The main value of Twitter, for me, is still very much the use of hashtags – especially the conference related ones I’ve been using a lot lately such as exeter10 and npc2010. During the CoFHE/UC&R joint conference I found following the exeter10 stream particular useful to engage with parallel workshops. Often you find there is more than one workshop you’d like to attend and so being able to attend your second choice virtually is the perfect compromise. It also helps if the presenters put their slides up later so you can revisit the session.

(Click to enlarge)

I think one of the reasons why Twitter worked so well at the CoFHE/UC&R conference was because those people using the tag mostly attended different sessions. It meant that anyone following the conference virtually wasn’t bombarded with exactly the same message over and over again and got a general feel for the variety of events taking place.

The sessions that ran for all delegates like the opening address, plenaries etc were also well documented and it was interesting to read other people’s interpretations of the key messages. In having the archive available it was much easier to write up my report as the gaps in my scribbled notes had (more often than not) been tweeted, retweeted and commented on.

Generally I think the npc2010 tag was even more successful but in many different ways. Whilst the eavesdropping on parallel sessions was as valuable as at exeter10 there was a greater emphasis on using the tag to:

• network;
• crowdsource;
• encourage speakers;
• circulate useful information;
• explore links;
• and generate discussion.

Prior to the conference a list of attendees/speakers was also set up to bring tweets together and closer to the time it became a great place to start when looking for a familiar face/avatar also attending.

However, unlike my previous experience I really feel the use of Twitter during the actual event had its drawbacks (never thought I’d hear myself say that!)… My main issue being the amount of times the same point was tweeted during the sessions attended by all. I think maybe we were all a little too enthusiastic and all wanted to tweet-along but I’m not sure about the value of this. Had I not have been at the event I probably would have found it rather annoying, but that’s just me personally.

At times it felt like I was shouting over people to get my tweet heard (maybe) or racing to type it up first (that’s just me being paranoid about being slow on the keypad though). At other times I chose not to tweet anything at all because others with more followers, more kapow and more engagement with our peer networks did it first. Sounds silly right? But it leads nicely on to my concern about the ‘clique’ question being raised and Twitter newbies not feeling able to contribute to the npc2010 stream.

Engaging with social media is a personal preference and I worry that the non-tweeting delegates felt in many ways pressurised to join up or worse like they were missing out. I don’t know if that was the case or not but there were times when the message really did feel like ‘to be successful you must Tweet/blog/network’ etc. What about the being good at your job part? I’ve been doing this whole social media thing a while because I like it, not because I think I should and I guess I really just wanted to stress the point that it’s not for everyone… If you don’t like it, you don’t like it and that’s fine too!

Maybe one of the ways to address the missing out part is to get the Twitter stream up on the big screen with Monitter or Twitterfall for example? As for the clique part…. um. That’s all I’ve got for now I’m afraid.

For a snapshot of how well Twitter was used during npc2010 take a look at this fancy Summarizr:

• Total tweets: 811;
• Total twitterers: 120;
• Total hashtags tweeted: 38;
• Total URLs tweeted: 88.

Session two: Attitudes that add value

Ann Donovan and Rachel Edwards kicked off the afternoon session with their paper on Broadening your skills: The Bexley public library experience. Showcasing a number of projects within the public library sector the purpose of the talk was to illustrate the transferability of knowledge and skills within the LIS profession in general and how your professional development adds value to the organisation at large.

Discussing Bexley’s Golden Thread of staff appraisal and the contributions staff make to the local authority’s aims and objectives they introduced the idea of validating your role by integrating your personal/professional aims with the organisational strategy. Get to know the key aims which drive forward your organisation and prove your value by demonstrating how you fit into these.

They encouraged new professionals to say yes to everything; take advantage of all opportunities and worry about how you’ll pull it off later. Pick up a variety of project work to develop your generic skills in management, communication, organisation, interviewing, IT literacy and knowledge management and advocate the role of the library within this.

As an academic librarian it was particularly interesting to hear more about the types of activities public librarians carry out and how these differ across the sectors e.g. their summer reading challenge and library layout project.

Moving on to talk more about the traditional roles of librarians in modern times – Traditional skills in a changing world – Laura Cracknell and Lindsay Robinson focused on cataloguing/classifying and the growth of outsourcing. Historically cataloguing and classifying skills were taught at library school yet learning on the job has become much more wide spread and staff are usually responsible for a variety of tasks – not just cataloguing. Unfortunately the cataloguing aspect of my degree was removed due to license problems and so like many new librarians I have no idea how to catalogue a book.

Both Laura and Lindsay agreed that the rules of cataloguing are fundamental to understanding how the library system works and one of the benefits to learning more about classifying would be the time it saves in searching for information. They pointed out that even Google uses the same principles to classify the information it stores. It can also help you get to grips with Web 2.0 and the use of tags to categorise content etc. See LibraryThing as a modern example underpinned by traditional library values.

Ending the afternoon session came Awen Clement on Unleashing your professional edge. Having never achieved any professional qualification it was refreshing to hear more about Awen’s successes through the transferability of her vocational credentials – from supermarket check out girl to ‘projects and knowledge management controller’.

Like Awen I too started out in customer services, from Alton Towers to Miss Selfridge to HMV. I learnt how to offer a good customer service experience, categorise stock (as HMV’s vinyl buyer I needed to be able to tell the difference between break beats, house, drum and bass, techno etc – I’ve no idea how I did it), search catalogues, manage budgets and run reports. I still use some of these skills today!

The professional edge is really just the passion you have for the work that you do! Be enthusiastic and self-determined if you want to reach your goal, share knowledge and strive to learn, under promise and over deliver on activities and remember to network – even if it’s out of your comfort zone. Awen’s final tip on proving your worth was getting to know your worth, believing it and marketing it to a potential employer.

Open session

Rounding off the day came Chris Rhodes and Ned Potter with the launch of LISNPN (a new professionals network – get yourself signed up!), Kathy Ennis and the Information Unmanaged awards and Biddy Fisher with the closing remarks:

• don’t feel like you have to get to the top of the ladder to get the most out of your career;
• take charge of staff development reviews – your defining moment could come from someone saying no;
• take ownership of our professional future;
• make your noise count;
• challenge current set ups and processes;
• engage with your network – share best practice as it’s the professional generosity in LIS that makes it all worthwhile.

Overall I’d say the conference was a great success and the hard work of all involved really paid off. There are some personal comments I want to make about the experience so I’ll write up a special part four to save wasting space here.

Read more

• Twitter archive;
• thewikiman – NPC2010: That was the day that was;
• NPage – Proving your worth in challenging times;
• Palely Loitering – New Professionals Conference 2010.

Session one: Developing your skills on a shoestring

Bronagh McCrudden opened the morning session with her (award-winning) paper Would you work for free? Unpaid work in the information professional and how to make it count. Discussing the Catch 22 scenario (can’t get experience without a job; can’t get a job without experience) that most new professionals find themselves in during the early stages of their careers she presented the idea of grindhopping – skipping the bottom rungs of the career ladder by taking personal responsibility for your career goals.

Encouraging us to think creatively about the unpaid work we do Bronagh quite rightly pointed out that it’s important to work out your needs and assess the options as ‘not all unpaid work is created equal’. Use unpaid work as a vehicle to get ahead but stay loyal to the profession and make the work you do visible – create a portfolio of evidence for example; blog about what you do.

To make unpaid work work for you have a look at her 9 point guide to getting your return of investment:

• scrutinise – you’re not signing your life away, talk to the organisation about expectations;
• gamble – except that you don’t know how this is going to plan out;
• economise – watch your finances;
• boomerang – go back to the family home to ease financial pressure maybe;
• experiment – you’ll not know if you like it without trying it out;
• typecast – build your portfolio;
• create – finite projects that allow you to create something tangible;
• broadcast – make sure people know what you’re doing by showcasing its value;
• be loyal – professionally, don’t be exploited.

Next up was Laura Woods on Taking charge of your continuing professional development. This was the talk I was particularly looking forward to as it seemed to be the one with the most relevance to the current stage of my career. Opening with a Wikipedia definition of CPD (tut tut ;) ) she emphasised the professional element of updating our knowledge and competencies to further develop the personal qualities required to demonstrate our expertise and professionalism.

For Laura the two main barriers that impact our CPD are money and time! With no official training budget there have been times when Laura’s training has had to be hidden in the stationary budget (imagine that). This got me thinking more about how incredibly lucky I am to work within an organisation that values employee CPD and even has a separate budget to support it.

To work towards overcoming these barriers and negotiate funding it’s important to illustrate the benefits of CPD to your organisation and the added-value of developing the skills of its workforce. It’s worthwhile keeping notes/documenting your personal development and the acquisition of new knowledge that has made a difference to your day to day work to really prove the worth of your CPD.

Some of Laura’s tips for CPD on a budget included:

• keep up-to-date with professional literature;
• engage with the library blogosphere;
• get involved with professional bodies (not just CILIP) – special interest groups/volunteer on committees;
• try job shadowing to learn more about people from different teams and their different roles;
• attend events virtually – Twitter, live video, blogs, slideshare;
• apply for awards and bursaries for conference attendance (see JISCMail-LIS awards for info);
• and seize the initiative – there are other opportunities.

Finally Bethan Ruddock closed the first session with Proving the value of peer networks: Plugging into your peers. For our purposes peer networks refer to the contact groups we make within the professional environment – work colleagues, members of associations, Twitter followers (or Tweeples), Facebook groups etc. Yet why are these important?

Well to start with they are a way to share best practice and generate a collective intelligence. It means we’re able to learn from the experiences of our peers and garner support for our informal training. It’s a way of maintaining current awareness and participating in a discussion forum on common issues effecting the profession. Maybe the solutions thrashed out could even help the development of the library and its service model. Not only that but it’s a good way to create new friendships that develop our personal qualities and encourage us to succeed. Crowdsourcing from a community of experts adds to the profession’s knowledge base and helps us with our continuing professional development, especially those of us just starting out on the career path.

Bethan also went on to talk more about the opportunities that arise out of your peer networks:

• joint papers;
• guest blog spots;
• book contributions;
• conference collaboration etc.

But how do you find a peer network? Look for the ready made networks e.g. colleagues/fellow students etc. Check out the bloggers network and find like-minded people on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Summing up some of the challenges to developing peer networks – time consumption and employer support – Bethan stressed the importance of proactively proving the value of peer networks to your employers, it’s good practice. As Woodsiegirl says ‘be open with your employer about using networking tools. Demonstrate [their] value from [the] start, don’t wait until you’re caught tweeting at work!’.

Read more:

• Bronagh McCrudden – The Shiny Forager;
• Woodsiegirl – Organising Chaos;
• Bethan Ruddock – Bethan’s Infomation Professional Blog.

First up is the welcome, opening address and plenary, which will later be followed by Session one: Developing your skills on a shoestring and Session two: Attitudes that add value. During the day parallel workshops on blogging, effective CVs, Twitter and elevator speeches ran but as I didn’t attend any I’ll just add in links at the end.

Opening, Welcome and Plenary

Maria Cotera (past President, CDG) welcomed delegates with the general housekeeping and introduced Sheila Corrall for her welcome discussion about core competence and what it means in practice.

Sheila began the address by defining the notion of core competence as:

a bundle of skills and technologies (rather than a simple or discrete skill or technology) that enables the company to provide a particular benefit to customers (Hamel and Prahalad, 1994)

before moving on to focus on the characteristics of core competencies in the LIS profession and how these demonstrate a special contribution to the organisation.

Establishing our unique competence is a key factor in proving our worth during the ‘economic down-turn’ or challenging times if we want to illustrate the importance of our skills and knowledge as librarians and Sheila went part of the way to describe these for us:

• professional/technical knowledge and skills - data, information and knowledge organisation and management, information, communication and learning technologies;
• business acumen/institutional understanding - generic transferable management skills, context-specific knowledge or own organisation and sector;
• personal qualities and abilities - self-awareness and personal effectiveness, interpersonal behaviours and relationship management.

(Corrall, 2005; Fisher et al, 2005; Skelton & Abell, 2001).

It’s our special knowledge and understanding of information and how we articulate this that leads to the expansion of our knowledge bases, a greater involvement with institutional strategies, the development of new partnerships and growth in our technical abilities. Communicating these core competencies in a way that makes sense to the particular situation is therefore crucial, whilst also illustrating the continual expansion of our core skillset and the increased overlap with other professions/specialisms e.g. librarians as teachers, researchers, business managers and technical specialists.

The key message to come out of Sheila’s discussion was the importance of continuous professional development and a number of examples on how to do this were presented – cross-organisational projects, knowledge sharing, professional networks, formal training, trial and error, writing publications, engaging with professional literature etc.

Eleni Zazani was up next to talk about bridging the gap from employability to employment – the challenges of job hunting and remaining positive. Dividing up her talk into three parts – our major challenges, what employers are looking for and how a positive mind-set can make a difference whilst job hunting – Eleni emphasised the changing nature of our world and how we make sense of it through passion and enthusiasm for the profession.

Budgets, technological advances and new roles are redefining the information environment and we need to assess how our skills fit into this. We need to be able to demonstrate our core competencies (like those Sheila discussed earlier) to our potential employers to prove our worth with evidence. Networking is the key point here. We were encouraged to find like-minded people, share ideas and support each other to fuel our passion and recognise its importance. But how do we do this? Eleni suggested we:

• ask for help or advice;
• get involved (with CILIP special interest groups or committees for example);
• introduce yourself (face-to-face networking too);
• and engage with social media (Twitter, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn etc).

I’d also like to add to this by stressing how easy it is now to build up a portfolio of professional activities. Blogging has never been easier and it’s a good way to get into the habit of reflective writing and reporting. Remember that employers are looking for flexible and adaptable professionals prepared to think out of the box and it’s likely they’ll be researching you as much as you research them pre-interview. For Eleni proving your worth as a new professional really means providing potential employers with evidence of your core competencies, core librarianship skills and specific skills to the role that represent ‘the bigger picture’ and your attitude to moving with the times/adapting to the changes effecting the professional environment.

Coming next: Session one – Developing your skills on a shoestring.