It's time to reflect on Things 10-12, each offering options for online professional networking. I found these Things provided much food for thought.
Creating and sustaining a professional brand is an ideal, but at a time of significant political—and hence social—change in my country, can the professional be neatly separated from the personal? As I hinted in my Thing 10 post, many of the individual American librarians I follow on Twitter create and/or retweet a fair amount of political content, and I do as well. What effects (if any) this display of the personal may have on my professional future remain to be determined.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how many prospective professional colleagues in the U.S. or Canada would look for me on Twitter (or Facebook or Instagram) first. Au courant Americans in librarianship tend to create and maintain their own professional websites. If I want to know more about individual librarians or library school students from my country, I start by searching for those sites, turning to LinkedIn and ORCID as second choices. Twitter (and probably Facebook and Instragram) enables me to get a sense of their personal lives and thoughts.
American academic librarians typically fill those professional websites with evidence of publications and presentations. Unfortunately, my publication and speaking history reflects both a workplace with no systematic support for scholarly endeavors and my own failure to seek a mentor early in my career. Seventy or so Library Journal book reviews occupy a fair bit of space on my ORCID profile, but they don’t impress librarians with faculty status who are on the tenure track. (Readers, if you’re interested in mentoring or collaborating with a novice at research and publication in librarianship, let me know!)
The more I contemplate LinkedIn, on the other hand, the more opportunity I see to highlight my extensive professional service experience. The profiles of other Rudaí 23 participants and STEM librarians I know are shaping my plans for populating my profile.
Consciously building a brand, however, raises the question of whether that brand is marketable. One of my strengths is that I’m an experienced public services subject librarian with a focus in STEM disciplines; another is that I’m good at working with “returning” or “nontraditional” students. But based on what I read in current U.S. advertisements, many employers find these of little interest. They appear to prefer recently acquired technical skills instead. Hopefully pursuing MOOCs like this one will make my skill set more appealing. With ageing relatives in another state, it behooves me to build my professional brand and expand my online networking efforts.
On the lighter side, two weeks from now, I’ll get my first opportunity to use Skype professionally. Because this winter is particularly harsh, it thrilled me when a committee organizer offered the option of remote access to a meeting located ninety minutes from my workplace. Next week I’ll test several devices to see what works best, and then it’s time to actively network online!
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Sunday, December 3, 2017
Thing 12: Collaborative Tools
Ah, group projects. When I was a library school student, our professors told us “Get used to this. You're going to be working in groups for the rest of your career.” (And when group projects weren't going well...we heard the same advice.)
I have experience with multiple collaborative approaches. When serving as an SLA Division committee member, I find that many teams tend to use older technologies. One of the committees I'm on right now relies extensively on email, leading to the dreaded long, confusing chains Slack could eliminate. Within my medium sized library, however, most group work involves face-to-face meetings (and face-to-face informal discussion between meetings).
For all these groups, however, Google Drive has certainly facilitated both creating items and maintaining files for later reference by all group members. (I am old enough to remember working with people whose email systems did not permit attachments. We would need to incorporate plain text into the body of an email. Replies would be even lengthier emails, as correspondents would need to specify the paragraph, line number, and the wording of a specific phrase--in both its “before” and “after” versions. The alternatives were faxing--with charges for long distance calls--or even using the postal service.)
As for the other tools mentioned, I’ve used Doodle both as a meeting organizer and as an attendee. My experience with voice-only meetings (via Adobe Connect, WebEx, and Google Hangouts) is that it’s never clear when somebody finishes speaking. It can be awkward or even difficult to add to a discussion without interrupting another participant. Sometimes I wonder, “Was that odd noise a stifled sneeze or a brief verbal objection?” Visual cues available during video calls with a group reduce those problems. It’s definitely less of a hassle to use Skype than to set up room reservations to video conference via Polycom.
I’ve used a couple of additional collaborative tools. A shared spreadsheet works well for scheduling meetings--as long as everybody agrees on the meaning of a “filled” cell (free or busy) and knows how to add fills to cells. My supervisor schedules internal meetings by viewing all of her subordinates’ shared Google calendars to find open times.
The ideal collaborative tool requires a minimal learning curve and operates across multiple platforms and/or modes. Considering the options for this Thing, Doodle and Skype best meet those criteria.
I have experience with multiple collaborative approaches. When serving as an SLA Division committee member, I find that many teams tend to use older technologies. One of the committees I'm on right now relies extensively on email, leading to the dreaded long, confusing chains Slack could eliminate. Within my medium sized library, however, most group work involves face-to-face meetings (and face-to-face informal discussion between meetings).
For all these groups, however, Google Drive has certainly facilitated both creating items and maintaining files for later reference by all group members. (I am old enough to remember working with people whose email systems did not permit attachments. We would need to incorporate plain text into the body of an email. Replies would be even lengthier emails, as correspondents would need to specify the paragraph, line number, and the wording of a specific phrase--in both its “before” and “after” versions. The alternatives were faxing--with charges for long distance calls--or even using the postal service.)
As for the other tools mentioned, I’ve used Doodle both as a meeting organizer and as an attendee. My experience with voice-only meetings (via Adobe Connect, WebEx, and Google Hangouts) is that it’s never clear when somebody finishes speaking. It can be awkward or even difficult to add to a discussion without interrupting another participant. Sometimes I wonder, “Was that odd noise a stifled sneeze or a brief verbal objection?” Visual cues available during video calls with a group reduce those problems. It’s definitely less of a hassle to use Skype than to set up room reservations to video conference via Polycom.
I’ve used a couple of additional collaborative tools. A shared spreadsheet works well for scheduling meetings--as long as everybody agrees on the meaning of a “filled” cell (free or busy) and knows how to add fills to cells. My supervisor schedules internal meetings by viewing all of her subordinates’ shared Google calendars to find open times.
The ideal collaborative tool requires a minimal learning curve and operates across multiple platforms and/or modes. Considering the options for this Thing, Doodle and Skype best meet those criteria.
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