#ITOT 2

After submitting my dissertation proposal a couple of weeks ago there's been a bit of a lull. That lull is fast turning into slight panic!

In my rough draft schedule I had hoped to be a bit further along by now (but don't we always?) and knowing  I will be away for a few weeks imminently I can only see myself falling further behind. At about this point the plan was to have a pilot questionnaire circulating among my classmates with a final version setting off in the second or third week of July. At present I am yet to be assigned a project supervisor or have my ethics formed signed off!

I'm already thinking now that the proposed 10 weeks to collect responses may have to be reduced. This will not necessarily be to the detriment of the research if I can push it relentlessly to gather as many responses as possible, so this week and in a fortnight I will be following a lot of people on Twitter! I think I'm also attending the CDG Conference in Birmingham so I hope there is something circulating by then?

Thing 4: Current Awareness

It is my displeasure to be dipping my toes in library waters on the weekend (especially at this time) without it being necessary for academic work. But since the football's finished and the only thing on TV is Cameron Diaz having a go at acting, here I am.

Twitter - I have mentioned before how I've dipped in and out of Twitter in the past, since my new incarnation I do use a bit more regularly (time permitting). I began to follow the usual suspects plus a few others I find interesting. This has been great for keeping informed and staying up to date with the library community. I try not to be too much of a lurker but I rarely find something others might find useful that hasn't been mentioned before, especially as I only find myself checking Twitter at the end of the work day!

One of my primary reasons for sticking with Twitter this time is that I had something tangible I wanted to get out of it (purely selfish). I wanted to tap into a community of knowledge where I could gather/request information/advice for my dissertation in the first instance anyway. For this to work you need people to follow you as well as following them. That's the Catch22, if you follow everyone it's just information overload  and advised against in some circles (follow what's useful...) but then you may miss that vital piece of info or a request for help. Still immensely useful though!

RSS Feeds - I started following blogs before my involvement with 23 Things using Google Reader and am happy with how this works and very satisfied with it. I have updated my subscriptions with some fellow participants and find it a much more enriching experience to read detailed experiences of others. I'll certainly keep going with RSS but I'd like to better organise my feeds.

Storify - I had heard about this but never used or explored it until now. Initially I didn't really get it! Who has the time to put a story together using various web 2.0 tools? I can see how this could be very powerful for reflecting on the global experience of a huge event for instance the uprisings in the Middle East, people harped on about the power of social networks then, imagine if that was professionally organised (which I imagine the value lies)!

I'm sure it's of more use to others than to me, which is probably why I didn't enjoy using it. It's not something  of any particular value to me in my work or my organisation with it's lack of social network usage. From the sample stories I looked at mostly use Twitter as it's feed which is where I think my only interest in it lies as it is now used for conversation summaries for UKLibChat. I'm also not a fan of it's use of Facebook status updates, as I think this could get a bit murky with people being targeted see here, regarding YourOpenBook. Since, there have been a few sites that let you search across Twitter and Facebook updates such as Kurrently.

I prefer using tools for dedicated news streams that I have selected that appeal to my tastes such as Pulse and Google Currents. This way my favourite news sites, magazines are in one place and up to date, I will be keeping my eyes peeled for more of the same!

#ITOT Dissertation Proposal

Last week I submitted my research proposal for my dissertation. Since one of the primary purposes of setting up a blog was to track it's progress I thought I should give a little summary.


At library school, whenever we had a guest speaker questions often aimed at them from classmates were not about their roles but how they got them. In other more casual conversations people often expressed concerns about what to do next, how were they going to get their first professional jobs if the work's not there, organisations are closing shop (hiring freeze) or people weren't moving out of their posts at the necessary rate?


My initial reading focused on this career platauing and the concept of the greying profession labelled at librarianship, not just because of it's dowdy perception but backed up by demographic research. The "greying" profession has been widely written about from an American perspective where employment planning is quite cyclical. The late 1990s saw many folk concerned about the impending wave of retirements that were believed to be around the corner and prompted a recruitment drive in early 2000s ($10M from US Government).


The exodus, didn't happen. Of course a contributing factor being the economic downturn. So there were a lot of LIS graduates with no-where to go, feeling they had been miss-sold on the profession (see Fiakoff 2010).


So I wanted to explore getting that first professional post, what are the perceptions of those looking and the experiences of those who acquired it - the UK perspective.


Data Collection


Inevitably this will require a questionnaire - an online form being most efficient. Since there is no set sampling frame I hope to solicit as many responses as possible from a snowball effect. 

• I hope once it's launched, to promote it's completion from LISNPN, Twitter (please retweet) and other new professional's groups and mailing lists.

• Initial responses will inform further open questions to be asked in online Twitter discussions similar to the format used by @uklibchat, using the #ITOT.

• There is also the intention to carry out small interviews (face-to-face or telephone) with relevant representatives in recruitment.

So that's a very brief summary of where I'm at. If anyone has come across any good articles/blogs about this or similar please do pass them on and follow @costyouall to get involved. There are a few things emerging that are following the American trend, I would like to see a UK version of this: INALJ.COM which features success stories to inform and inspire.

Thing 3: Considering my personal brand

I had not had the pleasure of seeing Ned Potter’s presentation at CILIP’s New Professionals Day but the positive feedback I found encouraged me to check it out. A lot of what I thought about my personal brand comes from a corporate perspective (a recent feature in Shortlist [link unavailable] was very useful) making me think about my brand by in the context of my 5 core values, which turned out to be very tricky so I stopped! I had hoped to ‘be my brand’ immediately, emerging online as my professional self without showing the journey (if I kept that position I’d never emerge).

So here I am. I had always signed up to social network sites in the past as a means to connect to friends but now see the value of a professional presence. With that in mind, for me Facebook is strictly friends (or should be) and I hope not to embarrass myself on other sites, I hope not to embarrass myself on Facebook either but I’m not of the opinion that I shouldn’t be me in the comfort of my social circles where I swear like a sailor with their bits in a mangle and always have.

What’s in a name?

I have had a number of Twitter accounts in the past, dropping them rapidly as my interest waned but not deleting them until recently. Rather than going back to an account and tidying up I opted for the creation of new ones (no, I don’t know why either)! My first iterations were simply my full name, first initial – surname or some variant with an underscore. I later opted for @digicol13 (digital collections being the area I was based in and 2013 year I’m due to end). I have since lost access to digicol13 so set up ANOTHER Twitter account. @CostYouAll is not particularly inventive but hopefully useful for anyone who meets me as it is how I pronounce my surname (minus the all). Hello, I’m John Kostiw. This is something I have also used for my blog name keeping a clear connection. Following the advice on many a blog I now use the same profile picture across my social network sites.

Shock horror, I hadn’t Googled myself for around 10 years! Not since Dave Gorman’s Are you Dave Gorman? When I thought I too would find it fascinating to find another John Kostiw. It wasn’t. Having more of an online presence now I thought it worthwhile to see what information about me was out there. As suggested I used various search engines, my first appearance on Bing was my Facebook page (locked down) with my LinkedIn profile appearing further down the page a similar result to DuckDuckGo. 

My Google results faired a little better; first page, second result was LinkedIn, in the top 5 was my old twitter account annoyingly with a not embarrassing, but not preferable profile picture.

As I looked through more results my concern grew...somewhere along the line I had signed up to last.fm (news to me). I will try to rectify this later if possible but I also found information about myself on Yasni referring to Amazon wish list titles (clearly me with the amount of library related books displayed) Ummmm what, how? I have or so I thought kept my Facebook thoroughly private, this exercise prompted me to double check, while not every aspect was friends only nothing was public. But profileengine.com had a little more access than I liked with access to my friends and group lists although I’m not sure how up to date the information is.

I thoroughly recommend people search for themselves in these sites to see what is available. I would also be cautious about what information you allow mobile apps to access when downloading to your smartphone as I suspect this is why I’m finding a bigger footprint than expected.

While I am now more aware of my personal brand and branding I imagine this will still take a back seat for the time being as I need to evaluate what I want my brand to say about me, how I want this to be portrayed and how it can work for me among other things.

I seem to have a habit of apologetic sign offs...so here I go again, but this wasn’t even half of what I could have written!