Metro Career Transition SIG on Friday, November 12, from 5:30-7:30 p.m., U R What You Tweet Social Media 4 Career Advancement

Metro Career Transition SIG on Friday, November 12, from 5:30-7:30 p.m., U R What You Tweet Social Media 4 Career Advancement

I went to the Metro Career Transition SIG on Friday, November 12, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Metro has a number of excellent classes and networking events. They even have an individual membership now for
$100. It is worth considering if you go to their classes regularly.


The Metropolitan New York Library Council http://www.metro.org/  is on 57 East 11th street, Fourth floor, New York City, between Broadway and University Place. The location is easy to get to by subway. This event was open to nonmembers. Suasna Gormley, the chapter chair, introduced the speakers. I saw one person from New York Librarians Meetup and I saw Tom Nielsen who is the member services chair for Metro. I remember meeting him once when he was working at an engineering library many years ago.



Metro New York is very clean and well laid out. The meeting room is comfortable, the projector is large, and at every meeting or class I have been there, they have decent coffee.



As always, I try to present what I thought was important that I heard at the presentation. There was a lot of very relevant information in this presentation.



One of the presenters was Bonnie McEwan President of Make Waves. Her blog is called Ripples and Wipeouts, http://www.makewavesnotnoise.com/blog . Make Waves is a marketing and communication consultancy for nonprfits. Tbe other presenter was Donna Severino, Vice President, Records Management at the New York City Economic Development Corporation. She is also the Chair of the SLA Employment Task Force. I found a recommended book title which looks interesting on her Linked In profile, If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Pracitce by Carol O'Dell and C. Jackson Grayson, Jr. The title of the preseentaion was UR What U Tweet Social Media and Your Career. Having seen lots of different presentations, this was one of the more practical, better presentations that I have seen. It is part of Bonnie McEwan's slideshre presentations. http://www.slideshare.net/BonnieMcEwan/social-media4careeradvancement



Having the url for the presentation freed me to listen to what was being said and take notes on what was not in the slideshow. Slideshare is wonderful because it eliminates the need for copious notes. I could think about what she meant by transparency. In a way, I am not very transparent. I don't necessarily agree that being transparent is the most wonderful thing. A certain amount of being enigmatic can have its usefulness. I would rather represent myself as an image of what I work with; book related pictures, book related art, or book posters are some of the imagery I like being associated with. It generates some controversy which is not always a bad thing.



Some of the ideas that were particularly useful were that you should frame yourself in the social media environment or other people or employers will do it for you. This means checking how people are talking about you and branding yourself. Sometimes it is good to Google yourself. Bonnie McEwan described Linked In as being a fairly safe environment to brand yourself to start with. Facebook is more about relationship building and twitter is one of the best communication channels. Part of branding yourself is keeping your communications consistent with your image. I found these ideas something to ponder. Bonnie McEwan talked about a little bit about how to keep your Facebook profile clean of arguments and present a good face to the world. Employers are looking at your Facebook account. I agree that facebook is a way to share ideas and build relationships.



There were of course some tools that were mentioned. One of them was http://www.tineye.com/  which allows people to upload an image and search for it. I have heard about this application at other meetings which I have attended. The other application that seemed interesting was an application called wordle which generates word clouds http://www.wordle.net/



The main focus was on Tiwtter, LinkedIn, and Facebook which are the three largest social networks. Bonnie McEwan also talked about Foursquare http://www.foursquare.com/  which is a location based social network.



There was a small amount of discussion on the topic of copyright. Creative commons was brought up. There are so many different kinds of licenses available for content. It can get confusing. There is copyright, copyleft, creative commons, gnu free documentation license, and other agreements. There are also trademarks and personality rights which are just as important to pay attention to.



There was also a discussion of the concept of librarian by Donna Severino . For some people, the word librarian summons up old fashioned connotations. I found this interesting. I am finding that some of the newer information jobs are spread into other fields like information science, records management, computer programming, web design, and content management. Librarians are one of the groups of people that can fill these positions.



Donna Severino also talked about wording in resumes and other places. She said it was very important to pay attention to how you used words in resumes. It was enlightening and makes me think that I need to have someone review my resume.  She suggested Laura Hill of Careers In Motion http://www.cimllc.com/ .



Bonnie McEwan reviewed books with the purpose of being viewed as an expert book reviewer. She focused on professional books with a mix of serious mysteries like Elizabeth Peters. Elizabeth Peters is an excellent writer. This showed a little bit of her personality along with the different styles of music she likes on her Facebook profile. Social media encourages a certain amount of mixing between professional and personal interests.



There was also some discussion of putting your resume on the web. Eportfolio is the term for a website with samples of all the different work you have done on the internet. I think a Linked In profile in many ways is superior to a resume. It would be nice if we could just send our linked in profile instead of a piece of paper to employers. I liked how Bonnie McEwan described how she no longer uses much letterhead paper or envelopes for her company anymore. At the same time, a person showed a very detailed business card which used both the back and front of the card. The back was a bullet pointed list with skills. Bonnie McEwan's business card is in color with printing on both sides.



This was a very well rounded presentation. It was worth going to. Depending on how things are going, I may go to another one of the Career Sigs at Metro in December.



There was only one element missing from the description of social media for careers. This was the meetup where people meet in person to discuss a specific activitiy like ebooks, libraries, social media, or technology. I have been to a lot of these lately and write about them. The social in social media ultimately in many cases is face to face. I found out about this meeting through http://www.meetup.com/NYLibrarians/  which led me to the Metro website.

Thinking Outside the Library: Nontraditional Careers for Information Professionals

November 5 - Thinking Outside the Library: Non-traditional Careers for Information Professionals

There were three speakers

• Terence Fitzgerald, Taxonomist and Content Strategist, Markit
• Sari Harris, User Experience Designer, Scholastic
•  Daniella Romano, Vice President of Programs, Research and the Archive, Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation.

The crowd was very different than the one I am used to. Many were in business libraries, law libraries, and other special libraries. People were dressed more professionally focusing on business casual attire. There were a lot of people in their 20s and 30s and less middle aged people.  A lot of people were just starting their careers so their focus was more career exploration than looking for jobs. The session was presented as a question and answer session.

I learned a little bit from the different people. Both Sari Harris and Terence Fitzgerald were technology oriented librarians. Daniella Romano was an archivist. The presenters were talking about fields on the edge of traditional librarianship.  Most librarian jobs are in businesses, public libraries, or academia.   A lot of the technology was very new.

Sari Harris talked about User Experience Design at Scholastic which is designing web sites and  portals using information architecture. She basically worked in house for Scholastic providing different iterations and documentation for websites.  I learned later, that she worked more on the functional side than the content side of websites.  I am very much interested in the content side, especially econtent.

I found her discussion about her background in library science interesting. She talked a lot about taking information design and usability classes in library school. This was not around when I went to school for my library degree. A lot of her work was focused on design thinking.  Usability is a very interesting subject.  It is about how to make websites easy for people to do what they intended to do on the site.

 She works with people to solve problems. She is involved in how people use information. This includes ipads, ereaders, and mobile devices in addition to computers. Her personal networking is focused on user groups and communities through meetups and conferences that deal with applications and information.  She finds many of the conference she goes to through the New York Times or Google. I can identify with going to meetups.  Tech meetups are in such high demand that it sometimes is hard to get in.

Terence Fitzgerald had a very different focus on technology. His focus was not on design but making things findable through taxonomy and metadata. Taxonomy and metadata are fields that are in very high demand in the information industry. I liked how he described that library science create a framework to view information. It is not so much how to build information and databases, but how to use information and databases. Taxonomy translates what the user wants. He focused his coursework on metadata, information architecture, information policy, and information design. He mentioned that he wished he had taken xml in college. These classses also were not around when I went to library school. How people use information has changed considerably. He did a practicum in taxonomy.

Terence Fitzgerald described how he sold himself as being a person who made sense of information to the engineers and mbas at the  company he works for, Markit which is a financial information company. His job is tie the databases together and make them findable; to index, classify, and structure information. He also said that much of his personal networking came from working with standards bodies for information where other taxonomists worked.

He also described how technology is making taxonomy more relevant, because there is still a need to categorize things and make them findable. I liked what he said. I found it very technology oriented.

There were some things that tied together between Terence Fitzgerald's portion of the talk and Sue Harris's description. They both said that their skills were in very high demand. They got called once a week by recruiters for the technology skills that they offered. There were also some common themes between the two peoples talk; a focus on metadata and design, some understanding of web site design and markup language.

Also both of them worked in an office setting, not so much a library, but a work group.  This reminded me a bit of when I worked as a sourcer for recruiters. The one bit of advice which he gave was to learn budgeting, especially how to understand business numbers.

The third presenter was Daniella Romano from the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation. She was developing documentation on the history of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There are 243  businesses and 5600 employees at the navy yard. She works with the visitors centers and often works with maps and plans from the last 150 years.

Her job was very different. She kept the keys to the histories of the companies in the yard. She was focused on preservation and cataloging When she was in library school, she focused on technical librarianship, archives, and records management. A lot of her work is about administrative planning and grantwriting. Once again, I find many positions when I am looking at listings include requests for grant writing and administrative planning. A lot of senior public library positions now require fundraising experience.

She also does a lot of cataloging and accessing information. The new technology she works with is sustainable construction and environmental technology. She also does a lot of community outreach. This is also something I see which people want.

This is of course my own interpretation of what I heard.  People all see and hear things differently.  It is a kind of summary of what I heard.  I am always open to comments on this.

This was a very different experience. There were three people from the New York Librarians Meetup as well, but the crowd had a much more formal feel to it. A lot of the people were there to find out about a specific type of job, not so much to find a job.  Because it was tied to a school it also had a different feel.  It was at Pratt.  This is the web link. http://mysite.pratt.edu/~sla/ 

I am so used to the job board and go to career fairs kind of mentality.  This was not.  It was quite refreshing.  I am trying to look at doing things differently.  The kind of things which I might be interested in are not going to be part of job boards or career fairs.  I am very interested in large content sites like goodreads, librarything, shelfari, and complex ebook sites.

I may take some time to read up a little bit on the basics of metadata and some more on web design.  Not so much information architecture, but presentation design.  I am interested in content.

When I grow up...

At thirteen I wanted to be a clown and travel with the circus. I was determined to attend Clown College. By sixteen I was looking at a vet school – except I nearly failed Chemistry (much like Brie of Pixie Chicks). So plans changed again. One teacher wanted me to go into journalism (far, far from the chemistry lab). Others urged me toward sports medicine.

At thirteen my daughter became part of a 'career focused' school program. This program means a special standardized test in which personality traits, inherent skills and general interests are all stirred up and the result reveals the best slice of the career pie chart. Good plan, very informative test – but it means she has to declare a major - in high school - ack!

While my daughter discovered a slice of career pie in line with her strengths, she has friends who are very talented in the arts who were told (at thirteen) to give up their dreams and choose something 'practical'. How heartbreaking! Our dreams often point toward the best outlet of our strengths!

I'm not saying you don't need to find a paying gig so you can live independent of meatloaf night at mom's house, but being uniquely YOU isn't a curse. Being an author is cool, but not always 'practical'. It took me a long time to accept that words are my biggest strength and then mold that strength into a career.

As a mom, I think I've managed to combine clowning with basic medicine and a little kitchen chemistry. Whatever you want to be at thirteen, it might not be exactly what you become when you grow up. Then again, it might just be the springboard to the best YOU ever!

Regan
Click here to read the Love Me Love My Book interview with a Pixie

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