Advocacy is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. I work in cataloguing and people have been prophesying the doom of my particular area of the profession for years. I naturally think that this is a huge mistake. I can see libraries all over the world getting rid of their cataloguing departments and downloading records from a central agency. There are too many things wrong with this to go into but I also believe that libraries will live to regret it and bring the departments back. Unfortunately by this time the skills may have been damaged, if not completely lost. Even in my library course, which has an entire module devoted to cataloguing and classification, it seems as though people treat it as more of a chore than a core element of the profession. For anyone who is interested in this I recommend that you read the High Visibility Cataloguing blog.
I have also recently been involved in some attempted advocacy for the department at work but it's not going well. It seems to be only the preserve of the few rather than the many, surely this should be the other way around? Still, I will keep trying since I am nothing if not persistent!
Publishing is a definite future goal for me but right now I just don't have the time/energy. I am about to start work on my MSc dissertation and I've been told by more than one person that it has some potential. I have published some smaller work, see my previous post, but hope to do something bigger in the future. For the moment though I have to prioritise and that means the dreaded dissertation!
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