Monday 25 July 2011

Thing number 15: social media

Thing number 15 is easy peasy, as I'm already using all the social media mentioned.

Facebook is what I use for personal, non-work socialising - so all my friends and family. I've been on Facebook for over four years now and it's scary how my life since joining is all recorded there - holidays, birthdays, friends' weddings, etc.

I've been on LinkedIn for 18 months or so and this is more for professional life, although some of my 'connections' are really good friends. I created a Group account for the Information Literacy Group, which is handy for letting members know about events and other IL-related news.

It took a while but I am now a Twitter convert. This kind of crosses the divide between personal and work life. I didn't want to have two accounts so I follow librarians and my favourite celebs using the same one.

Thing number 14: create a podcast

For Thing 14, we were asked to make a podcast using Audacity. This thing has been a while coming as I encountered several obstacles along the way. I have created the audio file but am having problems posting it so you'll just have to believe me. It makes me cringe anyway so probably best it's not out there for the world to listen to!

Thursday 21 July 2011

Much Ado About Blogging

Tuesday 19 July was a very busy day!

Morning: University of Westminster's Annual Learning and Teaching Symposium
The Marylebone Road librarians presented a poster on a QR code project we've been developing.



Afternoon: CPD25 event, presenting with my colleague Ellie Murphy on our library blogs
Proof of the opportunities that can arise through Twitter! A couple of months ago (during my post-Sweden come down), I saw a tweet from Ian Clark asking if anyone was writing a blog for their library. I replied 'yes' and he asked if I would like to speak about it at an upcoming cpd25 event. It sounded like a good opportunity so I agreed. I invited one of my colleagues, Ellie Murphy, to speak with me.

The event took place at the London Mathematical Society, in Russell Square. Here's what Ellie and I presented.
The other speakers at the event were Dave Puplett and Tim Fletcher. Dave's presentation was about how the LSE is using various social technologies (including Facebook and Twitter) to connect to their users and to find out what users are saying about the service. He included some brilliant images of Henry hoovers!



Tim presented on using Twitter to communicate with Birkbeck library users. There seems to be a good camaraderie between London libraries on Twitter and I can't help thinking Westminster is missing out here. A positive sign that this is an area for consideration at Westminster was the presence of a marketing colleague at this event.

It was great to have the opportunity to speak at this event so many thanks to Ian Clark for posting that message on Twitter. To read his take on the afternoon, visit his blog. I'd also like to thank Caroline Fletcher and the rest of the cpd25 team for organising the event.

Evening: Much Ado About Nothing, starring former Doctor, David Tennant, and the very witty Catherine Tate
My friend and I booked this ages ago and we had great seats. In fact, Russell T Davies was sat just a few rows in front of us! Much Ado is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays (partly due to the Kenneth Brannagh film, which happily coincided with me studying the play for GCSE).