I’ll be writing posts on a variety of different topics including personal development, product reviews and recommendations and things I’ve learnt and would like to share. Content will reflect my current interests and activities (at the moment I’m doing daily posts from my beauty advent calendar). If you’d like to keep up-to-date please visit my new blog at https://jowalley.co.uk/blog/ and if you wish to subscribe there are details at the bottom of the page or you can subscribe via Bloglovin.

The post Blog move appeared first on Jo Alcock Consulting.

I’ve been struggling with my professional identity for a few years, and have blogged about it previously when I moved from working in a library to working in a research role within a library (but not located in a library), and again when I moved to working for myself. I always introduced myself as a librarian and that aligned with my identity in 2010. It’s now 2017 though and it’s been over 7 years since I worked as a librarian. Whilst I still worked in the heirarchy of an academic library until 2016 I could possibly argue my identity was still that of a librarian, but in reality that wasn’t really the case, and it certainly hasn’t been since then.

There have been some core elements of all my work, both paid and voluntary, primarily in helping others develop, and that continues to be the case. My professional identity now aligns much more with that of a coach, and I can now confidently introduce myself that way. I am a coach. Coaching underpins the work that I do and more importantly how I do it – I use this approach in my training and facilitation, and in my research and consultancy work. I’m doing more pure coaching too (both one-on-one and in groups through action learning sets), and am looking to expand this side of my work.

Since getting married earlier this year, I’ve been struggling with my identity even more due to my choice of name. I felt quite comfortable with the idea of keeping my maiden name for professional purposes and changing it for family purposes. This seemed to make logical sense. Until I lived it for a few months. Over the past few years I’ve been on a journey of learning more about my authenticity and bringing together the different parts of my life so that I don’t have multiple identities and I bring all of myself to everything I do. This is the way I want to be. But now I have created two identities for myself. I have to remember who to introduce myself as, what name to put on the form, and which signature to use. I’m always the same me, yet I have two names. It doesn’t feel right for me. So I’m going to change that and embrace my new identity, both in terms of my professional identity as a coach and in terms of my name as Jo Walley.

Hi. My name is Jo Walley and I’m a coach. I’m hard-working, honest, open-minded, supportive, generous, curious, and silly. I love learning and helping others learn. I honour commitments and bring myself whole-heartedly to them. I try to live in an ethically conscious way.

OK. That’s the hard part done. Now I need to implement this with the small matter of changing my name (and business name, still to be decided) for tax purposes. Then I need to let people know about the name change. Then there’s my various online identities. I have so many different accounts with different content, yet they’re all me. I have five blogs for example; keeping them all up-to-date is exhausting (and I often don’t as my interests change over time). Choosing which one to post this on today was an interesting challenge – I drafted it on my ‘Journal’ blog but decided to post it on my ‘main’ blog. It’s confusing for me, let alone anyone else! I’m therefore looking to bring as many of them as possible together and give myself permission to be authentically me on all my online accounts. This is likely to be a long process, but it’s something I’ve resisted for too long and am ready to tackle. I’m confident with my identity now and want to show that in my online identity.

How about you? What does your online identity say about you? Does it fit with your sense of identity? 

The post Some thoughts on identity appeared first on Jo Alcock Consulting.

In order to combat this feeling of not being good enough, I invested so much time and energy into ‘doing my best’ hoping that I could perhaps feel like I deserved these things. I went above and beyond in all aspects of what I was doing, partly because I enjoyed them all so much but partly because I felt I had to in order to earn the right to be doing these things. Unfortunately, I invested so much time and energy in them that I neglected other needs in my life, and I experienced burnout.

Slowly but surely I realised this was my imposter syndrome rearing its head and causing unnecessary doubt, and I realised I wanted to pay attention to it but not let it rule my way of being. I started to relax and respect my time more (including my downtime). I started to do things the way I wanted to, in a way that felt authentic to me, rather than the way I thought I ‘ought’ to because of what others do. I began to pay more attention to what others were sharing with me, especially when they were expressing thanks and appreciation for my work (I was already paying plenty of attention to what they were saying about how things could be better!). I tuned into my strengths, skills, and experience that helped me fulfil these roles. I started to see that maybe I was the right person at that moment for those roles, and I started to respect the fact others had put their trust in me. It was a beautiful feeling and it enabled me to wholeheartedly apply myself to the different roles.

Imposter syndrome is something that will always be with me, but over time I’ve developed a number of different strategies to help reduce the impact in terms of longevity and intensity. It’s a work in progress and I’m picking up new strategies all the time. Later this year I’ll be sharing my experiences in the Overcoming Imposter Syndrome online course that I’m co-facilitating with Sarah Durrant as part of our Mindful Leadership for Women Programme. If imposter syndrome is something that impacts your work too, perhaps you’d like to join us. There are a few places left and if you book before 30th September you can get the early bird price (£325/$425). For more information on the course see the Overcoming Imposter Syndrome Course Overview and to book your place visit the Overcoming Imposter Syndrome Course Booking Form.

The post Overcoming Imposter Syndrome appeared first on Jo Alcock Consulting.

The recording is available directly from Soundcloud or embedded below:

We discussed all sorts of things including:

• My career history (including roles in public and academic libraries, and my research post)
• Projects I’ve worked on that make me most proud and that I have enjoyed
• My current work (including training, coaching, and learning development)
• My voluntary experiences (including chairing committees and organising events)
• My experience with CILIP Fellowship (more to come on this in a future post – my application was unsuccessful but I learnt a lot from the process) and CILIP Chartership
• Learning to prioritise and say no to things
• My work on developing the Mindful Leadership for Women programme (and our first course on Overcoming Imposter Syndrome)
• My current focus on being rather than doing
• Learning about authenticity
• What does it mean to be a librarian?
• My ideal library train (including Ryan Reynolds and Wonderwoman, obviously)

I hope you enjoy the interview. You can subscribe to the podcast (via Soundcloud or using the RSS to add to your podcast software); Jo will be publishing new interviews on a weekly basis. I’m really looking forward to listening to the other ones.

Related links

Blog posts about my career

• Joeyanne Librarian
• Librarian without a library
• What do I do?
• Career (and life) planning
• A new chapter
• Librarian without an organisation
• Freelancing – six months in
• Lessons from my first year of self employment

Conference planning experience

• SLA 2017 Conference Vlog and Reflections
• 10 Tips for Conference and Event Planning

Mindful Leadership for Women

• Mindful Leadership for Women Programme
• Overcoming Imposter Syndrome Online Course (and booking form)

The L Word

• What makes a librarian a librarian?
• Am I a librarian?

The post Librarians With Lives Podcast Interview appeared first on Jo Alcock Consulting.

The role of Conference Planner is well suited to my skill set in terms of event planning and organisation, communication skills (mostly online communication but lots of it needed), and hosting and moderating events. I learnt a lot about working with organisations and other conference planners to organise larger events (the conference had around 1500 attendees), as well as learning about SLA as an organisation. It was a useful and enjoyable experience, and I was in my element at the conference (I’m so much more comfortable when I have a role to play!). In order to share my experience and support others who take on this or similar roles in future, I’ve listed a few key things I’ve learnt from this experience, and other experiences of event organisation. These are mostly focused on before the event as this is when the bulk of work happens, but there’s also some for during and after too.

1. Pay attention to the conference themes
   Conferences usually have a specific theme or a series of sub-themes. Deciding on these is usually a collaborative effort, and in my case we had a physical meeting at last year’s conference to discuss the intended content focus (though sometimes it’s set before the planners are involved). Once the themes are defined, it was then up to us as conference planners to consider how our unit would support that. Fortunately for me, leadership was one of the themes of the conference so the Leadership and Management Division was well placed to support that theme. As you are working on shaping the programme, it’s worth checking back to ensure you are sticking to the vision and theme of the event. Of course sometimes you want to have a session or two that are a bit different, but in general you should be using the themes as a guide to the content focus.
2. Always give yourself plenty of time (at every planning stage!)
   A year or more might seem like a long time to plan a conference, but there is so much to it – even when you’re only looking at one part of the event. All events are different, but follow a similar process. The first stage will usually be the logistics of the event (dates, venue, capacity etc.) and shortly after the focus will be on the content themes. Then you’ll start to sketch out the sessions, and either invite proposals or approach potential speakers/facilitators. There’s likely to be key cut off points for proposals and final details of each session. My experience taught me to have all this information ready in advance of the deadline and give myself an internal earlier deadline for each stage which incorporated a buffer of a week or two to account for delays. This deadline (the earlier one) was the one I shared with people I needed information from to give myself time to bring the information together, and also allow for delays on receiving the information. I almost always needed some of this extra time but it meant I was never late for the actual submission, so I’d recommend working on this basis.
3. Think about variety and different needs
   As a conference planner, the role you have represents a large number of different people with varying needs. You will of course have some form of bias based on your own interests and approaches, but it’s important to try to consider different preferences too. One way to do this is to ask for suggestions from potential attendees, or just pass your ideas by other people to see what they think and if they have any suggestions for adding or amending anything. Be ready for challenges, and embrace them – the programme is there for the attendees, and some of them may be very different to you. Don’t be afraid to try new things out.
4. Consider ways to facilitate conversation between attendees
   The content of a conference is of course important, but the conversations are too, and as a conference planner I feel it’s important to try to set up spaces to encourage conversation. I tried to do this within some of the sessions I organised this year and the feedback was positive (I led a session on leadership challenges for example, and the content and discussion was determined by the participants). It’s great to have experts share their wisdom and experience, but there’s a lot to be learnt from the wisdom and experiences of the conference attendees too so I think it’s important to make the most of this and create opportunities for people to connect, whether that be within the sessions or outside of the formal sessions (through socials and during breaks/lunch).
5. Communicate regularly (with all stakeholders)
   You may be sensing a theme in terms of communication! Most of my time was taken up with communication rather than planning (the planning is the more straight forward bit that happens between the conversations!). It will be different for each event, but I don’t think you can do enough communicating. For SLA I was in regular communication with my contact on the Conference Advisory Committee, the Leadership and Management Board, each of the potential speakers, SLA themselves, and people who were helping with the planning. Keeping everyone informed helped ensure we all knew what was happening and nothing fell down the cracks!
6. Accept help when offered
   I was very fortunate to be working with a fantastic group of people in the Leadership and Management Division. Some of them offered to support me by helpintg with some of the tasks that were part of my role. The Director of Communications for example was a fantastic source of support in terms of promotion (more on that later), one of the board had previous experience with one of our events so took responsibility for that, and next year’s conference planner was an incredible source of support during the conference (along with other board members who helped out too). Initially I felt guilty accepting their help, but I soon realised that they were offering because they wanted to help, and that it was a win-win situation all round.
7. Promote the programme
   We had so many activities planned to promote the conference programme, though it still didn’t feel like enough as we knew some people weren’t aware of the programme. Partly this is likely to be a case of information overload, and I’m not suggesting you contribute more to that than you need to, but make sure you have utilised each of the relevant channels to promote your programme – things like websites, blog posts, webinars, flyers, social media, etc. One thing that I think worked well for us (it certainly made things easier for myself and the Director of Communications anyway!) was to have a set of interview questions to ask each of the presenters to answer in relation to their session. Some of the information I adapted from the session blurb, and the rest we did an interview style (by me emailing the questions and them replying to each). Hopefully this was easy for the presenters to answer, and beneficial to those wanting to know more about the session and the presenter.
8. Be present
   As the conference planner, it can be all too easy to be so focused on the behind the scenes activities that you don’t get to be part of the programme. I’d urge you if you can to be part of as much of the programme as possible. You’ll obviously have some things you need to do during the event that will take your attention away from that (setting up spaces, looking after speakers, checking people are arround to cover roles you need covering etc.) but make sure to do what you can to be present during the programme (and at the exhibition if applicable). This will not only be rewarding to see what you have worked on come into fruition (and especially gratifying when people enjoy it and thank you for your part in making it happen), but it also helps you consider what worked well and what didn’t work so well from your own perspective. This will help not only you for future, but also future planners who can learn from your experience.
9. Collect feedback
   I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t do this for SLA, and I really regret it. In previous events I’ve tended to collect feedback electronically after the event (by sending email invites out to a Surveymonkey survey), so I didn’t consider the fact that this time I wouldn’t know who had attended our sessions (unless I had asked people to share their names/email address and I didn’t do that either!). I did a headcount so know how many people came to each, but other than the anecdotal feedback at the time and some emails since, I don’t know what people thought. Fortunately next year’s planner is a lot more organised and shared a survey to capture some of the feedback and ideas for next year. I’d definitely recommend thinking how you will collect this information (which I’m usually pretty good at being a natural evaluator!).
10. Share your experience
    Linked to the above in terms of sharing feedback, but more specifically in terms of supporting future event planners, it’s helpful to share your experience and tips and advice. In the past I’ve usually done this by sharing notes or a report with the committee I’ve been working with, or some sort of handover to the person taking responsibility for the next event. This time I’ve chatted to the conference planner and have shared more publicly through this blog post – I’ll be making sure to share this blog post with some of the people I know will be planning next year’s conference.

Do you have any further tips and advice for people planning conferences? Please add them in the comments if so. 

The post 10 Tips for Conference and Event Planning appeared first on Jo Alcock Consulting.

This year I was conference planner for the Leadership and Management Division (LMD). A lot of my time at the conference therefore was taken up with LMD activities such as moderating sessions and manning our stand in the exhibition. I really enjoyed the role and will share more about it in an upcoming post (along with some tips and advice for others doing similar roles). I wanted to record some of my reflections from the conference whilst I was there so I did some vlogging whilst I was at the conference (embedded below or direct link):

A few post-conference reflections:

Map out your schedule, but be willing to be flexible
I used the SLA Conference app to roughly plan my schedule beforehand, but I didn’t fill my schedule with too much and had some slots with a few options so I could see what I felt like on the day. I made sure to put my formal conference commitments in (the LMD sessions and my timeslots manning the kiosk), but other than that I stayed fairly flexible. This meant I could take advantage of new things I hadn’t spotted, or take time out when I needed to recharge without feeling like I’d be missing out on too much! One event I wasn’t aware of before the conference was a social for the Association of Independent Information Professionals, which I went along to and had a fantastic time; I met some great people and had some fascinating conversations.

We’re all different; something that might be incredibly popular with others might not be your thing
One of the sessions I was keen to attend for personal interest was a session on leadership run by one of the other units. The topic and speaker seemed really interesting, so I had fairly high expectations. Unfortunately, it wasn’t what I was expecting and I didn’t end up staying for the full session (I saw tweets from another session at the same time which sounded much more my sort of thing so I switched to that one). I felt a bit disappointed but from the tweets and conversations I had later, some people absolutely loved the session I didn’t like. This was a really useful reminder for me that we’re all different and have different preferences for style and content of conference sessions. This is really helpful for me to remember in my own work as a presenter and workshop facilitator as I’m aware my approach won’t appeal to everyone (and that’s OK, I just need to make sure I’m clear at the outset so people know what to expect).

Educational sessions can be great, but conversations can be even better
Some of the best parts of the conference for me were the people I met and the conversations I had – in the exhibition hall, before and after sessions with people I ended up sitting next to, and at social events. The content of a conference is of course important, but the conversations are too.

Spend your time (and energy) wisely
I mentioned before that I switched sessions when one I attended wasn’t floating my boat and I spotted one on Twitter that seemed more appealing. I also left one early to take a walk and clear my head. Plus one of the evenings this year I didn’t attend any of the socials and went out for dinner with my partner and then went to bed early to get some rest. Recharging is really important for me. I love conferences but they are mentally exhausting and in order to get the most out of them I need to pay attention to my needs, which sometimes means switching sessions, skipping sessions, going for a walk, or hiding out in my hotel room for a little while. I’m also starting to find vlogging useful for this as it aids my reflection and helps me record thoughts before I move on to the next thing.

Librarians know how to conference and are happy to welcome others
This is the first time I’ve attended a conference with my partner (a non-librarian). Because we were turning it into a holiday, it made more sense for him to come out with me, but I was apprehensive about how this might work during the conference. In practice, it worked very well. We spent our days mostly separately (myself at the conference; my partner exploring the area and planning the rest of our time from the comfort of our hotel room), then spent our evenings together. Most (if not all) the social events at SLA are open to family so I got tickets for him to attend with me. Others had their partners too, so he wasn’t the only one, and he was welcomed with open arms by everyone he spoke to. Obviously, being in a relationship with a librarian for 14 years means he knows a bit about the sector, but he was also able to bring his own experiences to the conversation and of course not all conference conversations are work-based anyway, especially not at the socials. He ended up volunteering his video skills to record and edit an interview for the LMD division too, which gave him something else to do during the conference. He was so impressed with the friendly, welcoming nature of the events he attended and his conclusion was, “Librarians really do know how to conference”

SLA 2017 was an excellent event and I’m really glad I was able to attend. Thanks to the Leadership and Management division for supporting my attendance.

The post SLA 2017 Conference Vlog and Reflections appeared first on Jo Alcock Consulting.

Time is precious

Having an hourly rate rather than an annual salary has, for me, made me much more conscious of how I am spending each day. I’ve always been someone who tends to spend a long time on each piece of work until it’s as good as I can get it, but I often don’t have the luxury of that. This sometimes leads me to overwork and give up my ‘free time’, and has been something common to all my work. Now that there’s only me in control of my workload I’ve been learning how to manage it better and make the most of both my time and my clients’ time (often they want something sooner and cheaper than something that will take a long time to make a little bit better). I’ve also been thinking more carefully about how I spend my time when I’m not working. Time with people I love is worth so much to me, but time spent on errands or tasks done to save a few pounds isn’t worth a lot to me, so I’m able to make much more informed decisions. I’m still learning, and sometimes struggle to spend time doing things for myself without feeling guilty, but I’m getting much better and the self-employment mindset has definitely helped me re-assess the value of my time.

Money isn’t everything

I’m fortunate to have had some great paid work this year and I’ve had enough money to live the life I want to live. We have used some savings for a big holiday recently (we got married in Las Vegas and had a honeymoon in Orlando), so we’re trying to rebuild some of the buffer back up, but we don’t need a lot of money for our lifestyle. So far I’ve been able to assess work on its merits without considering the money too much – I’ve taken on some voluntary roles, and I’ve turned down some paid work. My motivation for being self-employed isn’t about making money; it’s about doing work I love. I know there is value in my skillset and the work I do, and I know my work can bring huge positive changes to the organisations and individuals I work with. I charge accordingly, and those who see the value are happy to pay for my work. Money is the basis of payment, but it’s not the basis of the working relationship – it’s how the work happens but isn’t why the work happens. I’m loving learning more about who I align with and can bring the most value to, and how I can achieve that.

Your ‘organisation’ is you

I love this. I’ve been told it can be scary for some people as they worry about ‘being on’ all the time and having to be presentable and represent themselves as their business accurately at all times. For me it’s totally librating. I am my business, so whoever I am and whoever I become defines my work and my business. Yes, I’m not great in the early morning. So I don’t tend to do work in an early morning. I love to talk and share experiences. So my work reflects that both in the sort of work I do and the way I do it. I’m fairly informal and easy-going in my nature, but I’m respectful with time commitments. So the way I facilitate my workshops and coaching reflects that; I’m flexible during the workshop or coaching session, but will always finish on time. The Jo you see at a conference is the same Jo you speak to on social media, or over the phone, or in person. I’m me and my business is me. It fits perfectly with my values of authenticity and openness and I love it.

Balance is essential

Of course if the business is me, where does time away from the business happen? This is a common complaint of those who are self-employed as they struggle to switch off, and I get it. There are some times where I really struggle to stop working or at least thinking about work. Fortunately I have some fantastic family and friends, and spending time with them takes me away from that and helps me live more in the moment. ‘Balance’ is a key theme for me this year, and I’ve been trying to achieve more balance on a daily and weekly basis (rather than working all hours for a couple of weeks and then spending the next week sleeping and catching up with people you haven’t spoken to). It’s a work in progress, but most of the time it’s a lot better than it was. I don’t have a routine, but that suits me fine as every day, and week, is different. I’m far more aware of what I need, so I pay attention to that and do what I can to do what I need to do when I need to do it.

What’s next?

I’m certainly enjoying being self-employed and am in no rush to change that (despite a brief pondering about working in Lush over the Christmas period when I saw a flyer in their store recently!). I’m planning to focus more on the things I enjoy the most at the moment (specifically coaching and facilitating learning experiences), and have been integrating elements of these into my work as well as developing new opportunities such as the Mindful Leadership for Women programme. I will be continuing to develop my skills and share my experiences to help others, both through the work I do and through conversation or blog posts. I’ll be continuing to listen to others and see how I can help them achieve their goals.

I still love my initial tagline of ‘helping people develop’ but I think I’m focusing more now on ‘helping people define and work towards their personal and professional goals’. Let’s see how the next year goes!

The post Lessons from my first year of self-employment appeared first on Jo Alcock Consulting.

Values 

Training

Coaching

Value of open communication

Bringing together different perspectives

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3 

I thoroughly enjoyed UKSG conference this year, and hope to be able to attend again. I find it incredibly inspirational and always come away with lots of ideas of what I can do next to take things forward (for those who attended my values session you know this will float my boat as growth is one of my values!). I’ve already spent some of my journey home planning some ideas for training materials I’d like to develop and videos I’d like to create and am definitely leaving feeling invigorated and motivated (I will be needing to catch up on lots of sleep this weekend too though!). Thanks to everyone involved in making UKSG Conference so great – organisers, sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, and attendees. I hope to be back next year

The post UKSG Conference 2017 appeared first on Jo Alcock Consulting.

I looked into a number of different software options (including Adobe Spark which is a free web-based tool and great for short videos to get a message across quickly and easily). I planned my videos and designed and recorded one in Adobe Spark*. It was fine, but didn’t have the customisation options I had hoped. I looked into a few other options and decided to create my own using iMovie. I have some experience of using this to edit webinar recordings for JUSP (which I was dreading at the time as it was totally new to me but I really enjoyed doing it!). For the research method videos I decided to create the visual elements in Keynote, export as images, record the narration directly in iMovie, and combine with the music. I then exported the video and uploaded to YouTube and added captioning in within YouTube. There were a few hiccups along the way, but I’m pretty happy with the end result and learnt a lot during the process.

Each video includes information on what the research method is, when it can be used, some examples, and tips for using the research method yourself.

The videos are now available and embedded below:

Focus groups

Link to view focus groups video in YouTube

Surveys

Link to view surveys video in YouTube

These will be used in a CILIP Library and Information Research Group course on the CILIP VLE.

I really enjoyed creating these so now that I have developed a system for planning and developing content, I’m in the process of making some more. I’ll be sure to share on the blog when they’re available, or you can subscribe to my YouTube channel to receive notifications when new content is added (I’m hoping to vlog at the UKSG conference next week so that’s likely to be my next video).

*Link to Adobe Spark version – https://spark.adobe.com/video/K8Vv3QsS8jpKy

The post Research methods videos – focus groups and surveys appeared first on Jo Alcock Consulting.

Over the last few years I’ve learnt a bit about the chocolate preferences of librarians through the activities in my focus group workshops – for anyone who is interested, the findings suggest that Cadburys Roses aren’t so popular when compared to Cadbury Heroes or Celebrations; Bounty are the marmite of the chocolate world (either loved or hated by most people); and Creme Egg Twisted are generally a highlight. Perhaps one day I’ll share more in-depth findings from the research activities into chocolate preferences that I’ve completed during my focus group workshops. For now though, it’s time to share the findings of a slightly broader research question about the snack preferences of librarians which I conducted as part of my preparation for my statistics workshop.

I was intrigued to know more about the snack preferences of those in the library and information sector (I’ll be referring to these as ‘librarians’ but I’m using this as an inclusive term). I had a few key research questions:

• What type of snacks do librarians enjoy?
• What snacks are most popular with librarians?
• Do librarians in different sectors have different snack preferences?

I chose to use an online survey to help me collect data towards my research questions. I set it up on SurveyMonkey and promoted it via Twitter:

Doing some highly important research into the snack preferences of librarians. Please help by completing my survey https://t.co/8pcgsPgzB7

— Jo Alcock (@joeyanne) November 20, 2016

As you can see, a number of people helped spread the word by retweeting the link to the survey. The survey was open for around 48hrs from 20th November to 22nd November 2016. I then exported the data to Excel and had a thoroughly enjoyable train journey or two analysing the data (yes I really do love this sort of thing!).

Time for some data analysis on an early morning train journey. Yes, it’s the librarian snack preferences survey #veryimportantresearch pic.twitter.com/jku2s7Magv

— Jo Alcock (@joeyanne) November 22, 2016

Respondents

There were 279 respondents to the survey (which considering the time it was open and how little it was promoted makes me think librarians are either very generous with their time or are really passionate about snacks!). The breakdown of respondents by sector and by country is shown below:

Librarian snack preferences – respondents by sector

Librarian snack preferences – respondents by country

Due to the sampling methods used (convenience sampling and snowball sampling) it’s not too surprising to see academic librarians as the most represented sector, and the UK as the most represented country, as I imagine many of my Twitter followers fit these demographics as that’s my background. It was pleasing to have respondents from so many other countries – amazing the reach you can get in such a short space of time thanks to social media (a definite advantage to this sampling method).

What types of snacks do librarians enjoy?

I chose to ask a multiple choice question to address this research question, with the following options:

• Cake
• Biscuits/cookies**
• Crisps
• Sweets
• Chocolate

Respondents could select as many answers as applicable depending on which types of snacks they enjoy.

As can be seen from the pictogram below, many respondents enjoyed chocolate, biscuits/cookies, cake, and crisps. Sweets were a little less popular with just under half of the respondents enjoying sweets.

Librarian snack preferences – snacks enjoyed

What snacks are most popular with librarians?

I used a similar question to the previous one to establish the most popular snacks, but this time respondents could only select one answer (to represent their favourite). I used this approach and the same responses to see if the patterns showed a similar trend for the types of snacks enjoyed and loved or if some snacks are enjoyed but rarely loved.

As you can see from the bar chart below, there is a slight shift from the pattern in the previous chart showing there are some snacks that are liked but not loved (sweets) and some snacks that people tend to love (perhaps more than you might expect given the similar numbers in the last question).

Librarian snack preferences – favourite snacks

Do librarians in different sectors have different snack preferences?

In order to answer this question I combined the responses to the question about favourite snacks with the demographic information about respondents’ sectors. I was able to do this fairly easily in SurveyMonkey to produce the following stacked bar chart:

Librarian snack preferences – favourite snack by sector

As you can see, there does appear to be some variance in the preferences. The data suggest public librarians seem to have a greater preference for cake, health librarians have a greater preference for chocolate, and school librarians have a greater preference for biscuits/cookies. However, remember the sample sizes for some of these groups is small.

Conclusions

The survey data suggest librarians love snacks, but that they’re far more likely to be interested in chocolate, crisps, biscuits/cookies, and cake than they are sweets (which from a personal perspective is excellent as it means more sweets for me!).

As with all research, there are some caveats that need to be taken into consideration, particularly around the methodology and sampling. However, the findings offer an interesting insight into the snack preferences of librarians that I hope will be useful for those planning events for librarians which would benefit from snacks.

I hope you enjoyed reading about this research and took it in the spirit intended (with a large dose of silliness). If you’re interested in learning more about the methods and techniques used to collect, analyse and present statistical data and would be interested in attending a workshop on this, please see more information in my statistics workshop flyer, and feel free to contact me.

*Not actually important research at all. A lot of fun though.

**I thought I was being inclusive by adding cookies as an alternative term for biscuits but totally forgot to add chips for crisps and candy for sweets – oops.

The post Librarian snack preferences appeared first on Jo Alcock Consulting.