Photo of Katie Fraser with CILIP Blogger Button

www.chuukaku.com

Katie Fraser's blog and website

I'm an academic librarian, working in the UK Higher Educational sector, supporting academics and students. Prior to this, I was a researcher, working with social and learning technologies.

My interests include the application of all kinds of technology, research support in libraries, learning spaces (my Librarianship dissertation studied an Information Commons project), evidence-based practice and the professional development of library and information workers.

You can find out more about more about me from the links to the left.


CPD23 Thing 7: Face-to-face Networking

July 23rd, 2011

Burlington House, home to learned societies for many of the subjects I support

Burlington House, home to learned societies for many of the subjects I support

This blog is part of 23 Things for Professional Development, a course encouraging information professionals to explore online tools.

Thing 7, Face-to-face networks and professional organisations, asks me to consider networking through professional organisations. Getting out and about and talking to other professionals is one of the parts of my job I enjoy most, and I always find it revitalises me and encourages me to try new things.

Networks I already know

Those who read this blog regularly will know that I have particularly strong connections with CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, so I guess that’s a good place to start. I’ve been involved with some central CILIP activities, such as the Defining Our Professional Future project, but like a lot of members the majority of my involvement with the organisation has been through the special interest groups (SIGs) and regional activities. I previously sat on the Career Development Group Yorkshire and Humberside division Committee, and have also attended events from the increasingly active East Midlands Branch.

Overall I’ve found these subgroups of CILIP are a fantastic way to meet other information professionals (from a range of sectors), and they organise a number of events I’ve found invaluable for my career development. In attempt to give back more, I recently joined the University, College and Research Group East Midlands division Committee, and the division was also kind enough to fund my attendance at one UC&R National Committee, which I found very enjoyable and educational. I’m not sure I’ve got a lot of scope to increase my involvement in CILIP right now, but I should probably aim to be more active and proactive on the UC&R East Mids committee.

Here’s some other kinds of groups I’ve really found equally valuable for training and / or networking:

I’m also hoping to get involved with the newly launched LIS-DREaM network of library and information science researchers soon: they’ve got a series of upcoming events and I’m hoping to find a way of getting to one or more.

The Other Contenders

A couple of the groups Bethan lists for this ‘Thing’ feel particularly relevant to me, but I haven’t engaged with them. Why not? The first is the Special Libraries Association (SLA). I did apply for SLA Europe’s Early Career Conference Award for a couple of years in a row but  never got anywhere with it. Plus, the majority of their events are in London (I know there’s been one in Manchester, but that was harder to get to than London!) and so they’ve seemed really been compelling for me. Sorry guys! Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) is something I might consider aiming for, but the HEA seems to be heavily hit by current cuts, and I’m not sure it’ll still be there by the time I’m ready!

Conclusions

I feel I’m pretty active with face-to-face networks, but I have to be realistic about what I can manage in my own time, and what I can get the blessing to do at work, so I wouldn’t be comfortable taking on much more. That said, I’ve got two definite goals identified from this ‘Thing’: becoming a bit more proactive with UC&R East Midlands, and seeing how I can become involved with LIS-DREaM.

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CPD23 Thing 6: Online Networking

July 21st, 2011

Online at work

Shot of my old PC at work, whence I networked.

This blog is part of 23 Things for Professional Development, a course encouraging information professionals to explore online tools.

Thing 6, Online Networking covers a bunch of online social networks of which I am already a member. Namely, LinkedIn, Facebook, LISNPN, the Librarians as Teachers network, and CILIP Communities. I’ve linked to all my profiles on these networks, in case any CPD23ers are interested in adding me on them. You’ll see the one exception to this is Facebook: I use this for personal rather than professional networking.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been looking at these profiles a little bit and thinking about how I use them. There was some discussion which prompted this in the online chat CPD23 I participated in earlier this week. That was a little bit Thing 6, a little bit Thing 7 (face-to-face networking)!

Professional Networks

LinkedIn is where I really see myself networking professionally online, but during the chat it occurred to me that my profile is actually fairly static (I mostly maintain my profile as an enhanced professional CV). I’ve made the effort to join a bunch more groups this week in the hope that this will prompt me to be a little bit more dynamic! I did have a similar account on the network Naymz, which I found out today had been rebranded Visible.me. It’s not something I used or updated much, so I’ve done a little bit of housekeeping and deleted my profile.

I’m a member of both LISNPN and LATNetwork, and I think they’re both great ideas, but I don’t interact on them as much as I’d like. There’s a fair amount of lurking going on on both, I suspect, as neither is highly active, with LISNPN (which has greater numbers) seeming a little more so. However, I like being part of both as I think the topics which are discussed are important. Similarly, I’m not particularly active on CILIP Communities, but I think it’s important to be part of that space and have the option of engaging with conversations when they are happening.

Academic Networks

There’s another category of social network that isn’t mentioned in Thing 6 as it isn’t relevant to all information professionals, and those are academic networks. I’ve got an Academia.edu account which is static in a similar way to my LinkedIn account. Academia.edu is a site where the academics and postgraduate research students I support have accounts, and so it’s nice to put myself in that space, and demonstrate that I’m also a researcher. On a related note, I have a Researcher ID which allows me to promote my own identity as a researcher, and test some of the features in Web of Knowledge it provides. Just like with LinkedIn and Naymz I was also half-heartedly maintaining a ResearchGate account alongside Academia.edu, but it wasn’t getting any use, so I’ve given that the chop as well.

So what’s the winner?

At the moment, LinkedIn is the king of all these accounts for me, and it’s where I’ve made the most connections by a landslide. It’s also a place where I interact with contacts from my pre-library life, so I think it gives a broad picture of my experience and skills. Most of the other networks I maintain because I think it’s important for me to join the discussions which happen in those spaces, rather than because I get a huge amount out of them, and the relationships I do have in them are usually maintained in Twitter.

The new challenger is definitely Google Plus. In fact, I just went onto it to get my profile address, and then got stuck reading things for ten minutes until I remembered what I was doing, suggesting it’s pretty compelling. I love that the circles feature allows me to interact with different kinds of people in very different ways, and I’ve already got a lot of friends, librarians, academics and others in circles of various kinds. The main thing I think it might be missing is a way to form a self-nominated group, otherwise it could pretty much cover all the networks I use. One to keep an eye on.

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Posted in CILIP, professional development, research support, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

East Midlands Members’ Day: CILIP’s future, the WI and information literacy

March 28th, 2011

Crab apple blossom

Springtime blossoming in the East Midlands

Last Tuesday I attended the Members’ Day and Annual General Meeting of the East Midlands Branch of CILIP, the regional wing of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. It was held in Derby this year, and featured the Annual General Meeting of the branch, alongside talks from Annie Mauger, CILIP’s new Chief Executive on ‘The future structure and role of CILIP’ and Biddy Fisher, CILIP’s Immediate past President on information literacy.

As one of the project board who worked on the Conversation section of CILIP’s Defining Our Professional Future (DOPF) programme I was interested to hear Annie talk about the institution’s new approach to advocacy, identified in the DOPF Conversation Report as an area of future focus for CILIP. I’m not the only one who’s noticed that CILIP’s presence in the media has grown hugely in the last few months, and I’ll confess that I’m just a teeny bit proud that my work on DOPF contributed to this change.

The part of CILIP’s future which generated most interest around my table at Members’ Day was how advocacy for public libraries could grow to include other sectors in which information professionals work (academic, government, corporate etc.) and it was nice that Annie explicitly asked us to feed back on what we’d like to see in those areas (while reassuring us that they’re next on the agenda). Discussion around our table also focused on CILIP’s qualifications (primarily chartership), which I believe are currently under review. It was interesting to me that because of my work with CILIP I’m pretty well clued up on how such procedures work in comparison to the average member, which suggests that communication about what’s available does need to improve.

One thing I didn’t know about was that on the 8th June the National Federation of Women’s Institutes are voting on whether to make local libraries a focus of their nationwide campaigning and there were many calls for information professionals to engage with our local branches to promote the cause where possible – do check out the link for more details.

The Annual General Meeting was the usual fare, with the exception of a change in committee, from outgoing president Joan Bray to incoming president Mary Bryceland. I know there’s also a review of branches and groups going on at the moment, and there was some discussion of impending changes, but mainly of a ‘watch this space’ nature.

Finally, Biddy Fisher spoke about information literacy and its potential as a central uniting issue for CILIP members. In redistributed groups we discussed some of the issues, and agreed that information literacy was definitely a uniting concern for information professionals, no matter where we worked. We found our group task – unpacking CILIP’s definition of information literacy in simple language – quite hard. The consensus was that it was something we did so naturally ourselves that it was often hard to make explicit what we did. This contrasts with what I’ve found in universities – that librarians can be better at describing what being information literate involves than the (often highly information literate) academics we support, especially when it comes to teaching skills to students. I guess it’s a challenge for anyone! Our major conclusion was that the concept was better explained by example than by description.

I had an absolutely fabulous day – kudos to the East Midlands Branch committee for arranging it, and Annie and Biddy for making their presentations highly engaging, and giving us the opportunity to feed back on what we discussed. I’ve often been unsure what the exact role of regional branches of CILIP is, and this seemed an excellent exemplar of what they can do: bring discussion about the purpose and future of CILIP to the region, and allow engagement with profession-wide issues in a scalable way.

Posted in CILIP, information literacy, professional development | No Comments »

CILIP’s New Professionals Information Day: Fear the fear and do it anyway

January 13th, 2011

Sign at CILIP HQ

CILIP HQ

One of the blog posts which has disappeared down the virtual sofa during Operation Move House is my talk at CILIP’s New Professionals Information Day (NPID)(an annual event aimed at new information professionals, students and the information-profession-curious). This ran in London in October (at CILIP HQ) and Newcastle in November (at the rather beautiful Newcastle City Library.

I was going to upload the slides for my talk after the event, but without the context of the talk they felt rather disjointed, so I thought perhaps a blog would capture it better. The two days also influenced my current professional activities to some extent, which I wanted to reflect upon: but more on that later.

I was asked to speak at this event because of my work on CILIP’s Defining Our Professional Future (DOPF) as a new professional. I was given the suggested title ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway: Working with people at all levels‘ but in the end the talk was more about how neither part of the title applied to me!

  1. Feel the Fear: I wanted to talk about how positive my experience working with senior professionals in DOPF had been. The project board was inevitably made up of people with an enthusiasm for CILIP, but who felt it could do better. I wanted to point out that working with other information professionals (senior or otherwise) seems intimidating, but it’s actually probably easier than working across disciplines, and that there’s no reason (or stigma) in getting involved even at a very early stage in your career.
  2. Do it Anyway: this talk actually persuaded me to reflect on the way I become involved in professional activities. Enthusiasm always hits me before fear: I commented in the talk that my motto is like ‘Agree to do it, and then feel the fear afterwards’. This means I get into some random situations, but nearly all of them have been positive for me, so I wanted to talk about harnessing that enthusiasm!

The conclusion of the talk was what a great experience getting involved in the wider profession had been for me, and to make it clear that CILIP can be a great option (if only one among many!) for getting involved in professionals activities.

CILIP HQ: picture of the ramp by the entrance

More CILIP HQ: note the pink CILIP logo in the window

The talk sparked some fascinating debate about CILIP from sceptics in the audience: I emphasised that I was focusing on the positives of getting involved in the Institute, but that I wasn’t a CILIP representative, and that I knew it was only one option among many.

My favourite moment of the discussion was in Newcastle where, together with Maria Cotera (Past President of the Career Development Group), I persuaded Phil Bradley (who was then still running for president, and in the audience as he gave one of the NPID keynotes) to say a little bit about why he’d rejoined and become active in CILIP again: he gave a lovely speech about the importance of professional bodies and the opportunity we have to do something great with CILIP.

It was fantastic to see the enthusiasm and response for running this event in both north and south, and there was some great speakers to chat to, but it’s sobering to realise that this could be the last year that the New Professionals Information Day might not be around next year due to budget constraints.

I suppose the major long-term outcome of the event for me was, having reflected on how positive my experiences getting involved with CILIP were (in DOPF and also as a previous member of CDG Yorkshire and Humberside) led me to resolve to become active more regularly. I’m going to take over on the UC&R East Midlands committee for my institution next: unlike some of the things I’ve become involved in during my professional development, this is a stable commitment (which I think will do me good), but also I’m looking forward to helping develop some random plans on the committee once I start!

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The 3Cs of Worksop Library: chartership, collaboration and cuts

January 6th, 2011

Worksop Public Library: view from upper floor

View from the upper floor of Worksop Library. Apologies for the blurriness: only had my camera phone!

In November I went on a visit to Worksop Public Library run by the East Midlands branch of CILIP, which combined a workshop on CILIP qualifications (relevant to my chartership) and a tour of the library.

It was good to meet people who were in a similar stage of chartership and the talk from Kath Owen was great. This was the first part of my plan to get beyond the ‘gathering evidence’ stage of my chartership and actually start putting together something which looks like a portfolio. As I’ve finally regained my free time after buying a house in September (hence the lack of activity on this blog since then!) I should have lots more opportunity to make that happen!

Worksop Library is newly built and only opened on 20th September 2010. It’s lovely: my photos really didn’t do it justice, so I’d recommend checking out the photos from the day on the East Midlands Branch Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/emboc/sets/72157625342805449/. It’s a beautiful rebuild.

What was really inspiring for me, though, was hearing all about how the library had gone the extra mile in embedding itself in the community since the reopening. The library had worked alongside community businesses to help open up author days and put on lots of community activities. They were also co-located with other services, including a registry office (and gorgeous little wedding chapel!) and a day centre for those with disabilities.

With my chartership hat on I was particularly interested in how the library has fostered relationships with the other services in the building. I think it’s often assumed that putting two services together will automatically lead to collaboration, but in my experience it’s far from that easy! For example, the Student Development team in the University are based in the library building at my current post, but we’re still working on ways to work together.

At Worksop collaboration and co-location seemed to have worked well: you could tell that staff from different services all knew each other, and day centre users were happy to wander out into the library and get books. I asked after the tour and the staff were keen to stress that it had needed a lot of personal commitment. Clearly something to think about doing more in my post (I’m a liaison librarian, after all!).

The only downer of the day was going into the staff room and noticing a newspaper clipping about library cuts on the noticeboard. It’s all the more heartbreaking to think about the impact of cuts when you see what a little investment in library services can do, and Nottinghamshire County Council is getting hit hard http://www.thebookseller.co.uk/news/131578-protests-begin-over-library-cuts-in-nottinghamshire.html. I hope the momentum Worksop Library gained when the new build opened isn’t lost completely in these hard times.

Posted in chartership, CILIP, library visits, professional development, public libraries | 1 Comment »

Defining Our Professional Future: Thoughts on CILIP’s KI Conversation

May 12th, 2010

As previously revealed on this blog, I’m currently acting as a project board member on CILIP’s Conversation with the Knowledge and Information Community. The process is underway and you can read more about it, and how to get involved, at http://www.cilip.org.uk/get-involved/cilipfuture. Conversation through social media and regional focus groups is currently underway.

Although I’m sitting on the project board, I’m a CILIP member myself, and one who’s not 100% sold on every service it offers. I therefore wanted to take a moment out to be part of the Conversation too, remove my ‘Project Board Member’ hat and have a bit of a chat about the three questions the Conversation is currently mulling over:

  • What will the knowledge and information sector look like in 2020?
  • Where will a professional association fit into this sector?
  • How will you engage with this professional association?

The Knowledge and Information Sector in 2020

Technology is one that will come up again and again (and not just in the information sector). I’ll cover it briefly. I’m not going to guess which technologies will be relevant to information professionals in 2020. Technologies change all the time: if you think that learning to use Twitter now is going to help you in 2020 you’re sadly mistaken. However, I am certain that the information professionals in 2020 will need to be early adopters of technology, experimenters, and no longer those behind the curve in hearing about and adopting new forms of tech. Or else we’ll have gone the way of the dinosaur. End.

An issue that’s more personal to the sector is its fragmentation. I believe in 2020 the sector will be just as fragmented as it is now. It’s inevitable that information management will take place in a range of different institutions: that there will be public and private organisations (and individuals) with different needs. And its also inevitable that whether I work in a university, or a law firm, or a public library, or the health sector, or a school, or for Count Waldstein, I’ll have more shared experiences with those in similiar posts. However, I hope that in 2020 information professionals will have grown better and looking beyond these everyday sectoral  concerns to wider shared issues (information literacy, information management, information systems design).

The role of a professional organisation in the Information Sector

The role of a professional organisation is surely about bridging the gap between those sectors. About developing a shared identity for information professionals. And to do this it needs to definine its boundaries. Who is an information professional, and who isn’t? What kind of work does an information professional do? It’s comparatively easy to tell if you’re a librarian or not, which I think is why CILIP ends up full of librarians talking about librarianship.

You may have noticed that the subtitle above doesn’t say ‘the Knowledge and Information sector’ Why not? In have an MSc in Occupational Psychology, and studied knowledge management. I’ve therefore got some expertise behind this claim: knowledge and information management are the opposite of each other. Information management is all about arranging information in structures so it’s easy to find, and making it easy to convert data to knowledge. Knowledge management is all about capturing disorganised ‘soft’ human knowledge and desperately trying to convert it to data. While these two processes are related, and professionals in both sectors can learn a lot from each other, I don’t think an organisation like CILIP can simply lay claim to the Knowledge sector without a merger with a specialised Knowledge Management group. We can’t claim to be experts in everything, and our identity is strongest when we admit what we are not.

Lastly, once it’s established what an information professional is, the professional association must be clear about what a good information professional is (those undertaking continuing professional development, for example), and build its membership from these good information professionals. What’s the point in joining a professional organisation when there’s equally competent equally active professionals outside it, and those who merely passed a course inside it? It must actively improve the quality of professionals within its boundaries, for example by masterminding the cross-sector initiatives referred to above. And if it can’t offer this, why call it a professional organisation? Why not have training courses and networking sessions funded by one-off payments? Why have membership at all?

How I’ll engage with this professional association

This time I think I’ve really answered this question before I got to it. How I engage with a professional association depends on what I get back from engaging. I’d love to be able to be a member of a society where being a member is a guaranteed of quality to employers, where collectively we are improving the information sector. However, if that isn’t going to happen, I’ll just have to demonstrate my professionalism through my activities, and do my best to keep an eye on what happens in other across different sectors. I can do it on my own: I’ll join committees, and attend courses, and read the literature of a professional association if it can help me do it better.

So, your move first, professional association. How do you plan to engage with me? What do you think might make me a better information professional? If your answer is convincing enough, I’m on board.

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Posted in CILIP, professional development, professionalism | 2 Comments »

Changes

April 6th, 2010

Chinese New Year fireworks

Photograph of Chinese New Year fireworks at University Park, University of Nottingham, 2010.

Since I last posted a lot of things have changed. I’ve started my new job and finished my old one, in that order, as I was asked to carry on working part-time in my old maternity leave cover post while I started my new (permanent) part-time post. I’ve submitted my personal development plan for chartership, moved from subject support for Business to Science, and had to adjust to a whole new institution.

I’ve also just (before Easter) returned from LILAC (Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference) 2010 where I ended up presenting a workshop solo, due to last minute changes of plan. I’m not surprised I haven’t updated for a while, although as my chartership plan involved updating this blog (and as blogging LILAC seems to be becoming an annual activity for me!), I’ve been feeling bad about it. I’ve also been involved in meetings and work on the renamed Big Conversation and spent yesterday evaluating consultants’ bids: more on that soon.

The good news is that I have a backlog of blogs waiting to be written on my new job, LILAC, and various bits and pieces. I’ve also migrated my blog to WordPress, as Blogger was suspending support for FTP and I’m still not convinced enough by the cloud to stop hedging my bets. Plus, I’ve got all this webspace, may as well use it! The particularly observant may notice a few small changes in the layout, and I’ll continue to fiddle with it for a while until I’m completely happy, but both blog themes were based on the styles from my main site, so things mostly look the same (except perhaps in Chrome, where the background seems to be broken – working on it).

Anyway, this really constitutes a) a shout out to say I’m still here, b) a brief update of what I’m doing and c) a way to remind me to make the updates that aren’t here yet!

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Posted in chartership, CILIP, conferences, jobs, website | No Comments »

Library Day in the Life — Day 3+ — 27/01/10 – 29/01/10

February 1st, 2010

Decided to merge my last three days of Day in the Life together, as I did too much miscellaneous stuff, and not enough sitting down and writing. Consider this edited highlights!

Wednesday morning I spent looking for some new DVDs providing training in team building, meetings, and other workplace communication skills. Unfortunately the only materials I could source which seemed good enough to keep student attention were the ones we already owned (but on DVD rather than video). Too expensive to justify buying twice, so I’m still looking, if anyone has any ideas!

After that, an induction session. It was arranged as part of an induction programme for a small course, but only the library session was on Wednesday. Isolate library sessions never seem to encourage students to attend. Terrible turnout: a few arrived on time and a few late, making eight out of an expected twenty. I wasn’t presenting, but did lead the tour, and felt a bit better about making the effort to organise the session when the students who did come were interested and asked lots of questions.

Most of the rest of the day week involved wrapping up activities, as this was my penultimate full-time week in the post. Wednesday concluded with my late night in which I created (by request from the head of my section) a list of keywords for induction demonstrations (such as databases) for the different departments I cover. There’s some general subject-specific keywords, some comparative ones to show the difference keyword choices make, and a classic article to use in citation searches for each of the four departments. Sourcing and trialling these took me most of my late night shift, bar ten minutes which I spent editing margins so the crib sheet fitted onto a single handy sheet of paper!

Thursday and Friday morning (I work only the morning on Fridays to compensate for the late night) involved summary activities which more or less ran into each other. There were a couple of highlights. On Thursday afternoon we had an interesting session on the government’s new Customer Service Excellence standard, which we’re working towards, identifying measures we could use to demonstrate our excellence.

The best part of the week for me, though, was the announcement that I’ve made the Project Board for the Big Conversation: a discussion that CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in the UK) is running to determine its future. I’m really pleased and got lots of nice comments on Twitter from people who were happy to have a New Professional on the board. I’ve got project experience from my PhD and other academic activities, plus a billion opinions on research methods, so I’m hoping to be valuable in choosing a strategy for the project. The first meeting kicks off in February. Definitely a memorable week for me!

Picture: Sign at the new Nottingham Contemporary art gallery. I caught the end of the David Hockney exhibition on my week off this month.

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Posted in CILIP, HE libraries, professional development | 1 Comment »

Response to a blog post by Bob McKee, CILIP Chief Executive

November 26th, 2009

I’m not easily angered, but was infuriated by a recent blog post from CILIP’s Chief Executive, Bob McKee. The offending part of the post was a throwaway comment, towards the top, in which he referred to those voters who turned up and carried a proposal for an increase in membership fees through as ‘wonderful’. It doesn’t seem outrageous to read into this that those members of CILIP who voted against the proposal, and who were, for a range of reasons, unable to attend the meeting in person, were less than wonderful. I’ve reposted my comment on his blog below for your consideration.

Dear Bob

When I saw the results of the proposal for an increase in CILIP fees had gone through I was surprised by its approval. However, as CILIP is run by the democratic method I accepted that the views of the voting members had been represented. To be honest, I would expect the Chief Executive of CILIP to attempt to disguise his or her own views on such a vote, and to focus on the importance of the vote representing the members. I therefore saw your comment above about the ‘not wonderful’ proxy voters as not only personally insulting, but rather inappropriate.

I submitted a proxy vote against the increase in fees, and encouraged my colleagues to do the same. I had a good reason for doing so. I have recently graduated from a librarianship course. A large number of students on this course saw CILIP as a looming overexpensive drain on their resources. I strongly believe that charging higher and higher prices to account for a failure to recruit these new professionals is just going to drive them further away. I believe that raising fees does more harm to the long-term earning potential (and relevance) of CILIP than good.

The information profession is not my first calling, and I came to it with a strong belief in the importance and power of professional bodies. Therefore I will not be leaving CILIP in protest. I think working from inside CILIP is a better way to change it than leaving. My believe in working within an organisation for change is why I voted by proxy, despite being unable to attend the meeting. However, I sympathise strongly with those who are leaving, and think your (doubtless intended to be) throwaway comment above is only going to further alienate the disenfranchised.

I hope you will forgive me for also posting this comment on my blog. I also have little time, and hope to get extra value out of this content by reusing it.

Regards,
Katie Fraser

I’d be interested to hear any comments, especially from new professionals on the way they see CILIP and its value to their own careers. Who knows, Bob McKee may even be interested in your thoughts.

Posted in CILIP, professionalism | 4 Comments »

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, librarians gotta charter?

July 22nd, 2009

There was an interesting conversation happening on Twitter this week about whether or not to charter. I understand completely that many people feel rather disenfranchised from CILIP, and don’t feel like they get their money’s worth from the organisation. Chartership, similarly, is an aid to professional development, but not the only way to expand ones knowledge and self-awareness (and I’m sure there are some who (whisper it) cannot be bothered… although I’ve never met any self-proclaimed non-bother-ers).

My background is in psychology, and there a completely different conversation is happening: whether the unchartered should even be allowed to call themselves psychologists. It is understandable that people are more worried about ensuring a certain level of training from someone playing with their minds than someone fetching them a book. As Joeyanne Libraryanne pointed out the equivalent conversation in librarianship is whether a qualification is needed at all. However, isn’t the whole point of calling us a profession to point out that librarians do more than just fetch books? I really hope we do, as I get bored of fetching books quite quickly.

For me, CILIP membership and chartership is a complete no-brainer. I have been indoctrinated somewhere along the line to believe that professional organisations are a good thing and CILIP does seem to have given back to me for everything I’ve put in. I’m a CILIP blogger, which has given me incentive to keep on blogging, I’ve been sponsored to attend the Mashed Library Conference via CILIP, and I’m a member of the CDG Yorkshire and Humberside committee where I’ve helped organise events which gave me experience and information. I even read the Gazette and Update on the train. Oh yes, I’m one of those.

For me, the process of chartership is the unimportant part of the equation. I’ve not gone through it, and the stories I’ve heard indicate that it may not be the most well-developed programme in the world. But idealistically, the idea of chartership is important to me. If librarians really are a profession – if there’s some benefit to shared training and continuing professional development – then we need to have a chartership process to reflect and validate our professional activities. My thinly veiled opinion is that there is a benefit. Now, how do we make that benefit more evident, CILIP?

Note: photograph shows view across the lake, University Park, University of Nottingham.

Posted in chartership, CILIP, professional development, Web 2.0 | 6 Comments »

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