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The final theme was the future of librarianship, and this covered two main aspects - the need for leaders of the future, and the research library-specific consideration of how librarians' roles might change.

There were two talks on leadership. The first came from Alistair Work, and mainly focused on how individuals react when the moment to show leadership arises. He also asked an interesting question - given that long-term professionals tend to develop certain styles of thinking, with associated neural changes, what does a librarian's brain look like? For me, an equally interesting question was whether a newly qualified librarian is going to end up with a similar brain to the librarians in charge today, and what, if any, differences there are between the current cohort of library school students and those of a few decades ago. In addition, Sheila Corrall, my Head of Department presented an evaluation of the Leading Modern Public Libraries programme - it seems well worth a look for those interested in library leadership across the sectors.

The other main theme was the emergence of new types of librarian role in research libraries. Often when speakers talk about the changing role of librarians it is simply a matter of integrating new technologies into old posts; this was about how changes from technologies might create entirely new posts. For example, with the advent of open access, researchers will need librarians to manage internally produced repositories of publications, and even data. In research libraries it seemed like librarians were being encouraged to move away from liaison roles to the support of researchers' information needs, and with my background in research this certainly sounds like an exciting opportunity!

So, that's the end of my thoughts on the RLUK conference. There's a bunch of stuff about the course and visits backed up to talk about, but that will have to wait until my next update!

Labels: conferences, future of librarianship, leadership, research libraries, RLUK Conference