thewikiman

The ten tips of the title are near the top of this post – it’s quite long, so don’t worry about reading the examples bit if you just want the nuts and bolts.

I’ve created or had a hand in creating three Prezis that have made it into the public arena (plus some previous attempts that I’ve deleted). Prezi has its critics, but I like it a lot – it’s nice to engage people in a different way to what they’re used to. A lot of librarians seem fed up with it but remember, the people you are presenting to might not necessarily be blasé and weary Info Pros! I’ve seen people literally blown away by a good Prezi, particularly after Laura and I used one for our Echo Chamber presentation – if someone hasn’t seen one before, and you make a good one, chances are they’ll be interested in a way that PowerPoint simply couldn’t achieve. Good Prezis are arresting. In fact, in the same way that the whole ‘death by PowerPoint’ thing can actually obfuscate excellent content, you can put even average content into a nice Prezi and people will be still be excited to engage with it.

Incidentally, if this top 10 tips had to be just a top 1, it would be: a good Prezi is a balance between exploiting the capabilities of the medium, and ensuring these capabilities don’t become and end in themselves.

Ten Top Tips

1. Create your structure first, fill in the details afterwards. Think of your presentation like a building – you need to create the foundations and the structure first, and you need to know the outline before you start building. Think about what your top-down canvas view will be like before you start – this is what people will see before your presentation begins (either in person or embedded online), so it is important for it to look striking and draw the viewer in, and for it to function in support of your subject matter. Don’t try and design it as you go along, like Ellen Paige in Inception…
2. Make your sections bigger than you think you need to. Just trust me on this. You won’t believe how often you think you’ve made something massive, but ending up having to cram loads and loads of other stuff into the same space, and wishing you’d make it bigger in the first place. Remember, the Prezi canvas is to all intents and purposes unlimited in size – everything looks the same size when zoomed in on to fill the screen anyway. So don’t be afraid to make your title absolutely enormous if you’re fitting the structure of the presentation into the same width, as with Example Two, below. The first time I created that title it was about a fifth the size of what it ended up being.
3. Choose your colour scheme well, and choose it early. Unlike almost all other software we’re used to using, Prezi does not allow an infinite range of possibilities in terms of fonts and colours. This is either a blessing or a curse depending on how creative you are. But as there are only a handful of options, there’s really no excuse for not choosing the one which best embodies the feel of what you are trying to say. The way the visuals work is, you use the same building blocks to create the presentation (so the shapes, the frames, the arrows, the text) and then change their style / colour scheme en masse. You can’t have, say, pink titles and black body text on a blue background, because that ‘theme’ doesn’t exist.  So, choose from what they have – if it’s a serious presentation, don’t use the jaunty font one. Similarly if what you’re doing is quite colloquial, that weird sort of Soviet-chic theme probably isn’t for you. Or maybe it is! But do think about it properly.The reason I’ve said do this early is, different ‘title’ or ‘body’ texts are different sizes on the different themes. So for example if you have your titles nested inside circular shapes, like in Example Three below, then changing the theme after you’ve carefully arranged these into the circles will probably ruin it, by making the text stick out over the boundaries of the circles, or be too small. Decide on what you’re doing early on, and stick with it.
4. Position your materials sympathetically to avoid motion-sickness. There’s no point in using Prezi if you’re just going to stick a load of paragraphs of text on the canvas at random, then plot a path between them. You may as well use PowerPoint as you’re not exploiting the platform at all, and it’ll probably leave the viewer slightly queasy.If you arrange your materials sympathetically, it’s better for everyone. So try and move progressively and consistently between items – from A to B to C, in a horizontal row or vertically or even in a circle, rather than from A – Y – D all over the place, wildly oscillating around the canvas. It’s nice that Prezi will tilt to read everything as though it’s horizontal – it’s fun to have a diagonal line of text and then a horizontal one, so that it zooms excitingly between them. But try and limit the number of these you have in a presentation – changes of direction should be a neat special effect to punctuate your presentation, not the norm.There is a reason people get motion-sick on trains / trams far less than they do in cars, and it’s to do with consistency of motion and the effect this has on the inner ear. Gradually accelerating train = fine, even if you’re facing backwards; lurchy stop-starty car on a country lane = sick inducing even if you’re in the front. So be consistent in your movements on your Prezi, and choose the path of least deviation as far as possible.
5. Reign in your ambition! Most Prezis suffer from the giddy excitement that comes from exploring a new medium. Oooh look, I can do this! And OMG, THIS! But consider if you really need to have that bit where the whole thing turns upside down and then on its side – if it serves as some kind of visual metaphor then great, but if it doesn’t then keep things on an even keel.To return to the building analogy, let’s take a kitchen as an example. Most people’s kitchens are a compromise between the gadgets they’ve always wanted and the gadgets they can afford – so,  like 99% of humans in the Western World, I have a cafe-style toasted sandwich maker hidden away in a cupboard somewhere (FTW). I would also love an ice-maker, a massive espresso-machine, maybe a nice stereo in there, probably not a TV but an ice-cream maker, maybe a soda-stream, a lovely bread maker, plus my wife has her eye on one of those massive pink SMEG fridges – but we can’t afford any of those things. If we won the lottery and I actually went out and bought all of those, and put them in our little kitchen, it would be terrible! It would look rubbish, be over crowded, I’d never use half of them, they’d lose their specialness and value among so many other gadgets, and ultimately the actual Kitchen itself would cease to function in the way I needed it to.That’s what Prezi is like. Just because you have the freedom to do lots of bonkers stuff, doesn’t mean you should – or that it’ll make the presentation better.
6. …but still employ at least one extreme change of scale… Epic scale changes are ace. Prezi can go REALLY big and REALLY small, so it’s a nice thing to zoom in on something people won’t have guessed is there from the top-down view at the start. In Example Three, below, check out the zooming in on the dot of the eye to show my logo and my web address (thus getting across essential information without changing the top-down look of the Prezi), and in Example Two, look out for the angry, ill looking twitter bird that comes in the Examples of Failure section. W00t! It completely dwarfs the rest of the presentation, and is then itself dwarfed by some text (and this is a visual metaphor – I’m saying that the fact that twitter goes mad about library misconceptions but none of this anger is heard or understood outside the realm of the library, dwarfs much of our excellent efforts towards defending the profession). When Laura and I presented our echo-chamber ideas using this Prezi, we actually had to pause for a while and wait for the laughter at the blood-shot and drooling bird to subside…
7. Achieve uniformity of style by using ‘duplicate’ then ‘edit’. Because of the way in which you can move the mouse to make items bigger or smaller, it’s actually quite hard to get two different sections of text or shapes to be the same size – it’s not like PowerPoint when you can pick a font size and stick to it. But in a lot of cases it does look better if your headings are the same size, so are you main body of text sections, etc. The easiest way to ensure uniformity is to get the first example of something to the size you want it, then ‘duplicate’ it – this will produce a second example exactly the same size, which you can then edit to say whatever you want. Then duplicate and edit that, and so on and so on.
8. Use PDFs, not JPEGs – and remember every image will fill the screen. Prezi does not like Gifs or JPEGs – it prefers PDFs for whatever reason. Every single image on all the Prezi’s I’ve made has been a PDF because it looks so, so much crisper. This is a faff, but worthwhile – either use Photoshop if you have it to save images as PDFs, or use Zamzar online file conversion – it’s free.A lot of people complain that Prezi makes images look grainy or low-res (and indeed it does, with JPEGs, hence the use of PDFs) but there is a reason for this. Prezi is a zooming presentation platform; it literally zooms in and fills the screen with whatever you click on or tell it to look at. So if you’ve got a little 10px by 10px picture, it’s going to be shown far, far bigger than is ideal when Prezi zooms right in on it – hence it’ll look grainy. When, for example, taking a screen grab you want to feature as an image, don’t crop the screen-grab down to the bare-minimum – try and leave enough of an image so Prezi doesn’t have to focus in too close.This is hard to explain, do you get what I mean by this? Basically, anything smaller than what fills your screen in its original context, may look a bit shonky on Prezi when it is enlarged to fill your screen in a Prezi context – just like if you zoom in on any picture and start to see the pixels, or just shove your face really close to a newspaper. This issue is exacerbated when your presentation fills a big-screen at a conference venue. So, no tiny pics, okay?
9. Specifics: Moving a bunch of stuff at once with the Shift key, creating proper hyperlinks by duplicating, using frames, and embedding youtube vids. Often you can spend ages assembling a little cluster of materials, only to find they need to be moved – and if you select one you can move it, but then you have to go back and move all the rest, and this is annoying and takes ages. I did this for months, then Laura pointed out that if I’d read the manual I’d've known you just have to press and hold then Shift key on your keyboard, then use the mouse to draw a box round the group of items you want to move collectively. This saves ages of time.For reasons I don’t understand, hyperlinks don’t appear most times you type a URL into Prezi.  It just remains as www.whatever.com rather than www.don’tactuallyclickthis.com. However, if you ‘duplicate’ the relevant section, the new version will have hyperlinked URLs. I don’t know why this is, but it’s an acceptable work-around for an annoying problem – just delete the original, and move the duplicate into the right position.Using frames well is important to a decent Prezi. As the name suggests, Frames just frame a section of the Prezi to be zoomed in on and fill the screen – they can be visible frames, or invisible. Invisible is often better. If you have a picture, some title text and some body text in a cluster, if you just click on one of them when plotting the ‘path’ of the Prezi it’ll zoom right in on that at the expense of the others. If you frame all three objects together, it’ll zoom in on the framed trio collectively.Finally, embedding videos – you can embed a few formats of video by uploading them as files, but much easier is to just add a youtube URL as free text. This will automatically embed the video, and you can press play on them when the Prezi path ‘arrives’ at that bit.
10. Make sure you are the dog, and Prezi is the tail… Should be self-explanatory this one – always make sure Prezi is working for you, not the other way around. You chose Prezi because it serves a function for you – if it doesn’t serve that function in practice, or using it drives you mad with frustration, then ditch it! Don’t let the tail wag the dog – pick materials that suit this presentation platform, but don’t let the medium dictate to you what you’re doing.

In addition to all that, I’d add: if you keep a blog, link back from the Prezi to a post which gives a bit more information, and bit of context. Prezis make people want to know more.

Examples

Example one is the first one I ever did – for this blog post on tomorrow’s information professionals. It’s had loads of views because it struck a chord with people (plus Prezi.com made it a staff-pick) – the content is good, but actually the presentation is pretty poor. (All of these are best in full-screen mode, but not on automatic)

This is a bit of classic first prezi with all the naivety they tend to bring, and I was very tempted recently to clean it up and make it nicer – people continue to look at it a lot as it is embedded in the most tweeted blog post I’ve ever written. But actually I’ve decided to leave it, for now at least – learning processes are important, and not something we should be ashamed of. Some freaky people do appear to arrive fully-formed and able to do things brilliantly straight-away, but for the rest of us the journey can be quite enjoyable!

So what’s bad about this? The top-down canvas view of the whole thing isn’t particularly interesting, there isn’t much use of anything other than plain text, the big frame thing is quite ugly (you can have invisible frames that achieve the same thing), the massive URL for my website at the end is a little crass and not hyperlinked, and most of all the content is arranged too haphazardly and this makes it too lurchy. The lurching is, I think, the biggest objection people have with Prezi. It IS possible to mitigate this and prevent motion-sickness in your audience, but I did not achieve that here. The snippets of text aren’t really arranged with enough care. More on that sort of thing above.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t a presentation that I’ve ever delivered live. I just used Prezi because I thought I had something interesting to say, and I wanted to say it in a way which would capture people’s imagination a bit more (and allow them to embed it into their own blogs etc). People see a lot of text on blogs, so it’s nice to give them something else once in a while. And it worked, too – the blog post in which the above Prezi is embedded is the second most viewed of all time on this site.

Example two is mine and Laura’s Echolib effort – this had a long gestation period so was actually created in part before and in part after example three. This means I’d learned stuff as I was going along, which made it better.

The different sections of our talk are arranged into a nominal ‘chamber’ shape, with the examples of successful escapes listed outside the walls for a little visual metaphor thing going on… As we each took a section it was really easy to collaborate when putting this together – we could basically assemble our own nodes (e.g I went away and thought about examples of Failure, then designed that section) and see the other person’s contributions gradually assembling elsewhere.

There is the extreme scale change mentioned above to look out for here, as well as embedded youtube vids. Another thing to note is all the contributions from the room which we added in real-time during the presentation, and the contributions from Twitter, which we added afterwards (having live-tweeted our presentation). Prezi is really easy to edit on the fly, and this particular one will serve as a living archive of useful stuff, perpetually updated as we do this presentation on future occasions.

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Tagged: library day in the life

As with a couple of the previous rounds, I’m taking part in the Library Day in the Life Project this week. It was set up by Bobbi Newman, and you can read about it here. It’s a great thing because comparing what we do is interesting of itself, plus if anyone outside the echo-chamber reads any of these posts, it may go some way to challenging misconceptions about what people in libraries get up to these days.

It would be hypocritical of me to do all five days (I only ever read one day from each blog I subscribe to, as I can’t deal with all the extra posts at once) so here’s a couple of day’s worth in a single post.

What I do for a living

I work on a JISC-funded project known as LIFE-SHARE (this is an elaborate acronym, because we don’t have nearly enough of these in libraries) for the University of Leeds. My role is split between the Leeds parts of the project and the Sheffield parts (the other project partner is York, who have their own Project Officer for LIFE-SHARE).

The purpose of the project is, in short, to explore consortial strategies for digitisation in Higher Education, with particular reference to preservation and curation. Which is to say: our collections are falling apart, what do we do about it, do we really have a clear way forward, and can we work collectively to solve the problems and save some resources along the way? The Project lasts from last January to next March, and you can read more about it on the website  here.

Monday

LIFE-SHARE has a case-study at each institution, investigating different aspects of digitisation. For York, it’s on demand digitisation. For Leeds, it’s digitisation to support Collection Management. For Sheffield, it’s digitisation to support Special Collections – and Sheffield was where I was on Monday. We’ve just got to the stage where we’ve written up the Case Studies (they’ll be made available via the Outputs page of our website) and I was in Sheffield tying up a lot of loose-ends. Firstly the Project Manager and the other Project Officer came over and I showed them all the equipment we’d purchased for the audio-visual digitisation suite, and examples of the videos and audio I’d digitised. Then we had a long meeting to discuss the internal and external versions of our case-study reports. Then they went home and I returned to my windowless cell to finish off.

I created some metadata (Dublin Core) for the digital objects I’d not yet described and auto-generated some technical metadata using MediaInfo. I wrote a detailed list for Sheffield’s head of Special Collections as to exactly what I’d done, why I’d done it, and whereabouts it was stored – then had a brief meeting with her to explain it all in person (she was pleased, which is good!). Then I had the glamorous task of clearing up all the packaging that was strewn around the room – we’d ordered loads of equipment (cassette tape players, time-code-corrector boxes, professional monitoring headphones etc) and I’d not wanted to throw away anything until we knew it all worked. As this was my last visit to Sheffield for a while, it was also the last chance to leave their room in a presentable state…

Tuesday

Back in the Leeds LIFE-SHARE Office for today, and finalising procedures manuals for Sheffield. As part of the Case Study we digitised a sample of a larger multimedia archive; the idea is, their staff should be able to pick up where I left off and digitise the rest before it is packed up and sent back to its original donor. So I’ve written some detailed guides to all the stuff I’ve been doing, including photographs of leads with labels explaining what they’re for, explanations on how to use Audacity, etc etc.

I also started to internalise my case study report, and pick out the key points for external dissemination – the format of the first draft was a bit of a compromise, so we’ve decided it’s better to separate it into two distinct entities. This will be much easier, I think.

Other stuff crammed into my free time today included writing a proposal for a book chapter including a third-person bio that required an insane amount of information in 75-85 words. It wanted name, place of work, location, details of your degree and where you got it from, job title, publications, awards AND career highlights! (To give you some idea how small a space that is to fit all that in, this paragraph alone is 78 words and counting.)

In the end, I went with: “thewikiman, zomg, he is ace – srsly, trust him on this.”

Not really. Although when I was moaning on Twitter about how I couldn’t fit the info into so small a space, Andy Priestner helpfully came up with this:

“‘Ned is really nice and good at libraries. You’ll like him. Probably” Done it in 12 words.’

Thanks mate! Brevity is a gift.

A lot of stuff happened today with LISNPN, the New Professionals Network, as well. Having launched nearly a month ago now, we’re gradually adding more and more stuff to the Resources area (member’s only, that bit, so sign up!). Things I’m really pleased with include the fact that Phil Bradley has generously allowed us to reproduce his public speaking guide, and the editors of the two major CILIP publications (Gazette and Update), Debby Raven and Elspeth Hyams, have contributed some really useful stuff to the How to: Get published guide – so if you’ve wondered what sort of thing they’re looking for, check it out: it’s in the Resources area of the site. Anyway, today for the first time we promoted it via a couple of JISCMail lists – LIS-Profession and LIS-CDGDivisions, with emails from myself and Chris Rhodes.

The result was 50 new members in about 3 hours, and that number continued to rise, meaning we’ve broken the 300 barrier. I’m really pleased about this – for all the obvious reasons (the more people there are, within reason, the more useful it will be as a network) and because we haven’t even promoted it via LIS-LINK, Gazette or Update yet (all of which are in hand for the next fortnight or so). And I’ve not even written my long promised blog post about it! So 300 is pretty good for a network which is less than a month since launch, and not fully pushed into public consciousness yet.

Wednesday

Before work I decided to set up a document to record my CPD (Continuous Professional Development, I think is what that stands for). This ended up being a spreadsheet with four tabs – presentations, publications, training, and events – which just records stuff I’ve done in chronological order. I realised I’d had so much training from LIFE-SHARE that there was a danger I’d forget stuff I’d done previously, and also that I might need exact dates of publication to hand etc. The ‘events’ tab is a bit woolly but basically covers conferences/ lectures / other open day type things I’ve attended for work which can’t be classed as hands-on training.

I think this’ll come in really handy later on, because every job application / CV needs to be tailored to the role – this way, I’ll have all the stuff laid out for me to choose from, which should lead to clearer thinking and more focused applications.

At 9:30 I had a meeting with the Library’s Conservation Officer, Sharon Connell to talk about the Leeds case-study for LIFE-SHARE. We discussed the revealing and quite alarming results of the condition & usability assessment she’s undertaken of a typical library collection (if you’re interested, see this LIFE-SHARE blog post for a bit more info – turns out a lot of books are knackered!). What we’ve been trying to achieve is a workable model for establishing the costs of physical preservation. So the condition and assessment survey threw up four categories of disrepair (1 being fine, 4 being imminent book death) and we’d like to be able to say – if a given number of books are in condition X, what needs to be done and how much resources will it cost in terms of staff time and money. Obviously there’s so many variables this is impossible to fully achieve, but after all Sharon’s hard work we can certainly make decisions that are a lot more informed in future.

The next step is to determine comparable costs for digitally preserving the items, so I’m going to arrange a meeting with Jodie Double, our Digital Repositories Manager, to go through all that – we need to come up with prices for in-house digitisation, and out-sourcing. Project work often relies on many more people’s time and expertise than just those on the Project team, so I’m very grateful to all the people helping out.

Then, at lunchtime, I notice a really interesting debate going on in the comments section of out-going CILIP CEO Bob McKee’s blog, and add a big comment on it of my own, which is basically a blog post in itself (and may later turn into one). Then, I publish this!

- thewikiman

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[deep film announcer voice] A Wiki Chaos production, from the people who brought you the Library Routes Project… [/deep film announcer voice]

Today is the day Woodsiegirl and I present on the Echo Chamber, to a seminar at the CLILP Yorkshire & Humberside CDG AGM. The Prezi we will be using is below.

We both favour the ‘not just duplicating what’s on screen’ school of presenting, so there’s a lot of stuff we’ll be saying out loud which isn’t written down on the Prezi. I hope it’s still interesting anyway – have a look and tell us what you think.

What I’d really like to do is introduce an interactive, online element to this – our presentation is this afternoon. So if you have any comments, feedback, or particularly suggestions for how to escape the echo-chamber, we’d love to hear them. If you can leave comments on this blog, Woodsiegirl’s blog, or using the #echolib hash-tag on Twitter, by 3:10pm GMT, then we can feed them into the discussion (and hopefully actually update the Prezi in real-time with your thoughts, too. That might be stretching our powers of dexterity but hey, it’s good to aim high and there is two of us after all…). How ace would that be? Is possible, try and spread the word via Twitter and encourage people to join in.

As ever, this’ll work better in Full-Screen mode. Some of the bits it’ll zoom in on have quite a lot to read, so best to keep pressing the ‘Next’ arrow rather than letting it auto-lurch. Full screen is fairly essential too.

The initial top down view – it looks a bit like a chamber! Sort of? Yeah? So the title and the concept are in the middle, and the rest of the sections form like a kind of wall of the chamber around it – see what we did there? And successful escapes are beyond the wall, ZOMG! Well, I thought that was cool anyway…

This whole thing started way back with a couple of blog posts and tweets asking for input on the subject. Since then, an enormous amount of people have helped Laura and I with ideas, blog posts, tweets, suggestions and input of various kinds. Thank you! Featured in the presentation above in one form or another as a result of this, are the following luminaries of the Information Professional world (in no particular order):

• Bethan Ruddock
• Andy Priestner
• Emma Cragg
• Sharon Clapp
• Toby Greenwalt (big time!)
• Bobbi Newman
• Wayne Bivens Tatum
• Nancy Dowd / Kathy Dempsey
• James Mullan
• Phil Bradley
• Gareth Osler
• Scarlett Librarian
• Matthew Mezey
• Andy Woodworth
• Heather Mccormack
• Chrystie Hill
• Ian Clark
• Karen Muller
• And probably a few more I’ve missed – thank you too…

A couple of those we just went out and grabbed their relevant posts or videos, but the majority submitted their input on our prompting so cheers very much everyone!

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This almost works...

Shelling out cash on career development is a tricky issue.

It can be tricky to raise the cash in the first place; I don’t know about you, but me and my wife pretty much spend or put into savings everything we have, each month, no matter what we’re earning. It seems the outgoings expand to fill the vacuum of any wage increase – so making money available for professional development essentially means taking it away from something else.

It can be tricky to decide what to spend it on. Is a course more useful than a workshop? Is attending two local conferences better than one massive national one which costs a lot to get to? Should I be spending my money and time on something directly related to my current 9-to-5 role, or on something that might benefit my general development and later career?

Most of all, it can be tricky to get a tangible sense of whether or not it is worth it. Will you earn back what you spend? Will the next job you get on better pay have anything to do with that conference you went to, really? Is the fact that something is fun and interesting of itself, and may not actually lead anywhere career-wise, worth stumping up cash for? Etc.

I have various professional outgoings, on an annual basis. CILIP membership: £184. Website hosting + domain name registration plus upgraded wordpress package to allow for more storage / formats etc: £100. Business cards with the nice wikiman logo on the front and a horrific picture of me on the back:  £20. A combination of all this stuff plugging me in to the wider profession and meaning librarianship has gone from a job to a vocation for me: priceless! But it is a lot of money all told, and there has to be a limit to what I can spend – I’d love to be a member of SLA-Europe but have so far not quite been able to make that happen (even though I’m 99.9% sure it’d be worth it). And this isn’t taking into account money spent on conferences or training, or indeed the Annual Leave it costs me to do all the things I like doing – the extra-curricular Information Professional activities.

I’m very fortunate in two ways: firstly I work for an employer that invests in training opportunities and takes developing its employees seriously, so for all stuff directly relevant to my job I get sent off on training all the time. Secondly, by the time this blog is two years old this time next year, I think I will have attended more than 10 fantastic events for free (and with train fares paid), that I would otherwise have paid to attend myself as a delegate, because I’m either speaking at them or helping organise them. It sounds outrageously cynical / glib to say it’s worth submitting a paper for an event you really want to go to, but it really is worth bearing in mind! You’ll get more out of the day anyway, and you’ll save a lot of money. Same goes for volunteering to help run things – hard work, but free attendance For The Win.

I still pay for stuff myself where necessary though, and that doesn’t always end well. I once booked last minute train tickets and a place on a (rather disappointing, and quite expensive) copyright course in London in order to fill a gap in my CV for a job application, and subsequently didn’t even get interviewed for the post! We moved heaven and earth to make that happen, savaged the bank-account, took leave to attend, and the result was: fail. But generally speaking, I think it is worth taking a punt and spending money on career development. I didn’t get to see Woodsiegirl’s talk at the New Professionals Conference, but I understand she said something along similar lines.

What strikes me is that most of us who are in this for the long term end up doing a library Masters. This costs a fortune – thousands of pounds, and I couldn’t have afforded mine without help from my incredibly supportive parents. You spend several grand on a piece of paper that allows you to earn more in the future – and of course you might learn some interesting stuff along the way, but remember it will be outmoded in just two years. Two years! It used to be that the information you learned would be useful for five years after graduation, but the library world moves so fast that you only get 24 months nowadays. (I think the experience of being exposed to and immersed in lots of different aspects of the profession is more valuable than the specific stuff you learn, but that’s a different debate.) Not only that, but because so many professionals have the qualification these days, it doesn’t mark you out at all – it just gets the door open in the first place, rather than getting you through it. As a result, your learning can’t stop when you have a Masters – it’s only by going to conferences, training, courses and events that you can continue to stay ahead of (or even just try and keep up with) the game.

So next time I’m wondering whether to hand out £50 or whatever for attending a conference – I’ll remember all the sacrifices made to afford library school, and how astronomically much more that cost than the conference will, and how you have to keep making financial sacrifices in order to move your career along, and that eventually I probably will earn it back if attending this event is part of a rounded programme of professional development, and take a deep breath: then invest in my career.

- thewikiman

Cheers to TheatreGrad and FieldVole whose blog post and comment respectively made my mind up on writing this post!

P.S. Talking of spending money on library-related things, the New Spice video (in response to the Old Spice man vids that are going viral at the moment) really is absolutely outstanding – here it is in case you’ve missed it so far:

I’m a big fan of the guy who has apparently been attacked by a plant, at 0:19 – they say libraries are boring, but clearly they dicier places than many imagine…

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