Busy Week

Not work related specifically but I suppose I was in the office when I presented a short half hour talk to a class of students on Monday this week. I was nervous but really excited to be asked to give a talk regarding Management and Supervision within the Library/information industry. Pretty sure the lecturer just found my name on our Library website and I was the first person with 'manager' in my title but either way I was super excited to have the opportunity to speak to a student cohort as a 'guest speaker'. So I essentially speed talked for 35mins solid about management and supervision skills - the activity/tasks aspects as well as the 'people' side of management, a lot of information for them and I ran through it really quickly. In all honesty I could have spoken for another half hour and still have things to talk about but hopefully for an introductory class, they got something out of it. I tried to add in a few jokes to keep it light, being a zoom meeting/presentation though its really hard to guage whether the audience is responding or not - ultimately not I suppose as everyone is on mute and not visible but hopefully there were a few chuckles. Really positive comments from everyone though so maybe I'll be asked back in some future session, I hope so - in all honesty public speaking scares the crap out of me but small zoom meetings really help to build confidence.

I volunteered to join in the inaugural ANZREG Alma Cloudapps Hackathon (bit of a mouthful) but with a recent development of ExLibris' Cloudapps platform which provides a range of samll apps which enhance the existing Library Management platforms functionality, the Australia / New Zealand Regional ExLibris Group (ANZREG) community came together to create apps to solve some of the issues raised by the community. Staff from multiple institutions were split into teams and given an issue to solve. Our issue was regarding the inability to delete 'sets' (groups of records) in bulk. In a week with the help of some very talented developers (I do not classify myself as a programmer - but I did come up with our team name: "Lets talk about sets") we created an app which provides that functionality through API calls. After the final presentation to an international audience and a panel of judges, our app won the 'Best app' award which was an amazing surprise. We each received a digital badge and a gift voucher which was awesome. Really proud of this achievement. And more that just creating the app and winning, it was a really great opportunity to network and work with people from other institutions. I don't know if its just because we are a rural institution but its really rare that we get to interact with people who have similar jobs at other institutions but it can be such a huge help when you need advice or direction on specific issues. Being a member of an email distribution list is one thing and you regularly see emails from specific people but so often I have no idea what they look like. One day in the future maybe we will meet in person at another ANZREG event.

I have also volunteered to join in the 15mins a day challenge through work. While I have recently started a diet and I have lost a bit of weight, more exercise would defintely help and I find that the requirement of logging how much activity you are doing each day really helps to ensure I actually get up in the morning and doing some exercise before breakfast. Since the challenge started, I'm happy to say that I have done a half hour on the roadbike (training setup in the garage) every morning - I was only averaging 2-3 times a week before that. I have also said that I would play hockey this year - hopefully with these things combined (and no injuries) will mean I continue to drop the weight