Promoting events in the Vale

Hi there! My name's Andy and I'm Community Outreach Officer with the Vale of Glamorgan Libraries. I think it's the best job in the libraries as it involves line managing the part-time branches and the Mobile Library, going out and meeting the public at coffee mornings and other events to promote our services, finding out what they want from us, setting up Reading Groups in some of our libraries and overseeing the Home Library Service, which involves visiting our housebound readers in their homes and recruiting volunteers to deliver books to them.

My newest task - which coincides nicely with my project - is to maintain a blog of the libraries' activities during Libraries Fortnight in November (1-14), where I hope to include details of the many events we're planning, reports and pictures/video after they've taken place and invite feedback and contributions from those who attended.

My main hobby is bellydancing and I am a member of The Desert Divas Middle Eastern Dance Troupe, Diva name Basma, but I also like geocaching, caravan holidays, Flat Holm and playing with my new little dog, Archie.

New Skills: New Plan

After a brilliant two days with Sangeet, at the Cymal sponsored 'WiseKids' workshops, I am full of ideas!

I work as a part-time Information Librarian, at the University of Glamorgan (Glyntaff Campus) LRC. My role is to support 'Care Sciences' students and lecturers (nursing courses etc.) navigate their way around our range of resources and get the most from them to achieve great results.

I arrange and conduct student inductions, run workshops, source and buy books (increasingly e-books) answer numerous queries, man the Information and Service Desk (ISD), manage a budget, attend faculty meetings etc. -  all on 18.5hrs p.w.! I job-share with my colleague Robert and one of my ideas, following on from Sangeet's course, is to develop a really interesting collaborative Blog, with weekly contributions from myself and Robert (and possibly other LRC staff ). This will be an extra and fun way of supporting students and staff - because it will be interactive and dynamic and definitely not boring. A real human connection, rather than cold functional advice. It will, of course, be full of useful information literacy tools, pointers to really great resources, reminders about current service developments and so on - but it will, hopefully, be so much more . . . . 

Once up and running, I will create a link to my Uni Glam e-mail signature, so that every e-mail I send out will have the link. I also plan to advertise my work in our Newsletter etc., as things develop. I have already discussed the idea with my colleague Rob and he's definitely up for it. With two of us contributing, the task won't be onerous and should be full of excellent content. 

I will be using 'TweetDeck' to help me populate the blog with interesting and up-to-date developments. I do already use Twitter - but the WiseKids course has taught me all kinds of ways to exploit this Web 2.0 tool in more effective ways. 

I could say a lot more here, but, for now, I'm simply going to quote the Nike mantra and 'Just Do It'. Wish me luck and I'll catch up with you guys again in November and hopefully, have something worthwhile to show. . . .   

Better late than never?!?

Hi,

My name is Caryl, and I am a Project Officer for RCT Library Service.  My role is quite varied here, and I enjoy my job very much (which is always a bonus), a part of what I do is to keep a facebook page for our library, although I need to look into this as I believe I should  have a page not a profile...any ideas on how to swap from one to the other would be greatly welcomed lol. 

I enjoyed my 2 days with the Wisekids Project, and found some of the material very useful, but some things I know I will not use again, however it's always good to have even a basic knowledge of whats out there is cyber world!! 

To complete my 'homework' I am compiling an 'idiots guide' to blogging, which I will incorporate as part of a short training session with some of my colleagues, I would also like to do a short podcast which I will circulate around our branches, this video would be a how-to guide to our reservation system. 

See ya in November!

Caryl.