I've had so much food for thought (and, it has to be said, real food) over the last few days that I feel like I need a strict diet for the next month or so. The BIALL conference was excellent, both personally/socially and professionally, but I have so many thoughts, ideas and things I want to talk about, it might take me a while to get to them all.
Rather than try to work through them systematically, which has never really worked for me, these are just the headlines of what struck me during the conference, and some vague thoughts about what I might want to do with them next:
~ A surprising number of Law Librarians are not using Web 2.0 technologies. The problems range from 'not seeing the point' to 'my company blocks the websites'. While I believe strongly that on a personal level, you absolutely should not have to use these things, unfortunately at a professional level, they are becoming all-but impossible to avoid. Which leads to:
~ To a large number of Law Librarians, the Web is very much Terra Incognita, and even if they were willing to find their way onto it, it's easy to feel lost and swamped very quickly. Current workshops helping people get started, but there's still a way to go.
~ I don't have anywhere near the skills that I want (and possibly need) for where I want to go with my career. I've been vaguely aware of this for a while, and am currently drawing up a list of things I want to learn, thinking that this might also be time to look at Chartership.
~ I want to do a shed-load of reading on some topics, which probably means a mixture of giving up some personal hobbies for a while, and giving up some lunch-hours to reading around the subject. There's so much out there, and so much I want to write about, but I need to know my facts first.
~ My particular interests - library history, the intersection of fannish and professional lives - are all out there at the moment, and if I can get my act together, this might actually be a debate I can contribute to.
~ Being a librarian can be huge amounts of fun. No, really.
~ Manchester is a great city, and I'd like to go back at some point.
Some of these are immediate, others are long-term, but all are about learning, which is something I've really been missing over the past two years. I need projects to keep my brain happy, and by some kind of serendipity, I seem to have arrived in Librarianship just when all this is happening.
Finally, not completely unrelatedly, it was such an inspiration to go to a meeting of influential, confident and skilled people and see that not only are the vast majority female, a good number are young women, running their own budgets and departments. And that's pretty damn inspirational.
