Impostor syndrome featured in a few people's #blogjune posts in 2015. I wrote about some confidence issues I was experiencing as a librarian working in a university where IT services and the library are fully converged. Convergence is not a new thing in universities, but there is not that much written about whether this kind of environment could or should influence the skills and knowledge that people in library technology teams should seek to develop.

In my experience so far, success in a converged environment requires me and other members of my team to become (even more) hybrid professionals, able to wear library and IT hats at the same time or to switch between these as we need to. My professional education as a librarian, and probably more importantly the values of the library profession, do inform all the work that I do but I need to be credible and competent in forums where most if not all of the other participants will be IT professionals. Something that I have been pondering lately is what it would mean to fully embrace being an IT professional as well as a librarian. While most librarians I know are avid users of and advocates for technology in the context of our industry, that doesn't necessarily make us IT professionals. IT professionals have their own qualifications, career pathways, specialisations, professional organisations and values, and these are sometimes not well understood or respected by librarians.

This year professional development (PD) is emerging as the unofficial #blogjune theme. I don't have an approach to my professional development plan that is as comprehensive or as structured as Alisa Howlett's approach (seriously impressive!), but I do take a lot of time to prepare for my annual performance plan discussions with my director. This year, as part of that discussion, I flagged my intention to focus on the IT aspects of my role and came up with three activities:

1. Participation in Women in Technology (WIT)

One of my PD goals for the year was to find an IT community of practice that would enable me to do some networking with people other than librarians.

I picked Women in Technology for a few reasons. Some librarians in my network are members. My university is involved in promoting WIT internally, since WIT's focus is not just on IT but also on life sciences. And as a feminist, WIT's vision to "advance, connect and empower women in technology and life sciences" is one that I can whole-heartedly get behind. So far I have signed up to receive email newsletters and joined the WIT LinkedIn group. I haven't yet gone to any events but I hope I will get to at least one later this year and will make a point of meeting and talking to at least one person that I don't know.

2. Enterprise Architecture

An IT colleague that worked with me on a project mentioned that he thought it could be useful for me to investigate getting some training in enterprise architecture, specifically in the TOGAF framework. In TOGAF the purpose of enterprise architecture is described as "to optimize across the enterprise the often fragmented legacy of processes (both manual and automated) into an integrated environment that is responsive to change and supportive of the delivery of the business strategy". There is a lot of crossover between what enterprise architects and what information managers are trying to achieve in an organisation like mine.

A training course and certification would be a huge investment both financially and in terms of time, but fortunately there are some good free PD options available. The first of these is a free online four-week course, Introduction to Enterprise Architecture. This is offered under the Open Universities Australia Open@Study branding, is presented by a well-known industry practitioner, and is really highly rated by students. One of the architects at my work had done this course and also recommended it to others.  He also pointed me in the direction of an overview video on YouTube provided by the same trainer.



My colleague noted that the Open2Study module is based around a formal course structure and doesn't go into the more practical aspects of application, while the YouTube video covers practical application as well. So I am planning to start with the video and then move on to the online module later in the year if I feel like I need that extra level of detail.

3. Service management

I'm currently undertaking some in-house training that will lead to a certification. On Thursday this week I will sit an exam (my first since about 1990 - eek!) for the ITIL Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management. ITIL was originally created by the UK government's Office of Government Commerce to help implement an efficient framework for IT Service Management (ITSM). ITIL has changed since its introduction in the 1980s and now offers a more generic lifecycle approach to service management covering strategy, design, transition (change management), operations, and continuous improvement.

I am finding some of the jargon in ITIL a little alienating but the core concepts are very applicable to my work as the manager of a library technologies team. Although both are a bit out of date, this 2007 blog post and 2008 journal article are good place to start if you want to understand more about how ITIL service management concepts can be applied in libraries.

In 2001 I moved to New Zealand from Scotland and started my Master of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) at Victoria University of Wellington. I'd decided after working in a university archive that I'd found my vocation and had been looking into moving back to my hometown Brisbane to do postgrad study at QUT. Wellington came up as an option later, after I'd met my then partner (who was into ice climbing and so needless to say did not really think Queensland would be ideal).

I quickly made friends with a small group of wonderful fellow students. Most of us were career changers in our late twenties / early thirties who were trying with some degree of success to complete the qualification as quickly as possible through full-time face-to-face study. We studied hard and socialised together a lot. A regular big night out involved an 80s music club night called Atomic (coincidentally run by another librarian that I would work with later at the National Library of New Zealand).

It was a pretty intense year but we all made it out the other end and embarked on our various career pathways as information professionals.

Sally was already working in corporate libraries while she was studying. She moved to London and has continued working at high-powered finance and management consulting companies in research and knowledge management roles. I saw her in London a few years ago. We don't really keep up with each other's day-to-day news but we are connected via Goodreads and have very similar taste in books. It's a slender thread stretched by time and distance, but it's still there.

Fiona livened up the library tours we did during the course by asking staff "So how's your job satisfaction?" I can't remember any of the exact answers but they were surprisingly candid! Fiona's moved several times to support her partner in her career as a journalist and they and their two boys recently moved from Auckland to Melbourne. Fiona started work in records management in a Melbourne hospital a couple of months ago, which she really loves. I saw them about six months ago and hope to see more of them now they are on this side of the Tasman.

John went on to work in the library at VUW for a few years and then went to the NZ Institute for Chartered Accountants, where he has moved through library management into a range of other managerial roles. I missed seeing John and his family last time I was in Wellington as they were away for a holiday, but I know I'll see them there sometime for a brunch at one of the cafes along Cuba St.

Tash, I have lost touch with. She got pregnant towards the end of the course and moved back to Auckland. I hope that she is doing OK.

Sadly, two of our classmates have died, both suddenly and both far too young.

Karina was the youngest in our class (straight out of her undergraduate degree, I think) but knew exactly what she wanted to do with her qualification. She wanted to be an archivist and in her short career and life achieved so much not just in NZ but in the entire Pacific region. She died in May 2013. Her friends and family still post to her Facebook page, particularly around her birthday and the anniversary of the day that she died.  I have no doubt that of the class of 2001, she would have been the shining star in the years to come.

Brendan collapsed and died at the gym in October 2010. By that time he was a well-respected member of NZ's government agency recordkeeping community. He was also a pedantic bastard so I can imagine how he would react to finding that the link to his obituary on the ARANZ website is now a 404. (Because why on earth would you expect a professional organisation for archivists to be able to appropriately archive their own content? And in a nice touch, ARANZ have also set up a robots.txt blocker on their own website to ensure that other agencies like the Internet Archive can't preserve their content either. Sigh.)

Long after others had left Wellington or were staying home with their kids, Brendan remained my stalwart dancing buddy for Atomic. I suggested a couple of songs for his funeral. Nena's 99 Luftballons, to which Brendan knew all the words in German, made an appearance as did The Smiths' There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.

I wanted to write this post because somehow it's been fifteen years since 2001 and because I'm grateful to have found the friends I did in that year. The MLIS was a springboard from which we have bounced in different directions, but I'll never forget them. 

I've been on Twitter for a few years (not so much of late), but Tuesday night was the first time I've participated in a live Twitter chat. It happened under the auspices of the International Librarians Network (though you didn't need to be involved in the ILN to participate) and some of the staff from the QUT Information Studies Group were facilitating and sparking conversations. The topic was professional development (PD) for librarians.

I really appreciated the chat guidelines provided on the ILN website. There was some useful advice there about tools that you could use. I ended up just adding a column to my usual desktop client (Tweetdeck) but I may try one of these next time. The organisers suggested letting your followers know that you would be participating in a chat so that they could choose to mute the hashtag if they didn't want to be bombarded. This was a great piece of Twitter etiquette (Twitterquette?) and not something I would have thought to do myself.

The organisers provided the questions beforehand, so it was possible to think a bit about the topic before the heat of the moment. Even so, on the night the tweets were flying so thick and fast it was hard to keep up! (Not even my 60wpm touch typing was enough. Though I still give thanks to my Mum for forcing me to learn typing in the 80s - on a typewriter! - it is a good life skill.) I was grateful to be able to go back over the Storify for the event the next day to see everything in context and to follow some of the participants.

Given that the conversation covered free ways to develop yourself and the importance of networking, the chat was actually a good example of the kinds of things that are readily available to us all as PD options, regardless of employment status and availability of funding. I saw some old friends, made some new ones, and thoroughly enjoyed spending an hour on a Tuesday evening with fellow librarians. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for further Twitter chats on topics that I'm interested in and would recommend joining in if you haven't tried it.