Bleak House or Great Expectations? NE CILIP Mini Umbrella – November 23rd 2011

I often complain about living in the North East. Being a fair distance and an expensive train ride away from most of the interesting LIS events it’s easy to feel disconnected and as though you’re somehow missing out on all the important stuff that’s happening in the profession. Mini Umbrella (organised by NE CILIP and the Department of Information Studies at Northumbria University) is a great event – partly because it’s local and free!! – but mainly because it is an opportunity for local library and information services to showcase their initiatives and innovative approaches to service delivery. And actually this event highlighted that really important stuff is happening right here in the North East region too. Who knew?!

There were speakers from across the sector – NHS, public, HE, and FE – who are doing really innovative work to improve and develop their library services, adapting to new ways of working when faced with the challenges of the current economic situation. Two of the key messages that stood out were the need for library services to develop strong working partnerships and to manage expectations.

Partnerships

Rachel Steele from Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust spoke about a pilot project to develop to role of the clinical librarian. A clinical librarian develops strong links with medical practitioners to inform evidence based practice. They assist in keeping practitioners’ knowledge up to date by conducting literature searches and critical appraisal of health research. This role involves accompanying practitioners when they see patients so the librarian can source relevant research to inform the treatment of those patients.

Mark Freeman and Kathryn Armstrong talked about the Tyne2Seine2 project that they have been involved with for South Tyneside Libraries. This was an international reading project to introduce children to modern European languages. It involved forging strong partnerships between South Tyneside council staff, libraries, and schools and developing links with their counterparts in the twin town of Epinay-sur-Seine in France. They also worked with authors from both countries and even with colleagues from North Tyneside! This project has been very successful in developing the language skills of both English and French schoolchildren and of the adults involved. Most importantly it has demonstrated the value of libraries in reading and in education.

Sharon Reeve from Newcastle City Libraries spoke about services for visually impaired users. Development of this service has relied upon strong partnerships with a range of groups, including service users and external bodies. Newcastle City Libraries were part of the NEALIS (North East Accessible Library and Information Services) project, which was nominated for the 2011 Libraries Change Lives award. This project brought together 12 public library authorities from the North East of England to develop library and information services for people with visual impairments, working in partnership with the RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People). Sharon also described the Reading Buddies scheme for providing one-to-one assistance for visually impaired library users from Duke of Edinburgh Award participants, which is another strong partnership for the library service.

Managing Expectations

Speakers from the education sector – FE and HE – highlighted the importance for academic libraries of measuring student satisfaction with and expectations of library services in order to develop and make improvements to services. Dilys Young and Christine Willoughby from Northumbria University described how the University Library uses National Student Survey (NSS) data and other feedback for targeted service development, for example improving resource provision in subject areas where NSS scores are lower, thus responding to student needs and rising expectations. Middlesbrough College learning resources service also use feedback and survey data to determine student expectations. Claire Donlan, Tracey Totty, and James Wells described how this information has highlighted that their students’ expectations of a technology enabled library service. In the current economic climate it is not always possible to spend on all the latest technology and where they have done so they have invested wisely. They also emphasised the importance of “doing more with less” (a phrase familiar to most of us these days) by making the most of existing resources and investigating the plethora of free online resources available. I will certainly be investigating some of the free online tools they mentioned. Just as soon as I finish CPD23…

In his summing up of the day, Colin Raistrick (Chair of NE CILIP) said that the day had proved that the situation is far from bleak. It’s inspiring hear about a range of innovative developments in library services especially when they’re happening in your area of the country.

CPD23: Thing 15 – Events and conferences: attending, presenting, organising

Ah, I appear to have fallen behind again. I have a note…

Anyway, onto Thing 15 about events and conferences. I haven’t a lot to write on this one really as so far my experience has been rather limited. I’ve never spoken at an event. At the moment I don’t feel as though I’ve done enough to make a valuable contribution, though I would like to give it a go one day. I’m in awe of all those new professionals who do speak at events and find it inspiring that others can – though it is also a little intimidating and this is perhaps the source of my reticence. I’ve also never organised an event – although I’m good at organising myself I’m not so sure I’d manage to organise others. I’ve only quite recently joined the CDG NE committee so I may have more opportunities to get involved with organising events in the future.

I do have some experience of attending events, however. I really enjoy going to events to learn new stuff, meet new people and generally come away feeling inspired and full of new ideas – all good.  I’ve been fairly lucky in getting support from my employer to attend a couple of events (including the 2010 New Professionals Conference) but mainly I’ve attended free events – including the Toon(lib)TeachMeet earlier this year. North East CILIP organises Mini Umbrella each year and this is another excellent free event. With less money available for training and development anywhere it’s great that there are good free events like this (or fairly cheap ones that I can afford to pay for myself) but it’s definitely worth applying for funding for larger events. Jo’s post for this thing is worth a read for some good tips on applying for funded places at conferences. After missing out on funding for Umbrella this year, I’m keen to try again for funding for future events and conferences.