…of being married – number 1: being able to compare and contrast two sets of parents!

Can you tell I’m procrastinating from writing my nanowrimo!?!

It has often been said that the use of twitter means that you blog less, but I’m not sure that’s the case. I think I am inspired by some of the things that those I follow on Twitter write about into writing something on my blog that it far longer than you can write on Twitter. I use Twitter mainly for the conversations, not writing endless updates about what I’m doing now, and I find it invaluable for networking and finding out what’s going on in MPOW and wider.

The problem I’m having at the moment is finding the time, as I seem to be spending more and more of my time in meetings and so I’m not as immersed in the stream as I used to be. This means that I am less engaged with what’s going on and my contributions become less valuable in a sense. One of the benefits of Twitter is the real-time updates, which I am less and less actually reading as they are posted and just skimming over what’s new when I have a second spare. I am now posting less on Twitter, as I’m not there to respond to comments that I could and I’m never certain how long after a tweet it is still appropriate to respond.

I also have lots of ideas of things to blog about, and start writing them, but either I never finish or when I start to write them out they don’t seem anywhere near as interesting as when I’d thought about them! So I have a number of unfinished posts, which are sitting here as drafts and I wonder if I ever will finish them.

Anyway, enough of rambling this morning – I’m not sure if this makes sense or if it’s just a few thoughts noted down, or what the point of it is!

Having seen a couple of posts on Reading Habits (inc Joeyanne Libraryanne) I thought I’d join in too, so here’s my answers:

Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack?

Sometimes I eat whilst reading – generally chocolate based, or similar, but it depends on what’s available.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

Not normally, although when I was studying I did highlight bits.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?

I normally use a bookmark, although if I don’t have anything I can use I’ll fold the corner over. I do sometimes lay the book over the arm of the sofa as well.

Fiction, Non-fiction, or both?

Both – I read non-fiction during lunch at work, and generally fiction at home. It varies depending on what I feel like at the time I start a book – if I’m feeling serious or if I want to read something trashier and less demanding!

Hard copy or audiobooks?

Has to be hard copy, I’ve never got on with audiobooks, although I have read a couple of ebooks.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?

If it’s fiction I find it very difficult to put down before the end of the book (hence I don’t read fiction at work!), otherwise for non-fiction at the end of a chapter.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?

Not normally, although it would depend on context and whether I think I can guess what it means!

What are you currently reading?

Often I am not reading any novels, as if I get into the story I will read til the end (drives my husband mad!), but at the moment I am in the middle of a few as I’ve got stuck and/or distracted:

• At work: “Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive” by Jared Diamond
• At home:
  • Novels: “Clarissa” by Samuel Richardson (I was named after this and have been reading it on and off – mainly off – for the last 15 years or so); “The inheritance of loss” by Kiran Desai; “The picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde; and I’ve just started re-reading “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas again.
  • Non-fiction: “101 ways to develop your people without really trying” by Peter Honey & Alan Hurst; “Shakespeare’s wife” by Germaine Greer; and “Relativity: The special and general theory” by Albert Einstein so I can explain it to my Grandpa.

What is the last book you bought?

“Preserves: River Cottage Handbook Number 2″ by Pam Corbin – now we’re married we make jam, so require multiple jam-making books!

Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time?

I have different books on the go in different places (one at my desk to read during lunch at work, one by the side of my bed, and a few others scattered around the house (hence the list of books above!). I also regularly re-read books I enjoyed.

Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read?

It varies a lot, from not reading very much at all to reading every spare moment I get.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books?

Both, I choose books based on what the story/subject area is and whether I’ve liked anything else by the author. I read both series and individual books.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over?

It depends on the situation – I’ve recommended both Jodie Picoult and Kelley Armstrong recently.

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?)

My husband has insisted that we organise our books by genre, then by author’s last name, then by series (if an author has written multiple series), then by date of publication! I am somewhat distressed by this and also by the fact that everyone assumes that it was my insistence as I’m a librarian. Previously my books were organsied by how much I liked them, by what fitted on each shelf – keeping books by the same author together – and by theme (eg all the books about dragons were together), which I can understand would make things difficult for anyone else to find!

If you’re really interested in what books we have they’re all catalogued in LibraryThing (although I haven’t got round to tagging them according to how we’ve split them into genres – one day maybe!).

Just over 5 months ago I started this job and I’ve been thinking alot recently about the differences between the two roles and whether this job is what I expected it would be (mainly because I had my appraisal earlier in the week).

The two main things that I now no longer do, are working on the helpdesk (so I have virtually no contact with students) and working with courses. These were two parts of my previous job that I enjoyed and found very satisfying, but whilst it’s a bit sad that I no longer do these I knew that they were not part of the new job so I can’t really complain!

I now have a team to manage, which is one of the best bits about the new role, as they’re great people and I enjoy working with them. Some of the management side is more challenging, especially as I’m not confident that I’m supporting them in the best possible way, or giving them what they need to do their job.

One thing that has really surprised me is the extent to which I’ve been thrown in at the deep end with the role, especially with some of the more strategic work. I’m not sure if that’s because I already worked here and so people forget that I’m new, if it’s a compliment as they think I’m capable and so don’t need the time to adjust, or if they’re under the misapprehension that as I’m new to the role I don’t have enough to do!

The major difference between the two roles though, is the workload and the extent to which new tasks are given to me with fairly short deadlines. This wasn’t something I was all that aware of before, and I now realise how much I was protected from it in my previous role.

I find the variety of tasks in both roles to be what I enjoy, as I like doing different things, but it does make it more challenging, especially for time management and prioritisation of the different tasks. Just as well I like challenges!

Earlier this week Phil Bradley created a list of 100 UK Librarians that use Twitter, which included me (thanks Phil!) and as a result of that I have gained 32 followers, which is great (& hello to you all!), but makes me wonder how they would have found my twitter stream otherwise. How easy is it to find people on Twitter who are interested in subjects that you’re interested in?

How often do Twitter users search to see if there are new people in their area of interest? I know when I first started using Twitter I found a few people (who mainly worked with me) and I looked at who they were following and then who they followed and interacted with and followed some of them myself. I now have a growing network of people on Twitter, some of whom I know in the “real world” and some of whom I only know through Twitter, and that are in a variety of areas that I’m interested in – mainly people interested in libraries and members of staff in other departments at MPOW, although there’s plenty of people who fit in neither of those ctaegories too. But I don’t go out and look for new people to follow. When someone follows me I have a look at their Twitter stream and tend to follow them back (unless I can think of a reason not to), but I don’t actively look for more people to follow.

In a way I think I follow too many people already as I already can’t keep up with the number of tweets, especially given the number of meetings I have in my diary between now and Christmas! Oh well, that’s life I suppose!

I’ve been thinking alot over the weekend about choices – why people make the choices they do and what I would do if I was in their place. I think this started after watching My Sister’s Keeper (with my sister) and then re-reading the book. The family in that story is placed in a terrible situation (their daughter has an aggresive form of leukemia) and they do everything they can to save her and prolong her life, including genetically engineering another child to be a perfect match and then donating parts of her to their first daughter.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a child, let alone one that is so ill, so I am in no place to judge their decisions, but it has made me think about the people I am close to and how much I take for granted from them and from myself. Not that I’ve reached any conclusions – it’s difficult to know what’s the best thing to do in any given situation, most important decisions aren’t taken lightly and yet what results from them isn’t always what you think it will be!

Tony keeps talking about how the library homepage should be amended by looking at the usage data, and whilst usage data is important I’m not convinced that it’s the be all and end all of things.All this focus on usage data reminds me of the joke:

What’s the similarity between statistics and a bikini?

What they reveal is interesting, but they conceal the vital bits!

For one I’m not convinced by the Google Analytics click-through data as it seems to me that it only looks at the sub-domain of the links and so any clicks to a base url get amalgamated together. And just looking on the homepage there are the following base urls:  http://library.open.ac.uk; http://www.open.ac.uk; http://www.open2.net; http://intranet.open.ac.uk; http://voyager.open.ac.uk. So not being able to distinguish between people who leave the site to go to the catalogue and those who go to another institutional page or an external site makes it very difficult to then use this data as our primary decision-making tool.

Secondly, we get other feedback direct from our users that we need to take into account – either as a result of surveys and user testing, or unsolicited comments. These are often insightful and show what people are thinking of the site when they use it – what they are trying to do and what problems they have doing it.

Lastly, we within the Library have a view on how we think the website should be used and what we want to push to our users to help them use our resources. We may not be right, and that’s where site analytics are invaluable in seeing how the site is used, but they can’t be used in isolation.

Tony is right though: we do need to get better at using the data we gather to inform our decision-making. We gather alot of information (not just web analytics) and need to be more proactive in working out what we want from this and then using it. Tony’s been talking about using the website usage data as the basis for a re-design of the library homepage for over a year, and given how many staff I know read his blog it’s quite embarassing that it’s taken so long for us to do anything about it. But our new front page will be launched on the 1st Sept and the usage data (among other things) has been used to come up with the design.

I was just sent this and it made me giggle so I thought I would share it.

Happy Friday!

Today I had two days of email backlog to work my way through to start with and then I did the following:

• had a 1:1 with a member of my team where we confirmed her objectives for the rest of the year;
• wrote a reference for another member of my team who is applying for a place on a part-time MSc;
• completed my application for a training programme;
• amended the paper my colleague and I have written on the use of ‘guides at the side’ to meet the reviewers comments;
• logged what I’ve spent my time on this week in our time-recording system;
• had various discussions round subscriptions for the next financial year (which starts tomorrow);
• was told what my responsibilities will be when I am rotaed to be the Duty Manager;
• discussed what performance indicators were useful for reporting on our work.

All in all this week I have done quite alot of admin. Only really having three days of work has meant it hasn’t been a normal week, although I would find it difficult to describe what a normal week is!

Today I have had the day off as leave to pick my husband up from Heathrow.