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or so I have had to do a lot of reflective thinking, I applied for promotion and as a consequence had to tackle my very outdated CV, and I also had to write a page or two about the achievements in my career to date.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!