Professional organisations and real-life networks

I'm really getting behind now - blame school sports day, fun night and a sudden, compulsive need for clothes shopping.

This is going to be a short post, partly because of lack of time, but mostly because I'm not a member of any professional organisations for a number of reasons:

• cost – that's probably the main reason,
• limited benefits – for geographic reasons more than anything else. It takes about 2.5 hours to get from where I am to places where events, training and meetings usually happen. There were 7 events or groups listed on this blog and the nearest is Cardiff which is, yes 2.5hours away.
• Lack of time – I work part-time because I have other commitments. It makes it very difficult then to do additional activies
• Priorities - also, I'm not looking to advance in my career right now, so there isn't that additional motivation to make myself more visible, and collect things to put on a CV.

We did attempt to get an information group of librarians involved in managing Customer Services in HE libraries together, but it didn't happen for a number of reasons but that would be something I would find useful.

I've just looked over the above and realised that I sound like a miserable loner, burying myself in my little corner of the world – which I'm not, really! I'd love to be able to discuss some of the issues at work with people in other institutions, but opportunities to do that face-to-face are rare.

It also highlight just how important online networks are to those of us who are geographically isolated, or not able to participate in real-life networks for whatever reason.