Thing 6: Reflective Practice

This is my second attempt at this post, I managed to delete the first one by accident, so I'm going to try and re-create it, and before you ask, yes I did try to retrieve it, I went into my history and tried the cache, but to no avail, it is well and truly gone! The moral to this story is - never delete a draft on the mobile Blogger app before refreshing it otherwise it is gone, gone, gone - see I've learned something already!

Our task for #thing6 was to take a look at other Rudaí23 participants blogs, comment on them and reply to comments left on our own blog. Well, I spent a very pleasant Bank Holiday Monday afternoon browsing through lots of blogs, commenting and replying and I am blown away by how good they are! Take a look at thelivedinlibrarian.This is a lovely clean, neat, well written blog with really beautiful images.  It really makes me want to try a it harder!

Reading the posts makes me realise how passionate we all are about our profession, and I don't care if you are qualified or not, if you are a 'librarian' or a 'library assistant' we are all competent, intelligent, hard working professionals, and our journeys into librarianship have been many and varied!


Over the last six months or so I have had to do a lot of reflective thinking, I applied for promotion and as a consequence had to tackle my very outdated CV, and I also had to write a page or two about the achievements in my career to date. I found this a challenging task, talking about myself and what I do, really doesn't come easy to a lot of us!

One of the reasons I volunteered to contribute a couple of guest posts to Rudái23 was to get me out of my comfort zone and do something I have never done before, and I feel more confident for having done so.

Also when I attend library events, conferences and seminars I will meet up with people I know, and, while it is lovely to catch up and network, which is very important for all of us, I make a determined effort to introduce myself to someone I haven't met before and talk about what I do, where I work and what interests me. People usually respond in kind. Initially I found this really nerve-racking, but the more I do it the easier it gets!

Thing 5: Online Networks

Facebook and Twitter

I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, I have family in Australia and the UK, and I love that I can see all their photos and keep in touch with them, but I hate that I am expected to make friends with nearly everyone I come into contact with, I have a long list of friend requests that I just haven't felt the need to accept!

I keep Facebook as private as possible, I currently only have two friends who are not family members. I have joined Rudaí23 and I've said hello - this is my first and only group membership, and I really don't see that changing anytime soon and I have liked very few pages.


Twitter is different, I like Twitter, though it has taken a while for me to be comfortable with using it and I was  a lurker for quite a while, and initially I keep my account private. I've tried a couple of times to tweet while at library events and seminars, but gave up because I couldn't concentrate on listening and tweeting at the same time, and felt that I was missing the point in being there in the first place by spending my time tweeting!

I'm looking forward to the #rudaí23chat, I have followed a few library chats, it is an interesting way to find out what other libraries and librarians are doing. I see Twitter as being another tool in the library collection, a way of communicating information and also to get feedback from library users.

Thing 4: Google

I like Google, there I've said it! I was already a gmail user before setting up this blog, and working on #thing4, I currently have two gmail accounts on the go, but once this course is finished I will be deleting one of them - I set it up specifically to sign up to various apps, and felt it would be easier to have a separate account.

 I signed up to gmail and google+ from the very beginning, I pretty much persuaded all my family to switch to gmail. Setting up circles, and security/privacy settings was pretty straightforward. I check google+ maybe once or twice a week. I don't post very often, but that's not unusual for me, I'm a bit of a lurker on most of the social networks I've signed up to! I follow a lot more people, news outlets etc on google+ than I do on facebook, I just pick a circle and browse through the streams.

I would use chat quite often, and I have tried to persuade family members to use hangouts, but they are firm users of Skype! I do think video chat and hangouts would be great as an 'Ask the Librarian' service via the library website - they could be marketed, scheduled and recorded for particular groups of students.

image from Official Android Blog

I used google scholar quite a bit when I was studying for my HDip., linking it to my college library was very useful in finding access to online resources and I would recommend it to our students as well.

I use Google Keep on my smartphone (android), it's great because it is so easy to write a note or list and set a reminder on the go, you can colour code your notes, for example I use one colour for work related stuff, another for birthday reminders, you can also label your notes, which is like assigning them to folders. No time to type in a reminder, not a problem if you have an android device you can just add a voice note, tap the wee microphone icon and away you go, your note is saved in text and as recording. I've added a shortcut for the web version to the google apps menu of my home email, that way it is always available when I am logged in, I just click on to the Keep icon and check my lists, tasks and reminders

I share shopping lists with my daughter so that we don't buy the same stuff - once it is ticked off on my list, it will update in real time on hers and vice versa! It's also handy for setting joint reminders for family get togethers.

The only drawback with Keep is that it doesn't sync with my calendars, but you never know that might happen in the future.

We've been using google apps in work for over a year now, the amount of storage is fantastic the fact that you can send/share large files via google drive is great. Calendars has to be one of my favourite apps for work, I have a least five on the go at the moment some shared with all the library staff, some shared with just one or two people and my own private calendar, with all my reminders set for the next month or so! Docs and Sheets are easy to upload, download and convert to Word, Excel etc., and I have been playing around with Google slides for a presentation to run on the reception desk screen.

So as you can see I'm an bit of a Google junkie!