
Why cpd23?

I’m new to the library world, and not new at all. I’ve been an information professional (without knowing the job title) for about 15 years, and have been maintaining a corporate digital library (without knowing that’s what I’ve been doing) for the past three years.

Three years ago my husband died, suddenly, and working from home via computer suddenly became a very limiting lifestyle: I never went anywhere, rarely interacted with anyone beyond the keyboard. Searching for a program of study which would get me out of the house and which would play to my strengths (a knack for finding information, English as a native language, some life experience), I found a program in LIS at Beit Berl College.

And suddenly, everything made sense. This is what I’ve been doing, the thing which I’ve been grasping at straws to explain. The reason why people thought I worked at an intelligence agency. My life.

But the program was limited and frustrating. I’m far more technologically advanced than most of my cohort: they’re just discovering social media, find HTML a foreign language, Ebsco a country far, far away. I was getting the social life I wanted, but most of the new information I was getting was happening between classes, talking to other librarians.

So I sought out other resources, drawing on the fact that of all my cohort, I was the only one more comfortable in English than in Hebrew. RDA and MARC email lists, Web Junction webinars and workshops, following the #libraryschool hashtag on Twitter and obsessively reading every link.

I’ve been running around like a librarian without a database for the past year, gathering information like acorns, but never sitting down to process any of it. Summer vacation has started (despite all the final assignments which will be due over July and August) and it’s time to lean back and try to integrate it all, figure out how what I’m learning applies to what I do at work, how what I do as a volunteer applies to what I’m learning. But how? And then I see links on Twitter about cpd23.  And maybe it all begins to make a little sense.

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6 Responses to “Why cpd23?”

  1. Nicole Brock Says:

    I like the look of this blog with both English and Hebrew, and I’m impressed with myself for finding the comment link.🙂

    Congrats on heading back to school, and good luck helping your colleagues learn the new technology! Perhaps they should try cpd23

  2. Ahava Cohen Says:

    You ought to be very impressed with yourself! I know that several students in my program couldn’t figure out where the comments link was, and they speak Hebrew.

    But I’ve now changed the language setting. My lecturer won’t look at our final assignment for over a month, and there doesn’t seem to be any other participant from Israel, so…

  3. Nicole Brock Says:

    Ha! I suppose my ability to guess the right link just goes to show that web design is a language of its own…

  4. Ahava Cohen Says:

    Absolutely! My daughter is learning C this summer and complained that she’s never had to learn a language since she was an infant. I reminded her that she has learned Microsoft very well.

  5. KatyStoddard Says:

    Great post! Very true about web design, even though I can’t read the Hebrew I recognise the language of posting.

    I bet I press the wrong button now…

  6. Ahava Cohen Says:

    No, you pressed the right one. See, it really is a language!

    I was thinking about switching the language back and forth every time I posted an English language post and then again every time I posted a Hebrew language post, and suddenly I realized — that’s part of my branding! See, I can turn a deficit into an asset.

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