Looking back -#BlogJune wrap-up

Photo from Cole Patrick via Unsplash

So….

#BlogJune 2016 has finished (I know, I should be up with the times, but I’ve been away in Vanuatu, completely off the grid for two weeks, so just settling back into NZ life again :D). It’s my habit to write a bit of a reflection post at the end of the month, so here goes 🙂

In terms of numbers crunched, I published 9 posts – not as many as 2014 (didn’t do #BlogJune last year; trying to remember why?), but I’m happy with the out-put. I haven’t published many posts this year (apparently only 10!), so glad to get back into the habit of writing  I really do enjoy blogging; I’m just not always disciplined enough to put in the time to do it.

In terms of quality, I managed to blog relatively practically this year, and explore some thoughts about work which was really fun. It was great to reflect on things that I am learning and doing (particularly in the area of health librarianship), although it was also challenging to blog in an honest way about work while still being professional and positive. I’m sure everyone has issues and challenges in their workplace, but for me, I don’t necessarily feel comfortable discussing those on a public blog. I prefer to blog in a constructive way about what I’m learning/thinking/reflecting on at work, so that’s what I chose to share here.

Turns out my most popular post was about live-tweeting a design thinking workshop; this one certainly garnered quite a lot of attention on Twitter – not sure which aspect (live-tweeting or design thinking?) was most popular 🙂

And a few numbers here (for those interested in stats):

Some of the other highlights for me were just being able to read other people’s blogs, and follow their stories and thoughts and ideas – so much inspiration! I’ll have to go back and catch up on those posts that I missed in the flurry of #BlogJune 🙂

So what was the highlight for you from #BlogJune? What did you enjoy most? What did you learn? Did you surprise yourself? 🙂 I’d love to know…

What did you say? Working Out Loud

Photo by Linnea Sandbakk available on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking for a while about blogging about my work, tweeting about what I do at work, and how much I should share or what people would be interested in. I think it’s probably something that a lot of people think/worry about – how much should I share? Is this private/confidential? What if it’s critical about something at work – should I mention the things that I’m not entirely comfortable with or that I think should be changed? But to balance all these (legitimate) concerns, it’s also really valuable to share your work and what you’re doing with folk, to generate other ideas and discuss your thinking with a wider community. I suppose maybe some of my more recent posts (like this one about Design Thinking and live-tweeting – which was for a workshop at work) fall into this category of sharing my work.

And then I came across this tweet:

It's Working Out Loud week. Find out how to #WOL via @johnstepper https://t.co/v9YNWwg8Lu – inc his TED talk. #wolweek

— Rachel Miller, All Things IC (@AllThingsIC) June 8, 2016

And was introduced to the concept of Working Out Loud – see more of what it is in this graph here, and read this introductory blog post:

So basically, my understanding of it was that it was similar to what I was doing already, tweeting about what I was doing at work, thoughts about issues, articles, people that inspired me, blogging about those things, but being even more intentional about it – inviting others to contribute their opinions, organizing it in a way that is useful to others and to yourself, and maybe even taking it a bit further and setting up a WOL group of peer support, in your workplace or wider.

So what do you think about the concept? Do you already ‘work out loud’? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Playing with my image – Bitmoji

So, inspired by a post by Karen Miller, aka @infoliterai, I created an avatar of myself using Bitmoji  – which may look just a little bit like me 🙂 I love the creativity in creating the cartoons, and would love to try my own bitstips. However, I’m feeling a bit technologically inept tonight – I can find the page & the app on Facebook, but it looks as though the Bitstrips app on Facebook is no longer active, but I can use the avatar I created in Bitmoji in other cartoons. Any ideas on other apps or places to use this?

Learning to see like your heroes #BlogJune

I think I’ve mentioned before how much I love @AustinKleon’s writing, and this is one of my favourite quotes from his book “Steal like an artist: 10 things no one ever told you about creativity.” The main point of this quote is that it’s fine to begin with imitating our favourite heroes, artists, mentors, but it needs to move beyond that. We need to not be content with imitating them (looking like them); we need to see things the way that they saw them and produce art like they might have (but with out own particular spin on it).

I suppose this also extends to professional practice; I’m sure we all have people that we look up to, or who we think about doing this whole librarian-thing really well. But we can’t be exactly like someone else; we have to put our own spin on it. But we can definitely learn from others before us, and the more influences we have – the better our own work will be!

So (at the risk of sounding like Buzzfeed) – you do you 🙂

I’m going on an adventure! #BlogJune

And it’s that time of year – Blog June has began again! You can find out more about it in this excellent blog post by Peta. Go and have a read, and sign up if you want – or just blog 🙂

Looking back at this blog, I haven’t blogged regularly over the last year or so – whoops 🙂 Things have changed a bit in my personal life, I got married, moved cities, and changed jobs (from a full-time tertiary librarian to a part-time health librarian), so quite a lot has happened that I could blog about. So I’m looking forward to using a bit of impetus from this #BlogJune movement to hopefully explore some topics that I’ve been pondering on for a while, but haven’t put into words (or blog posts). Things like:

• Reflections on an Allied Health conference (first non-library conference I’ve attended!)
• Reflections on the first Librarian Research Symposium (RLL1) – a rather excellent day of sharing research 🙂
• Thoughts on literature reviews, curating, and filtering, and presenting the results in a digestible way – was quite struck by @sallyheroes post recently on this topic
• Using Twitter & social media to discuss and promote research – something I’ve been passionate about for a while, but came across this article yesterday that stoked my enthusiasm again
• And any other random things I come across, creativity, design thinking, interesting quotes or memes or gifs (aren’t gifs great?)

So go forth and blog for #BlogJune – looking forward to reading everyone’s posts!

Getting back into the habit…

10 habits by papayatreelimited licensed under CC BY-NY 2.0

Dearie me – I seem to have written a few of these types of posts at one time or another; usually after I have spent all my blogging energy on #BlogJune and then say nothing for several months 🙂

But despite having been to several blogging catchups – I have not published a post since 9 September – just before I went to Melbourne for ALIA Conference 2014! A lot has happened since then – several conferences, one award, presentations, and heaps of work stuff, but I’ve found that my mind has been full of other things and I haven’t had time (or I haven’t made time!) to sit down and assemble it into some kind of blog post.

So I’m hoping to get back into the blogging habit and to get some of these ramblings out of my head onto this blog. I’m looking forward to blogging about open access, the intersection of technology and education, progressing on my professional registration journey, and lauding the virtues of HTML as I move into a custodian role of the library website.

So this is just a small taster of some of the things to come – so watch this space as I get back into the habit! 🙂

A little bit caught up…

“Caught up” by Nanagyei via CC license on Flickr

I was just looking at my blog and realized the last post was titled: “This could be a hard habit to break.” Well, maybe not that hard – seeing as I haven’t posted in over a month!

It was quite unintentional to follow up 30 days of non-stop blogging with (over!) 30 days of not blogging, but I’ve been enjoying some time off and a slightly different pace of life.

In the past month, I have wrapped up my six-month contract role on a cataloguing project, enjoyed a week’s holiday away with the family, and spent a couple of weeks at home catching up on stuff and applying for jobs.

This post isn’t an excuse for not blogging, but rather a realization that I needed some time away from this blog to focus on some other things in my life. I feel that I am coming back more refreshed with more clarity about the priorities in my life.

Sometimes it can be a hard balance to be both disciplined with blogging (because we all know it’s a discipline, right?) and to also allow yourself the freedom to skip a day (or a week!).

I really enjoyed Blog June and the challenge of posting something every day, but feel that is quite a frantic pace of blogging to maintain. Then I completely fell off Comment July – and I don’t even feel bad about it! I’m hoping to continue in the spirit of Comment July with “Blogger Friday” as I still feel it’s important to comment on other people’s posts, but I’m glad not to have the pressure as July was a busy month for me. I’m hoping to make a more realistic return to blogging now with at least one post a week – maybe more. I have a habit of writing or blogging when I feel the urge, but then sometimes find it hard to motivate myself when I am busy and tied up with other stuff.

What are your tips for keeping motivated with blogging?

This could be a hard habit to break…

Chain by pratanti via CC license on Flickr

After blogging every day in June, it’s a bit hard to stop! I was going to leave it tonight, but had this itching feeling that I had to post something.

So today’s been a bit of a mish-mash with sorting out some stuff around the title of my research presentation at LIANZA Conference 2013, being asked to do a 5-10 minute presentation on ANZ 23 Mobile Things at our work hui this Friday!, working on ANZ 23 mobile things stuff, finishing off another book review for Library Review and trying to catalogue some hard books at work (only 2 weeks leave – argh!)

I also managed to publish the summary of my #TwitMentoring research on the New Professional NZ blog as that was the place I asked my research questions (since this was before the birth of the Octopus Librarian blog…)

Also published my first comment for #CommentJuly on Fiona Doyle’s (@FiFYI) Buntoting Librarian blog. I picked her post on “The Twitter” as it perfectly sums up my feelings towards Twitter.

What with one thing and another, I’ve made it through this day – it’s truly been an octopus day, a bit ‘legs everywhere’; hope tomorrow might be a bit clearer!

Joining the conversation – #CommentJuly

Conversation by Peter Nijenhuis via CC license on Flickr

Wow – it’s been a whirl-wind month with #BlogJune and trying to write every day and catch up on the 60 odd people who are participating too! Thank you very much to @flexnib for organizing it again this year; it’s a great challenge and discipline to write every day.

But one part I feel I have missed out on this month is the commenting; engaging in conversation with those bloggers who have made me think, made me smile, made me go ‘ah-ah’, or who inspired me. I think this tweet this morning sums it up perfectly:

30 days hath September, April, June FTW #blogjune is almost over & my most favourite bit is the reading – please continue writing #selfish

— Teresa Bennett (@kalgrl) June 27, 2013

I agree with Teresa; one of the great things about #BlogJune is having all these great posts to read from a great community. But it’s equally important to join the conversation.

I posed a question in an earlier post (actually before #BlogJune) – Why is it so hard to comment?  People gave some really interesting responses in the comments, and following a twitter conversation with @c_hocking, we decided to challenge ourselves to do #CommentJuly. This involves going back to blog posts – starting with the ones from #BlogJune – and commenting on one each day.

I outlined my #CommentJuly rules in an earlier blog post and just summarized them here:

1. I will comment on someone else’s blog post that inspires me each week day in July.
2. 31 days in July, but only 23 week days = 23 posts.
3. I’m away for a whole week in July (without access to WiFi) so will either have to pre-schedule 5 or 6 posts or drop the number of my posts from 23 to 17 or 18. Still working on this…
4. I will comment on only ONE blog post from each person.
5. In addition to commenting on this blog post, I will write a post about it on my blog.
   This will include a link to their post and some commentary on what I appreciate about their blog. If possible, I will re-blog it on my blog but appreciate this might not work with all blogging platforms.
6. Because 23 posts from 23 bloggers is not all that many (and there are heaps of fantastic bloggers out there), I might have to introduce a regular blogging feature and give a shout-out to a blogger once a week. Maybe #BloggerFriday???

I now wonder if my rules are a bit ambitious, and might modify them (a la @juliaderuiter) to just do a wrap up post at the end of the week with the 5 posts I have commented on and share the posts I’ve commented on on Twitter daily.

• Fill in Catherine’s form if you’re interested in being part of the #CommentJuly community
• Julia’s #CommentJuly rules

So are you keen to join us? I’d love to hear what your plan is for #CommentJuly – make up your own rules or modify ours…

Come and join the conversation!

Writing: the secret weapon within a librarian’s arsenal

Writing by Alan Cleaver via CC license on Flickr

I came across this great blog post yesterday on Hack Library School (one of my *favourite* blogs) called: “Learn to Write (Well)” by Joanna June. What pulled me into the post was the first sentence (and I quote):

Alternate Title: all I needed to know about acing grad school I learned in 6th grade.

Wow! I was immediately intrigued and read on. A lot of what June said I could agree with. It’s something that is not immediately obvious (or is so obvious you never think about it!), but librarians require strong writing skills – something that universities assume we have. It is something that people are taught, but ultimately it boils down to practice.

I love her point about how writing fast and easily is related to reading comprehension. She advises:

Once we know what we are trying to say, regurgitating those ideas in a cohesive manner is much easier. So my first tip when you sit down to write, know clearly in your own head what it is that you want to express.

She also recommends reading other authors critically to see how they have arranged their own ideas to get their points across.

After all, a crucial part of a librarian’s work is to: “efficiently sift through information and find the important bits.” If you have good reading comprehension skills and have honed the ability to pull out the important stuff, you are well on the way to becoming a good writer.

I personally have always been a bookworm (this reason was why my parents advised me to get into library work!) but I subconsciously developed the habit of speed-reading. I was so keen to get to the end of the book and see what happened, I would just skim-read to pull out the important concepts and grasp the flow of the story. I thought this was pretty ordinary, until I told someone at a meeting that I had read all 300 pages of board minutes on a one-hour flight from Hamilton to Wellington and she asked me if I had taken a speed-reading course! It is a pretty handy skill (particularly when you are a bit of a procrastinator – come on, who isn’t?), but it’s also vastly handy when developing your writing skills if you can grasp the point from the information and succinctly relay that point to an audience.

So back to the central point – how do we get better at writing?

Practice.

After all, practice makes perfect, right?

Practice in a variety of contexts:

• Blogging
• Tweeting
• Creative writing
• Comment on blog posts
• Newsletters
• Announcements
• Taking minutes
• E-mails
• Report writing

I’ve taken on a number of volunteer opportunities to hone my writing; including Volunteer Editor of LIANZA’s Library Life. I’ve learned so much from this last year on it, and have written a large number of different pieces including articles, editorials, and sales pitches. It has forced me to be succinct and concise and it had also made me work on my marketing skills to get people excited and involved.

I’m also really loving #BlogJune because it allows me to get in touch with my creative side, and put into words some topics I have been thinking about for a while. The quote below sums up my situation; blogging definitely helps me find my quiet space to shape ideas.

Writing is best way to… by mwedwards815 via CC license on Flickr

So what about you? What are your tips or strategies for making your writing or reading comprehension better?