Acceptance of Professional Training Plan for Professional Registration

As of February 20th 2013 my application (in the form of this blog) has been accepted by the Library and Information Professional Registration Board.

This means I am now a professionally registered librarian within NZ (well I will be when I pay my Annual Professional Registration Fee!).

To give prospective candidates for Professional Registration an idea of the level of work required for a Professional Training Plan (PTP) I have included below some of the relevant assessment comments made about my own PTP. This way candidates and interested individuals can compare what I felt was expected in terms of the amount of work I put in to the blog with the level of work the Professional Registration Board expected.

I know for myself that I found it difficult to estimate what level of work was required of me without having previous PTP examples to go by. This blog and these comments are one of those examples.

Assessment comments

"I have read Alan's portfolio of learning as detailed on his blog, and believe it contains more than enough detail to meet the standard required for registration."

"Each heading contains very full and comprehensive comments of what has been learned and achieved..."

"A huge piece of work which is in itself a valuable resource for others."


I hope you find this useful and if you are considering applying for Professional Registration.

My next step is to start thinking about my Revalidation Journal as registered practitioners are required to revalidate their registration every three years to retain RLIANZA status...


'Bon Voyage!'

Al.

And in conclusion...for now anyway

So, here we are, give or take a year later, and I have reached the end of my Professional Training Plan which I have completed as a requirement for professional registration as a librarian in New Zealand.

Each of the tasks required has its own page (see the list down the right hand side of this page) and I have concluded it all with a self-reflection.

It has been assessed by my mentor.

The blog itself is my submission for professional registration to LIANZA (the Library and Information Association of New Zealand).

Once it is assessed I intend to continue to develop and refine it as a blog for librarians redirecting my focus onto the areas of interest that have developed through this process e.g., libraries and Maori, libraries and the disabled, the professional development wiki 'What's uPD with you?', and further investigations into Index New Zealand (INNZ) title usage by its users.

The end is nigh...

After nearly a year of working on (and off) my Professional Training Plan as part of the process is becoming a registered librarian in New Zealand, the end of this first step is in sight. I just need to finish off a couple of the tasks, tidy up the rest, right my self-reflection on the whole experience and then get my mentor to write her own assessment. Then I'll be able to start my own revalidation journal as the next step in the process!

What's UpPD With You?

Here's the prototype of a regular post where people can enter in their latest PD thought, idea, concern, etc. Or they can add a comment to a post already published.

Well, here we are five months later and this prototype post turned out to be just that - a prototype - an idea that ended up as something else completely but a good idea at the time.

What it ended up as was an email within the Content Services group of the National Library sent out on a Friday and highlighting additions/changes to the What's uPD with you wiki.

Going live - mentor response and the importance of costing your professional training plan before settling to it

Good news this week. My mentor gave me the thumbs up to push my blog out to people within the larger area of the Library I work in. Now I am faced with the implications of putting my thoughts and musings out into this 'public'. How will I come across to others? Will this blog fill a gap or a need? Will people respond? The idea has just struck me of introducing it to a couple of selected people who I know are doing MIS papers to get their input first. I like it. Let me think on it.

But more pressing, it's now time to investigate further the code of conduct within our organisation in terms of being aware of discussing issues or actions in a way that will be 'fair', 'impartial', 'responsible' and 'trustworthy' (Code of conduct, July 2011, p.4). While this blog will be launched properly 'in-house' the plan is for it to be pushed out nationally (at the moment it has been pushed to a limited number of people), outside the library into the wider world so care will need to be taken that these criteria are always kept in mind.


If only hindsight could be reversed perhaps I would not have included in my Professional Training Plan (PTP), as part of addressing knowledge and skill gaps not covered in my qualification or required for my job, attending some Oral History workshops. They cost money! More money than I feel comfortable with paying when it's part of my job requirements. I've sent an email to the appropriate person looking at possible options that would allow me to pay less, i.e., only attending one of the two days of the course. I'm still really keen on Oral History just not on the cost involved. I should have spent more time investigating the cost and been aware of its likely increase due to inflation(?). Bah humbug.

Taking my PD blog to the library - thoughts

So here they are, my first thoughts at how to develop a PD blog within my library, inviting other librarians to contribute to it as part of their own PD requirements (e.g., participating in professional networks and activities) and as a tool to share with each other what we're all working on.

The idea at the moment is to send a general email to Content Services introducing the blog and it's purpose, inviting interested people to visit it and hopefully join both the blog and also follow it on Twitter. Then, on a weekly basis, I will email and tweet something along the lines of 'So what PD are you working on now?' as a way to start conversation.

I had thought that my own blog would be the PD blog, using the Post aspect of it, with my own PD within the blog's pages. I'm not sure though whether posting like this, where people can sign onto my blog and add comments, will work, or whether another way (perhaps a Wiki?) would be better...time to run it past my Mentor.

Any other thoughts from anyone will also be appreciated...

Time for self promotion of blog? Twitter and Kaupapa Maori

Self promotion
Now that I have been creating this blog for a few months now I am realising that it is getting closer to the time when I will need to start promoting this blog within the Content Services area of the Library I work in as part of my Professional Training Plan (PTP) requirement to 'Invite other NLNZ librarians to contribute as part of their own professional development requirements, whether they be starting out on the registration process like myself, part way through, or have finished and are looking for ways to add to their revalidation journal activities'.  

There are also several areas within the PTP that require me to present my findings and newly acquired information to my immediate colleagues and I am thinking that it would be better to do this bit by bit as I go, rather than all at once at the end of the process.

Twitter
In my last post I said how I would try and log on to Twitter more regularly to see if I could reap more benefits than I was previously getting. Since then I have logged on each morning and kept an eye on it during the day, checking out each new tweet as it came in. Overall, while the majority of tweets have not been of interest to me, there have been the odd one or two that piqued my interest requiring me to investigate further. It seems that there is a process of culling and restocking that I will inevitably have to start to go through weeding out those tweets that are not offering me anything new or interesting while continuing to search for more - the overall objective being to keep the amount of 'Following' at a manageable number.  

Kaupapa Maori
Due to an IT issue which meant I couldn't carry on with my usual work flow I spent the time researching information for the first part of my PTP question 7 about the ideas and philosophy behind kaupapa Maori methodologies in terms of understanding the needs of Maori clients of Index New Zealand (INNZ) - the database I work on.

It turned out to be the kind of research when you start out reading with one point of view in mind and you finish with another. In this instance it was the idea that in order to understand the needs of Maori clients we need to make a long term committment to the relationship between INNZ and its Maori users. We need to go outside the institution and meet with Maori users and learn where each of us is coming from and how we can work together to achieve common goals.