To a Sparkly and Promising 2020

Hello dear readers,
Here we are, at the beginning of a new year, reflecting on a very proficuous, busy 2019, ready to give you a wee summary of the previous episodes.

2020, year of the rat in the Chinese zodiac is a year of progression and new beginnings: while we cannot say we are particularly superstitious, we want to believe that this will be the year in which our development as librarians will thrive and flourish. If you are not familiar with the story of the rat in the Chinese zodiac, this is a curious read to start the year with so much hope! Believe it or not, let’s all do our best!

We have been on a lot of adventures, the three of us together or on solo missions, and we have shared (almost) everything with you. However, for those who have tuned in with us only recently, here you go, this is what happened during the past year. We have started with some introduction of the three of us, the “Wee Italian Librarians” since we come from different library sectors: Academic, School (now Law) and Public. And we have shown what being a librarian means for us, in different posts. This is a wee post on why we believe libraries are important in each sector.

However, this is not only a blog about libraries and librarians and books. Being three Italians, hence coming from outside the UK (duh), we felt somehow obliged to write a post about Brexit, which has become even more relevant considering the latest political development - see the results of the last General Election on 12th December. As people who have chosen Scotland as their residence and working place we have expressed our thoughts on the matter and we recommend you to have a read and share your ideas.

Are you interested in CPD? We have written a couple of posts about that. We are all working towards CILIP Chartership and we have tried to keep you in the loop with what we are doing. In addition to these, we’ve written about the annual CILIPS Conference in Dundee, an inspiring experience, where all of us had so much to learn from all the experts that were present there. Oh and some good old networking too!

We’ve given an account of two summer experiences: Luca and Elena at the Maps Department of the National Library of Scotland and Laura at the IFLA WLIC (World Library Information Congress) 2019, in splendid and sunny Athens!

The latest experience for Elena and Luca has also given us much food for thought: “Decolonisation in libraries and the ghost of Dewey”. It made us reflect on the way we classify items in libraries, but also on how bias affects the acquisition of materials.

It has been a productive (a little stressful perhaps) year for all of us. The Christmas break is often that time when you stop for a little to ponder on what you have achieved during the previous year, on what went... not so well and to set some resolutions for the upcoming year. We have had various changes in our careers, not because we are picky, but because we are trying hard to progress and seize opportunities for professional growth. We also had changes in our personal lives, which involved all of us moving house, one of us getting engaged and another one welcoming a gorgeous feline friend in their life. This year is looking equally busy, but we will be focusing on settling more into our jobs, whilst continuing our path towards Chartership and possibly having a life besides all that!

We have really enjoyed writing this blog and we plan to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. At least till we have something interesting to say! We have a few topics already lined up, such as mental health and life-work balance, equality and diversity - or the lack of these - in the workplace (including some unpleasant firsthand experience) and more reports from the various events we will be attending.

While we mainly focus on our professional lives in our posts, the end of this holiday season seems a good moment to remember that we are also very human: we have personal lives that got in the way of our performance, sometimes we felt overwhelmed by the new jobs, got scared, sometimes also feeling like we wanted to give up. But our human part reminded us that we are first and foremost friends, and we can rely on each other to ask for help, and sometimes even just to vent. This is one of the reasons why in this sparkly and promising 2020 we would like to dedicate more time to our friends and loved ones. For how much our job is important, we need to treasure the people we love, friends and partners alike, and we will do it! We will learn to respect the boundaries between work and life and create a better life-work balance.

Also, when we chatted amongst ourselves last year, we shared successes and failures: we acknowledged that we made mistakes along the way and our beloved chartership sometimes got pushed away from our priorities, because, as we told ourselves over and over, life got in the way. Nonetheless, we vowed that this is the year we will be putting more effort into our portfolio. We have had our experiences last year, and we will have new ones in the current one, therefore is just finding the time and the strength to write some evidence to support our professionality (aka, getting the chartership done!).

We would love to hear what you think of this blog and we would be very happy to receive suggestions on topics. Thank you very much for reading and supporting us, as well as helping us to reach out to more readers.

We wish you a wonderful 2020, full of joy, good news, laughter and books. Coffee or tea too. Whatever you want really!

Till next time, LEL (Luca, Elena, Laura)