Free PD with Library 2.014 This Week

Another year has rolled around and that means the Library 2.014 Worldwide Virtual Conference is upon us again.

This means two (and a half) days of round the clock sessions and keynote speakers on a range of library topics delivered direct to your computer. By tuning in to the presentations in real time you can participate with comments and questions, and all sessions are recorded for later viewing. Thanks to their sponsors, partners, and volunteers, this conference is completely free.

This year there are six strands:-

STRAND 1: Digital Services, Preservation, and Access

STRAND 2: Emerging Technologies and Trends

STRAND 3: Learning Commons and Infinite Learning

STRAND 4: Management of Libraries and Information Centres in the 21st Century

STRAND 5: User Centered Services and Models

STRAND 6: Library and Information Professionals – Evolving Roles and Opportunities

Keynote presentations are spread throughout the schedule, and local participants may be interested in the keynotes from Australian presenters Helen Partridge Pro Vice-Chancellor Scholarly Information and Learning Services, University of Southern Queensland,  Christine Bruce Professor, Queensland University of Technology, Hilary Hughes Senior Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology, and Ian Stoodley Researcher, Queensland University of Technology. The International Librarians Network will also be presenting a session on their program at 12pm-1pm (Sydney time) on 9 October.

Take the opportunity to set up the Blackboard Collaborate software ahead of the conference, and look through the schedule to see what appeals to you. I spy some that I will make an effort to attend in real time, such as How To Win Elections and Influence Politicians presented by Patrick Sweeney on behalf of  Every Library. Because all the sessions are recorded for later use, there already exists a great portfolio of sessions from previous years for you to explore, but I have also found this useful to go back to sessions in my reflective practice, or just when the topic is suddenly more relevant to me.

Hope you find the time to join in.

-Lauren Castan

ALIA National 2014 Conference Wrap up

Caitlin Williams and Amy Croft both attended the ALIA National 2014 Conference: Caitlin via social media, and Amy in person. They compared notes on their experiences:

Attending from a distance...

From 15-19 September, information professionals from around Australia and overseas converged on Melbourne for the ALIA National 2014 Conference.

Attendees and spectators from social media sources are now left to digest the excellent debates, workshops and sessions they attended, and hopefully apply what they learnt to their workplace.

While I didn't have the chance to attend in person, I was able to follow the conference on Twitter, and catch a glimpse into sessions thanks to livetweets. Many people took the opportunity to showcase the notes they had taken through Instragram, which offered a personal touch to this event.

ALIA Sydney's very own workshop, focusing on careers and networking, was highly engaged with technology allowing an online audience to put forward questions on PD and interviewing, and even connecting with special guest speaker Julia Garnett all the way from Canada!

Here are some of my favourite tweets from the conference:

Which tweets did you find most memorable?

Attending in person...

I was lucky enough to be in Melbourne to enjoy the coffee, ubiquitous art and, um, changeable weather in person, as well as to soak up the atmosphere of the conference and meet some amazing library and information people. Actually being at the conference allowed for all sorts of opportunities to run into people, window-shop for new shiny things at the exhibitor's booths, and share ideas over lunch, dinner or drinks. Like Caitlin, though, I found the Twitter backchannel to be a valuable way to start or continue conversations sparked by some excellent keynotes, presentations and workshops. I will definitely be trawling the #national14 tweets, both for sessions I missed and those I attended, before reporting back to my colleagues.

The conference was such a whirlwind that I'm only just starting to slow down and reflect on some of the issues raised, but the main points which stuck with me about the theme 'Together we are stronger', and the daily (and overlapping) sub-themes of Content, Collaboration and Capabilities, were:

• We need to find a 'common language' for working together with other parts of our organisations, as Monash University Library has done by developing a research skills development framework to enable library-faculty collaboration. We need to gather the right data to measure impact, identify the problems of our communities and collaborate to solve them, and show the value of libraries (and get funding in a time of continual cuts). For plenty of inspirational case studies, check out the Urban Libraries Council's Top Innovators.
• We need to find out what our customers/clients/patrons/communities/organisations are interested in, and make it happen - whether that's offering a Minecraft Gaming Day for (and driven by) young people at North Melbourne Library, designing a new library space with a focus on 'making and doing' in Aarhus, or redeveloping academic library spaces based on how students use those spaces.
• How? By building capabilities through education and development, such as cross-institutional mentoring in Victoria, the University of South Australia teaming up with the State Library of South Australia to give students 'real life' library experience, and Queensland public libraries cultivating a culture of learning and development to allow staff to build higher order skills... and especially by individuals taking responsibility for their own careers and for building their own leadership capacity.

This barely scratches the surface of the ideas discussed at the conference, and I haven't even mentioned shenanigans at NGAC's cardi party, the awesome dance moves at the conference dinner, or the Raeco and QUT photobooths... and the fantastic libraries at the University of Melbourne and the State Library of Victoria deserve their own separate post (watch this space).


Sooo... did you attend, or wish you had? Would you be interested in a reprise event in Sydney? Let us know in the comments below!

- Caitlin Williams and Amy Croft (@amyecroft)

Blog Every Day in June Day 30 : Glorias Assimwe, Ugandan Librarian

Today's guest contributor rounds up a terrific month of #blogjune by taking us through her fascinating professional journey as a librarian in Uganda. Thanks for sharing your story with us Glorias! -Maria Savvidis

My name is Glorias Asiimwe - a 29 year old Librarian from Uganda. I recently moved to a new role working as a Health Librarian at a newly established medical School in rural Eastern Uganda and have just submitted my Chartership Portfolio to the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) in the UK. 

My journey into the library profession had not been by accident. I had realised that in Uganda our reading culture was low and wanted to inspire a change. Starting out in 2008 fresh from University with no practical skills, I decided to volunteer with a UK charity operating in Ugandan Prisons.

I worked up the professional ladder taking on different roles in the organisation to being a solo prison librarian in East Africa. Despite the excitement the full-time job could offer, I did face a number of challenges having to work in an isolated environment. I had assumed several responsibilities including developing the first ever built prison library in Uganda, initiating book clubs and literacy activities and training Prisoners and Wardens as Library Assistants amongst others – but no prison librarians in my region to benchmark from.

I felt overwhelmed in this role until I received an amazing opportunity to travel for the first time outside my country on a five-week professional study to the UK - which equipped me with hands-on skills and widened my professional network. This prepared me to embrace high positions of responsibility in my career including, overseeing eleven prison libraries, outsourcing for book donations since the organisation had a limited, at times non-existent budget for collection development to managing library grants.

In 2011, I was awarded an IFLA funded grant to attend the 77th IFLA World Library & Information Congress in Puerto Rico. What a life-changing opportunity having to present a paper I had co-authored at this conference! Joining other delegates on a school libraries tour during the IFLA conference, I was able to learn new ideas that I applied in setting up one of the biggest primary school libraries in Uganda serving a population of 1800 children from the prison and neigbouring communities.

Currently I serve voluntary as the Executive Secretary for the Association for Health Information and Libraries in Africa - Uganda Chapter, which I joined in 2010 having tested the ups and downs of working in isolation. Being affiliated to this professional network has provided professional solidarity and opened doors to more rewarding and excellent opportunities in my career – one of which is my new role as a Health Librarian.
My professional journey hasn’t been all rosy as I have had and still face challenges such as poor internet accessibility. However, this has been an incredible dream-come-true given the limited opportunities available to young LIS professionals in developing countries like Uganda face. 

The sky is the limit!!!

-Glorias Assimwe

Library 2.013 Worldwide Virtual Conference One Week Away

The Library 2.013 Worldwide Virtual Conference will be held October 18 - 19 (Friday and Saturday). 

The conference is online, in multiple time zones over the course of two days, and free to attend! The School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at San José State University is the founding conference sponsor. For those of us in Sydney or surrounds, the first presentation will be at the unfriendly time of 2:00am on Tuesday October 15th, being Connected Librarian Day (hashtag #cld13), with the Conference proper beginning at 1:00am, Saturday October 19th, and running continuously until 2:00pm on Sunday 20th October.

But don't despair! If you are keen to hear the presentations, but also need your sleep, all presentations are recorded and will be posted fairly quickly on the Library 2.0 website. On the other hand, with more than 144 presentations to choose from, there are bound to be some you would like to join and participate in. A list of keynote speakers can be found here.

Last year I thoroughly enjoyed the Conference, mainly lurking around and not joining in much, and most likely I will do the same this year. I enjoyed hearing from presenters all over the world, and later in the year, I was easily able to return to recordings of those sessions as something cropped up that made me want to refresh my memory.

Register through the website if you like, but you don't need to register to enjoy the presentations.

Lauren Castan

Upcoming Workshop- Succeeding with Embedded Librarianship: How to Initiate, Develop, and Sustain New Relationships in Your Organisation

As part of the Australian Law Librarian’s Conference being held in Sydney from 23-25 September. ALLA is hosting a workshop on Monday 23rd September on Embedded Librarianship which will be run by David Shumaker.

Embedded Librarianship offers new opportunities for librarians to become better connected and more valuable than ever. Librarians in leading law firms and academic institutions are adopting the embedded model to upgrade their role in today’s always-on mobile digital information environment. Yet this new way of working poses unique challenges every step of the way: from initiation, through development, ultimately to sustaining the embedded model. The path to success holds obstacles and dead ends for the unwary. In this workshop, David Shumaker, author of The Embedded Librarian (Information Today, 2012) and blogger at www.embeddedlibrarian.com , provides a road map and helps you chart your own course to successful embedded librarianship.

The workshop will run from 9.30am to 1.30pm at Herbert Smith Freehills, 161 Castlereagh Street, Sydney NSW 2000.

See the conference page for more information.

ALIA Biennial- the value of discovery

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks. I recently attended the ALIA Biennial conference and I had a great time. It was a conference of firsts for me- I was on the social media committee, presented my first paper and I took part in the mentoring programme as a mentor for the first time. I also spoke at the First Timers’ Breakfast.

There was a great breadth of papers presented and some really wonderful keynote speakers. Some of the highlights were hearing Justice Kirby’s keynote address, as well as hearing the ideas put forward by Dr Tom Ruthven on data mining and Professor Mitchell Whitehall on the design of beautiful interfaces that encourage exploration and discovery.

Besides all of the ideas that I took away from listening to the keynotes and presentations, I also took away a lot of other valuable experiences with me, such as all of the new people I met and talked to, all of the people I started following on Twitter, participating and monitoring the social media streams (did you know that the #ALIA2012 tag actually trended in Australia at one stage?) and of course, experiencing presenting for the first time. In fact, I would have to say that the informal and incidental learning experiences and discoveries that came about from talking to people during breaks, meal times, at the informal Tweet up and after my presentation, were probably the most valuable to me personally. I made some wonderful new friends and acquaintances, who have expanded my professional learning network considerably, whom I hope to remain in contact with long after the heady rush of attending the conference itself fades away. 

Judging from the tweet traffic on Twitter, everyone seemed to enjoy joining in the conversation. And judging from the traffic still being tagged with the #ALIA2012 hash tag, as everyone is preparing to report back their discoveries to their colleagues, people are still abuzz with conference chatter, even three weeks after the conference. This really demonstrates the impact that the conference-going experience has had on the LIS community. And it's a great community to be a part of. From my experience, we're a generous and passionate bunch of people and it’s a pleasure to be a part of it. 

Did you attend the ALIA Binenial? What was the most valuable thing you took away from it? Even if you didn’t attend the conference, you can search for the Twitter hash tag #ALIA2012 and check out some of the archives of Tweets that were captured on the ALIA Biennial blog.  

- Crystal

Crystal is the convenor of the ALIA Sydney group and tweets @crystalibrary.

ALIA Biennial 2012

I’ve just taken a stroll through previous posts on the ALIA Biennial blog and have learned so much.   So much stuff out there to help you through life!   Fides and I are looking forward to talking more about these developments at the Biennial Conference.  Only a couple of weeks to go now.  It is has been an interesting journey putting this conference together and we hope that for those who attend and/or who follow us through social media, that you will discover and re-discover all sorts of interesting things.  The key feature of an ALIA conference is that it brings together all sectors and we encourage you to explore the inspiring work that other libraries and colleagues in Australia and overseas are doing.  The program is exciting, wonderfully diverse, and should lay the seeds for many conversations during and beyond the conference about reimagining, re-envisioning, and discovering ourselves as a profession.

One comment about the conference we’ve regularly heard is that the conference is expensive because it’s being held at the Hilton.  Not true.  Conferences are costly events to host as yes, you do have to pay for a venue that’s large and flexible enough to hold the estimated number of delegates, concurrent sessions and exhibition space, plus you need to supply catering, ensure IT support, attract interesting speakers etc.  However, the cost of having the conference at the Hilton was extremely competitive compared with other venues, particularly as there are no hidden costs as most of what we require is already available at the hotel.  Being in the heart of the city means that getting to the conference is easy for delegates and once at the hotel, plenty of options for dining.  Of course there is the lure of the QVB with its upmarket shops, not to mention the new Westfield city complex, but we trust that our delegates and their accompanying family and friends, will shop each day after the conference has finished.  After all, there is only so much you can spend in three days!  The Hilton is not too far from the NSW Art Gallery where we are having our conference dinner, and there is also the Museum of Contemporary Arts, the Sydney Museum and, of course, the iconic Sydney Opera House.  So there’s a lot on offer within walking distance to keep delegates and accompanying family and friends well occupied. 

When planning the conference dinner, it was clear that delegates wanted something different to a traditional sit down dinner but wanted to be all together rather than separating into smaller groups.  A few of the Conference committee members explored options and felt that the NSW Art Gallery would do the trick.  The menu looks delightful and there will be plenty of opportunity to chat with one another and enjoy the beauty of art.  There will be time for dancing too!  Volunteers at the Art Gallery have kindly offered to show delegates around, our very own personalised tours.  You can’t get better than that. 

Another important social event of the conference is, of course, our welcome reception party.  This is because it is the official opening of our exhibition.  Our sponsors and exhibitors are essential for having a successful conference, they all put a lot of effort into putting together their stands and are keen to talk with delegates about their products and services.  At the Biennial Conference the exhibition will be set across two floors and we encourage everyone to visit EVERY stand.  Our sponsors and exhibitors are crucial to the holding of the Conference and we encourage everyone to check out the massive exhibition space.  You will be amazed at what you see and who you meet!   

Looking forward to meeting you at the Biennial.

Best wishes,

Janet and Fides

Janet Fletcher and Fides Datu Lawton

Co-Convenors, ALIA Biennial 2012

*This post was cross-posted on the ALIA Biennial blog.

Google Reader Roundup

Hello ALIA Sydney Readers! Today I’m going to share a quick roundup of good bits from my Google Reader, and take this opportunity for a good reflective think-out about blog readers.
The best thing about Google Reader is that you don’t have to use it all the time. You can dip into it occasionally or regularly, according to your needs. Recently I’ve been re-learning the flexibility of the ‘social’ in ‘social media’, especially with respect to my reading of blogs in and around the LIS field. If I read every interesting thing all the time, I’d get nowhere, unless I was undertaking a PhD on discourse analysis of LIS blogs. (actually that’s not a bad idea…) At present, Google Reader functions more like a trusted local café. I don’t have to go there all the time, or even regularly, but when I do there’s usually someone there to catch up with and have an interesting discussion.
I’ve shaped this roundup to include 7 useful blog post genres, and I’ll summarise them here for your (time management) convenience:
1. The LIS Reflective Practitioner Post
2. The Specific Call Out For Responses Post
3. The Managing Information Not Necessarily in LIS context Post
4. The Conference Roundup Post
5. The Online Participative Event
6. The Post about Teaching
7. The Scathing Rant

1. The LIS Reflective Practitioner Post
My first anniversary
After one year in the post as a college librarian. Cara Clarke reflects on her experiences working at a higher level and within a new library context  - a College Library – in comparison to her background in school libraries. The main value of this kind of post is the   candid nature in which Cara talks about her work environment and realities of professional life. It provides a useful insight into ‘on the ground’ work activities.

2. The Specific Call Out For Responses Post
‘repackaging’ information education – your input needed!
This blog post genre is characterised by a direct need for interaction. In this case, Kate Davis is seeking responses to 3 questions for ‘a context-setting/provocation video for a workshop that [she] is facilitating at the upcoming Australian Information Education Symposium on ‘repackaging’ information education’. If this is your bag, and you’ve got something to say, head over there now!  Seeing as I’ll be attending the Symposium, commenting on this blog is top of my list, but I have a post here to finish first!

3. The Managing Information Not Necessarily in LIS context Post
Twitterror, via 2cultures.net(.au)
This blog post poses an interesting idea to include strike through option on tweets. I can see why it would appeal to the latent proof reader and social historian in all of us. You can deal with your own misinformed tweets by ‘transparently’ adjusting them accordingly, rather than accepting the sometimes ambiguous vacuum left by a deleted tweet.  Ultimately it’s a translation of a live blogging /journaling trope whereby you can say exactly what you mean under the guise of deletion. I’ve seen it used to much hilarity in fanfiction communities that I belong to on dreamwidth. As the Twitter designers argue (quoted in their ubiquitous 140 characters), it would cause massive problems for their core function. However, as the author has demonstrated, it can also add a layer of discourse more suited to the boys' own shower room gossiping. Which is not how I prefer to engage with Twitter. Obviously any person on Twitter will tell you that people gravitate to their own groups and through constant negotiation develop rules and etiquette for discussion.

4. The Conference Roundup Post
University Science and Technology Librarians Group Meeting #USTLG
Blogs provide an excellent forum to share reflections from a conference tour, or even a big day of presentations. In this example  Librarians on the loose Sarah and Emma report on a twice yearly meetup to share information and good practice. And look, they’ve also shared the twitter hashtag if you want to look up the twitter archive.

5. The Online Participative Professional Development Event
Thing 7: Real life networks
The cpd23 is a blog-based summer online event (UK) which explores 23 things related to professional development for librarians and information professionals. It’s in its second round this year and looks to be a great way to develop your skills in social media relevant to LIS. Primarily because you’re exploring these tools with a network of geographically disparate people at the same time! That is, if you’ve scheduled the time to do it.
This week focuses on real life networks and commends participants to reflect on the place of professional organisations on their career path. There’s even extra credit for investigating new groups and organisations!

6. The Post about Teaching
Teaching: Design Anthropology via http://www.designculturelab.org
This post features a wonderful list for “How to be an Explorer of the World”, in a post which reflects on teaching design anthropology, with many salient points for learning, teaching and sharing knowledge within an educational setting. I often think that education and design fields are perfectly complementary to library and information science, and there’s much to be gained from the convergence (but not merging!) and overlapping of common threads.

7. The Scathing Rant
Libraries: crowdfunding our asses off
A bombastic rant reflecting on the reputation of libraries and the impact of the digital economy enabled by the globalisation and late capitalism. Censored genius is your go-to librarian when you want to get all riled up about the state of libraries today. I particularly love the effing librarian for their delivery of high quality invective on issues in the library profession. No blog roundup would be complete without this kind of blogging.

Obviously, this is a partial and highly selective list. Do you have a favourite blogger that you turn to for any of the above genres? What other contenders might there be for blog post genres?

Over and out,
Liz Stokes
ALIA New Grads Coordinator NSW

Meet another committee member

 Hi. I am Vikki Bell, and many of you will have seen my name in correspondence from the ALIA Sydney group. My role as part of the committee is to assist our event officers with the administrative side of things. I am one of those introverts that Amy mentioned in her last blog post, ‘tho now I am sure there are less of us around after our recent event.

Outside of ALIA Sydney I am Principal of Bellinform Research, where I take on diverse library related (and not so library related) projects. As an intrinsically shy person I find it interesting that a great deal of my work involves speaking, running workshops, training and facilitation. In this capacity I will running a workshop on using LinkedIn at the Imbase Intelligent Information Symposium on May 3^rd.  I hope to meet some of you there!

I would be interested in hearing from librarians using LinkedIn – the why, and the how, and any benefits you may have gained. ALIA Sydney has a LinkedIn group – just look for us in the Groups directory, hit the JOIN button, and perhaps create or contribute to a discussion.

In addition to our face to face events, we will again be featuring the “Blog every day in June” event. If you are interested in contributing a piece (even shy people can shine at this!), or writing on a topic you are passionate about please contact the committee via ALIASydneygroup@gmail.com . We would particularly like to hear from those of you who attended “From little things big things grow” event last October (summarised here), tell us how you have been contributing to the profession, or even what is holding you back.

It’s the weekend, having given you some additional chores (comment on LinkedIn, join ALIA Sydney group, volunteer for a guest blog) I won’t take up any more of your time - thank you for reading, and responding!

Vikki

How are YOU contributing to the library and information profession?

Excuse me, library professional, but how are you contributing to the profession?

Are you writing a paper for publication or preparing a conference presentation?

If not, you should be.

If you missed ALIA Sydney’s workshop on preparing to present and write a paper—From Little Things Big Things Grow—you missed a great learning and professional development opportunity!

                           

While I wasn’t completely sure what to expect from this workshop, I have been planning to write a paper for publication or a conference presentation for a while (perhaps I’ve been waiting too long!). Not necessarily because I think I am doing amazing things in the library world, but because I do think that what I’m doing in my large metro public library are things I want to share. I know that there are other first-year/new grad librarians out there—or even veteran librarians—who might be interested in the computer courses I’ve developed for seniors or in the comprehensive social media policy I’ve prepared for my library system (and the ups and downs of dealing with emerging technologies with my library and Council).

This workshop really inspired me to write! Which is one of the reasons I dusted off my Macbook and started with this blog entry.

So what did you miss at the workshop?

First off, you missed Janet Fletcher from UNSW Library explain why we should be writing and presenting at all. While she gave some great advice and was a great opening speaker, I’ll boil her presentation down to the things that I, personally, took away with me:

·         What’s in it for you?

This varies greatly from the personal (you have something to say that is bubbling in you, or maybe you just completed a great project) to the professional (it will look great on your CV when you are going for a promotion or new job, or maybe it makes you look good within your organisation). Remember, writing and presenting requires a time commitment, but it will probably be worthwhile. Either way, you are probably doing something that will benefit our profession if you share your experience.

·         What’s in it for your organisation?

Does your organisation “require” you to present (which may be the case for more and more academic librarians)? Does the paper or presentation you want to do relate to your work, organisation or field within librarianship? If you have to pitch the paper to your supervisor or library, you should spend some time on how your paper or presentation will benefit your organisation.

·         What’s in it for the library and information profession?

Sure, you may have great ideas or your library wants its name stamped in a journal, but will other library professionals want to read your paper or listen to your presentation? Is your work in a public library transferrable to an academic, corporate or even prison library?

Developing and pitching an idea

If you missed the workshop, you missed a great activity exploring abstracts of previous paper proposals and looking at the requirements and topics of upcoming conferences (don’t forget that the ALIA Biennial Conference is 10-13 July—and abstracts are due 30 November!).

In small groups, we looked at ALIA Biennial paper proposals from previous years and developed some quick ideas of what we would have presented. We also developed a quick “3 Minute Elevator Pitch” to promote our idea with our supervisor and our organisation. If you would like to present at a conference (or prepare a paper for publication), there are a few things to consider before you even get started.

·         Will it work for the conference or publication?

No matter if you are thinking about presenting at a conference or writing for publication, will your paper topic meet the theme and requirements of the conference? If you are a public librarian writing about innovative story times, it probably doesn’t make sense to submit a paper proposal to a conference on Mobile applications in academic libraries.

·         Will your supervisor or organisation approve your participation?

Before you go through the trouble of writing a paper or developing a research project at work, you should get approved through the proper channels. If all you need is your boss’s informal approval, a quick chat might work. But if you need approval from your council or other administrative body, you probably will have to pitch your idea to your supervisor, your library director and/or an administrative personal champion.

·         Create a 3 minute elevator pitch

If you need to get formal approval to participate in a conference or write a paper regarding a work project, think about creating an “elevator pitch” to get first-line approval from your supervisor. Then you should start thinking about a more formal pitch for your supervisor’s supervisor’s supervisor (etc, etc, etc).

Planning your research

One of the most useful presentations during this workshop was a Kate’s step-by-step guide of how to plan your research or project. While you might want to present or write about a project already underway, you might think about creating a project or doing research on a completely new project.

While Kate had a set of great slides along with a great presentation, I’m providing my quick notes (you really should have attended!) that I thought were essential for developing your research or project:

Phase 1: Define your objectives

·         Ideas: Find ideas from projects you’re working on, journal articles you’ve read, wherever!

·         Audience: Describe why someone should care about your project

Phase 2: Create your brief

·         Objectives: Create the outline of a strategic plan; what do you want your project to prove?

·         Scope: Create boundaries—what your project is & what your project isn’t

·         Background: What is the story/context of this project?

Phase 3: Develop your framework

·         Create a Brief: An outline like an elevator pitch, structure or plan

·         Research: Define your search strategy;  Get data: look at primary/secondary resources

·         Source Analysis:  Material for inclusion

Phase 4: Create your product

·         Framework: Flesh out your brief; should include a detailed plan, structure, base

·         Writing: Tailor your writing to your objectives; explain and detail collected data

·         Source verification: Find out other resources that verify what you are proving

·         Editorial review: Get feedback from trusted advisors and colleagues outside your comfort zone

Lastly, I really want to thank Kate, the ALIA Sydney Committee Convenor, because I thought she did a masterful job of separating out the steps required to develop a project. I have to hand it to her—she created a step-by-step guide of a complex activity!

Preparing to write

So you’ve decided on a conference, you’ve decided on a publication and you’ve decided on a project, but before you write, think about your product.

Each conference and publication will have different submission guides in terms of writing style, word count and tone. Remember to look closely at the submission guidelines—and follow them!

Okay, so maybe you don’t have a conference and publication yet. And maybe you’re not sure you want to present. What about just submitting a paper or an article? Here are a few places to think of as a place to publish as a library professional:

·         Blogs!

A blog—like this one!—is a good place to get your feet wet. Many libraries and institutions rely on guest bloggers (like this one) for extra content. Have a look at the NSW State Library glob, Mosman Library, Sydney TAFE and, of course, ALIA Sydney blog!

·         INCITE

·         Public Library News

·         Good Reading

·         IFLA

·         Australian Library Journal

From Paper to Presentation

Another useful presentation that made this workshop worthwhile, Alyson gave an incredible rundown of how to move your conference paper from page to presentation. I was unaware that Alyson was such a great presenter—or how much time and effort she has put into becoming one! While I can’t speak for her, here are the tips that I took away from her wonderful presentation.

1.       Show your character

2.       Edit your paper for your presentation

·         Pair down your paper to just the bare bones

·         Have a “maybe pile” of things you are unsure you want to keep

·         Add stuff NOT in your paper

·         Add anecdotes and stories

·         Keep only what’s necessary

3.       Things to include

·         Who you are

·         Context of the project and why it’s relevant to your audience

·         The interesting bits of your lit review

·         What you did and how

·         What you found and what happened

4.       Things to leave out

·         Most of your lit review (except for the interesting bits)

·         Most of your data (except for the interesting bits)

·         Most detail of the project (except for the interesting bits)

·         Basically, take out anything that won’t be interesting to your audience

5.       Work on your presentation skills

·         Keep a polished and measured pace (speak slowly and have a conversation)

·         Use silence instead of filler words (remove ums, ahs, sos, thens; replace with silence)

·         Practice your presentation

·         Get presentation skills (PD training, Toastmasters)

6.       Visual Aids

·         Use PowerPoint only if you need it

·         If using PowerPoint, add black/blank slides between slides and pauses

·         Create a mood with photos

·         Include graphs, lists and videos wisely

·         Don’t read your slides!

·         Use good templates (not too boring, but not too fancy)

·         Trust technology (don’t turn your back to see your slides)

7.       3 Tell’ems

·         Tell’em what you’re gonna tell’em

·         Tell’em

·         Tell’em what you just told’em

Finally, big thanks to everyone who participated and organised the event, especially Crystal, Amy, Kate and Alyson—and an especially big thank you to our video presenters!

Like I said, you should have been there. The practice exercises were spot on and the presenters were engaging (so engaging, I almost missed the delicious afternoon tea!). If you did miss it, however, you should still think about how you are contributing to the profession either by writing or presenting. As library professionals, we have so much to share regarding the innovative programs and projects going on in our libraries. While LIS education and research is great, we have to remember that as practitioners within the field, we’re the ones that are informing our colleagues both locally and abroad. We’re in the trenches—so we should be writing our war stories and our victories!

Jeff Cruz

User Education Librarian

Member of the ALIA Sydney Committee

All opinions expressed are my own and do not reflect the views of my employer or ALIA Sydney.