Celebrating England's library and information professionals. Letters to a Young Librarian: Preventing Librarian Burnout. Months back I read an interesting piece on Inside Higher Ed.
"Can I Do the Same Thing Over and Over Again? " by John Warner (if you don't follow him on Twitter, you should - very thought-provoking) resonated, but I wasn't sure what to do with it. A small group of us have only just started talking about creating a space/place where librarians can turn for resources to combat burnout. We're not sure what shape it will take or how it will evolve, but we know we need something.
So, to get the cliche ball rolling I thought I'd share a few things I do regularly to avoid burnout: Get out of my building every day. The things that John Warner mentions are important to think about as well. 23 Things for Professional Development: Thing 20: The Library Routes Project. This post was originally posted by Laura Woods as part of the 2011 programme.
This Thing is all about library careers. I’m going to talk about the Library Routes Project, but recommend that you visit the Library Day in the Life project as well. The Library Routes Project was set up in October 2009, following a lively conversation on my blog about how people get into librarianship. As a result of this conversation, Ned Potter (aka thewikiman) and I decided that it would be a good idea to set up a space where people could share these stories, and thus the Library Routes Wiki was born.
Library Day in the Life Project / FrontPage. The Project is now closed and will remain as an archive.
You can read more about Bobbi's decision to close the Project here. The Library Day in the Life Project was a semi-annual event coordinated by Bobbi Newman of Librarian by Day. Twice a year librarians, library staff and library students from all over the globe shared a day (or week) in their life through blog posts, photos, video and Twitter updates. Whether you are a librarian or library worker of any kind, help us share and learn about the joys and challenges of working in a library. Join us by sharing details of your day for a week on your blog..Not only is this a great way for us to see what our colleagues are doing and how they spend their days but it’s a great way for students who are interested in the library profession to see what we really do. Library Day in the Life Project by Bobbi Newman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Infoism - A blog dedicated to information politics. All posts by @ijclark and licensed CC-BY. Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog. Trying To Kill Ourselves With Fun. UKeiG. Sheila Webber. Moira Bent. IFLA IL section blog. Geoff Walton. Jane Secker. Blog « LIS New Professional's Toolkit. I’ve been over at MMU again today, this time talking to the MA Library and Information Management students about the value of professional organisations.
I always enjoy talking to new professionals. It leaves me feeling very energised, and optimistic about the future of the profession! As well as the slides above, I did 10 minutes on Voices for the Library, as they were unable to send a current member as rep to MMU this year. The group came up with some really interesting questions about professional organisations and campaigning which raised some good points I haven’t covered, so I’ll summarise some of the questions and my responses. Campaigning: why can’t people employed by local authorities campaign against them? If you work for a local authority, it’s likely to be in your contract or conditions of employment that you’re not allowed to undertake any actions that might be a conflict of interest with your employers, or bring your employer into disrepute.
Absolutely! Yes! Organising Chaos. The Library Career Centre. Making games for Libraries. Blog. This is spot-on.
In fact sometimes you see people doing the opposite of this, and focusing first and foremost on 'developing their brand' and it simply doesn't work. It turns people off. They position themselves outside the dialogue, which is the opposite of what we should aspire to do with social media. Anyway, to the point of this post! I'd be interested in your views on this in the comments, as it's not immediately obvious to me what an online identity really needs, and in what order of priority. One thing thewikiman was good for was consistency - it was my username across several platforms. Professional focus is another useful thing from an online identity. Findability is important. Visual branding I think is not important. A consistent voice is probably much more important than the rest of the things I've listed put together. I don't want to be at the behest of my online identity, essentially - which means I reach a smaller group of people than I otherwise might.
Trying to be a librarian. Joeyanne Libraryanne. Library Wanderer. Phil Bradley's weblog.