In the run up to NLS8 and prompted by this post by @libsmatter a few weeks ago,here’s my two cents worth about mentoring. I haven’t been on either side of a formal mentoring situation and I’m not sure that setup is for me. It is definitely the informal mentors, the corridor conversations, the chance encounters in…
My brain has been in a whirl much of the past three days as I’ve been following the twitter stream coming out of a major Australian library conference (VALA 2016) going on in Melbourne. I had colleagues from my new workplace presenting four different papers, two of which were on projects that fall into my area…
This, yesterday from Unshelved. Says it all about libraries really. Not just the things in our collection, but the information we provide about research impact, copyright, collection management or just about anything else. We are about providing the information so that our user community (client? patron? customer?) can decide what’s best for them, in their…
Last week I attended the inaugural conference of the Australasian Association of the Digital Humanities, held at the Academy of Science’s Shine Dome at ANU in Canberra. I was there because of the interest at MPOW in our library supporting academic research and e-research in particular is becoming increasingly important to our role as Outreach librarians…
This semester, in my quest for a postgraduate qualification, I’m doing a subject called Value Added Information Services. Turns out this more or less covers what we do all day every day as LIS professionals, but with a slight twist towards a kind of business advisory service. Anyway, I’ve chosen to look at the feasibility…
This post is my final entry for the Social Media subject for my Masters and is designed to both evaluate and reflect on my learning throughout the semester. As library and information professionals there is no doubt that web 2.0 technologies and social media tools are useful professional development tools and allow us to find…
We have a new team member starting at MPOW at the end of the month – suddenly I won’t be the new person anymore. This is a bit daunting as I find the I’m new here can you tell me how this works card quite useful. I know I’ve only been here a few months…
I thought this was a perfect topic to wrap up my contribution to Blog Every Day In June. On WordPress’ Freshly Pressed page today was this hilarious post about the very serious topic of all the projects and tasks we start in our lives and then just never finish. Read this bit – you’ll get some…
Earlier this year, I attended a one day ‘Research for LIS practitioners‘ seminar put on by ALIA in Sydney. Last year, I completed a FOLIOz course in Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP), also offered by ALIA. This is a little story about the blurring of the lines between the two. One of the…
Last night I attended an interesting PD event put on by the newly rejuvenated ALIA Sydney group. Billed as ‘How to be library senior management in 12 easy steps‘, it quickly became obvious from the impressive panel of library senior managers assembled that there are in fact no easy steps. While some of it appears…
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