Well where did the last 2 months go? There I was religiously posting every week and then LILAC occurred. I now have a LILAC shapped hole in my blog posts.

I also have a ‘wow April was busy’ shaped hole in my blogging schedule where I essentially travelled between Stockport and York and Stockport and Cardiff a lot. With a soupçon of London thrown in for good measure.

Oh. and then there was the start of May. I was on holiday then. 🙂 Here in fact.

(Photography courtesy of Miss Heidi Human, as I’ve not downloaded my pics yet.)

LILAC was great, I’m always in awe of all the work we seem to get done. The LILAC Committee does a fantastic job, although I might be a little biased. (in case you didn’t know I’m the new LILAC Chair) It’s an immense amount of work that the team do on top of their already full on day jobs. We’re now on the debrief part of the year. Where we look at what we did, what worked and what didn’t and how we can improve things for next year. And I still wish I presented like Steve Wheeler.

I’m the CILIP IL Group Training Officer, a role I share with Emily Shields, and over the last couple of months, we’ve been organising IL training sessions (with help from Emma Woods and NoWAL) and putting out a training survey so that we can make sure that we put the right training on for our members.

Something that is hugely exciting is that I’ve been asked whether I can train in French. My degree is in French and Spanish so I was able to say “Yes, yes I can.” So for the last few weeks I’ve been listening to FranceInfo everyday (Like Radio 4), and am thoroughly enjoying it. Showing my age here now, but when I was at university (Bradford) we had to go into the Language Centre on campus to listen to recordings taken from French Radio or to watch TV in French. Now with the internet and a tablet, I can listen to the news, live, in French whilst I’m in the shower. (Technology is ACE.) The training isn’t definite yet but I’ve got my fingers crossed.

I’m also writing a couple of new courses, Train the trainer and an intermediate social media course. (As you can tell I’ve not thought of a snazzy title for this yet). Doing the research for the social media course has been fun. I’ve found some really great examples of what libraries are doing and have had a play with Tumblr.

You have to check out the Pinterest boards done by Bowling Green State University Music Library. (http://pinterest.com/bgsu_mlsra/) It’s through this that I find out about Sleevefacing. (I went to have a look at this because I read this post from the INALJ blog: 10 Inspiring Pinterest Collections Created by Libraries and Librarians fb.me/1OwE9mKcj)

Tumblr is interesting. I really quite like it but am also slightly disturbed by some of the sites I found searching for #librarian. (My eyes, my eyes.). I just wasn’t expecting porn. I have discovered that you can set it up so you are only browsing in ‘safe mode’. But this depends on whether people have tagged their Tumblr with #NSFW, (Not Safe For Work), so you can still come across the odd pornagraphic site. (did I mention, my eyes, my eyes) The thing I’m having difficulty with is, if I’m training with this, how far do I go in showing people what they might come across? How easily offended are people? Then again, these are issues that anyone using the internet might face, so showing them what can happen and how to avoid it if they want, is really important.

Hmmm. more thinking I believe.

Right, I’ve made my dodgy excuses about not blogging for a while and told you what I’ve been up to. So, I’m going to go. But before I do, I feel I have to share one of my favourite Tumblrs with you – “Animals Talking in all Caps“.