Give your (#libcampuk11) cake a QR code

I break my blogging drought with a quick post fleshing out an idea I had yesterday evening.

You may have heard of Library Camp - an 'un-conference'-style event happening a week Saturday in Birmingham.  The good people organising it have invited attendees to bring along a cake (we all know that librarians like cake).

Some people have been talking about making their own name badges, and including QR codes on them so that people with smartphones can find out more about the person in front of them.  Well, that's all well and good, but what about those of us who are more interested in new cake recipes than other people?

And lo! The idea of QR codes for cake was born.  Thus far in life, I've been a bit QR-code ambivalent. But being able to get to the recipe for a cake you're currently eating - sounds perfect to me.  Carrying on reading if you want a step-by-step guide...

#cpd23, Thing 10: Routes into librarianship

Well, I really enjoyed the elephants in the last post. 'Graduate traineeships, Masters Degrees, Chartership, Accreditation' is rather hard to illustrate with animals, though. But maybe there's something I can do with it. It's all about our 'journey' (cue slushy music) as librarians, isn't it? And when I think of journeys, I think of nothing so much as the majestic bison wending its way across the plains (cue David Attenborough)...

"Here, in the Hayden valley, Wyoming..."

Now, I've talked about my route into librarianship fairly recently, so if you want to know all the ins and outs I'll point you over here, and those that have already read the tale won't end up like this fellow:

What do bison dream about?

In this instalment of the story, I really ought to talk about Chartership, and my progress (or lack thereof) towards it. Having completed my part-time LIS MA in September 2008, by early 2010 I had pretty much got used to my not having essays to write in every spare moment, and thought I was ready for a new challenge. I also new that the job hunt would be looming in a year's time. These two factors combined to convince me to register for Chartership.  I'd been engaging in a fair amount of professional development since graduation (the nature of my job demanded it), so I felt that I had the material for a good portfolio.  I found a mentor, went to some Chartership course, and got involved in things to add to the portfolio evidence.  I set myself an ambitious deadline for completion. So far, so good.  But things have a habit of not turning out how you think they will.

Did you know that you can turn bison into knitting?

The trouble is, that I got so involved with so many great things, that Chartership has fallen by the wayside. I made six months' decent progress: drawing up necessary development plan, meeting my mentor, writing up some of my experiences, and creating a beautiful portfolio template that just requires me to fill in all the blanks. Around about Christmas and shortly afterwards the job situation resolved itself (at least temporarily), my extra-curricular involvement stepped itself up another notch or too and Chartership really hasn't had a look in since.  Dear mentor, if you are reading this, sorry.

It's time I faced facts: I need to sort myself and get on and finish this.

A face you can't ignore. (I should point out that my mentor looks nothing like this. This is mor a representation of my inner annoyance at letting Chartership drag on.)

Probably the first step should be to contact my mentor.  I've been putting that off and off and off not least because I feel I should have done some work first. So maybe I should do some work - draw up a plan, at least - and then get in touch.

Hopefully this public self-shaming will encourage me into doing something, anything. All encouragement gratefully received. Is anyone else in a similar position? Want to team up, and motivate each other together?

Yours, abjectly,

Katie.

#cpd23, Thing 9; Evernote

...or Excuses for Elephants. Every good course needs elephants, I say.

The premise of Evernote sounds amazing. A way of tying together all those notes of cool things, to-do lists for different parts of life, documents, webpages and so on; and of accessing them from all possible platforms and devices. I should be leaning towards this like, well, like this elephant:

I ought to embrace Evernote

But the problem is, as I may have mentioned before, that I don't (yet) have a gadget with me at all times. Web-based solutions are great, as I use several different computers, but I don't have a smartphone, or even my own laptop, so a lot of my remembering still has to happen the low-tech way (pace my iGoogle to-do list). I imagine that eventually I'll follow the herd (see below) into the technological present and I'll be able to embrace this more fully.

Following the herd

So what can I do with this Evernote thingy?

What, indeed?

Well, I can write little notes, all formatty like a word-processor and tag them. And I can clip webpages, not just the URL but the whole thing if I want, and tag them up too. A quick search suggests that there are ways of getting Delicious bookmarks into Evernote if I wanted to transfer them across, but it doesn't seem that they would be so easily available to other people? There's a 'share notebook' function, so I could set up different notebooks and share some of them but not others. But is it possible to make individual notes private or shared? Sociability is much harder than these guys make it seem:

Why isn't more of life like this?

The point. Geddit?

So, what's the point of this post? Apart from liking elephants a lot, I think the point is that I see that Evernote's something useful--I'm sure it could turn me into the productive, organised, efficient person I'm sure I really am--but I need to use to more to work out how it works. And I probably won't use it more in the very near future because of a lack of tech.