The next step...

Woohoo! Really glad to have made it into double figures for CPD23 Things!! The organisers have been very generous in allowing time to reflect this year and this has been helpful in giving me a chance to keep up with this. I'm frankly pleased just to have kept this going - sometimes it has been difficult to find the time to blog, or there have been glitches with Blogger (while I'm on the subject, a big grrr to all of these adverts which keep cropping up!) and it would have been very easy to let this fall by the wayside.


The other minor cause for celebration is that I have found a potential mentor for Chartership - which, as luck would have it, is the subject matter of Thing 10. Having been in touch with several others from CILIP's mentor list without success, making an appointment is something of a breakthrough and I'll look forward to meeting them at the end of this month. This has also started me thinking about putting together a Personal Professional Development Plan (PPDP). The template for this is downloadable from the 'Five Steps to Chartership' section of the CILIP website and requires me to look at where my training needs are and how to address these. I'm also writing up my appraisal at the moment so it will be useful to work on both of these in conjunction with one another. 

Meanwhile, following a visit to the European Commission (pictured below) on Monday, it was interesting to read in CILIP's May Update about Partage Plus, a project the EC is spearheading to digitise thousands of Art Nouveau materials. 

The Berlaymont, headquarters of the European Commission, Brussels

In Brussels, Art Nouveau is everywhere and here are photos of another library building typical of this late 19th Century style. This was also an introduction to another type of library I had not encountered before, namely the Bank Library:

The National Bank of Belgium Library houses reference
materials on Finance, Economics and Monetary Policy

This is free for use by students and members
of many finance-based institutions in Belgium

It's worth noting, though that Art Nouveau is not the only type of architecture on display in Brussels. One of my favorite buildings, tucked away in a shopping arcade off the famous Grand-Place (and believed to have been designed by the same architect-sculptor, Jean Cosyn) was La Bellone - Maison du Spectacle. This too hosts a library, as well as a variety of performing arts and cultural exhibits:

La Bellone: This late baroque style building is protected  
by a glass cover, forming a courtyard for events and shows