Exercise 14 - Inviting Others to Comment and Review

I was VERY late with this having been fatally distracted by the school holidays. I posted an urgent request on the class forum but I fear it is all too late.  Therefore I have asked some friends (not from TAFE) to review my blog in the meantime.

I invited Kirsty Fikkers, Tamsin Salehian and Rachel Urwin to the blog.

Exercise 9 - Social Media & Me

I am a very sparse user of social media.  I have firmly resisted joining Facebook as I’ve absolutely no desire to share the minutiae of my daily life with the world.  Nor, rather meanly (I admit), do I wish to be updated with the boring daily details that I know my siblings post – enough is enough in my books.  I still prefer one on one conversations where details are shared between two (even if that does sometimes take place by text rather than phone).  

I’ve also resisted Facebook and the like as I am unwilling to share (or have shared) tagged photos of my children on the internet.  As they age, I know the time is coming when they will establish their own social media profiles, however, I think they have the right to create (and curate) these profiles for themselves.  They don’t need baby and childhood photos preserved in eternity for the world to view – they are more than capable of creating their own embarrassment without me starting it for them!     

I do however use the review functions of social media – for example I use and contribute to TripAdvisor.  I find this type of site very useful to filter and screen for bad experiences when booking accommodation in places I have never visited.  I also know its power – as I have a sibling who is in the restaurant trade and am often hearing of the consequences of a bad review, and the steps restaurants will undertake to mollify an unhappy patron BEFORE a negative review is posted.

I also have a LinkedIn profile, but only because a sibling bullied me into it.  I was informed – in no uncertain terms - that it was necessary if I wanted to be gainfully employed in the modern world that I have an online presence a potential employer could search, rather than being invisible!!  We compromised at LinkedIn as it is professional rather than personal.  Although I do admit that I rarely look at it, and have really only tinkered around the edges of the profile that I established when I started the LIS course in 2014…

Exercise 2 - Blogs

For this exercise I have chosen to review a post on the blog entitled Librarian in Black.  It can be found at http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/memoryloss/

This blog has been written by Sarah Houghton since 2003.  Sarah is currently the Director for the San Rafael Public Library in California but she writes the blog “Librarian in Black” independently of her work.

The latest post is dated July 25, 2016 and deals with the interesting and important topic of providing library services to people with memory loss, dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease.  The need to understand this topic is increasing in the western world where populations are aging, and in Sarah’s location (Marim County, CA) the median age of the population is 45.5 years – 8 years older than the US median, and almost 10 years older than the Californian median age. 

Sarah’s experience as a member of the San Rafael Leadership Group had highlighted to her the particular and increasing needs of her local community and in response she organized training for all library staff in Marim County from the Alzheimer’s Association and the local Senior Access Association.  The blog post was created as a summation of the training and some of the experiences in Sarah’s library.

The blog is neatly divided into sections for easy accessibility:

• How do memory disorders usually make themselves visible?
• How might these memory disorders present in a library environment?
• How might these memory disorders present in a library environment?
• What are people with memory disorders experiencing?
• What is the most important thing to do when working with someone with a memory disorder?
• Communicating with someone with an impacted memory can be very frustrating. What should I do and not do?
• What should I do if I repeatedly see an adult alone in the library who seems to have some kind of memory disorder and who cannot take care of himself or herself?
• What should I do if I repeatedly see an adult alone in the library who seems to have some kind of memory disorder and who cannot take care of himself or herself?
• Resources.

I found the strategies discussed in the blog post to be very useful and practical.  The simple technique of steering the person to a quieter area with fewer distractions, and slowly providing simple instructions one and a time can help to at least improve the quality of communication between the person and the librarian providing services. 

The idea of offering the library as a site for a support group is also a great incentive to extend the community services and level of engagement a library can provide. 

I would thoroughly recommend reading this blog post, as supporting persons with memory loss is becoming more frequent both in our personal and professional lives.