the CILIP Manifesto is a good step forward

CILIP has launched its new Manifesto - six priorities for the next government. You can view details of it on CILIP's website, or click here to download the whole thing - it's only a 4 page PDF.

The six priorities are

1. Make school libraries statutory

2. Promote and protect the rights of users within copyright law

3. Build a successful knowledge economy

4. Preserve the UK's digital cultural heritage

5. Fund and enable the effective co-ordination of health information

6. Develop a set of library entitlements for public library users

Leaving aside the colour of the thing, I like this a lot. It is short, to the point, clearly laid out, and with basic information you can take in at a glance and more in-depth stuff too if you have time to read it. Here's a quote:

"A copy of every book published in the UK is deposited at the British Library and, by request, at other national deposit libraries.This is not so with audio-visual or digital material and much unique material has already been lost. There are eight million websites in the UK domain but, for example, no contemporary web records exist for the death of Princess Diana or the unveiling of the Angel of the North."

It makes its point well, highlights the dichotomy of the traditional perceived role of the library and the one we actually have to serve now, and gives a solid and tangible example of what failings need to be addressed.

All six priorities are important, and the chances are one or more of them is relevant to either your work or your other professional activities - for me, the whole Preserve the UK's digital cultural heritage business is fundamental to the LIFE-SHARE Project.

I like that there is are instructions and suggestions on how to use the document for lobbying and advocacy, including an email template to write to your MP, and details of how to go about contacting your local media. This is what a public and national library body should be doing - empowering its members to act, and providing the tools and the guidance to help them do so.

What I really like, though, is how widely CILIP has distributed this Manifesto. It's gone to a LOT of people, including all parliamentary candidates. (There's more than two-and-a-half thousand of them.) It has also been sent to political Party HQs, senior Information Professionals, and a press release has gone out. Much effort has been made to escape the echo chamber - this is not a Manifesto just for us to read among ourselves, but to communicate what we all say to each other to the wider country. I've thought for a while that libraries sometimes seem under-represented in popular culture - as well as all the funding cuts, the well-worn cliches, the closures etc, it doesn't always feel like we've got enough fire-power to fight back in the public domain, via the media and so on. This is the first time CILIP has sent out a message to so many people (and so many potentially important, policy-forming people at that) and I really applaud them for it.

In other CILIP related news, the Diversity Group Conference 2010 has been announced: "An Inconvenient Truth: Race, Class and Libraries". It takes place on Monday 14 June 2010 at CILIP HQ, and you can find details of the programme, prices, how to book etc on the Diversity Group's web-pages. The talks look really good, and Bonnie Greer, no less, is providing the keynote. So check it out. I have a special set of circumstances this year which means I've used up each and every iota of leave and / or conferences-not-directly-related-to-my-9-to-5-job allowance for this cycle so will have to miss this, as well as Liver and Mash, and some other good looking conferences and a couple of events I was asked to speak at, which is sad times (although all in a good cause) - so I can't go, but I wish I could. It's an important issue, race in libraries; we seem to be a very un-diverse profession. It's particularly noticeable in Leeds where I work in the UK - the population of the town has myriad ethnicities, as does the student population, but this doesn't seem that well represented in the library staff. So if anyone reading this goes to the Diversity Group conference, I'd be interested in hearing what gets said...

- thewikiman

you are only as good as your last customer interaction

I've said this before in papers and presentations, but never as blog post of its own - a recent Agnostic, Maybe post about library advocacy has reminded me of it.

Sport is riddled with cliches, and one of the less vapid ones is "you're only as good as your last game."  Of course, your reputation should actually be the sum total of all your actions, but the most recent of these actions is by far the most important in forming opinions. Your reputation can be absolutely stellar right up until the point at which you choke in the final; at that point your reputation will be 'choker' rather than 'silver medalist', most likely.

The same applies in a very real way to library customer service. The reputation of each library is only as good as its last customer interaction. There are, of course, a million and one caveats to this, but I'm trying to learn the art of briefer blog posts so I won't insult your intelligence by listing them here. Serve every customer superbly and there will gradually be a net gain in the reputation of your institution; serve one rudely or lazily and there may well be an instant reputation plummet. Word of mouth is so important, and everyone knows the majority of people are more likely to pass on bad experiences than good ones; it's just the way we are.

I wanted a nice pithy definition of 'reputation' to use here, so I looked it up in the OED. Turns out there isn't really a useful summary you can fit into a single sentance, but the gist of it is this: reputation is the general esteem in which something or someone is held.

This general esteem is easy to percieve as a fixed constant, a largley solid and static 'thing' which is sometimes influenced by particularly significant events. The reality for something like a library is that reputation is a constantly updating, evolving and shifting entity, held in the collective (and individual) conciousness of both the library's users and even people who've never set foot on its premises. The reputation of your library is in part informed by you - literally you, as an individual, based on your actions as a member of its staff.

I'm going to pull out my favourite quote here - it's from Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, in Information and Library Manager 5 (3) 1985:

"The library is not an abstraction. It has an identity, an identity created by the staff contact with the users."

Two things strike me about that quote - firstly it came from someone who wasn't a librarian (Dame Esteve-Cole, as she later became, was an academic and two years after writing the article I'm quoting from she became the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum) and secondly I was five years old then, and I'm not entirely sure her message has got through over the last quarter of a century. Library advocacy is a complicated issue and something of a problem for the industry, but the one thing we can all do as indivduals to improve reputations is good customer service. If 100% of librarians are nice 100% of the time, people will start to notice...

It's really hard to do, by the way. It doesn't take a genius to point out that being nice to people will improve reputations; of course it will. But actually applying that maxim to the full, particularly five minutes before you're due to close with an annoying patron who isn't showing you any courtesy at all in return, is often easy to duck out of. But it's worth sticking with it, for the good of all of us.

- thewikiman

It's a good time to be a New Professional

I've been working in libraries since 2006, and only really been aware of the wider goings on in the profession since I joined CILIP around a year ago. But as far as I can see, despite the massive economic difficulties involved in the sector, if you can secure employment it is actually a great time to be a New Professional. There's a growing realisation that you can really get things done and make things happen quite early on in your career - making opportunities, rather than waiting for them to come to you in management 10 years down the line - and of course social networking has made it much easier to connect with other New Professionals and share experiences and advice.

I'm pleased to see that CILIP (and indeed SLA-Europe) are not just responding to but catalysing that excitement about being a new professional. From what I can understand, a huge amount of credit for this emphasis must go to Maria Cotera, currently serving her year as Past President of the Career Development Group; it seems she instigated a lot of the stuff that is now going on. Chris Rhodes has his role as the first New Professionals Coordinator, and last year was the inaugural New Professionals Conference; this year's (coming up in July) I'll blog about at a later date but details of it are here.

On Thursday I went to CILIP HQ to plan this year's version of the Graduate Open Day, at which I presented a paper last time around. A whole bunch of New Professionals Support Officers for various regions of CILIP, plus some other interested parties, got together last year to draw up plans for a regional version of the Open Day - CILIP is often criticised for being too focused on London and the South. A working group of myself, Chris Rhodes, Annette Earl, Maria Cotera and the indefatigable Kathy Ennis reconvened last week to take those initial ideas to the next stage and actually plan the days.

What came out was a New Professionals Information Day, which may be themed to some extent along the lines of my previous blog post about the applicability of existing interests to the library profession. (That, incidentally, is a great example of opportunities for New Professionals... I went from writing a blog post on a Tuesday, musing about how we can make more of the fact that you can apply all sorts of existing intersts and passions to librarianship, to suggesting this on the Thursday as a theme for a whole conference which'll hopefully be attended by hundred of people. There are no comporable opportunities in my 9-to-5 role.) It'll probably run twice, once in London (replacing the Graduate Day) and once in Newcastle, and cater for people who are either starting out in the profession or just at the 'wondering if LIS is for them' stage, and we've devised what I reckon is a really exciting format and programme. One of the best things about it, which if I remember rightly was thought up by Bethan Ruddock at the previous meeting, is what I and sadly no one else except me likes to call* Palindromic Scheduling™ - where the parallel sessions from early afternoon are repeated early evening, either side of a central section with a couple of key presentations and some time to network... This allows different people to catch the same programme at different times suitable to them, and ensures the key social networking opportunity is hopefully available to everyone in the middle bit. The event will be welcoming, inclusive, free, and exciting, I think. We've got loads of great ideas for it, and it's a brilliant thing to be involved with. (If you have anything you'd like to see happen at it, leave a comment or send me an email.)

What struck me about the day was how the five of us seemed to contribute almost exactly the same amount of ideas (correct me if I'm wrong, fellow attendees!) - something that doesn't often happen with committees. Not only that but Kathy was really happy for us to have an equal say in what happened - despite the fact that she's the expert on this sort of thing, and it is in effect 'her' day that we're appropriating and mucking about with. I hope that when (if) I ever become an expert in anything, I'll be so open to everyone else's ideas!

By the way, another reason it's a good time to be a New Professional is that the online New Professionals Network (LISNPN) is almost ready to launch. Stay tuned for more on that, I think it's going to be ace.

In other news

I was also really pleased to get an email confirming my essay - The Unspeakable Truth - was one of the three winners of the LISNews Contest. It was a good contest to support and I'm glad I entered, as I got comments and interaction with people who'd never read this blog, so that's great. To win is a lovely bonus. :) I'll stick a PDF of the essay on the website shortly.

- thewikiman

* I'm afraid I can't think of a way of phrasing this that don't be making me sound like a pirate. I likes to call it Palindromic Scheduling - yaaar!