Friday, February 16, 2007

February mentoring meeting

Although it hasn’t been long since our January meeting, Karen and I met up last night in order to go through the personal professional development plan (PPDP) draft that I had sent over to her earlier in the week. This thing needs to be submitted in the first six months of the process and my six months are up in a few weeks so it was important that we get together to go over it. Aside from a few changes to the content and layout (and shamefully, a couple of typos), it looks about ready to go.

I have used the CDL PPDP for CILIP Chartership Candidates document as an outline for the different categories in my PPDP. At first, I found creating the PPDP quite daunting. With nothing more than a pretty generic template to guide me, I was struggling to get my head around how to structure it and what to include in it. The CDL document, though, provided me with a structure and some description around the sort of thing that should be included under each heading and sub-heading. This really helped to focus my effort and to generate the content. I haven’t followed the CLD document completely; I have left a couple of sub points out, mainly because they just didn’t apply to me.

One of the most (worrying?) glaring blank spaces in the document is under the ethics heading. I just couldn't think of anything that I could put under that heading that fit with my role. We had a lengthy discussion about ethics in librarianship in general and then talked a bit about how that might apply to my current role. In the end, it looked like with the exception of anything particularly out of the ordinary occurring, I would need to fill that space with actions to the effect of discussing it, reading about it, and abiding by CILIP's code of conduct. That code states that CILIP will pursue disciplinary measures against professionals acting in breach of it. I'm not too clear quite how that would work and one of the actions for me coming out of our conversation was:

Action: D - to post a question about ethics and CILIP's disciplinary actions

So the plan is for me to make the changes that we talked about, agree the final version, print it out and sign it before sending it over to her to sign and submit to CILIP. I’ll feel a lot better once this first ‘assignment’ is completed!


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