That last post went on a bit, didn't it?
Personal online brands are interesting things to investigate. Good luck finding me - I appear to be pretty invisible to the wider world due to my extremely protective privacy settings. Facebook is personal, but even my Facebook friends can't see my address or telephone number. I do have librarian friends on Facebook, but it can be problematic if they are your colleagues - don't become friends with your line manager!
I use a separate email address for social networking to prevent the flood of spam that you inevitably get from signing up to websites (a lesson learned from the early days when my university email account was blocked due to a build up of unsolicited mail - I reached my quota of 5Mb over the Easter vacation) and I use pseudonyms to prevent my real name from appearing on my blog and on Twitter. Protecting my identity may seem paranoid, but I think it protects your right to freedom of speech as well. Having said that, Twitter is completely public, as I don't protect my tweets, and having run teaching sessions for colleagues on how to use Twitter, several people in my organisation know who I am anyway (@pinklibrarian).
So if you search for me using Bing (only for research purposes, mind, as I have a Google account attached to many things which would skew the results), the first two pages are a London-based wedding photographer (not me). Unsurprising, as she has her own website. Then there's a firm of recruitment consultants (also not me). Next is a press release from Thames Valley Police reporting a death in 2010 (definitely not me).
Hit 3 on Page 3 of the results is http://www.catalog.group.cam.ac.uk/founders.html (this is a vague reference to me, from 2004, when I was a trainee at the Classical Faculty Library - I am not in the picture).
So I searched for my name and "library" and discovered a comment I posted on Jo Alcock's blog in 2008 that I had totally forgotten about: http://www.joeyanne.co.uk/index.php/2008/04/05/what-makes-a-librarian-a-librarian/
(In case you're interested, I got a new bathroom and then did my Masters)
There's also a really old Libraries Information Bulletin from Cambridge University (also about CATALOG), but nothing about me since. I was not overly surprised, as my online presence is pretty heavily protected. I do feel that now may be the time to branch out into the wider world of library people on the web and try to get involved more in online discussions.
I suppose if a potential employer were trying to find information about me online, they would be hard pressed to find anything bad. However, they would also find it hard to find anything good! So I shall be trying to blog more often, and I have now linked this blog to my twitter feed. Both share the same profile image, background theme and colours. The photo was taken by my good friend Geoff Durrant (http://www.right-image.com/) at my wedding. It's quite a good representation of what I look like (although I will never again get such perfectly curly hair) and I'm wearing pink, which seemed appropriate, bearing in mind my pseudonym.
Notice I've not mentioned my full name at all in this post? Still can't get out of the habit of protecting myself online.
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