Monday 31 October 2011

ILI2011 - Navigating the New Normal - Strategies for Success

This week saw the Internet Librarian International Conference 2011 come to London, for an excellent two day programme devoted to the "New Normal" - the new environment, with new technologies and new economic realities.  How can librarians and other information professionals adapt to this new situation?

A full review of my experiences at ILI2011 can be found here

Monday 10 October 2011

Event - LIKE 29 (Take 2) - Connecting Information with Innovation

On Thursday I spent a very enjoyable evening back at the Crown Tavern, at the second showing of John Davies’ presentation of TFPL’s report on their second survey of the information profession.

In 2006 TFPL conducted a survey of the profession and produced a report “Who is managing information - roles in the e-landscape”.  They have recently conducted another survey to follow up on this work and John described some of their key findings.  In view of the credit crunch and ongoing economic woes, they were surprised to find that there was on balance stability in the numbers of staff in ‘knowledge and information management’ or KIM functions, having expected to see a drop.  Also interesting was that the trend to these staff being dispersed across the organisation, rather than concentrated in an ‘information centre’, has increased since the last survey.

John asked us to discuss some of the survey questions around our tables.  One of these was “what is the point of a professional qualification, and a professional body?”  Amongst the reasons suggested around my table were:

  • To widen new entrants' view of the profession
  • To give a baseline of skills
  • To give a theoretical underpinning to professional practice
  • To set standards
  • To govern ethics
  • To accredit qualifications
  • You can't be a profession without a professional body
The point was also made that almost all other professions insist upon a set number of CPD hours &/or revalidation, to retain professional status, and that CILIP should do the same for the profession to have more credibility.

During the survey respondents were asked to say which attributes they felt were important in KIM workers.  Although many permutations were received, they were able to distill these down into several key areas, including:

  • Vision
  • Perseverence
  • Pragmatism
  • Collaboration
John asked us to debate which of these were the most important. On the table I was at we felt that vision and collaboration were the most vital, but also unfortunately the most often lacking.  Someone suggested that too many people still came into the profession expecting it to be ‘back room’, and another said that it tended to attract introverted people.

Another point that was made was that many people nowadays may self-identify as ‘knowledge workers’ (eg, information asset managers, or people like immigration officers who manage large databases of information), and yet not have a ‘library qualification’ or be seen as information professionals by CILIP or any of the other groups.

During the feedback discussion, John pointed out that we were naturally talking in terms of ‘us’ and ‘the business’ - and he was sure that HR or IT or other groups did the same - but that in fact we are ‘the business’ and should be talking about ‘we’.  

Dinner arrived while the debate was still in full flow, and the animated conversations continued over the food and afterwards, with Jennifer encouraging us to get up, circulate and share ideas with new people.

Wednesday 5 October 2011

Event - BIALL Solos Presentation

Last week I was delighted to speak to a group of solo law librarians who are all members of the BIALL Solos group.  Slightly unusually, the presentation was conducted by telephone conference, with the slides distributed in advance.

This method of delivery allows people who are working in a team of 1, where getting cover to leave the office to attend a seminar isn't always realistic, and also where not all the members are based in London, to get together and share experiences.

The topic was all about how to develop your career when you are working as a solo.  We focused on two approaches to this - either to develop the scope of your current role &/or lobby to be able to grow your team, or else to move on a find a new role elsewhere.

The slides from the presentation are above and this is a link to the audio recording of the talk (BIALL membership log in required).

We managed to cover a wide range of topics during the hour's session, ranging from how to develop a business case and cost/benefit analysis, through to skills analysis, writing effective CVs and preparing for a successful interview.

Monday 3 October 2011

The Library Career Centre Launch Competition

** Winner Announced!! **

The winner of the launch competition of The Library Career Centre
is Imrana Ghumra, a Knowledge Manager from the Healthcare sector 

Imrana won a FREE CV Review Report

and said

"Wow, thank you!
I'll take a look over the weekend and then let you have an amended CV."