Bear Bahoochie

I’ve decided to combine these two together, as Thing 21 is all about my skills and Thing 22 is about volunteering and I’d argue for me the two are so intertwined that the posts would just be duplication. The CPD23 post asks some questions so I’ll use these as the framework for this post.

1. What do you like to do?
I like to do craft, Girlguiding, archery, reading, writing and playing with my pet rats. I like food (though not so much cooking) and hanging with my family/ husband/ friends. I like a night in watching TV or a movie (or a cinema trip). I like themes and decorating the house/ library in them. I enjoy working with young people. I like sleeping, lazy mornings and cups of tea. I like being warm, geeky fun and my glasses. I like libraries, book shops and online shopping. I love zines, handmade things and getting post.

2. What do you dislike?
Reality TV, small children and babies (in large numbers or if I have to be impressed by them or watch them as if they are amazing entertainment), people who don’t read but instead just ask despite the answer being in front of them, people who don’t read and are proud of their limited world view, accounts (though they don’t like me either), sports (again the dislike is mutual) and cooked red peppers. I’ll also not crazy about change, chipped nail polish or being told that by not having a kid I’m some how less of a woman. People who complain but won’t do anything about it. Driving on overly busy roads, telephone sales calls and people who don’t say thanks or at least appreciate that you made an effort for them.

3. Do you remember the last time you felt that feeling of deep satisfaction after creating, building, completing something? What was it about?
Library wise it was yesterday at doing the podcast but personal wise it was finishing the epic Christmas crafting off.

4. What skills do you need to do the things you like?
Enthusiasm, flexibility, commuication skills and creativity. Ideally I’d also have patience, tolerance, tact and diplomacy but I think those are debatable quailities in me.

5. Have you undertaken unpaid work to further your career?
Yes.When I needed to prove I could manage accounts I took on the unit accounts at Guides. Though my volunteering also gives me transferable skills and those skills have also helped though they weren’t the reason behind volunteering. For instance the work with Girlguiding and DofE let me demonstrate my ability to work with 14 -26 years olds. I think these skills were key to me getting my current post as at the time I had no experience of actually being a librarian – I was library assistant or student before then.

6. Is volunteering a good thing, or by working for free are we in danger of devaluing our profession?
There are two parts to this question so I’ll start with a reflection on my volunteering.

Is volunteering a good thing? Yes, yes it is.
I do lots of volunteering and for a range of reasons.

1. I volunteer and help run Scottish Senior Section Lones (for girls who can’t make a local unit but don’t want to miss out on the 14-26 year old opportunites Girlguiding has to offer). This mainly involves creating a monthly newsletter and phone/ email support. I also help run the Senior section Scottish camp and I’m on the planning team. I do this for fun, I like the leaders, I like the girls and it’s a good laugh although it can be hard work.
2. I run a Open Duke of Edinburgh’s Award group locally (there are about 50 young people on my books currently). I loved doing my award and I want others to have the chance to do theirs (I was also a Guide and Senior Section member in my younger years but I don’t count that as a reason I do that now). I find DofE can be more of a part-time unpaid job as it can at points be a large time commitment thanks to the expedition section plus I have a lot of responsibility and act as a co-ordinator for a number of other volunteers. Quitting isn’t really an option for me partly due to guilt, partly the fact my husband is my boss in this and partly because when it’s going well I do enjoy it and the people I volunteer with.
3. I am chair of my local community centre and produce a bi-annual newsletter for the centre. Sometimes you volunteer and other times volunteering is thurst upon you and this role was very much off loaded on me by my lovely hubby. Despite not being the best chairman (I have major issues with neutrality and a low tolerance for people unwilling to take action) thanks to an apathetic group I got the job by default. Still it’s been a fun ride (save for when I have to deal with accounts) and the centre has had a number of positive changes as a result of me taking on the role (though I don’t think I can take credit for more than forcing decisions to be taken). I would happily let someone else do it but need to convince someone else or have a dramatic life change like moving out of Central Scotland (out of catchment won’t cut it as it’s where we do archery and my DofE group).
4. I am secretary of SLA(S) this is a CPD thing but the meetings are at the weekend. I do this because it’s a fun way to mix with fellow school librarians and I get to be involved with trainings and write the newsletter. For similar reasons I am also willing to use some of my free time to attend the local school librarian meetings which take place on my afternoon off.

Now that is a lot of newsletters to write, meetings to attend and events to organise but it isn’t as time consuming as it sounds and I am getting much better at asking for help, articles, free stuff and generally getting others involved. I do find delegating a challenge as sometimes people don’t appear, do the work or it’s sub-standard and fixing it takes longer than just doing it yourself straight off, still when people do come through I really treasure those people and encourage them to do a bit more whenever possible.  I firmly believe that you have to get involved and contribute to making the society you want, you can’t complain about it if you aren’t willing to be the change.

Now the second part of the question – is working for free devaluing the profession?
If that means me or someone else doing my current job at the level I do it at now, for no pay then yes, it does devalue the profession. I’ve worked hard to become qualified and skilled at my job and that should be recognised and valued. I don’t think I’m irreplaceable but you can’t use a volunteer get the same quality of service (especailly if they are not a librarian) nor do I think it’s fair to ask anyone to do this level of work without paying them for it.

You pay for the knowledge and the skills – just as you pay an artist for their work. If this was the private sector it would never be suggested not to pay someone for their knowledge and skills but as Librarian is a job people think they know all about (after all everyone knows I spend my day reading books and drinking tea) getting some unqualified person off the street or asking a qualifed librarian to do it for the love is for some reason felt as being fair. No it’s not! Cameron’s Big Society idea where we all volunteer and help run our local community services is rubbish. Not only does it undervalue the skills, qualifications and talents of those running current council services.  To me it seems to be based on a vision of Britian where people don’t need to earn money, instead can afford to give away their skills for free. In 1910 when Girlguiding began the women who ran it were volunteers but they were middle or upper class with no need to work and their volunteering was a hobby not a career. In 2011 the reality is modern society has changed and only a handful of people come into this category. Modern women (and men) have jobs, families and other interests and volunteering isn’t about doing a job that someone should be being paid to do or working for free it’s about supplementing the services available locally – making the community better.

What it comes down to is that you can get people involved (though often getting people to volunteer is a problem) but you need a support mechanisim for volunteers from paid, trained and commited staff. Volunteering doesn’t work when there isn’t the support available for the volunteers. I work full-time and do all as my volunteering, so this means I don’t have the time to do lots of development work or extra bits for the groups I volunteer with.  This has to be co-ordinated by paid staff who can make this support part of their remit. Volunteers come and go and skill sets can vary hugely, you need constants and capable staff to support and drive the vision of the group and while paid staff will and do change they will at least be trained and skilled for the job.

I think people volunteering in the library can be a good thing. I provide volunteering options through Girlguiding, DofE and my role as a school librarian for young people to contribute to the library and my various groups. I have a team of 45 volunteers in the school library who help for a huge range of reasons from needing somewhere to go, needing stability, needing support to needing something for the CV. All of them help me provide the library service and without them it would be a very different place.

Volunteers can be a huge asset but they still need to be managed and I find that sometimes I spend as much time managing my helpers as I would just doing the job. So why bother? Well it gives people a feeling of ownership which is vital if the project is to succeed plus they can be brilliant for ideas, skills and just generally helping. After all many hands make light work.

So the CPD23 posting idea for Thing 20 was to share how I became a librarian but I already did that in Thing 10 so I just added a link from that to the The Library Routes Project.

It was suggested I reflect on my route compared to other but on some further reading it’s clearly a common story – accidental rather than a planned and with a healthy dose of history love thrown in. Even if it had been planned I couldn’t do an undergraduate in Scotland in Information and Library Studies, so a undergraduate in a different subject and then a post-grad in Library Studies is pretty much the only way (you can still do such things in England but as a Scottish student I wouldn’t have got funding to do this). If you’d told me at 17 that ‘School Librarian’ would be my job I can safely say I’d have laughed at you (I was told that architecture or social work might be good options though I think this simply shows how little my careers adviser knew me) but then again maybe at 17 I knew more about my future then I thought.

I recently found my old CV folder from high school. In it we’d had to write what we thought we’d do in the future, at the time I filled this in slightly stupidly and said I’d study archaeology, have a Saturday job in the local library and I’d have been to Orkney. All of which I have done. Mind you, I also said I’d be able to play ‘Great Balls of Fire’ on the piano and have a white picket fence – neither of these have happened.

I did ‘play’ library as a kid, and while this could be suggested as being a foreshadowing of my future, I also used to ‘play’ at ironing and hoovering and both of those are things I try very, very hard to avoid as an adult (the toys were fab though, it was a proper Hoover hoover and everything).

The other content suggestion is advice for those coming into the profession. I’m going to focus this on school librarianship so here are six things I’ve learned:

1. Always keep the janitor/ admin staff/ photocopy assistant on side.

2. Don’t be scared to stand up for yourself and the library, but before you do breath and make a list of arguments to support yourself but be prepared to compromise.

3. Pupils don’t read instructions, but then neither do teaching staff, so slow verbal explanations are almost always a must.

4. Be enthusiastic and helpful or if you can’t be helpful, be apologetic about it and suggest others who might help.

5. Be flexible! The school library can be an exciting and hectic place and staff will want to change lesson plans, ideas, time slots. Don’t take it personally, instead view it as an opportunity to catch up (as this weeks spate of blogging suggests it has been a week of cancelled classes).

6. Treat pupils as you’d expect to be treated and demand they do the same. If you change things be prepared to explain your decisions and try and get them involved in the library.

While it wasn’t deliberate I’m happy I’ve found this job and I really get as lot of enjoyment out of school librarianship, mostly because of the young people. For instance, I overheard in the library today – ‘Never put your phone in the oven.’ Apparently this doesn’t work to dry it out and will melt the screen.

The future is bright…

The idea of CPD23 Thing 19 was a bit of a catch-up week and a chance to reflect on what Things have made the cut and are proving useful. Since I’m on a  massive catch-up some of these Things haven’t had a change to become routine. I’m keeping this post short and snappy as I already shared the Top 10 of online tools I would recommend a few weeks back. The only things I might add to that would be Slideshare for sharing Powerpoints, Screencast-o-matic for sharing  ICT how-to guides and podcasts.

I have tried the two tools suggested in Thing 17 – Prezi and SlideShare – this year both as part of my S5 study skills lessons, though I’ve used SlideShare for a few other things as well.

I’ve seen a number of people use Prezi at presentations I’ve been at and it is bit more exciting than PowerPoint though I think it rather depends on what you are trying to do (I’ve seen it suggested as a study tool and I know if I was to use it that way it would look amazing though I doubt I’d remember much). Also as someone who suffers from motion sickness it can be a tad unbalancing to watch if the person hasn’t thought about the flow enough. It was easy enough to use but it did take longer than )PowerPoint and I found it wasn’t quite as intuitive (so had to watch the how-to videos) but I’m sure doing it again or revising this one will be faster work.

I used Prezi for my S5 lesson (16/17 year old) on bibliographies (mostly as this is a rather dull topic and any way to make it seem less dull is good).

I want to add to this the examples of online bibliography things I looked at back at Thing 14. I don’t think I’ve utilised it wonderfully and it is still rather dull visually. I’m thinking I might make more of the circle around the heading and possible add a larger image to zoom back to between points or possibly the arrows between points and zoom out to re-cap. That second idea has more appeal given the context I’m using this in.

SlideShare is easy to use and effective at sharing PowerPoints. The only limits I’ve noticed to what I’m using it for is the size of the file (as I’m too cheap to go Pro) but for a my standard lesson/lecture then it’s great and sometimes the whole presenattion doesn’t convert I noticed some of the images in my ‘Just the Library’ one have been distorted.

Having said that most work without issue and for this part of the post I’ll share another of the S5 lectures. This one is part of my ‘taking notes from a lecture’ lesson and part of that is to give a lecture – My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Group Work Skills. Depending on the class I either do it very seriously, tongue in cheek and/or ad-lib more with how it applies to their lives.

Don’t you wish your librarian was as geeky as me? Worryingly enough this has had 379 views and while no-one has commented it’s clearly hit a wider audience than I expected – should have covered that sucker with the library brand. Having got the PowerPoint online I can then add it to the library blog and add some extra links to MLP:FIM and group work skills stuff or share it via Glow or email. A useful way to share stuff done at conference or similar trainings as well.

I can see me using slideshare to get inspiration on making my slides look more intresting but I’m not sure I can see either replace my CV – they could be a useful tool if I ever have to do a presentation at a job interview.