. Troy admits that the copy & paste function is not very good and makes it difficult to paste chunks of RDA into Word so the “embedding” function is meant to replace that (make of that what you will…).
• On the RDA Toolkit home page, there is a section on Teaching & Training (http://www.rdatoolkit.org/training) which includes links to webinars and also has a training calendar where everyone is encouraged to their own training events. More information will be added to this training area over time.

Overall it was a really enjoyable one-day seminar, in the beautiful Black Diamond (as the Royal Library building is known) and one of the best things was the opportunity to talk about cataloguing with people from all over Europe. I’m such a geek.

 

Post 23 Things…. what to do now

I would like to keep the blog going for a while at least, specifically to talk about TeachMeet (more coming soon to this blog and many others hopefully) after it takes place but also more generally. It’s just a question of making sure I find the time and actually writing the things that I’m thinking about writing.

Most of what I would talk about now that 23 Things is over would probably be cataloguing-related though.

CLICK

That was the sound of 92% of my readers mentally switching off. Probably. We’ll see – my RDA post remains my most popular post and I have an update report on that RDA in Europe seminar coming very shortly.

Wordle

My Wordle (just from latest posts)

Here’s my Wordle. If I hadn’t left it so late (and had so much wine in the writing of my Thing 23 post), I would have liked to paste the text of my whole blog into Wordle to create it and get a proper overview. However, here is the one created from the latest posts. Please note the little “cataloguing” placed in the bottom right-hand corner!

Plus ça change… (thing 23)

It’s frustrating and yet strangely reassuring to find that I haven’t changed at all in roughly 20 years of having “coursework” to complete. As soon as the 23 Things blog posted about the stay of execution, I just knew that I’d be writing this at the last minute on Monday night, even though I was well on track to complete by the original finish date of 27th August. Memories of various dissertations and even Alevel coursework flash across my mind, hastily compiling bibliographies (from index cards in the pre-Zotero days) into the early hours and checking page numbering while standing in the queue at the printers’. Sigh. I can take some solace from the fable of the hare and the tortoise maybe? So long as I get there in the end.

Image by Jehsuk, via Flickr

I’m determined to cross that finish line and collect that voucher certificate, so I’ve made sure that I’ve posted and tagged on each thing, up to and including this one. I’ve actually done it, 23 Things.

To fulfil the requirements, a quick summary of what I’ve thought of the various Things, though those thoughts haven’t changed much since I first blogged about them.

Things I was already using or liked so much I bought the company will continue to use: Google calendar, Google docs, RSS feeds (how did I manage without them?) and Google Reader (I tried out some other feedreaders but have always returned to Google Reader), Doodle, wikis, Twitter (more of this one later), blogging, commenting & tagging, youtube & podcasting (though not necessarily in a library context for the last two)

Things I really like even though I’ve not returned to them yet: LibraryThing, Zotero/Mendeley, Slideshare, Delicious

Things I am suspending judgement on, pending further use: LinkedIn

Things that are Not For Me: Facebook (no surprise there), iGoogle (I just haven’t really used it since I set it up despite using the calendar and reader functions several times a day)

It seems like a long time ago since the launch. A lot has happened since then and it’s been interesting to look back at my earlier blog posts and remember the early stages of this journey (yes, I used the j-word, live with it). I hoped to find out more about social media and specifically how they apply to libraries and I have. Through the various Things, I know more about what is going on in libraries in Cambridge and beyond as well as thinking about what else could be done and what that would mean. I know that’s the point of the programme and it’s been great.

However, I’m going to be self-indulgent and talk more about what it’s meant for me personally and professionally. If naked narcissism offends you, look away now.

When I started this blog, I wrote specifically about what I was hoping would come out of my participation in 23 Things.

I am particularly interested in seeing the new connections, friendships and working relationships that might be born out of the peer support and social networking that form an integral part of 23 Things.

This has been the best result of the programme for me, because I think I have made new connections, friendships and working relationships. As a direct results of 23 Things, I’m on the organising team for the Cambridge Librarians Teachmeet, working with 4 people met only through commenting on blogs and who have been great fun to work with, using tools (Doodle, Google Docs, wikis) that formed an integral part of the programme. It’s been a fantastic opportunity and I’m really looking forward to the event itself, which I think will be extremely interesting professionally but also in terms of continuing the peer support and networking that has begun with 23 Things. The communication meeting was also a direct outcome from the 23 Things programme, dealing with something that was hugely important to me. That conversation and discussion has already started, in ways that wouldn’t have really been possible before, and I am very hopeful that it will continue.

I agonised about anonymity when starting this blog, something I talked about in  Batgirl & me. I’m glad that I didn’t aim for total anonymity because being identifiably me has made it easier to get involved in Teachmeet and the communication discussion. I’m actually surprised how much I’ve been willing to put my name on during the course of the last 12 weeks – I now use my name on my Twitter account, on the Teachmeet wiki and elsewhere. It’s a real departure for me and I’m still getting used to it. I think, though, that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

Certainly Twitter has been the big revelation of 23 Things for me. I was highly sceptical at first, lumped it in with Facebook. I lurked there, looking at tweets from conferences or training events that I couldn’t attend. I thought being an active tweeter wouldn’t bring me much more than lurking, but I was very wrong. Twitter has been invaluable in creating the sense of community I was hoping for. More broadly than that, I have found it a fantastic professional awareness tool because there are so many great librarians/information professionals on Twitter, linking to interesting blog posts/news stories/projects. I’ve also found a real benefit of the informal communication style is that I’m more likely to contact someone or ask a question or follow up on something via Twitter than I would be by email, for example. I’ve had fascinating discussions, found help with details of organising the Teachmeet and got involved in projects this way. I’ve used it for other non-work projects that I’m involved in. I have really enjoyed commenting on blogs as well, it seems that there is real value to be gained from being a contributor as well as a consumer of web 2.0 content.

All of this – Twitter, rss feeds from great library blogs, Teachmeet – has come at a time when I really wanted to get back on the professional development train after a few years where maternity leave and balancing work and home became more a priority. This experience and writing a blog has helped enormously, there is now burbling under at all times a real sense of professional development. I have several objectives in mind for the next year (useful as staff review is coming soon), which have crystallised due to my time spent doing 23 Things. It’s amazing to think about it really.

I am thinking very seriously about continuing to blog, something I didn’t expect. I definitely will keep going until after the Teachmeet as I want to blog about that and then of course there’s Teachmeet 2011. I also have a couple of posts formulating in my mind that I haven’t had time to post yet. I’m unsure if I have enough to sustain in the longer term though, and I’m also unhappy with my blog title if I continue to blog post-cam23!

Image courtesy of Creativity & Thomas K Hamilton, via Flickr

What is left to say? Just a big thank you.

Thank you to organisers and thank you, a great big thank you, to all the participants. You know who you are, those people who commented on this blog, those who posted great, funny, entertaining, thought-provoking posts that I commented on. Thank you for the very many conversations I have had with so many of you, most of which could only have happened because of 23 Things in the many virtual spaces for conversation that this programme has created. Thank you for Twitter, RSS feeds, countless great recommendations and links. Thank you for renewing my enthusiasm for my profession and for giving me the chance to re-engage with the things that drew me to this job in the first place.

I’m going to leave now before I turn into Kate Winslett at acceptance speech time. I’ll save all that for the wrap party.