Anyway…

I’ve spent quite a lot of this afternoon working on my chartership. I thought it would be a good idea to look at each of the essential criteria and see what I could write about and use as evidence from my own experience. It was just a brainstorming session, really, but it made me realise that I have quite a lot of things I could potentially use, which was comforting. I’ve emailed the results of my brainstorm to my mentor to make sure I’m along the right lines.

There are still some areas where I don’t seem to have much experience, particularly the “Breadth of professional knowledge and understanding of the wider professional context” bit. I’ve only ever worked in academic libraries, apart from two weeks’ work experience in a public library, so my knowledge of other sectors of the library world is quite limited. I also don’t really know more than very basic stuff about legal things like copyright, data protection and Freedom of Information, so I feel that I should read up a bit more about those things.

I still haven’t read any of the Chartership reading list, so I’d better do that quite soon, as well. I need to gather evidence and write about various things – quite a lot of various things, unfortunately. It’s a bit annoying that most of the stuff I’m going to need to build my portfolio is on my drive at work and not accessible from home. I think there is a new way of accessing work drives from home but I tried to make this work the other day and couldn’t. If I really can’t make this work I’ll just have to start emailing things to myself at home or print them off at work, or both. I suspect this would mean I would have to stay late at work because I don’t think I’d ever get round to doing it during working hours. Alas. Or, if I could be sufficiently focused, I could do it before work or during my lunch hours. Not sure how realistic this is, though.

In other news, I’m thinking of submitting an article to Library and Information History. It would basically be a shorter, re-hashed, version of the dissertation I wrote for my Library-related Master’s degree. I contacted the editor of the journal, who said she would be interested in such an article, which was encouraging. I really want to do this, but I suspect it might have to wait until I’ve finished my chartership. All the more motivation for me to get the chartership application handed in!