he tangata, he tangata, he tangata 

Acknowledge the past

Embrace the present

Advance the future 

1. Why did you sign up for the joint ALIA/QUT project?

After attending NLS4 in Melbourne, we were both inspired by Gill’s talk on ePortfolios. They sounded like something interesting to experiment with. One of our mentors had recently attended a PebblePad session that was held where we work. She was having fun with her ePortfolio, so we thought we’d like to try too.

2. What do you want to achieve as a member of the project?

Our current jobs are three-year graduate positions, and we need somewhere to keep a record of everything we are learning, keep track of thoughts and ideas and somewhere we can work collaboratively. This is what we are using our ePortfolio for and we hope to have lots of evidence of our learning available when we need it.

We also feel that it is important to embrace and use new technologies. Being part of the project allows us to gain practical experience in doing this and we are able to pass this knowledge onto others within our organisation.

3. How are you progressing and what are your experiences so far?

Our ePortfolios are progressing along nicely. We both have over one hundred assets and have worked out the best way to use ePortfolios to store/record our professional development as new librarians. We find that sometimes we will have a PebblePad blitz and use our ePortfolios a lot and other times other things get in the way and we don’t use them as much as we would like.

4. How have you used your ePortfolio (practical applications)?

We have used our ePortfolios in a number of different ways.

We currently use a blog to communicate and share thoughts/ideas and experiences with each other. We hope this will be a great record of our experiences as new Graduates and may even help to shape the direction of training programmes for future graduates within the University of Adelaide Library.

We have delivered a ‘show and tell’ session about ePortfolios and the project to our managers. We used our ePortfolios to create a webfolio which we used to drive and present this session.

We have also used webfolios to deliver an interim report to senior library staff. This allowed us to showcase the potential of ePortfolios within the workplace.

We store training sessions we have attended within our ePortfolios. This allows us to think about what we wanted to achieve from the training and reflect on what we did achieve. It is very easy to share this record with our managers and mentors. We have also found that the information stored in our ePortfolios to be very valuable when preparing for an annual staff review session.

We have also recently been developing training sessions to deliver to library users and have found our ePortfolios helpful for this, too. We can store ideas, links, drafts, notes, handouts, presentations, feedback and lots of other things we use and learn during the sessions. Our ePortfolios are part discussion space, part digital repository and part journal.

5. Almost 8 months have passed, what features of your eportfolio do you like the most and why?

There are many features about our ePortfolio which we like. We find that it is very easy to use and create professional looking documents (webfolios are one of our favourite features).

We find that sharing information with each other and our mentors is invaluable. It is great to have a place to store thoughts and ideas we have which we can revisit at a later date.

6. If you had to create an 'elevator pitch' aimed at fellow librarians re your ePortfolio and professional development, what would you say?

In keeping with the theme of the conference we see that ePortfolios are a great way to ‘acknowledge the past’, ‘embrace the present’ and ‘advance the future’.

Storing and recording professional development/knowledge/ideas that are occurring now will help us as we (hopefully) move from a Graduate to a professional position in the near future.

We also believe that by learning new technology and passing this knowledge onto others we are helping to advance the future for Libraries, librarians and professional development.

We encourage other Librarians to experiment and explore the wonderful worlds of ePortfolios.