Thing 16: Advocacy and getting published

Still trying to catch up and having read ahead to some Things to come, I am not sure I want to catch up as they look quite hard.  Still, advocacy.....not something I am especially good at I think.  I am very good at keeping up to date with what other people are doing to save the library profession, such as Voices for the Library http://www.voicesforthelibrary.org.uk  and I wrote to my MP when they organised a parliamentary lobby earlier this year (receiving a rather bland and slippery shoulder response); my letter and the response can be seen in my earlier posts.  I am also aware of the upcoming parliamentary Lobby for School Libraries on 29th October and will be contacting an MP (can't decide if it should be my own MP or the one for the constituency where my school is - don't hold out much hope for either really) in due course, although I cannot be there in person.

But that's about it for me.  It's not that I don't care about the profession.  I do and I have always been quick to support its professionalism.  I am qualified, currently chartering and working in a school where it is essential to have a professional qualification and more (Masters, NPQH, threshold 1, 2, 3) for career progression, therefore I believe in celebrating this professionalism.  Not that I am going to get into that whole professional/non professional stuff in this post.  It's just that I don't get out there and shout! I am not an Ian Clark or a Lauren Smith et al who are doing great things to advocate libraries and I am not even sure I do it very well in my workplace where I am sometimes scared to say I am a librarian for fear of not being taken seriously or ridiculed. It's why in my email signature, my job as Assistant Head of Sixth Form is listed first because I know that this carries more weight, despite me working in a very supporting school as far as the LRC is concerned, employing me (qualified) to strategically manage the LRC (alongside my other responsibilities), a full time (non-qualified) LRC Manager and a part time (22 hours a week) LRC assistant.

Regarding being published, I have been in 2009.  I contributed a chapter to a School Library Association publication called the SLA Survival Guide.  Each of the chapters was written by a school librarian who had featured on the School Librarian of the Year honours list and aimed to give bite size chunks of advice to librarians entering the school library profession for the first time.  I have also had an article recently published in the CILIP SW branch's newsletter, circulated with September's Update.  I wrote an account of a recent workshop I attended on marketing online resources in library, run by Credo (see an earlier post) and this has also been featured on the  Libraries Thriving  website at: http://www.librariesthriving.org/workshops/workshops

So that's it for this Thing.  Definitely a need to do more both with my personal advocacy for libraries and to try and share more of my experience as a professional librarian, including keeping up with this blog once CPD23 and my chartership is finished.