Thing 13: Reflective Practice (Applying for Online Networker Badge)

For the Online Networker badge, we had three Things to do before the reflective practice.  For Thing 10, we were asked to choose either Facebook or Twitter, find a group, page or list that interests us, and join or follow them; or, send a hashtag on Twitter.  For Thing 11, we were asked to create a bio for an online profile; or to set up a LinkedIn or ORCID account and highlight aspects of our personal brand.  In Thing 12, we were introduced to a number of collaborative tools and asked to consider the usefulness of these in our own professional lives.

I was in two minds about applying for this badge as I know all too well that I cannot be called an online networker by any stretch of the imagination.  I set up a Facebook page years ago and cannot even remember the last time I visited it - I think it was back in 2012 or so - and the same goes for the Twitter account which I set up two years ago and have used to send a tweet precisely once.  I am somewhat more active on my LinkedIn page which I keep up to date as regards my professional development.  I have even gone as far as liking a post or two (living on the edge, man!) but as for posting on it myself, forget it.  It's not that I don't know how, it's just that I don't quite see the point.

Having said that, I am glad I went ahead with these tasks as they gave me much food for thought.  Thing 10 has made me rethink my views on Twitter and Facebook and appreciate their value as institutional networking tools.  It has also made me see the benefits these tools can give to individuals who want to raise their career profile and are prepared to work hard towards that goal.  Even though at this stage of my own career I would be slow to use them personally, I would not dismiss the prospect of resorting to them at a later stage to promote my work, and Thing 10 has given me the know-how to do that.

Thing 11 inspired me to customize my LinkedIn profile address and update my professional profile to bring it more in line with my current work situation.  I was also excited to learn about ORCID.  Research and academic writing is something that appeals to me a great deal and is something that I would like to explore in more detail over the coming years.  I was a bit disappointed that Thing 11 didn't go into more detail about ORCID but then again that's what Google is for!

Thing 12 provided a very useful introduction to collaborative tools and while some of these I am already familiar with, others - Trello and Slack in particular - were new to me.  I was interested to read up on these and would certainly like to learn more and experiment with both tools.

Beyond the practical skills that Things 10-12 provided, they also made me think more seriously about my own professional footprint in the digital world.  Googling myself in incognito mode was an eye-opener and made me realize that my professional online image is a bit patchy.  Some aspects of what I do are perhaps over-represented while others are almost invisible even though in real life they all carry equal weight.  Seeing this made me think more closely about my career and where I want it to take me in years to come.  I realized that there are perhaps too many strands to what I do and that now might be the time to decide which of these strands to focus on and strengthen, and which of them to let go.

I still have a degree of antipathy towards social media and online networking tools, but there is no denying that when used right they present an excellent means of branding and promoting one's skills.  I don't think I'll ever see the point of going all out and randomly operating every imaginable social media tool - Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and whatever new ones are sprouting up around us as we speak - but I do see the benefit of choosing one or two and using them systematically.  It has also struck me that different networking tools serve different purposes.  Twitter is great for networking ideas - spreading news, sharing information in real time, or finding the latest topics that are trending.  Facebook is great for networking people, building social relationships, and for ongoing topics or conversations that are not dependent on time or timing.  People who are more achievement-orientated and interested in a career change or very focused on promoting their professional skills are more likely to benefit from LinkedIn, while ORCID is the obvious choice for those interested in academic writing and research.  In today's increasingly competitive world it is hard to make oneself heard. To me it would therefore make sense to pick the tool that best meets your own career goals and run with that rather than fire haphazardly on all cylinders in the hopes that somebody somewhere will hear you.

Image: HD Wallpapers

Thing 12: Collaborative Tools

I'm not often involved in collaborative projects, and those that I participate in don't as a rule include individuals outside of the library.  This makes meetings simple as everybody is sitting face to face, and between meetings communication can be easily managed via email.

I do however have one project experience in the course of which I would have given my right arm for collaborative tools.  Two years ago, we were asked to create an exhibition based on one of our collections.  The exhibition was to be held in the Hunt Museum in Limerick City, it was designed by a Dublin-based company, and co-authored by a historian who at a critical time of the project was lecturing in America.  It was a communications nightmare.  We never managed to have a meeting with all team members present, and email chains worked poorly as nobody had real clarity on what tasks were the responsibility of which people.  We did manage a couple of conference calls but these only seemed to add to the confusion.

In the end, we managed to create a cracking exhibition but with the right tools the whole process would have been a lot easier, not to mention quicker.  Google Drive would have enabled us to scan and upload the exhibition items for the absent historian to see to make the exhibition narrative easier to write; instead, the narrative bore little relation to what was put on display and had to be extensively rewritten.  Trello would have been fantastic for keeping tabs on who was doing what and how the project was progressing.  Slack would have made communication a lot easier and ensured that nobody was mistakenly left out of the loop.  For conference calls, Skype would have been perfect as it would have enabled us to create virtual meetings with everybody present at the same time.  These are certainly tools I shall keep in mind if ever I am involved in a large-scale project involving a lot of people in different geographical locations.

I am a bit more weary of sharing documents online, particularly if these are of personal or sensitive nature.  I also find it a bit difficult to imagine a scenario in which a number of people would need to be working on the same document simultaneously.  The only example that comes to mind is a book in which every chapter is written by a different contributor, but even then one contributor would surely not start meddling with chapters written by others.  Anyway, that's just me being thick!  On the whole, I think collaborative tools are brilliant and increasingly relevant in a world where remote working and long distance travel have become a daily reality to many.

Image: Pixabay

Thing 11: Your Professional Brand

One of the first things I did when starting this Thing was to google myself in incognito mode.  I found it quite unnerving but was glad to discover that everything was above board and more or less matched my professional activities.  It is however quite disturbing to see how much information about you ends up on the internet without you having put it there.  Books I have written, talks I have given, archival catalogues I have prepared, qualifications I have gained - all of this is available at the press of a button without any active contribution from me.

This brings me to LinkedIn.  I set up a LinkedIn page with some apprehension during the last Rudai course.  I understand the need to make oneself visible in a professional capacity but this must also be weighed against the need (not to mention right) to privacy.  With cyber trolling, identity theft and online abuse on the increase, too much online presence is neither healthy nor safe, which in part explains my antipathy towards Facebook and Twitter as outlined in the previous blog.  Having said that, LinkedIn is the one online tool that I actually like and this is probably because it is professional rather than personal.  There is nothing on my LinkedIn page that is not available online about me anyway, and none of it is what I would regard as personal information.  I am OK with that, even though my personal preference would still be for no online presence at all but at this day and age that simply doesn't seem to be possible.

Once again, I have not been active on my LinkedIn page, but this Thing inspired me to customize my address and to update my profile which I have been meaning to do for ages as the old version didn't quite match my present situation.  If ever I become more ambitious in my career development, this would definitely be the way for me to go rather than Twitter or Facebook.

I don't have an issue with thinking of myself as a brand because I tend to see this as a tool which enables me to control what people know about me in the online community.  Whether you like it or not, information about you is likely to find its way to the internet.  That being the case, it is better to harness the tools that enable you to control that information rather than letting it control you.

Image: Joint Base San Antonio

Thing 10: Networking Tools

I have a Facebook page and have had it for years but I keep it strictly private and only share it with family members and a few of my closest friends.  To be frank, I don't really use it for communication as I prefer to keep in touch with friends and family more directly via Skype or email.  At any rate, Facebook to me is more a social thing and I have never considered using it as a professional tool.

As regards Twitter, I set up an account two years ago on the previous Rudai course and picked a few groups to follow but have never used it since.  To be effective, Twitter requires a lot of effort - crafting the post, responding to posts by others, and casting about for news to tweet or retweet - and after all that there is no guarantee that anybody will take a blind bit of notice of you.  It's like being lost in a vast canyon shouting, and hoping that the echo will carry far enough for someone to hear you.  To stand any chance of that, one should send several tweets a day and exercise constant vigilance, and to me personally it seems like an awful waste of time.  The work I do is quite monotonous by nature and I can't see anyone getting excited about news of me finding yet another rusty paperclip or filing a piece of paper in a shiny new folder.  I would only be creating pointless noise, and there is too much of that on Twitter already.

Can anybody hear me?

This is not to say that I don't appreciate Facebook and Twitter as networking tools.  Twitter in particular is brilliant for keeping up with the latest trends and developments, spreading news fast, asking questions, and connecting with people and institutions who share your views or post about similar topics.  As an institutional social media tool I don't think there is anything to beat it.  My department has had its own Twitter feed for the past two years now and it has done great things in raising our profile and making us feel as part of a great network of libraries, archives and enthusiastic information professionals.  The feedback and statistics have boosted our confidence and made our feel good about our collections - it is a great feeling to discover that they are appreciated not just by us but by the wider world!

I have also grown to value Facebook as an institutional social media tool.  When we created our Long Way to Tipperary blog, we set up a Facebook page to go with it.  One of the great benefits of this has been that Facebook allows people to make comment and interact with the project which the blog itself doesn't facilitate.  It has been a curious revelation to me that there are also those who don't read the blog but follow it enthusiastically on Facebook.


Image credit: Jay's Thought Stream

Thing 9: Reflective Practice (Applying for Visual Communicator Badge)

I went for Option 2 of the Visual Communicator section.  This required me to complete Things 3, 7 and 8.

For Thing 3, I was asked to explore one of the image banks mentioned in the blog and download an image from it.  As an added option, I was asked to write a blog about my experience, which I did - the blog can be accessed here.  I was really excited about this Thing as I use image banks a lot and was keen to experiment with Pixabay, which I hadn't heard about before.  I felt confident to use this tool and found it easy to do, mainly because I had used image banks before and they all work in pretty much the same way.  One interesting thing I learnt from this Thing is that image banks can differ quite a lot from each other in terms of their content - some are strong on contemporary images, others on clip art and so on.  Image banks are a wonderful resource and a great tool for creating infographics, LibGuides, how to-leaflets and websites, and I can see myself using them a lot in the future.  Another aspect I enjoyed about Thing 3 was firming up my knowledge on Creative Commons licensing which enables me to use images with greater confidence and to better understand the context and manner in which they can be used.  In the copyright jungle that exists today it is wonderful to have a resource that won't get you into hot water!

For Thing 7, I hit a snag, or rather several of them.  First, although the title of this Thing was 'online exhibitions', the instructions I was given didn't seem to match that concept as I was asked to recreate a poster or booklet online using a blog and re-imagine it in different contexts.  I asked one of the course directors what this entailed and was told that I should not scan any images but literally recreate them and use them for inspiration.  This threw me altogether (was I supposed to do an infographic or something?) so I decided to wait a few days to see how other course participants tackled this Thing.  Eventually I realized that the idea was simply and literally to create an online exhibition.  I think one of the reasons for why it took so long for the penny to drop is that I have previous - albeit not first-hand - experience of online exhibitions and knowing how incredibly time consuming they are I couldn't quite believe that this was what we were asked to do.  Things rapidly went from bad to worse as I had no idea what sort of an exhibition to create and it took me three months to come up with a suitable idea.  By then I was so far behind with the course that I nearly threw in the towel.  However, this was a skill I really wanted to learn so I decided to stick with it.

For my online tool, I opted for WordPress as I had done a beginner's course in WordPress basics a couple of years previously and wanted to put what I had learnt to good use.  On the whole, I found WordPress easy and straightforward to use, even though the free version differs quite considerably from the paid version in which I had received my training.  I did have a bit of trouble figuring out what to do when I was finished working on a page, and frequently ended up accidentally closing down WordPress rather than just closing the page tab. I also found that the options for manipulating the template in the free version are very limited.  This is fine for a simple, functional no frills website, but for anything more ambitious the paid version is a better option and one that I would opt for in the future.  I was quite nervous at the start as I wasn't quite sure what I was doing and was afraid of making a total mess of things but I am glad to say that going through the exercise has taken out the fear of using WordPress and given me a fantastic new skill to utilize.  It was really good to combine the training I had done with an actual experience of using this tool.  The Thing 7 blog on online exhibitions was also truly inspirational and packed with good information.  By far the best piece of advice was to plan the website before beginning to put it together.  I had a clear idea in my mind how I wanted the website to look and this made things like selecting the right template a whole lot easier.  Apart from the initial confusion and delay, I found this a truly positive experience and one that I would like to repeat in the future.  I honestly don't think there is a better way to promote archival collections and the wonderful stories they tell than through an online exhibition.  The exhibition I created for this Thing can be found here, and here is a link to the blog which accompanies it.

A snip of my online exhibition

For Thing 8, I was asked to experiment with Piktochart or Canva and put together an infographic on an easy topic.  I felt a bit wobbly getting started as this was completely uncharted territory for me but I was also intrigued and excited to learn something new.  I was relieved to discover that both online tools were really easy to use and this time I was even able to come up with an idea for the infographic in rather less time than three months!  I opted for Canva because it had a better range of templates to choose from.  On the negative side, the bank of free images available to users is very small, but having done Thing 3 I knew where to go and was able to download good clip art images from Pixabay.  I was also able to utilize some of the skills I had learnt from Thing 7, including the need to plan before you jump.  It was really nice to see all the new skills I had acquired coming together in this exercise!  Although I enjoyed learning a new skill, I am not quite sure how I could apply infographics in my line of work except perhaps if I were to attend a conference or put together a workshop and needed to bring along something easy and eye-catching as guidance or to promote our collections.  You can view my blog and the infographic I created here.

To sum up, earning a Visual Communicator badge has been a rewarding journey even though it required a far greater time commitment than I had anticipated when signing up for the course.  I am glad to have learnt how to create online exhibitions and infographics and awfully proud of myself for having stuck with the course when I felt it was slipping away from me.  Getting through the three Things was a big commitment but on the plus side I feel I have truly earned my badge!

Thing 8: Infographics

We touched upon infographics two years ago when we were asked to create one using Easel.ly.  I remember disliking it because in spite of its name I found this tool anything but easy to use.  I was a bit apprehensive having to tackle the subject again but it turns out my fears were unfounded!  I experimented with both Piktochart and Canva and found them super-easy to use.  I ultimately went with Canva because it had a much greater range of free templates to choose from.

I initially thought about turning a report which I prepared a few years ago into an infographic but this didn't work out.  The report was too long and had too many graphs in it, and squeezing it all into an infographic would have resulted in a cluttered mess.  Having said that, I think an infographic would be a great way to make a report or statistical data more digestible.  It would also be a great tool for providing step-by-step instructions for just about anything, or for presenting the key points of a difficult topic in an easy to absorb format.

Having discarded the idea of turning a report into an infographic, I had a moment of panic.  I am not the greatest in the world to come up with random ideas for projects and having wasted the best part of four months meditating on Thing 7 I couldn't afford to repeat that experience.  I therefore decided to go for something very simple and devised an infographic on the benefits of print books, the idea behind it being an attempt to entice people to pick up a real book instead of an e-one.  I found a template that suited the purpose nicely and found it very easy to manipulate.

As with WordPress in Thing 7, the one drawback of the free version of Canva is that the extent to which you can manipulate the template is quite limited.  For instance, I wanted to have the last two lines of the infographic in bold but this was not possible because the template was designed with non-bold text in this area and that was non-negotiable.  Another disappointment of Canva was that while there are plenty of brilliant images to choose from, the range of free ones is so limited as to be almost useless.  In order to make the most of this tool one would need to upgrade from the free version to Pro, or to pay a dollar per image which let's face it isn't a whole hill of beans!  However, Canva does allow you to upload your own images, either by saving them from a file or simply by dragging them across from your desktop, and there are plenty of good free clip-art images available in image banks such as Pixabay (as we learnt in Thing 3!).

This Thing has introduced me to a new way of conveying information and I found it a really enjoyable experience.  Here is the infographic I prepared:

Thing 7: Online Exhibitions

Well!  That only took four months...

I have mixed feelings about this Thing.  On the one hand, I was really keen on it because knowing how to create an online exhibition opens up an entirely new world of visual communication and with this skill the possibilities for promoting and showcasing archival material are almost endless.  On the other, I feel it was too much work for the confines of this course.  I had the advantage of having done a WordPress course a couple of years previously but even with that under my belt, scanning the images, writing up the text and then building and populating the website took me a solid eight or nine hours to complete.

Initially, I also had trouble understanding what exactly we were asked to do.  While I really enjoyed reading the blog for Thing 7 and learnt an awful lot from it, I found the instructions for the task given to us a bit vague.  Recreate a brochure?  Reimagine the material in different contexts?  It didn't really make sense.  I tried checking how other course participants had tackled it but very few of them had ventured into the realm of Thing 7 (can't really blame them!), and those who had seemed as confused as I was.  At least that was a relief!

Once it dawned on me that what we were really asked to do was to create an online exhibition I froze altogether.  I hadn't a bat's notion as to what kind it should be, and it took me a full three months of dithering before I came up with a suitable idea.  This I readily admit was my own fault and nothing to do with the merits or otherwise of Thing 7!



Just finished Thing 7...
Image by Jessica Cross, Creative Commons Licence 2.0



What I finally decided to do was to bring together and showcase the collections in our archive which relate to the First World War, Irish War of Independence, and the Irish Civil War.  There are nine of these altogether and I felt that the best way to present them was to give a separate page to each one.  It sounds like a lot of work, but it wasn't really.  For the text bit I simply extracted paragraphs from the existing catalogues, and as most of these collections have been fully or partially digitized I initially only needed to source and scan five images.  However some of the images did not look right or were the wrong shape, so it took a bit of toing and froing to come up with the final set of illustrations.

For the online service I went for WordPress for the simple reason that I half knew how to use it.  I had a very clear idea in my mind on the layout I wanted and was thrilled to find that WordPress had a free template, called Twenty Fifteen, which exactly matched it.  It was so good in fact that it required very little customising - all I needed to do was to change the background colour and remove some of the built-in widgets which I didn't feel I needed.  Uploading the images was easy, and the text I had prepared I could simply add by cutting and pasting.  I did come across some oddities though.  I nearly lost the plot trying to centre the image captions, which looked fine on the post editor but were always left aligned in the preview.  I wasted nearly half an hour ranting and raving until I discovered that the Twenty Fifteen theme has been designed to allow left aligned captions only.  What a waste of sweat that was.  I also nearly lost the will to live trying to get rid of the 'leave a comment' bubble which appears in the footer of the homepage.  I finally accepted that I could either jump off a cliff or just get used to the bubble so there it sits and bugs me.

The free version of WordPress is a great way for beginners to start learning about creating a website but it does have its limitations.  For example, there are only 100 themes to choose from, you cannot add any plug-ins, and you will have to put up with ads on your website which I personally find disagreeable.  The free version also limits what you can do with templates.  The Twenty Fifteen template for instance only had five colour palettes to choose from, and these in turn could only be manipulated by changing the background colour.  However, if you are happy with a simple and straightforward website, this isn't necessarily an impediment - I frankly am much happier choosing one theme out of a hundred than one out of several thousands!

So that was my experience in a nutshell, and here is a link to the result.