Farewell 2008

New Year Celebrations in London
New Year Celebrations in London (from i is Ashby on Flickr)

Firstly, I hope any readers who celebrate have had a wonderful Christmas season and enjoyed the break – I certainly have. It’s given me chance to see family, spend time at home relaxing with my boyfriend and our kittens, catch up on sleep, do some cross-stitching (for next year’s Christmas cards!) and learn a bit of Photoshop.

As it’s the last day of the year I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect back on the year and look forward to 2009.

2008 has been quite a big year for me professionally; I’ve worked on my qualification and completed my Diploma in October, and started my first professional post as a Resources Librarian in November.

I’ve also been to a number of events and met a lot of great people in the profession. Particular highlights include a COfHE event The Terrible 2.0s? Web 2.0 without tears, Internet Librarian International 2008, and the recent Mashed Library Unconference.

One of my main projects this year has been the Facebook Page for our Learning Centres. Although it has so far only been a fairly small-scale pilot project, we have almost 250 fans and it has been a very interesting experience. I’ve been able to help others with their Facebook Pages too which has been very rewarding. The Facebook Page was featured as a case study in a recent presentation about Librarians, Libraries and Facebook, and I’ve recently submitted a paper to ALISS Quarterly about our experiences (more on that in the New Year hopefully).

I was also invited to co-author a conference paper for the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference in Singapore, and wrote about the Library 2.0 initiatives and barriers at University of Wolverhampton as a guest blog post for the UK Web Focus blog.

I have particularly enjoyed blogging this year, I often find myself thinking about possible blog posts in my spare time. I enjoy sharing ideas via the blog and hearing about other experiences/points of view through the comments. Blogging also seems to have become more popular in academic libraries this year, and I hope to help develop that further this coming year.

All in all, it’s been a very exciting year and I hope to continue developing projects at work, and share our experiences through conferences, papers and blogging. I’ve enjoyed spreading the word about new technologies and ideas for developing services both in my department and externally and I hope to continue doing so next year.

I hope you all have a wonderful New Year and a happy and healthy 2009. 🙂