First and foremost, thank you FIL for
accepting me onto the committee at the conference in June, I’m looking forward
to getting involved now summer is almost in the rear view mirror (having left a
gaping wound in my annual leave!).
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For my first ever blog post (ever) I have been asked to write a
biography to introduce myself. This involves enlarging my digital
footprint, previously weighing in at a measly 2 out of a possible 60, as I
currently fall into the ‘no engagement with social media, product reviews,
comments, blogs’ category and am amongst the diminishing number of people in the UK who do
not use internet on their smartphone. Why? I’m not a dinosaur (honestly!); I
see its benefits (I do!). However, there is no straightforward answer to that
question. I’ll settle with, for the moment at least, perhaps the
cyber-social-banter-bug has not bitten my proverbial as yet; perhaps blogging
for FIL this week will stimulate the desire to nurture my, hitherto unreleased,
inner cyber-social-banter-blogger. Alternatively, perhaps FIL will be so
scarred the committee will refrain from asking me to blog ever
again; which will, in due course, scar me from ever attempting to blog ever again!
(If you’re seeing this, it can’t be that bad, though I may of course, have been
asked to edit. ;)
Anyway, to return to the point of this
post (if I ever really started it to begin with).…My name is Claudia Howard, my
age will be admitted if you ask directly in person, I come from a family
hotel business background, which made for an interesting/amusing/ enlightening/some
may say crazy upbringing (which could go some way towards explaining the tone
of this blog post).
I began academic ‘stuff’ as a mature student
(of technical age, not mind and spirit – never mind and spirit!) inspired by a
visit to the land down under, the books placed into my hands on the way, and
the ones that fell into my lap on my return to the land of the dragon (erm,
Wales). Which books/authors? Paolo Coelho, Kahlil Gibran, Hemmingway, Huxley, Kerouac, a
number of Herman Hesse’s books, including Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game and Siddhartha, Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, Hobbes’
Leviathan, Plato’s Republic, the list goes on...
The only way forward to feed the knowledge was English literature
and its broad scope of, amongst other things, politics, philosophy, theology,
and sociology. It consumed and fed me simultaneously for four and a half years
– my undergrad unearthed a love for Renaissance literature and philosophy, and
before I knew it I was trundling down the road of a Master’s degree.
With a career goal absent from my mind when
choosing degree courses (OK, truth is I couldn’t get a job I wanted with
English degrees, not for lack of trying!), I turned my focus towards a
Postgraduate Diploma in Business with Consumer Psychology (still with no career
goal in mind). As a result, I was appointed Project Officer for the North Wales
Libraries Partnership (NWLP; funded by the Welsh Government) in 2008. My remit
expanded in 2010, and I am currently the NWLP Partnership Support Officer. Key
objectives of my role include:
-
Expanding LINC y Gogledd
the regional cross-sector ILL consortium (partners lend books for free; more
about LINC in my next FIL blog post);
-
Delivering training, handling marketing
elements, management research (lots of stats!);
- Identifying
and delivering strategic and developmental objectives for the NWLP and LINC and
working on collaborative initiatives with a number of varied cross-sector partners.
I am currently Chair of the
LINC Group, a member of the NWLP Executive Committee, Wales’ National Libraries
Marketing Group, the North and Mid Wales Reaching Wider Regional Operations
Group, and, perhaps somewhat randomly for a semi-librarian (end of MSc in
sight!), the Welsh Government Pollinators Taskforce (stems – no pun intended –
from the North Wales Libraries and Planting for Pollinators project in 2013), and, now, the FIL Committee. 
Outside the obvious (e.g. family, friends,
pets, good food, Lindt chocolate, hot weather, travelling and shoes), what do I
love? To name but a few: Adrenalin. Skydiving. Skiing. Music, listening to it,
making it, playing it on the harmonica/attempting to play it on the keyboard.
Outdoors stuff. Bees, bugs and butterflies. Big cats. Nice aftershave. Qigong.
Thinking. Writing poetry when I get time. Organisation. Paradise Lost. Shakespeare, Dickens,
Hesse. Good art! Lost, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, West Wing, Game of
Thrones, Walking Dead (too many to mention, keep ‘em coming!). Bluestone 42,
Plebs, Bad Education, Freshers, Siblings (keep ‘em coming too!), Fawlty Towers
(home from home), Blackadder, Laurel and Hardy, Disney and Dreamworks… this
list could be endless so think that’s enough now! Probably enough six or so
paragraphs ago...
Signing out,
C. Howard
(this post has just grown my digital footprint by about 10
feet!)
Photo Credits:
Panther: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/bruce_mcadam/2860512301/">Hello, I am Bruce</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">cc</a>
Butterfly: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisbradbury/2745513954/">Chris@184</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">cc</a>
Diversion: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/pasotraspaso/4934310464/">pasotraspaso</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">cc</a>
| Ayre's Rock: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/karen_mcallister_photography/3868893082/">Mrs Mac2007</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">cc</a> | ||||
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