We’re all too nice and English to discuss money in CPD23. The participants are clever young people, who know full well that the only people who get rich in librarianship are those who have embezelled the book fund. We don’t do it for the money. When I entered the profession, the choice to go into…

I remember reading somewhere (is it in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?) that Roman Catholic eschatology concerns itself with four last things: death, judgement, heaven and hell. Richard Strauss wrote four last songs, Frühling, September, Beim Schlafengehen and Im Abendrot. As the sun sets on my CPD23 effort, and I offer its…

In lieu of what they now call a gap year, I worked as a hospital porter at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, in 1973. The porters’ room divided into two factions, young men such as me, in late teens or early twenties, and older men, over fifty. The latter group had all served in the forces during…

To complete this thing, we are asked to identify activities and interests that could be applied to our careers. First we are asked to answer some questions: What do you like to do? I tried to identify this when responding to Philip Pullman’s speech at the Library Campaign conference last month. See that blog post…

For this thing we are enjoined to reflect on how we have integrated things into our practice. So: Blogging: I’ve been blogging since 2003, both personally and professionally, so I think this one is pretty well integrated. In my new job, as Primary Care Librarian for West Sussex Knowledge & Libraries, I’ve just started a blog,…

I first used screen-casting when I worked at Brighton and Sussex Medical School.  I fear I can’t remember the tool I used, a ur-Jing, to capture walkthroughs that were supposed to demonstrate to users how to navigate their way through the Scylla and Charybdis of NHS and higher education Athens accounts. Though I played around…

I’m tackling this thing in reverse order and, in the spirit of the thing, here’s a podcast of me talking about, er, podcasts. Cpd23 It may be useful to list the podcasts I refer to in the talk In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg JISC Podcasts Talking with Talis [This seems to have withered on…

I first posted a presentation on Slideshare four years ago, it seems. The full ghastly history may be seen at: http://www.slideshare.net/tomroper/ That represents a small fraction of the number of presentations I have shared online. I used my blog to post copies after I’d given talks, and I even have some copies of ancient ones I…

I’ve never been convinced by the industry that has sprung up around ‘advocacy’. It seems to me second-nature that, if one is part of a profession that does something worthwhile, one would does one’s best to stand up for it in public. I always despised passengers, people who contribute nothing but the minimum required of…