Death, Romance and the Landscape

Time Passing

This piece is a rather odd collection of thoughts. As a jigsaw of unintended connections, it works as a semi coherent whole; from chance encounters with Tower Hamlets cemetery, various books on forests and a romantic landscape exhibition at the weekend. Wild wooded nature is the theme of all these and I've been thinking about how woodlands have been perceived by people at different times. There is a large physical difference between a dilapidated Victorian cemetery, South German primeval native forest, and sketches of pastoral fantasies. However they in turn have provided us, and continue to provide us, with pleasure, escape and a way of passing the time.

Adding a LinkedIn Button to Outlook Signature

If you are a regular user of LinkedIn, you may want to encourage your clients and contacts to visit your profile. An easy way of doing this is to add a button to your email* so recipients can click straight through to it. In a meeting I was asked to outline how to do this, so thought I'd post it here too.

Only set up this feature if your profile is complete, up to date and regularly updated.

First find the web address for your LinkedIn public profile. This should be a link underneath your photo on your profile page. If in doubt click on it and it should take you to your page as seen by your contacts. It should look something like uk.linkedin.com/in/yournameinfullhere/.

Go to Outlook and open a new email. Click on the Signature button and then Signatures…

Your existing signature will come up. Take this opportunity to update, amend or make any necessary changes to the original text.

Copy and paste the image below into the signature box under your contact details.





Click once on the image to activate it and then click on the hypertext icon – the globe with chain link to the far right. Return to your public profile on LinkedIn and copy your [uk.linkedin.com/in/yournameinfullhere/] link, then paste it into the address box. Click ok. 

Click ok again and the signature box should disappear.

To test whether the link is active, create a new email and send to yourself. When you click on the image box, you should go straight to your LinkedIn public profile. 

Easy.

*I use Microsoft Outlook 2010.

Effective Networking: From the recycling pile

Useful Connections

It's that time of year. The sunshine is finally strong enough to reach into the farthest recesses of the dusty bankers boxes on my office bookshelves. Looking at them blinking in the sun I realised I hadn't touched them in years. Despite a few office moves they have followed me around, so this morning I called their bluff and sorted them out ferociously. For the most part they contained old budget figures, meeting minutes, course notes, and various suppliers catalogues which I can now view online so my recycle bin is now bulging.

I thought I'd recycle some of the course notes in a different way, with one set from 2004 striking me as still very relevant and interesting. This piece uses 'Top 10 tips for effective networking' which was presented by Lesley Robinson (Oct 2004). Amazingly I still vaguely remember the seminar, partly because of the anticipative terror I experienced by the thought of having to actually talk with a large number strangers. As I recall we listened to her talk, then put her ideas into practice and it worked really well.

Twenty Years as a Law Librarian - Professional Bodies

This is the third in this series of twenty years in law librarianship. I already have covered technology and communications, both of which are fairly uncontroversial. This one is about librarianship's changing professional bodies, which made up part of my report's section on ‘professional awareness’, and could be problematic.



Our Professional Future 1998

Twenty years ago the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals was the Library Association. My Professional Development Report provides an excellent snapshot of where I was in 1999 and was submitted to prove my professional worthiness to become an Associate Member of the LA. At the time of writing it, the profession was undergoing momentous change, and they were consulting on the proposed merger with the Institute of Information Scientists (IIS). I wrote,