Management related courses are generally monotonous. Our lecturer Jane Burns made it clear on the first day itself that she is going to make this course interesting but in her own way. So, the first assignment she comes up with is a group activity and that was “A Scavenger Hunt”. Which I believe was a brilliant idea to get to know your fellow classmates (Yes! It was an Ice-Breaker) and understand management process i.e., team goal, collaboration, teamwork, and most importantly communication. This course was a really new experience for me both from the learning point of view and performance wise. I learned that innovation requires collaboration, creativity especially during the synthesis of concepts for your topic or project.

The aim of this module is to enable students to develop their management skills on a number of levels. Jane has been consistent in helping students to develop their skills to write reflectively. This was done through reading material and encouraging student reflection. I am so glad that Jane arranged a lot of prestigious guest lecturers who shared knowledge and experience of their journey. To be honest, I had very minimal knowledge about librarians and libraries but, after listening to the guest speakers I realized managing library and people is not that easy. I never knew special librarians existed until Niamh O’Sullivan arrived as a guest lecturer and who is also a Special librarian.

Also, Jane told us a very important thing, ‘management professionals should always have contingency measures in different emergency and situation so that your task can be carried out smoothly”.

I believe this module will be useful throughout my degree and in my future professional and private life.

 

Reference:

https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/01435121011013421?fullSc=1

I really enjoyed all of our guest speakers coming in and talking to us about their experiences in and out of the classroom. One of such guests was Laura Rooney Ferris. She works for the Health Service Executive (HSE) as Systems Librarian and manager of Lenus, the Irish Health Research Repository. She has experience in Management, strategic development, information services and a lot more. She is one of the rarest librarians I have ever seen who has gone through a lot of transition in their career and what grabbed my attention is that she also worked as a web developer. Before being a librarian, she did a lot of other jobs too but those were not her field of interest. She never stopped until she found a job where her interest lies. She spiced up her career by learning web development and released her first website on 2014. I could never imagine a librarian who knows how to code and create a website. Her career versatility did surprise me.

Also, she is the producer and presenter of “Librarians Aloud Podcast” where librarians talk about their career paths, what they love about their profession and what is the future of Information Professionals. “Wow” that is again a new concept for me to imagine about librarians. These kinds of podcasts will help people seeking a career in this field. I was impacted by her innovative thinking and initiatives taken by her to evolve in this profession.

Each of the guest speakers silently left a message for us saying none of them saw themselves in the position they are in today 10 years ago and they were all so happy. Just because you don’t end up where you thought you would be doesn’t mean you failed, you just took another route.

Institutional Repositories(IR’s) are intended to be a showcase for the research output of an academic or research institution. IRs are mainly implemented by means of open source software and costs in establishing a repository are modest when compared with other library initiatives.

Generally, IR stakeholders are – Public, Authors, Institution, Researchers.

The main benefits of using IR are:

(1) To provide a showcase for scholarly output from an institution (e.g. facilitating increased visibility; generating indicators of academic quality).

(2) Improved dissemination of research output.

(3) The management of research (and research information).

(4) The long-term preservation of resources.

(5) Breaking down access barriers to content (i.e. reforming the scholarly communication system).

IR’s provide authors with a stable, secure and a professionally curated environment in which they can record, manage and store their digital research outputs and teaching materials. Once their preprint is made online, they can get a preliminary appraisal from peers as to whether his/her work is ready to be submitted to a journal. Preprints also attract the attention of editors.

However, many authors indicate that achieving these goals with the current repository systems is very problematic.

The negative aspect of using IR:

(1) There might be a gap between the specific needs of a university and the functionality provided by the system.

(2) The cost of the adaptation of the system may be very high.

(3) The cost of performing changes within the system during the system’s life can be quite high.

(4) The yearly license rate may be high.

According to some authors, the dissemination fails mainly because the current journal system is seen as the most reliable route to the advancement of a scientific career and this shows that institutional repositories have a very low level of completeness. The value of open access repositories suffers if it does not handle valuable academic intellectual property, which is located to a large extent in commercial journals. This is one of the decisive factors influencing the very limited interest in referring to institutional open repositories among researchers.

 

REFERENCES: –

https://elearning.ucd.ie/bbcswebdav/pid-1555530-dt-content-rid-8269545_1/courses/IS40370/Rybinski_Integrating%20IR%20with%20CRIS.pdf

http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/lets-talk-about-preprint-servers

Click to access Baba_A%20System%20for%20Paper%20Registration.pdf

https://jcoynester.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/five-reasons-you-should-upload-a-preprint-to-a-repository-before-submitting-to-a-journal/

 

This study is about the contributions of SME’s (Small and Medium sized Enterprises) towards the socio-economic development across all the countries especially after 1980’s (Karadag, 2015). It highlights the challenges faced by SME’s in terms of poor financial access (external funding), low utilization of technology, lack of trained personnel and managerial skills. Basically, ineffectiveness of financial conduct has detrimental affects on the performance and longevity of the SME organizations. According to the studies, despite the importance of strategic financial management, SME’s are facing failure in business. However, studies also showed that with a proper strategic financial planning there can be an immense improvement in the growth. So, three propositions were stated. One was focused on managing its working capital i.e. keeping a track of funds coming in and going out. Second one deals with capital budgeting, i.e. if a proper technical evaluation is not done while going for fixed-assets which generally takes a lot of time to mature, then this can also lead to failure of business. So, it is important to keep in mind the short- and long-term goals/objectives and then take a decision about investing in fixed-assets. This is also known as strategic outlook which is another important factor for business growth. Third, it is very important to report the financial transactions, maintaining all the balance sheets and the record. Evaluation of these financial reports presents the trend and companies current financial performance and it can also act as a control and feedback function of strategic financial management.

Author has beautifully described the process of strategic financial planning and management along with their importance. All the three propositions were quite impressive. Well I think, maintaining the finance records are not only helpful for evaluation of the trends and financial condition but also for gathering external funds from banks or sponsors for expanding the business.

References: –

Karadag_Financial Management.pdf – https://elearning.ucd.ie/bbcswebdav/pid-1555519-dt-content-rid-8269535_1/courses/IS40370/Karadag_Financial%20Management.pdf

 

Collaboration is the process where two or more entities work together to achieve a common goal. For example, suppose Vodafone wants to develop an application. To make an application live, it must pass three most important stages, i.e. Development, Testing, Production. So, lets assume company A took the responsibility for developing the code, company B took the testing responsibility and company C took the Production responsibility. As all the three organizations are working towards the same goal but play different roles, we can say this is a collaborative effort. Now each organization will have small units known as Teams. Each team will have their own share of responsibility. For example, Testing team has sub divisions, like, some do smoke testing, while some do Integration Testing etc. All the people doing smoke testing for this project are known as smoke testing team and this is known as Team Work. Basically, all the people doing the same work to achieve a goal is known as Team Work. Team Work is an instantiation of collaboration. Coordination and cooperation are one of the most important aspect to make collaboration work. In the above example, suppose testing team is getting some bug while testing the code, they can ask development team of company A to sort it out. This is coordination. Suppose within testing team some people are facing problems, they can help each other. This is cooperation. Lack of coordination, low trust, Individual agendas, competition among each other (individuals or organizations) can also cause collaborative failure.

Scavenger hunt is a Collaboration exercise, basically, working together. I believe I can be a leader/captain in this game, because I can influence others to agree upon a plan and coordinate efforts to achieve the goal.

 

Vampire dairies is an american-fantasy drama television series which started from 2009 and lasted till 2017. Caroline was one of the character in this series. Now those who are aware of the series must be thinking why Caroline & why not Elena Gilbert who was in the main female leading role? Well I liked Caroline’s character because she was evolved from an immature ,self-absorbed, envious girl to a mature strong lady. I can relate her high school days with mine. I used to get involved in loads of extra-curricular activities, but hardly got any recognition even after winning the competitions. Focus used to get shifted towards one of my classmate who was my Best friend. I used to get jealous of that but could never tell my friend about it. Coming back to Croline, she was very shallow and envious about her best friend Elena because she used to get all the attentions which Caroline wanted for herself. Caroline faced a lot of troubles in her relationships let it be her Mom, Dad or Boyfriends. She got ditched by most of her boyfriends but she never allowed depression in her life. She used to fight back and come out stronger than before. After she became a vampire, the way she developed self control to resist drinking warm blood from veins was commendable. This gives us a lesson of self control, if we are strong mentally then any diversion/distraction will never be able to distract us from achieving our goal.  By the end of the season she transformed herself completely into a strong lady who can can handle any situation without getting a panic attack. She became a perfect mother who can handle mischievous twins, manage her office assignments on time, take care of her home and parents too. She did a lot of childish mistakes which generally teenagers do but to learn lesson from those mistakes is commendable and this is what required in life’s game.

There is a saying ” By seeking and Blundering we learn” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton