Day in the life 3

Spent most of the morning in a team meeting. Thrashing out our business plan for the next 18 months. I'm going to be very busy :-)

And most of the afternoon was taken up creating web pages.

And I followed* a few people on the way home.



* on Twitter...obviously

Day in the life 2.0

Spent a big chunk of the day wrestling with our email bulletin system. Eventually gave up on the text editor and just hacked about with the HTML myself. Sent the finished article off to our Comms manager who will check it over before it gets issued to our 4500-ish subscribers on Friday. I hope!

Also arranged some meetings, created some draft web pages in our Content Management System, answered emails and added a few resources to our Sharepoint site.



Photo: another pic from yesterday's training course. This is my graphical representation of what I learned during the day!

What's a librarian's day like?

A Day In The Life post...

(You can read the post that inspired librarydayinthelife on Bobbi Newman's site Librarian by Day.)

Signed up a day late, but the wiki site is actually blocked by the surf control at work and for various reasons I couldn't do anything at home yesterday.

Anyway, this particular librarian attended a training course on facilitation techniques today - specifically Appreciative Enquiry, World Cafe and Open Space. I'll write about those in detail at some point.

I'd call myself a fairly experienced trainer, but I've not done much facilitation and I'd not used any of these particular techniques before. It was a great course, very participative with a great trainer, a good group, lots of fuzzy felt, post-its and scented marker pens! My hands were covered in felt tip pen marks when I got home...always a sign of having been on a good training course!

I caught up with Tweets, RSS feeds, etc on the way home on the train and wrote this post after catching a couple of episodes of CSI!

Not a typical day...it's downhill from here for the rest of the week!



Photo: output from collaborative exercise at today's training event - turned out a bit like Zebedee, non?

Eek...I have a real job now!

I've been in my new role for a whole two months now. I've been to lots of events, met lots of knowledgeable people, read lots of interesting reports, attended lots of meetings, browsed lots of websites. So, I've settled in, I know what I'm doing and I'm raring to go, right?

Well, yes and no. I now have a good understanding of what we're all about and of where my role fits into that. However, I am still wrestling with regeneration as a definable subject area. There are lots of different definitions and it's a term that can mean different things to different people. A definition I like is from Newham Council's website:

"Regeneration is about transformation and revitalisation - both visual and psychological. This transformation can be physical, social and economic, achieved through building new homes or commercial buildings, raising aspirations, improving skills and improving the environment whilst introducing new people and dynamism to an area. Regeneration also seeks to provide the right kind of community facilities at the right time."

So that's pretty much everything then?!!

For the purposes of actually getting on and delivering regeneration, the definition isn't really that important. It's only really a problem for my librarian brain that wants to classify and categorise everything!

Anyway, I'm on firmer ground with the Knowledge Management stuff. And there's plenty of that to be getting on with! We currently have 3 main online channels of interaction/communication with our users. We have a (currently fairly static) website, we have 3 communities set up on the IDEA Communities of Practice plaform, and we have a electronic bulletin. At the moment we don't have a coherent strategy for the way we use each of these channels and there's minimal integration between them. We have a vague notion that the website is about tools and resources; the online CoPs about discussion/conversation; and the ebulletin about (one-way) communication. So I have to draft a strategy which will articulate the how, why, when and what of these 3 channels and how we integrate them.

If anyone has produced something similar they'd like to share, I'd be ever so interested. :-)