Dumpling in a Hanky

Well, in January this year, I submitted my Fellowship portfolio, and heard in April that it had been successful, making me now officially a Ladyfellow and able to add FCLIP after my name, yay! Me registration fees were paid in September 2015, so technically it took less than 18 months from registration to submission. However, that doesn’t include the good few months before that, preparing my thoughts, talking to my mentor, and plotting out just how I would Get This Damn Thing Done, so realistically, it was more like a 2 year process. So, how big a task was it? In a “dear god, what have I done” moment, I totalled up the word count of all items in the portfolio, and it came to approximately 30,000 words. That’s easily the largest piece of work I’ve ever produced (I’m a rubbish student, so I’ve never had to produce an academic dissertation). So yes, it turns out that reviewing your career and achievements to date, and reflecting on what you’ve learned from all of your experiences is quite...

I am, as you may know, a member of CILIP, the professional body for information professionals. There are two main reasons I'm a member. I am a Chartered librarian, and I take my commitment to maintaining this visible badge of my professionalism seriously. I have revalidated my Chartership within the previous assessment system, and I have submitted my Revalidation within the new system. To continue being a Chartered librarian, I must be a member of CILIP (although currently the commitment to continue to revalidate my Chartership is voluntary, and has been so for the length of my membership since approximately 2001). So I continue to be a member. I am a registered CILIP Mentor, and I help to guide those information professionals who are keen to be professionally qualified through the Chartership/professional qualifications process. I could not abandon midway through that process the people who are looking to me for guidance in their professional development. So I continue to be...

There’s a saying about making foolish assumptions , and it certainly applies in this situation. CILIP, a leading professional body for the library sector has recently launched a new Virtual Learning Environment for members, which will provide an online method of tracking and submitting the evidence of members professional registration activities (e.g. Certification, Chartership etc). It should hold all the information we need to do those things, and the My Portfolio area is an add-on to the VLE, a virtual portfolio which allows logging and submission of evidence of your professional activities directly. It should be better than the old, paper based, "oh god, I think I just destroyed half the Amazon, and now I have to index tab it...in triplicate!” option, and simplify and speed up what had become rather time consuming, mainly because of the admin. However..it doesn't appear that the changes, at this present moment, are much of an improvement. I initially went on yesterday...

Since my earlier post (multitasking lunch breaks R Us!), I've had some more feedback on peoples feelings about the proposed names for CILIP, and it seems that a lot of people are unhappy that the words "library" or "librarian" aren't included in the options. Now, it may just be because of my recent job hunting experiences, but I don't see that the skills of an information professional are tied to the words library or librarian. If I had restricted my job search to only those sectors, I would never have found a job (there have been a grand total of 3 library roles advertised in 3 months). I have looked at roles with terms like: data, knowledge, information, management, administrator, researcher, project co-ordinator, digital, policy. Those terms are all related to dealing with information professionally, and to me, the core skills of an information professional lie in their ability to effectively manage information, in whatever format it may come in. Hi...

So, recently, CILIP apparently sent out an email regarding a consultation on a change of brand image, and name. I say apparently, as despite being a member, I never got this email. When I went to the website to log in and check why it wasn't sent to me, it didn't let me log in. I tried a password reset, and that email came through, so it *can* send emails to me...but the password it sent won't let me log in. I’m losing the will to keep trying. Overall, this is kind of symptomatic of how I feel about CILIP, and how useless its IT systems are.... Anyway, the consultation is on changing CILIP’s currently, clunky and meaningless name (picked as the best of a previous bad lot, as David McMenemy showed with this link to the 2000 consultation results ) to something more meaningful and relevant is open. If you want to take part, it’s here . I was a good girl, and pootled over yesterday to take part, and after filling in all the bumph, I got to view the glorious options. Oh. My. ...

So, only three short months after submission*, and yet still many weeks before the next scheduled Board meeting on 12th September (CILIP moves in arcane ways), I got an Exciting Email on the 24th August - my Chartership Revalidation portfolio had been accepted, yaaaaaaaaaay! So, I believe this makes me a Very Valid librarian. You may worship at my feet, and shower me with gifts and adoration now... And it also possibly shows me to be reasonably masochistic, to have effectively put myself through the whole Chartership process all over again, four years** after I did it for the first time. Not to mention that fact that I'm going to be doing it again in another three years***. So why did I do it? Well, to quote George Mallory, "because it's there". Also, because it works well within my workplace's appraisal system. This system focusses on enabling staff to identify and address any deficiencies in either their own skills, or in the services that they provide to ...

I try and pretend I'm not, and keep it well hidden, but actually, I can be quite Grown Up and Professional. So much so that I'm going to be Revalidating my Chartership this year - ohhh, get me, eh? But...I am not-so-good at saying why I'm fabulous, or keeping up with collating my evidence of professional activity nice and accessible in a voluntary way, so I've got two things that are going to help me with Revalidation. The first is my employers internal appraisal system - as our Library service's work is entirely internally focussed, it's important to be able to demonstrate that we're still maintaining a high standard of professionalism and awareness of activities and developments both in and outside our specialist fields. The appraisal system allows my boss and I to set realistic targets and activities, keep track of them, and update them as progress is achieved. All of which works nicely with the Revalidation process! And second is teaming up with some...

So, for this Thing , I'm looking at my professional networks and organisations. CILIP / CILIPS I was never a student member, and only joined in the first place because 1) my employer paid the fees, and 2) my line manager at that time was heavily involved in the Scottish branch. The same pretty much applies now as the reasons for me maintaining my membership! Oh, and also because I'm Chartered now, and if you leave CILIP, you lose the Charter (which is fair enough - there's no point having a qualification that shows your commitment to your own and others professional development if there's no-one checking you're doing what you say you're doing) . What do I get from CILIP/CILIPS? Well, currently, not much. As a Chartership candidate, I attended a session on the process, and I've attended occasional events organised by CILIP, where I could squidge them to kind-of fit with my internal Appraisal goals. I get the CILIP info email on library related news, but ...

Apparently, in the CILIP Chartership system, the person in charge of supervising you is not your Mental. And the person going through the system is not called the Manatee. Illusions: shattered. Image from here

As mentioned in CILIP Gazette...or Update (my memory sucks!) the Open University has launched a new course for "information professionals": "The Evolving Information Professional: challenges in a digital world" is an online course,. available to begin studying at any time. The blurb says: This course is for information professionals – librarians, archivists, information and knowledge managers – looking to keep up to date with modern technologies, sources of information and today’s users. It is for those in the profession who wish to stay relevant in this fast-changing world of information, find out how other information services are facing the challenge and consider ways of proving their worth in the Google age. Among all the issues that the course covers, you will be given the opportunity to reflect on the possible consequences for your service of a new generation of ‘Homo zappien’ users, try out games developed for library users and archivists and consider t...

So, tomorrow's a big day - CILIP Council are experimenting with an open session to discuss how CILIP could / should be using Web 2.0 tools to interact with and support its membership. If (like me) you can't be there in person, you can take part via Twitter (although I'm not sure how this is going to be integrated into the session), and the presentations of Phil Bradley and Brian Kelly are either already available in draft form, or will (I think) be made available after the session. CILIP Council blog post here . Twitter hash tag is #CILIP2 (#CILIP2.0 tag has been abandoned as the 'point' disrupts some applications)

Well, on Saturday I got home in the evening (after a corporate fun day out which was, actually, really good fun) to find a "We tried to deliver but you were out having a life" card from the Royal Mail. I'm well used to these by now, as mail delivery time seems to be between 11am and 3pm in my area. Apparently, working and receiving mail are mutually exclusive activities in this fine city. So yesterday, I did my regular detour to the Depot to collect my undelivered mail. What I ended up collecting was a huge beast of a hard backed envelope, slightly oddly addressed: the teeny-tiny fact that I live in Edinburgh, capital of the country has been omitted from my address. Apparently I now live at the following location: Jennie XXXXXX XXXXXXXX Lothian XXX XXX Lothian? I have a region but not a city now? Then I saw the sticker on the envelope saying it had come from CILIP, and all was made clear. They've made yet another boo-boo. Not as good as the beginning of this year, whe...