The Story so far...

This is a bit of a long post, as I need to catch up on everything that I've done so far.

First things first, I work as a Children's Librarian for Croydon Libraries, and am based in Norbury Library, which is a medium/large branch in the north of the borough. This is my first professional position, and I started here as soon as I finished studying at UCL, in August 2005. I have been working there for about a year and a half now.

I kicked the whole chartership process off over a year ago, when I attended a "Chartership and Beyond" course run by CILIP, in February 2006. This made me determined to get going, but as there was noone in my library authority who was registered as a mentor, it took me a bit longer to find one. I eventually found a mentor (who works in children's services in another authority) and met up with her for the first time in May 2006. She agreed to take me on, and since then we have been meeting up every month or so, in a coffee shop in Balham, to discuss how things are going alone.

My mentor advised me to start building up things for my portfolio before formally registering, so that I didn't find myself running out of time when trying to get the portfolio ready to send off. I therefore did a rough draft of my PPDP in August 2006, and used this to analyse where further training might be most useful. I registered formally as a Chartership candidate in Febuary 2007, and am about to send off the final version of my PPDP. That's where we're at now!

New beginning

I'm going to be using this blog both to record my progress towards Chartered status, and also as a tool in getting there! It will be interesting to do, as I have done very little web publishing previously. Once I've finished setting up, I'll do another entry very quickly summarising my progress on the rocky road to Chartership so far.