A month late..

Darn, who'd have thought. It's a month since I signed in and naturally I'm really behind on my 23 things. A short report here on my new job and then I'm going to really concentrate on catching up

New job is fine. I'm finding it a little odd not to have any management rsponsibility and I am sometimes taken aback by the way one of the other staff speaks to me about what I would regard as fairly trivial admin. mistakes - but of course it's no longer up to me to decide what's trivial.  I think I am making other people's lives easier, if not making a huge original contribution. I hope on Wednesday to ba able to teach my first session on literature searchig - which gives you an idea of how slowly I'm being integrated.

On the bad news side, other hal'fs job is possibly not as secure now as it originally seemed so I need to look for a weekend or very part-time post to make up some hours. I'd happily do anything, but I'm not sure how I would go about getting the CRB check thatall local authorities seem to need.

On a really bad news issue I was shocked to see one of the library jobs coming up on the Twitter feed was an internship. or some reason I didn't think this was likely to happen in th information field. Really, really tough times.

  

Some very brief reflections on advocacy

I’m not going to say much in this post.  I’m not entirely sure I agree that advocacy should be part of every librarian’s job description. It may be, but is this a good thing?

Before the axe fell on my previous position I spent a lot of time advocating for the library service in general and my colleagues’ posts in particular with some success in preventing redundancies – except my own.

I think in the health sector advocacy is about proving our impact but also increasingly our effect on costs.

Work with schools : a librarian's assistant telling a story.

Dated 191?

Picture from New York Public Library's Photostream on Flickr. No known copyright restrictions.

Conferences and events.

Going to be brief on this one. While I was unemployed I was lucky enough to be given a bursary to attend Umbrella 11. I wrote this up for the HLG newsletter and it should appear in the September issue. I’ve never presented at a conference and it is something I’d like to do. Maybe the new job will present some opportunities. I have helped organise some local events for staff – this is hard work but enjoyable.

The thing I find hardest (and if you've been reading along you'll be expecting this) is the networking which everyone says they find so valuable. I can sometimes force myself to engage with people - but I'm not a natural at it and doubt I ever will be!