“This is How We Do It: One Professional Development Activity in the Lives of Librarians from Around the World” is a new series from the IFLA Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning Section to highlight our standing committee members, who they are and what they do!

In this post, we highlight Ray Pun, CPDWL standing committee member!

Ray Pun wearing gloves when handling photographs

Why are you a standing committee member of CPDWL and what are you working on for CPDWL Section at the moment?

Ray: I’ve been involved in CPDWL since 2015. I attended the CPDWL satellite meeting in 2015 held in Cape Town, South Africa. Through this section, I was fortunate to meet with CPDWL standing committee members and leaders Ulrike Lang (Germany), Catharina Isberg (Sweden), Susan Schnuer (USA), Vivian Lewis (Canada), Loida Garcia-Febo (USA), Dr. Gill Hallam (Australia), Dr. Jana Varlejs (USA) and many others who are passionate about reinforcing lifelong learning skills in LIS, and  encouraged me to be more involved. Dr. Varlejs actually happened to sit next to me during our 10+ hour flight to South Africa and we talked about LIS everything!

I initially served as a corresponding member from 2016-2018, where I assisted in supporting CPDWL sessions in WLIC 2016 (USA) and 2017 (Poland) related to our continuing professional development guidelines, and volunteered as a coach in our WLIC coaching session in 2018 (Malaysia) and 2019 (Greece). I also co-chaired the CPDWL satellite meeting program in Croatia in 2019 (in partnership with the Croatian Library Association – and co-chaired with Dr. Dijana Machala). I officially joined as a standing committee member (2019-2023) as the American Library Association (ALA) representative in the section and served as the information coordinator for CPDWL from 2019-2021 and now working on a variety of projects related to social media channels, webinars, podcast activities, etc.

CPDWL is always looking at new trends and issues impacting our field such as emerging professional development resources in LIS like Skilltype and Society of Scholarly Publishing (SSP) (see our past newsletter issue featuring an interview with former SSP president Alice Meadows).

What is one advice you have for new librarians interested in getting involved in IFLA or in their library associations for professional development?

Ray: Identify what you are interested in doing and then align what you are looking for within the association. It’s not perfect but you’ll find the overlapping areas to be helpful. Make connections with people serving in different roles in the association. Also keep in mind, we are all volunteers across IFLA standing committees, and it takes time to learn the process, to get involved, and to implement activities/enact change. I like to thank the Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA) (where I am currently serving as President) and the American Library Association (ALA) for providing support for me to attend and for enabling these global connections over these years!