I started writing this as part of one of my assignments today at work. And then when I got home and read through my blogs, I found this post from Librarian in Black, which lead me to Emily’s post on Library Revolution. And then a conversation started in my twitter about the same thing. So it’s all very timely at the moment.
This then, is my personal reflection on keeping up to date with the profession. Unpolished, but I thought I’d share it.
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Keeping up with developments in the profession is an important part of the job. It is necessary to know what changes are being made in other libraries, what other librarians are doing, and also what new theories are currently coming out of the literature. It can be hard to find the time, especially when so many librarians are time poor and stretched to do what needs to be done. But it is something that we all should do, as part of our responsibilities to our patrons. I try as much as possible to keep up with what is happening. I’ve not yet had the privilege of going to a conference, but I have followed with interest the live blogging that goes on. I read a large number of blogs, both library related and general. I read a number of journals regularly, even if I only skim through some of the articles. I monitor both ALIA and CILIP. It is time consuming, but I personally feel it is worth my time. I do occasionally feel completely overwhelmed by it all, and then I will prioritise, and give things a miss that I don’t feel to be as important. I don’t get to read everything I would like to read all the time. There are lots of journals and books I’d love to spend my time reading. Instead I’ve had to choose what I think is going to be best for my career. Since I work in a legal environment, I tend to eschew the more academic and public library oriented articles and concentrate on special or legal oriented ones. It’s not a perfect method, but for now it’s keeping me up to date.
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May 23rd, 2007 at 10:30 am
Seshat, great post. I think most information professionals will agree with what you say. Personally I don’t tend to monitor what CILIP produce although I do read articles of interest in the Update. One of the issues of course is making sure you don’t try and look at too much stuff. I have certainly done this in the past and for the sake of my sanity have cut down on the number of feeds I receive and journals I read. There is after all only so much time in the day. I do recommend attending conferences if you can, these are excellent opportunities to hear what other people are doing.