All entries for March 2011

Met with my Library Chartership mentor

Met with my Library Chartership mentor on Monday 28th March and updated her on my progress.

• I have arranged to meet with Sue Bennett Director of Student Careers & Skills to talk about the strategic plans for the centre. (Thursday 31st March)
• Completed my CV in draft - I need to check it and pass it to a job search advisor to look over it.  I will complete this, by the end of this week.
• Arranged to met with Antony Brewerton about the main library marketing strategy - April 28th
• I will finish making notes on copyright.  (I've nearly finished the 2nd book).
• Arrange to met with the Head of Academic Services Carolyn Haresign at Coventry University about their strategic planning.
• I must get a lever arch folder & start putting my portfolio work in, collating it better & to work out any gaps I've got.
• Book study leave to write my personal statement - I don't feel ready yet.

I'd better get on with it!

: 29 Mar 2011 15:27 |  Tags: Chartership Library |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

CV – 4 pages long

Follow-up to Completed my CV from Vicky's Chartership blog

Have shown my CV to my library chartership mentor and 4 pages isn't too long as it is an extended CV.  I will have to shorten it if I apply for any jobs!

: 29 Mar 2011 15:13 |  Tags: Chartership |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Sharepoint Training

I went on the IT's Sharepoint training Thursday 24th March 2011. The course covered the basics on Sharepoint with enough information to get you going.

Sharepoint will be a good tool to use for the Student Careers & Skills intranet rather than using sitebuilder pages. But I think it is something that we can't rush into as it is like building a website and we will have to decide on the structure beforehand.  We will also have to ensure that everyone uses it instead of using the sharedrive and uploads files the correct way and whether we use version control or not. 

Sharepoint is good at letting people know the last date a file was updated and the current version.  You can also enforce people to check out a file when they are going to update it and a copy is stored in your drafts.  When you update it and return the new version back to sharepoint you have to check it back in.  If someone comes to look at the file when you have it checked out they then can still at a read only copy and know who to talk to if they need to edit that file.

There is lot you can do with Sharepoint you can have libraries (files of information), lists (i.e. contact lists that you then can update outlook with), announcements, calendars, blogs.  We didn't cover the full use of the calendars as Student Careers & Skills want to use it for booking rooms.  It does look quite simple to use, although the permission levels on what people can do, can get complicated.   So I suppose we'd better get building the Sharepoint intranet.

: 28 Mar 2011 22:01 |  Tags: Chartership |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Completed my CV

I have just completed my CV and it is 4 pages long.  I know the CV for the chartership is an extended one, but I think 4 pages is probably too long.  But another reason why it is so long is that as I'm completing my chartership retrospectively I need my CV to cover 3 jobs in quite a lot of detail including all the training I have done.  I will have to show it to my mentor to get her opinion & I'll ask my fellow library colleagues about the length of their CV's at the Love your Chatership meeting that I'm going to tomorrow.

As I'm meeting with my mentor next week I have completed or almost completed some of my action points.

1. CV completed (draft only)
2. Spoken to Sue Bennett to arrange talking to her about the strategic plans of Student Careers & Skills
3. Almost but not quite yet fixed a date up with Antony Brewerton to talk about library marketing

I still need to ask about study leave to write my personal statement I will do this on Friday.

I will blog again later in the week as I'm off on a SharePoint training session all day tomorrow, to see how it can be used for Student Careers & Skills,  particularly the calender aspect but how we could use it for our intranet.  Coventry University library already use it for their intranet but I don't know how to build one.

: 23 Mar 2011 21:15 |  Tags: Chartership |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Sitebuilder managing your web content

Today I went on the ITs course - Sitebuilder managing your web content

It was a 3 hour long course about best practice and the tools that Sitebuilder has to help you manage your web content.  As Student Careers & Skills are currently go through a restructuring of our website I thought it would a useful course to go on.

The content of the course included:

• Content Strategy
• Identifying your audience
• What makes a good site
• Writing for the web
• Stock take
• Post audit
• Planning and restructuring your site
• Statistics on traffic to your site
• Sitebuilder's useful tools

The course did cover a lot in 3 hours. Although I knew a lot of it already as I've been doing research into best practice with usability, navigation and being given information from SCS IT officer & Ops & Info Manager as they have already met with Elab for advice.  It was to good to get the full picture.  It didn't necessarily make me feel better about the restructuring as we need to really need do an audit of all of the current pages and the website has over 900 pages.  That will take ages to do!  It reinforced to me how we need to test our proposed structure with the users of the website to make sure we are thinking like them.  

The handouts from the course are useful.  The content template for a website page, we could modify this and use it for our template of our new pages.  The web style guide handout, I have already written a web style guide but I can compare the Elab version to mine to see how I can improve it.

I feel that this course has backed up my own research into website restructuring and given me good guidelines to work with.

To find out more about the course go to:  Managing your web content

: 15 Mar 2011 20:35 |  Tags: Content SiteBuilder Web |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Handling Difficult Conversations course

I attended the Difficult Conversations Course (LDC) on Thursday 3rd March .  

The course was very interesting and gave an insight into the theories of conversations, importance of body language.  The skills used in having conversations and the different levels of listening.  It also covered transactional analysis and handling aggression.  

We were given a template to use for a fierce conversation, breaking the issue up into different parts, name the issue, describe your emotions, clarify what is at stake, identify your contribution to the problem, your wish to resolve the issue and invite your partner to respond.  We all had to fill out the template with a "real fierce conversation" we would like to have.  We then used role play to act out the conversation.  I don't really like role play but I could see the benefit of this practising before your undertake a difficult conversation working on your body language, tone and meaning.

I feel that this course has given me the confidence to tackle a difficult conversation and has given me strategies to work through problems rather than just ignoring them.  So beware you may be my next difficult conversation!

If you are a Warwick University Staff member and want to find out more go to: Handling Difficult Conversations

: 04 Mar 2011 21:17 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Met with my Library Chartership mentor

I met with my Chartership mentor yesterday to see how much progress I have made on my Library Chartership.  I don't feel that I have made much progress, but I have completed some things that were on my ppdp and am reflecting at every opportunity.

By the next meeting on the 28th March I have to:

• Find and read a copy of Coventry University's Library Strategy.
• Find and read the University of Warwick Strategy.  I have already done this,  if you want to find out more go to Strategy
• Continuing building my portfolio
• Arrange a meeting with Sue Bennett the Director of Student Careers and Skills
• Arrange a meeting with Antony Brewerton about marketing academic libraries
• Find out if I'm allowed study leave to compile and write up my portfolio.  As a way to find out what areas I need more evidence or experience in.
• Finish my CV add in training courses

As I have a major project just about to start in Student Careers & Skills restructuring the website to make all the various websites more integrated and easier to navigate,  I didn't know whether this should be included in my portfolio but that will delay my submission date as it will not be completed until September.  I probably won't include it unless I feel that my portfolio is lacking in some way.

Will blog again later in the week after I have completed my Handling Difficult conversations course.

: 01 Mar 2011 21:43 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem