Tips from Aaron Tay

Q) What are your top tips to increase visibility & impact?

In terms of visibility to the profession, there are many ways to do so. One way is to contribute to the profession by producing useful content by blogging, tweeting etc. It’s not always easy to come up with fresh original content, but one possible strategy is to study non-librarian things in depth and think about how they can apply to libraries . For instance, I have recently become enchanted by machine learning and have been putting in lots of efforts to learn R via free ebooks, tutorials and MOOCS, and my mind is now swimming with ideas on how to apply them to libraries.

Alternatively try to read widely in different areas of librarianship and see if you can connect them together for fresh insight. While it’s tough to become the best library technologist in the world or the most knowledgable and capable Scholarly communication librarian in the world, it’s possibly easier to be a good library technologist with good working knowledge of discovery technologies AND be well versed in scholarly communication knowledge which may allow you to see ideas and concepts that specialist in either areas might miss due to lack of awareness beyond specific areas. Almost everything is connected, so be curious about different areas of librarianship, even though areas that are ostensibly “not your area”.

Author: alawton

National Health Service Librarian for the Health Service Executive in Ireland

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