Report of CILIPTV AGM / Professional Registration Event 2 April 2014

On the evening of 2nd April 2014, the good folks of Library-land (Thames Valley side) gathered to find out more about the changes to CILIP's Professional Registration Event, and also to experience the wonders of our Annual General Meeting. Mainly involving cake.

AGM report

The first order of business was the AGM, the key points of which are outlined below. The minutes of the last year's meeting were approved. The Chair reported the financial status of the committee, which is fairly healthy. One of the events coordinators reported the various events organised by the committee. These events were well attended. The number of attendees was stable throughout the year with on average 15-20 attendees. Crucially, the event coordinator indicated that the committee is always welcome to receive members’ suggestions and input for future events: so please send in your suggestions!

The social media coordinator reported that the committee’s social media platforms continue to grow steadily. The social media coordinator aims to develop the blog in the following year and encourages any guest posts on future events. A great idea that came out of the AGM was to host guest writers contributing posts on a day in the life of their library. Always keen to bolster contribution, please do contact me if you'd like to do this- or any other guest post: remember you can use this in your portfolio as proof of professional engagement!

The Chair presented the new CILIP TV Committee for 2014, a list of which can be found on the CILIP website. It should be noted that we are a friendly lot, and always happy to accept new recruits!

The Chair spoke about the New Regional Network, the new name for CILIP Branches.  As for 1^st April, the Regional Network will be a merger of the regional branches with the CDG groups. The Chair invited everyone to check the CILIP website for more information. The Chair also stated that two roles (candidate support office and communications coordinator) need to be filed in the South East region and invite anyone interested to join to get in touch.

Elizabeth Schlackman, our outgoing Chair was then presented with a lovely bouquet of flowers (see picture) by the new Chair as a thank you for all of her hard work over the time she has served on the committee. It has been a real pleasure to work with Elizabeth- I have had the privilege of working with her on committee and professionally and have seen first-hand her commitment and passion for the profession. I am sure that we all wish her the best of luck as she returns to America.

We then had a brief break to allow everyone to refuel with tea, coffee, and the all-important cake. 

A word on the Governance Review

We then welcomed the President of CILIP, Barbara Band, who was quick to stress that CILIP had learnt lessons from the failed re-branding exercise, and feel that they must make the effort to become more transparent and effective- at one point 70 people sat on the Council, which seems slightly unwieldy.

Phil Bradley has led a review board for two years, and the results are now the hope is that the structure of CILIP will be more streamlined and efficient, whilst still maintaining the legal framework required by CILIP's status as a charity.

More details of the Governance Review can be found on the CILIP website, and I would recommend all CILIP members should spend the time reviewing this- especially as your views are currently being sought on the proposals. Consultation is ongoing until July 2014, then there will be a vote on the proposals at the AGM in September.

The main aim seems to be to produce streamlined committees. The Policy Committee is to be given higher priority, and there will be an increased chance to progress to higher level within CILIP from the grassroot's activism which is so valuable. CILIP should become a more open organisation, which is member-driven: which is what people have been calling for, and it seems like CILIP have listened to it's members- so this seems positive.

Professional Registration

We then welcomed Lesley Kumiega to discuss the changes to the professional qualifications. In theory, you will not now need to be a graduate under the new framework of professional qualifications. Clearer assessment criteria (a relief for all those who remember previous guidance!) was also announced.

The new Professional Knowledge and Skills Base will be crucial to success: it can be used as a tool to help identify gaps and used as the PDPP.

Members will be expected to revalidate every year, which has been a concern for me, but I was reassured that this will be simpler- consisting of only 20 hours of CPD, 250 words with no supporting evidence, logged on the new CILIP VLE and that it would be free: so now I am completely convinced (given I do well over 20 hours of CPD and already have a log of sorts...). Check back next year to see if I've got around to it...

I was also comforted that those who have Chartered and Revalidated under the new system so far have done OK. The whole aim now seems to have moved toward supporting people in their continual development. Although, it was stressed that the standards of Chartership- the gold standard- is already set and will not be relaxed.

More information on the changes is on the CILIP website, so again, I would strongly recommend that you check this out.

The meeting closed with offerings of yet more cake! A lot of important changes are in process at present, so this has been a huge post- hopefully it has covered the main issues and given you some idea of what is going on.

Library Camp 2012: 13th October, Birmingham

This guest post comes from Charlie Lythgoe (@maniccharlie), Assistant Information Specialist, NHS Blood and Transplant, Oxford, about her experience of the runaway success that is Library Camp UK, which took place last month.  All the more welcome as we had to cancel our November event. Over to Charlie...

On Saturday 13th October, I attended Library Camp 2012 in Birmingham. This is the second year a UK-wide Library Camp has been held, and there have also been smaller regional spin-off events. Library Camp is described as an “unconference”, which their website defines as an event where “participants decide on the programme at the beginning of the event, working on the principle that the sum of the knowledge, experience and expertise of the people in the room is likely to be greater than that of those on the stage at traditional conferences.”

This democratic, participatory approach was also evident during the planning stages, as a wiki was set up where participants could suggest ideas for sessions they would either like to present or to attend. Oh, and suggestions for cake too! Apparently, library camps are renowned for their cakes. Unfortunately, I didn’t have to time to bake anything but many people were more organised than me and turned up with an astonishing amount of whoopee pies, tiffin, brownies, cupcakes etc etc ...

The day began with people pitching ideas for sessions they’d like to lead. These were placed on post-it notes and a rough-and-ready programme was quickly assembled on a flipchart.

The first session I attended was on mental health in libraries, led by Penny Bronchia. This examined the language and attitudes we use in libraries to deal with mental illness in library users and colleagues. We discussed the way that mental health is still a taboo topic that unsettles many people, in a way that other issues (e.g. sexuality and race) largely do not. Should people with a mental health condition be “out” at work? While this may initially cause awkwardness, it can help raise awareness and tolerance among colleagues. Also, by not disclosing a mental health condition, it can be harder to access any support or assistance that the organisation can provide. We discussed how managers can best support employees with mental health conditions and we heard about schemes and reading groups some public library services run for their users.

For my second session, I chose to hear about free and open-source software from Liz Jolly and Andrew Preater. Andrew has already written a comprehensive blog post about this session, so I won’t write at length about it. We talked specifically about what OS software is and what roles it can play. But we also placed it in context by discussing why organisations may be resistant to OS software, how the collaborative mindset present in OS development can trickle in to other areas of work and what skills are necessary in the OS workplace.  I was struck in this session, as in many of the others, at the incredible depth of knowledge and expertise possessed and shared by those who weren’t leading the sessions. If this were a “normal” conference rather than an unconference, then these views would largely remain unheard.

Next, I went to a talk about classification. This session wasn’t as lively as the first two ... perhaps we’d all gone too long without a trip to the cake tables. We shared experiences of classification successes and failures, the pros and cons of in-house versus standard (e.g. LC or Dewey) systems, and the tendency for classification decisions to reflect the need of library staff rather than the need of the user. We wondered how libraries could go about systematically measuring the success of different classification schemes, in terms of how quickly users could find what they needed. We mused on how relevant traditional concepts of classification are for e-resources, especially since there isn’t the “I can only put this book in one place, even if it addresses two topics equally” mindset. E-resources can be “located” in as many locations as the user needs them to be (I recommend the book Everything is Miscellaneous for a good discussion of categorisation in the digital world).

Some participants felt there was a lack of sessions focused on academic libraries, so Christina Harbour squeezed a general academic libraries forum on to the flipchart. I feared that this was too big a topic to generate any meaningful dialogue, but we all had a very good attempt! I’ll just list some of the questions that were thrown in to the mix:

• What impact will the rise in tuition fees have?
• (How) should libraries ‘brand’ their e-resources, to demonstrate the link to the physical library?
• How can we involve academics in the work of the library?
• How do we demonstrate or quantify the value that libraries have?
• Are converged library and IT services a good idea?
• Does outsourcing work? If so, what services can be outsourced?
• Should members of the public be allowed to use academic libraries?
• How do libraries contribute to the employability agenda of universities?

Whew! I feel like we covered as much ground as I did in a whole term of the Academic Libraries module of my MSc, mainly because of the wide range of experiences and backgrounds that were shared.

I then went to a session about the logistics of lending out iPads to library users. Personally, I’d be concerned about the chances of loss or damage, but those sharing their experiences said that this was minimal. We discussed whether users should be allowed to use the iPads outside the library or off the premises, and what state they should be returned in (i.e. delete all photos and log out of Facebook and Twitter). The range of educational apps (for students, medical professionals, scientists etc) is growing all the time, but it can be hard to evaluate the quality of these, and whether they represent value for money. It seemed to me that any library wishing to start lending iPads or other tablets to their users could learn an awful lot from other libraries who’ve already taken the same step.

For the final session of the day, I intended to go to a session on open access. Due to my muddling up the rooms, I ended up in a session on Roaming Libraries. By the time I’d realised my mistake, I’d already got into conversation with the people sat next to me, so thought it would be easier to stay put. A fortuitous mistake! The speaker, whose name I didn’t catch, runs The Itinerant Poetry Library. The name is fairly self-explanatory - she travels all around the world with a poetry library, which opens up for a time (this time can vary) in bars, cafes etc. Depending on how long the library is in a city, readers may be able to take books away with them. They can then check on Twitter to see where the library will be over the next few days so that they know where to return the book.

 I learnt about Radical Reference, who are a group of professional volunteers working with political activists in the USA. Any questions that can’t be answered on the ground can be relayed back to a back-up team who will use their resources to find the answer. And then there’s the Mile High Reference Desk, who provide an information service to passengers on planes! Unlike in many other sessions, this was an area that very few of us had experience in. But it was the last session of the day, and I liked how everyone shared related experiences and anecdotes from earlier sessions they had intended. For instance, there was an earlier session about living libraries, so someone fed back their experiences from this and wondered whether a roaming library of people would be feasible. Once again, if this were a “normal” conference, this opportunity to share and synthesise ideas from other sessions may not have been possible. So, while I don’t know what I missed in the open access session, I do now know some of the amazing ways that librarians are challenging our ideas of what and where a “library” is.

There was a tremendous amount of energy and passion on display at Library Camp 2012, which was particularly impressive since everyone had given up a day of their weekend and many of us had travelled a long way early in the morning.  The conversations that started at Library Camp have continued on Twitter and blogs, and will hopefully generate some great new ideas and good practice.