Thing 3 (Part 3) : Work and play : Never the twain shall meet?

I don't make any attempt to separate the professional and personal sides of my life. I take the view that as a whole person, all the parts are the sum of the whole, and I would find it difficult to keep them completely separate.  Unless you do succeed in keeping the different parts of life firmly in their boxes, one effect of social media is to blur the boundaries. Colleagues have no doubt recently discovered things about me they might not have guessed, and I've certainly had new light shed on the working lives of some friends and family which I would not have known much about before. I try to behave online in the same way I do in real life, which mainly means not swearing in public, and not necessarily sharing political and religious opinions with all comers (but I do have some and they are not all secret!)

As one whose career began in the days when The Librarian was a distant figure who swept past you in the corridor without apparently knowing your name, I rather like the "levelling" aspect of social media: some senior figures in the profession engage readily with those at the beginning of their careers. That's not without its dangers, particularly within an institution: imagine having to sack someone who was a Facebook friend, or a disciplinary issue with someone you have been chatting to on Twitter! Could social media distort a recruitment process? Make difficult decisions at work more difficult?  I'm not in a position of having to supervise staff much now (been there!), but I can see the potential pitfalls.

My Facebook page is fairly bland: I took the opportunity of the recent profile changes to remove educational details, &c., because I was getting some pretty silly targeted advertising, but it wouldn't be hard to work out where I've been and what I've done.  For sentimental reasons, I'm clinging to my film camera - ah, those far-off days twiddling things in liquid and the magic of watching the picture slowly appearing on the film! I know this can't go on forever, I admire the photos which others share, but as I haven't yet succumbed to the digital age there are not many images of me out there. I suspect that a lot of the sensitivity around about Facebook is about photographs.

The Welsh-speaking world is quite small: we brush up against each other in more than one sphere and the idea of completely separating work and the rest of life is even more difficult among the Cymry Cymraeg, especially in smaller places - I bet anyone from Aberystwyth could tell you the religious affiliation of lots of people they know professionally, for instance. (Interestingly, sometimes this world does exist in a separate dimension: you might have a Welsh-speaking neighbour or colleague and never realise that within that Welsh world your neighbour is a famous poet or singer!) Other things can undermine any hope of separating life at work and life outside, too. If you have children, you are thrown together with other people who have children the same age (who could be colleagues, senior or junior, academic staff, or students). My comments refer to academic libraries, as that's where I am now, but for anyone working in a public library and living in the community they serve the boundary can be more of an issue, even without the additional social media factor.

Privacy is maintained by a certain amount of self-censorship, and I'm lucky enough to work somewhere where secrecy is not necessary. On the whole, I think I'm happy to stick with my mixed approach, while bearing in mind the things that might derail it.

Thing 3 (Part 1) : Online presence, branding and advertising

Thing 3 requires us to consider personal "branding" and reflect on our own online presence. On reading the cpd23 blogpost, my first thought was "oh no! I'm doing everything wrong!" - no consistency, no picture of me, multiple forms of name - in fact I can't condense it all into one post.

By happy coincidence, to break out of the library echo chamber for a moment, journalists have been having a similar conversation among themselves this week. It's inspired by the idea that Web 2.0 enables individuals to escape the corporate identity of their employers (which is why some don't like it), creating an identity of their own, or "brand", which in times of insecure employment may be very important.

The concept of "branding" provokes strong feelings. I enjoyed Tom Roper's blog comments (and found much I agreed with): or, for a laugh, look at this robust response to a student from Gene Weingarten. At the same time, I do really like the careful way Jo Alcock has approached her online presence, with the purple flower theme across different platforms, and her consistent name use.

I've mainly been a public sector person, but my mother worked in the strange nicotine-fuelled hothouse world of advertising in the 1950s/1960s - real life "Mad Men" - so I've always been aware of some of the tricks (hence my dollop of cynicism - I can spot a publicity puff a mile off), understanding from an early age that the point is to promote and sell the product. 1950s jingles and slogans did just that (some are still memorable and even still in use today), whereas later more indulgently arty ads seemed to be challenging the viewer to guess what the product was. No use, according to my mother, if you don't remember the name. Moral: a clear message with attractive packaging = sales.

I don't think of myself as marketing a product. I'm not planning to change my job, although in these turbulent times who knows what the future holds? I do however think that considering how we present ourselves online is important to us all. I'm going to skip the name thing for now, as "it's complicated" (mix of common names, doppelgangers,Welsh names, the Welsh language, and marriage). I did the "vanity" Google search using various versions of my name, the best results coming from "Helen + Price + Saunders". Adding "library" to this puts "The Sol and Helen Price Library" at the top - yay! A Helen Price Library!- with the next three hits being me, all from the library staff page at my place of work. Not everything about us on the web is within our control! I found one annoying thing, the ubiquitous http://www.192.com/ which pops up high on Google searches.You get a result for a name (in this case, just me), with partial postcode and town in 2002 (an out-of-date address for that year), and a long list of people I've never heard of allegedly living with me. Who are they? It was a tiny house! Everyone who ever lived in the house? The street? The whole company of saints? Apparently you can get yourself removed from this site, so that's on my "to do" list now. I also found something nice, a "thank you" on the website of Cymdeithas Melinau Cymru (The Welsh Mills Society), which I'd never seen before, which was lovely.

I treat all online communication as potentially open to the world. As I'm a bit late to all of this I haven't got as much to consider as some! I have never had a blog before; I do have a Twitter account, which is not locked down, and I'm happy to be followed by colleagues and anyone else. It's a mixture of personal and professional. I also have a Facebook account -  more privacy settings on that but I don't post much on it and there is nothing there which couldn't be read by anyone (not posted by me, anyway!) - and I'm registered with Plaxo (which I never remember to look at). I try to treat email in a fairly cautious way, as it only takes one click for someone to forward electronic communications far beyond their intended audience. If I really needed somewhere to express things I didn't want particular people to read, I would dig out my fountain pen and ink, revive my old diary, and use that - cold revenge is safer! Seriously, no potential employer is going to be thrilled to read lots of negative or incoherent stuff, so if you are job-hunting, tread carefully in the Web 2.0 world.