Thing 5 – reflective practice

Thing 5 – reflective practice


It’s at this time of year that I always have to indulge in a period of reflection: I’ve recently had my annual staff development review, so reflection is on my mind at the moment. I’ve discovered that although what I write is almost entirely dependent upon my mood at the time, the only sure thing is it will be always be negative! That’s just me! Lacking in confidence, a pessimist, whilst at the same time being ambitious and a perfectionist!

Over the last year there have been a number of catalysts to me arriving at a point where I thought I could undertake the cpd23. Going to the CIG conference in September 2010 made me realise there were other people out there who were experiencing the same problems, issues and successes as I was, was one of them. Linking with other cataloguers on Twitter was another. The CILIP Executive Briefing on RDA was another confidence-boosting session, as well as being an avenue for discovering more about RDA. All this whilst in the background our new VC was encouraging us to be a little more vocal about our achievements; ok so he was really talking about the academics, but why not the service areas too? After all, our library achieved high results in the student experience survey so we must have been doing something right, and we needed to recognise what these things were so we could expand on them.

And then there’s my blog. Originally I started a professional blog but really felt I had nothing to say that would be of any interest to anyone else, but having networked with cataloguers and seen what people were grappling with, I thought I had one or two areas of experience that might be useful to other cataloguers, so I started to blog more regularly. I also contributed a couple of articles to the high visibility blog, started up by Celine and Venessa.

My reasons for taking part in the cpd23 programme were really to see if there were other things out there on the web, or other practices that I could use to help me with my day-to-day work. So far, this has proved to be true and I’ve incorporated RSS feeds into my iGoogle page, considered my online identity, found loads of cataloguers out there to network with – and decided that I need to devote at least 2 hours a week to the process in order to do it justice and get as much as possible from it!!

I've also looked into just what exactly reflective practice is and found a brilliant site (amongst the many) which explains it to me really well. Hopefully, I shall continue to refect upon my learning and apply it to my "day" job for a long time to come.

Ok, now to Thing 6 – bring it on!