As we approch mid-October and a year in my first professional position I am pleased to say that I am not far away from being chartered if all goes well. I have spent the last couple of weeks priniting off eveidence and gathering it together in a presentable way. I will be speaking to my mentor in the next couple of days and if she is happy with my work then will look to submit in the next month or so.

I have found the experience of chartering not as daunting as it may have seemed st first. I think I am lucky in that my first job is a very varied one with service performance, marketing, IT, customer service, training delivery and much more involved alongside my day to day job of being the learning co-ordinator. It has meant that alongside attending training days my general work tasks have fed in well to the chartership model (although only if I pass will I say this for sure). It has kept my mind focussed on being reflective in my approach and also mindful of the importance of gathering performance evidence and this will be useful going forward.

In a work sense I now feel very much at home in my surroundings, I have had some key achievements in my first year; maintaining existing learning providers who looked ready to pull out, finding new partners, becoming a learndirect centre, becoming an ILA provider and starting to delive my own classes being the stand outs. This has now seen me start to come up with new projects and these are likely to focus on creating more in-house classes and programmes for employability and younger people. With so much focus on learning I think chartership has meant I kept a close relationship with the more traditional library work giving me a good amount of all round skills.

As my workload increased over the year my blog posts became less frequent but I hope they still reflect what I have been doing and how I have felt about it. I plan to keep blogging in a new blog shortly!

The last month has been spent mainly organiising the final preperations for our new classes, teaching my own classes and also arranging some projects involving information literacy. In addition my chartership has been gathering place including a visit I paid to the City Chambers Library.

In terms of our new timetable I have been involved in organising the recruitment of students. This requires many marketing initiatives and also phonecalls but it is good to engage with the learners in this way. This has been done to a greater level with my teaching of two classes, one in Basic Computing and one in Internet Skills. This has made me nervous but I feel I did well. I still have to develop my tutoring skills so that I find the best approaches but the learning curves within these classes have been steep and worthwhile. The students have been happy it seems with what they have learned and only a few teething problems have disrupted things. I pln to do more soon.

I also took part in a visit arranged by my chartership mentor. This was good as I saw the workings of a completely different library and one that is largely a legal one. This had many differences and was ultimately a very rewarding day that allowed a detailed write up of another service. I will return this visit in October.

With this complete I know plan to spend the next month completing the last of my eveidence and starting to bring my portfolio together in time to submit in October/November, I have written the first draft of my personal statement and will complete this shortly.

In the past month or so all my work has been focussed on the planning and preparation of September's timetable of classes within the libraries. This has involved a noteable success with the award of ILA provider status meaning that we can now create our own classes and allow people of lower incomes to gain funding to pay for these. This is a real success for the libarary and the challenge now is creating them. As we must start small and build up the recieved funds I have decided to take some initial classes. This will begin with a 4 week class that is free for way of a trial followed by a longer one that is ILA funded. The creation of courses is fun and have enjoyed it although I am nervous about the actual teaching and also whether I know enough!

Thankfully, we have input from local providers meaning we still have a strong timetable, this allows me to gradually reduce this and increase our own learning and I am lucky to have this opportunity. This involved a lot of negotiation and planning meetings and I feel my skills within these are improving.

I have also spent a great deal of time updating the library website, I feel this is an important area of any librray service now and slthough my authorities website isn't aesthetically ideal at least I have some new skills in designing pages etc (although not using html!)

Other than taht this month also saw a rewarding visit to the CILIP Scotland conference in Peebles, among other speakers my favourite talk covered Family History and really inspired me to develop a project when I returned. I am currently looking into a variety of funding initiatives to try and get this arranged.

The last month has continued to be a busy one that has still been focussed on the learning provision from September. As well as holding meeting with learning providers I also arranged the Adult Learners Week Event in order to get names for next years classes.

After a meeting with the local college still left us largely in the dark over exactly what classes we can provide next year the open day had very little in terms of confirmed classe. I have gathered a large amount of back up provision though and we are applying to become an ILA Provider so there was still plenty of reason to gather names. The planning of this event was made a lot easier by the fact I had done something similar in Janaury. The marketing, catering and all round arrangements were a lot more fun because I had learned from experience. the day itself was hectic and stressful with lots of learners to speak to but I realised that I find this very enjoyable and plan to start working with learners directly more as that is one of the best parts of the job.

Because of this, I am now planning to run some tasters with myself as tutor in mid to late summer, this will give me some extra experience befor we hopefully gain ILA status. I am doing some reading to help me do this as well doing an ITALL course which will help me deal with learners with literacy needs. I think tutoring should be a main part of my role and a very interesting way to develop and take it forward in the future.

Been a few weeks since my last post but with so much on it's been hard to take a second! As well as seeing my mentor and reviewing my progress I have also been progressing the learning in my library authority via planning and various training and visits.

As part of the marketing team we visited another authorities new library to see what inspiration or ideas we could pick up. This visit definitely proved how much of an improvement that good lighting and signage makes to a libarary. I felt that in terms of other junior and learning activities they were no better (and worse in some ways) so the visit was mainly useful for a design perspective.

I also went to Glasgow for an Information Literacy day ran by the Scottish Info Lit Project. This was interesting in terms of some of the talks showing ideas for learning opportunities and to get a feel for how other people are dealing with information literacy. I still feel that the area is prone to being ambiguous and this was shown by talks varying from accessibility apps to reports on prison learning.

The main task at the moment in the authority is to create a new learning plan for September. The involvement of the local college still hangs firmly in the balance and this may mean a variety of new provision is required. One key way of doing this is to become an ILA provider allowing us to bring in funding to help run our own courses. To start the ball rolling myself and my colleuge have visited another authority who does this and I have sent out best practice questions to others. This idea sharing has been invaluable and has been extremely interesting in allowing me to see how other authorities operate that are similar. My plan now is to apply to ILA and start looking and the inticacies of putting plans in place.

I have also been looking into other areas as part of my partnership working. As part of the learning sub group I attend I have been looking into the possibility of creating a database that would map learners achievemnets in the local area. This is an area I am definitely a novice in so I have forund it beneficial to have looked into it. Clearly setting up secure multi access databases has clear legal and technical implications and is something I will continue to look into.

I have also had some training this month into online reference services as I felt my hand on experience of these was not as strong as it should be. I realised however that I knew more than I thought and was encouraged by this!

The last two weeks have been taken up with the push for online learning we offer. This has required a lot of press releases being written and guides for th online learning to be printed. I have put the guides all over the libraries and branches to make them more prominent and put some information in the press. I have enjoyed this yet a couple of mistakes/inaccuracies on the guides have meant a couple of reprints and replacements being done but that has made me realise I need to be more careful as I have a habit of getting carried away when my excitement levels rise!

Another significant task has been dealing with an evironmental project that the council pays for in the library. This has been a different type of task as the council are really the clients of myself and the group that make the recycling video. This means we need to spend the 3000 wisely on tutor fees and libarry materials and produce a video they are happy with. My role is to spend the budget which I have found a lot harder than I thought I would! This has been a good lesson though as I am inexperienced with budgets and year ends and this has put the pressure on a little right now as I have still not decided what to spend it on!!

We are now in February and things all seem to be going well. My vent skills were tested to the full with our learndirect day that was designed to promote all our learning and other eductaional library services, the evnt went well with good feedback and around 500 attending. It also gave us a chance to raise the library profile as a whole with local council and press!

I have also held short training sessions on learndirect with the staff, this has been a good develkopment area as I enjoyed it and came across well but it has made me keen to try deleivering longer training sessions and I will get the chance to do this soon.

I have also been trying to develop my work within the wider learning community by agreeing to chair meetings or taking part in marketing or other service development areas in the wider adult learning environment. This is all good oppurtunities to help my chartership and overall development. As part of my chartership my PPDP is now finalised and I have been working towards some of the aims for a while already. I will now try and make sure I have a good amount of evidence to back it all up!

We're now a couple of weeks into the new year and things have certainly gathered pace. Due to the achievement of learndirect branding at the end of 2008 we now have a launch date and all efforts are going into the planning of this. It has been an excellent learning experience dealing with all the factors that are involved and I feel I have handled this pressure well so far. I now have dealt with a 1600 person mail drop, inviting dignatries and arranging who will help out, planning the layout of the day, ordering food for the event and other tasks such as carrying out risk assessments.

The start of the year has also seen most of our new classes starting and this has involved a lot of planning to make sure the classes don't lose numbers early on as this can cause them to be pulled.

All in all, it has been an exciting start and definitely not the quiet January people expect!