NPC2010: That was the day that was

Wow.

There's probably going to be a whole spate of conference reports on CILIP's New Professionals Conference but I can't resist adding my own. What a day! It was absolutely ace. It's tempting to talk about things coming full circle etc, with this being the second ever NPC, and last year's inaugural one being what pushed me over the edge into the world of blogging, and me helping organise this one and delivering a workshop on blogging etc. But I'm still inspired by Biddy Fisher's closing speech, and am desperate to follow through on all the optimism in the room and make stuff happen, so perhaps a circle is the wrong analogy as that suggests either coming to a halt where you started, or going round again... Maybe coming full circle in the same way a shot-put goes full circle before being launched off into the field. :)

Things that inspired me

Even though I was gutted to miss three of the presentation that ran concurrently with my own workshop, I still got loads out of the stuff I did get to see. I really liked Eleni Zazani's presentation on bridging the gap between employability and employment. I was sat next to Nicolás Robinson Garcia during that bit, and was once again struck by how awesome it is that people can present eloquently in a second language  - I'd say I was jealous, but the over-riding emotion is disappointment that like so many Brits I am rubbish at languages. I've got no excuses. (In fact, I was the first kid in any of my French Teacher's classes ever to get below a 'C' at GSCE French  - apologies, Mrs Cousins!) Anyway, two things in particular I really liked - firstly her earthquake analogy. She was comparing the current job market with an earthquake situation (she's Greek and has apparently been in a few!) and at first I thought it was just a simple pun on the fact that things were a bit unstable. But then she continued and explained that rigid structures fall during earthquakes, whereas flexible ones are able to move during them and then wobble back into place once the earthquake is over - and must we be able to be flexible in this economic down-turn, and be ready to re-assume our places once it is through. I liked that. The other thing I liked was that when she was talking about feeding the fire of your enthusiasm, she mentioned remembering why you wanted to be an Information Professional and keeping that at the front of your mind, rather than the back. Great advice.

Awen Clement's talk on unleashing your professional edge was brilliant, and very nearly won the prize (just two votes separated the first two papers, and everyone had a sizeable stack of voting slips on their pile when we were totalling them up, which is fantastic really) - it was properly inspiring stuff and full of practical things to take away with you. I particularly liked how much the melting pot of previous non-library jobs she'd done had ununexpectedly (or perhas expectedly) fed into her current role and made her better equipped to perform it. That, to me, is related to the argument against librarianship as an under-grad degree - with it most commonly being a Masters, I feel you get valuable life-experience and experience of different disciplines that can feed in to the way you do your job.

I loved hearing about what public libraries get up to, via Ann Donovan and Rachel Edwards. It struck me just what a completely different world it is to the academic one I inhabit. It's almost like a different profession - the resourcefulness and skills they were talking about are not ones I possess.

I also really enjoyed Laura and Lindsay's talk on Cataloguing and Classification. Their argument was that we should not forget the traditional skills that underpin modern librarianship, which is very important to remember and sometimes gets lost in the breathless rush towards 2.0 uptopia. Social media is after all mainly about communication, and communication is a means to and end not an end in itself. What they were saying about cataloguing being an important skill for everyone no matter what their role (more or less) really hit home - having resented every minute of the cat & class module at Northumbria on my MSc (until I realised there were right and wrong answers, so it was possible to get more than 90% for a module and push my overall mark up to a Commendation) I actually found it incredibly useful just last week, when creating metadata for digital objects. Metadata is basically what makes the Internet work for users, and is incredibly valuable. So, yay for its creators.

Most inspiring of all, though, were Biddy Fisher's closing words (Biddy being the current CILIP president). I found myself grinning from ear-to-ear throughout - she was obviously inspired by what she'd seen, and inspired us in return and gave us confidence that we could not only succeed and go places but also bend CILIP to reflect our needs in the future. She said she was sure there were future CILIP presidents in the room, and I found myself wondering how many were on my row - I could think of two potentially (and there were only two people on my row...), the point being that her faith in us gave me faith in myself and in us as a group of peers, and it pushed my ambition right up. It was proper inspiration. (I just can't believe I literally stumbled into this profession, and that it would turn out to be so consuming and involving and generally great...)

Things I learned personally (this bit is quite narcissistic, feel free to skip it...)

Being on the organising committee is stressful! I don't get stressed that easily but I was definitely on edge for this event. Even though I had the least to do of the proper organisers by far (and owe a HUGE debt of gratitude to Stella Wisdom for all the unsung hero stuff she did on the day) you just feel a sense of responsibility for the whole thing, as opposed to last year where I could just worry about my own paper. You sit there just desperate for it to go well. But it did! So that's okay.

Meeting people off twitter is ace! I knew that anyway, but I'd never met the twitterati on such a massive scale before and it was great fun. Big up the #oxfordlibrarymafia massive. :)

I still haven't really got the hang of small-scale presentations. For whatever reason, I find it easier to present to a big room than a small room. My workshop went okay, I think - I'll have to read the feedback forms to find out what people thought of it because I wasn't sure. It certainly went down well online though, apparently finding it's way onto Slideshare's homepage as the most tweeted presentation on the net (and Woodsiegirl's earnt a similar accolade on Facebook - we think Slideshare might just be broken or something!) despite some issues with my future-tweeting reversing the order of some tweets... I was very surprised to find myself running out of time (we started late, which didn't help) so it all felt a bit rushed and unbalanced, but I hope the delegates got something out of it. I put too much time into the materials preparation though - that much work would be completely unsustainable if I did public speaking on a proper regular basis.

So the workshop felt slightly difficult, but the LISNPN launch presentation with Chris Rhodes (more on LISNPN next time) felt really easy. I think it might come down to the fact that I'm naturally a fairly reserved person and quite laid-back, with a fairly quiet voice, who normally gravitates towards the observing end of the participation spectrum - I like to sit back and take things in on the edge, rather than being in the middle of the circle. So the gap between that and what is needed for a large-scale presentation is quite big and perhaps therefore easier to define and to leap - clearly being quiet and reserved doesn't work in a room full of 100 people, so you have to step up and become a performer, amplifying your voice literally and your communication style metaphorically. I know what I have to do there, so I can do it. Small scale presentations to a room with far fewer people is a lot less of a step up than that, yet still my normal 'talking to people' style of communicating doesn't work - there's a balance there somewhere in the middle, which I'm yet to achieve. Something to work on, anyway.

I heart Chris Rhodes (more than ever). Presenting with Chris was brilliant fun, I had a blast. We had so many other duties between us we had basically zero preparation - we got as far as dividing the slides up, but had no run through, no notes, and no real idea what the other one of us was going to say. Liking your co-presenter enough to insult each other with impunity is a great benefit to a relaxed presentation, I think! It was in fact the only time I felt completely relaxed in the whole day - it was the only presentation with not much riding on it in a way, as the others were either competing for the best paper prize, or opening the day, or running the day like (CDG Past President) Maria Cotera's bits, or closing and summing up the day. Chris and I just got to enjoy ourselves for 10 minutes.

Thanks so much to everyone who has signed up to LISNPN by the way; about 25 people have gone straight home and created their accounts just since Chris and I spoke less than 24hrs ago, so we're now up to 77 members - that's a great start!

Things to ponder for next year and the future

First of all, we ARE going to have some battledecks action! Chris and I will be participating in it, any other volunteers? It's an ALA thing, where protagonists are given a topic and a slide deck they've never seen before AS THEY GO UP ON STAGE, then have 4 or 5 minutes to present on the fly. It will be mint! You can see videos via Bobbi Newman's blog.

[Dear ALA, please don't sue us for stealing your fun ideas!]

Should we do the conference over two days? I was looking through the twitter stream from the conference (or see here for a nice bit of analysis of the #npc2010 tweets), and noticed Lex Rigby suggesting it would have been good to have had it over two days and with more workshops. Speaking as someone who missed three presentations I really wanted to see (including Bronagh's winning effort - congrats Bronagh!) because I was in a workshop, I think that's actually a great idea - we could have workshops on day 1, and presentations on day 2. People could pay a reduced rate to come to just one of the days, or full whack to come to both. What do people reckon to that idea? Would it be worth doing, or too logistically difficult or prohibitively expensive with an extra hotel night etc? Would love to hear what you think in the comments.

"We need more men!" Initially when Maria said in her summing up about needing more men, I thought it was just a personal plea from her. But she actually meant the conference needed more men.. And it's true, the vast majority were female. Of course the library profession is predominantly female (although I bet that percentage is not reflected in the percentage of Library Directors and Assistant Directors who are male; there seems to be loads of them, but that's a debate for another day) but still, would be nice to see some greater representation of the other half of the species next year. I read something in the Observer on Sunday about how female graduates are getting a lot more jobs than males because males are complacent and 'generally hopeless'. Three people from my organisation came to the conference as delegates, and they were all female - I hope the men don't feel complacent about continuing professional development, or generally 'too cool' to engage with conferences like ours. Anyway.

How do we keep energising this cohort when they're no longer 'New' Professionals?

Perhaps I'm getting carried away by the euphoria of it all going well and meeting so many lovely people, but it really felt like a special group of Information Professionals who could make things happen in the future. I was honoured and thrilled to be with so many forward-thinking, dynamic peers. But quite a few of them, myself included, are close to exceeding the 'five year' CILIP definition of what constitutes a New Professional. And quite rightly, we should soon start to make way for the next generation to keep the progress flowing, the innovation coming, and the ideas fresh. But still, collectively we do have a lot of great people with great ideas - we need to continue to bring together this particular cohort (and adding to it) past the point when we're all 6+ years into our library careers. We won't be classed as senior professionals for ages - so we need to come up with some umbrella which we can continue to congregate under, and be energised by, at events like this. Any thoughts on this?

Anyway, the short version of this very long post is: NPC2010 was ruddy marvelous. :)

-thewikiman

Newsnight: Lessons for Libraries

I want to draw a bit of a line under the whole CILIP and Newsnight thing pretty soon, so a good way to do that would be to see what we, the library community, can learn from the whole thing. [For those of you who missed it, a previous blog post on CILIP and the media generated unheard-of-for-this-blog levels of views and comments, so clearly tapped into something a lot of people feel strongly about.] Clearly all of the below deals specifically with CILIP, and particularly with Newsnight. But there may be lessons which can be extrapolated across the board.

In amongst all the debate it suddenly occurred to me that I have a Newsnight related contact! As exciting as a I like to think that sounds, all it means is one of my friends' career paths took them in that direction, so I could ask them about it from a Newsnight perspective. So there's a few quotes from, let's call them a nice androgynous name - Alex - below. Alex did not work on either specific programme that we're discussing, so Alex's views are NOT officially representative of Newsnight; they are just opinions based on what has happened.

CILIP does go where the conversation is

I was impressed that many representatives of CILIP tweeted links to, and commented on, my post. The social-media using arm of CILIP are always open to debate, never afraid of engaging with posts which criticise the organisation, and manage, insofar as I've seen, to remain fair and balanced in the face of something of a battering, at times. Remember kids, these people aren't necessarily the ones making the decisions they have to defend!

In addition to this, Chief Exec Bob McKee took the time to come and leave not one but two comments, responding to our questions, even though he had his own blog post on the same subject to deal with the responses to. I think that's great.

If we'd ALL acted after Newsnight, we'd probably have got an apology

I know that Debby Raven, editor of Gazette, and Johanna Bo Anderson, and a few other people, emailed Newsnight after the incorrect figures being wrong by several hundred million, thing, but really we should ALL have done so. I didn't, and I don't know why not really - no excuses for not taking action if you're going to stand on the side lines and criticise others' efforts, as I have done. Would've been simple enough to use Twitter to get 100 Information Professionals to send a brief email correcting the figure, so we should've. I asked Alex if the BBC would have been fussed about getting the figures so wrong:

Yes, the BBC would have been bothered. Someone would have got an earful but it would have entirely depended on the editor (Peter Rippon) whether there was an apology made or not. Unlikely to be on the web, not Newsnight style. More likely to be at the end of the next days programme or something.  If there were only a handful of complaints, chances are they would have responded to those individually and not broadcast a correction.

Now as far as I know, Jo and the others didn't actually get individual responses. But it seems that if literally 100 or 200 of us had emailed in, they would have corrected it on the next night's edition! Perfect Echo Chamber escaping behaviour, that would have been - letting the same audience that saw the original misinformation about libraries hear the truth the next day, rather than just repeating the truth to other each other as we have done.

We have to go to the media, rather than expect them to come to us

I proposed a theory to Alex, that went like this. The first Newsnight programme didn't invite CILIP simply because they weren't aware of them, ran with incorrect figures, then Debby and Jo et al emailed irately in, and with that in mind CILIP was firmly on the radar of Newsnight, hence the offer to appear on the second programme.

You'd be right in saying CILIP didn't get the nod for the first programme because nobody knew who they were. Unless you're either a. on the BBC 'ENPS' contacts system because you have been on before/a reporter has talked to you, or b. been a regular in the broadsheets you're not likely to be on Newsnight's radar.

So it seems, and this presumably goes for most media, that we have to force the issue and make people aware we have a professional body (with a royal charter, no less!) to represent us.

We have to play by the media's rules

It was suggested in the comments on my earlier post that even attempting to sum up the contribution of libraries / skilled librarians in just 1 minute was inevitably going to end up token and facile, and from Laura Wilkinson's tweets from a CILIP event yesterday I understand Bob put across the perfectly reasonable argument that it was better not to have anyone at all on the programme, than have someone under prepared who'd do a bad job representing libraries.

I agree with both those points. But on the other hand, the 1 minute elevator pitch is, considering libraries' legendary problems with marketing themselves, actually quite a well known idea and an established part of every Info Pros PR armoury - it's a shame there wasn't anyone on hand who could quickly brush up on theirs. More to the point, if you spurn someone like Newsnight are they really going to ask you back in future? Alex again:

Now that CILIP have refused to comment, I would say yes, they are unlikely to be contacted in the future. There are plenty of important, good value people with pro-library views and so they're not forced to go with an organisation which isn't willing to 'step-up'.  You have to remember that Newsnight is run by a very small team of people. They often have to put these things together in a day, so aren't going to chase people around who are too afraid to speak on TV, providing there are many suitable alternatives as I said.

So could there be an argument for getting someone on anyway, even unprepared? I don't know, it's so hard - I'm glad I'm not having to make this kind of decision myself.

I do think, though, with regards to the 'it was only a minute so it wasn't worth it' argument, that when libraries are in crisis, so many jobs are at stake under the new Government, and public perception has the potential to be a nail in a coffin or two, you've got to take any bone the media throws at you. Besides which, as Alex points out:

Note also that 1 minute of TV time is massive!  Any press person worth their salt should be able to get their point across in a 20 second clip. Bear in mind most news items are only 1 minute 30 to 2 minutes in total, and that usually includes 2 or 3 interviewees.  Newsnight is the exception.

There's hope yet...

I asked Alex if we could get CILIP back into Newsnight's good books, and to stay on their radar.

Basically, the BBC gets people on the radar because they either a. get to know reporters, b. have a high enough profile due to funding/politics or c. issue press releases alot and actively try and publicise the organisation.

I think that it would be a fairly rare thing for CILIP to be a regular story contributor as libraries are rarely in the news. But it might just be as simple as calling up Newsnight and asking to be contacted if there are similar stories in the future. the BBC has the system called ENPS which is a big database holding all contacts, scripts, research...everything. If someone types in 'Library Specialist', they'll [CILIP will] want to be the one that comes up.

So - someone at CILIP, make that call!

Edit: a final thought (just like Jerry Springer)

I feel like I should add something which I didn't make clear in the original version of this post.

For me, the thing to take from all of this is not, oh God, Newsnight are never going to invite CILIP back again. Admittedly that is rather depressing, but Alex could be mistaken about that, or CILIP could rectify the situation with a well placed call to the BBC. More to the point though, Newsnight is just one programme and doesn't represent the be all and end all.

The big thing, for me, is that CILIP, BIALL, the SLA, the ALA, all the other professional bodies and libraries generally, need to understand how the media operates in order to successfully engage with them - and that understanding isn't easy to come by! You have to proactively go out there and find out what makes the media tick, what the are the rules they operate by - in order that they / we get it right next time, and the time after that, and all the future times too. We must be self-confident enough to think to ourselves, yes, big news programmes do want to hear from us and yes, we do know how to deal with them effectively.

I think there's a hang-over from the old days of libraries as public institutions - charities in effect - that makes us somewhat meek, whereas in fact now they need to be run as businesses, with all the aggressive marketing that entails (and both pro-active and re-active PR).

- thewikiman

P.S Woodsiegirl and I will be discussing these issues and MANY MORE as part of our echo-chamber presentation in Leeds next month! :) Details elsewhere on the blog.

Hot topic! CILIP and the Media

There seems to be a discrepancy between what CILIP believe to be its media responsibilities, and what its members believe to be its media responsibilities. Hearing both sides of any story is so, so important. I can't think of ANYTHING I've got angry about, or railed against, that I haven't softened my stance on once I've learned a little more about the other side of the story. There's almost always a good reason why people do things that seem inexplicable at first glance. So I am prepared to have all this explained to me and to think to myself at the end of it all - okay, I was being naive, I can see how difficult this must be for CILIP. But either way, there is a problem here that needs to be addressed - whether the problem is one CILIP is contributing to, or is unable to do anything about. There is still a problem - and I get the impression, though only from a small pool of online responses to these issues, that CILIP's members see it as more of a problem than CILIP itself appears to.

• In my opinion, CILIP are not prominent enough in the media
• In my opinion, CILIP do not do enough to mitigate or respond to negative news stories about libraries, or to place positive ones
• In my opinion, CILIP should be able to escape the echo-chamber and are not currently doing so with sufficient frequency or success (although they are moving in the right direction)
• In my opinion, CILIP should not have allowed the first BBC Newsnight debacle to happen as it did because a: they should have had someone on Newsnight instead of a children's author 'representing' libraries and b: they should have ensured Newsnight were NOT able to claim library circulation was 314,000 books per annum when in fact it was 314,000,000 - responding to this afterwards simply isn't enough
• In my opinion CILIP seem too much like 'one of us'- ie indignant and often impotent. Our professional body needs to be 'representing us' - ie getting someone on the programmes that may cause damage to libraries' reputation. Various CILIP people have said you can't just 'get' someone on Newsnight (they were saying this off the cuff - it doesn't represent an official CILIP statement) but that isn't strong enough, for me. If you can't, then CILIP needs to take steps to force a change of attitude and increase its influence.
• In my opinion, that CILIP were unable to accept an invitation on to the second newsnight debacle is an absolute TRAVESTY. They were offered a 1 minute slot at very short notice, and couldn't get anyone to the BBC studios to fill it - Newsnight were unwilling to settle for a video link. I appreciate those are difficult conditions. But you HAVE TO MAKE IT HAPPEN! By whatever means -surely someone could have taken a cab across London and stepped up? I can imagine that Newsnight thought, right, we got lots of angry corrections from CILIP when we messed up the last feature on libraries, so we know all about them this time and we'll offer them a slot. Then they say no... So next time, we'll go back to ignoring them. [EDIT: I've learned today - 25th June - that CILIP actually contacted Newsnight, rather than the other way round. So while clearly it's a shame that CILIP were unable to make it happen, it's much, much better that they were chasing the opportunity, rather than passively impotent and unable to respond to it..]
• In my opinion, and apparently in the opinion of other library bodies too, it is not the members' responsibility to face the media, it is CILIP's
• In my opinion, CILIP should be getting someone on the Dispatches programme, not trying to get its members on it - at least not on their own. I think calling for people to go on that programme, and to produce a 1 minute video explaining the value of libraries, is great. But it should be part of a supporting strategy of member advocacy, with a primary strategy of CILIP appearing in the media itself. To take a presidential analogy: it's like we're being asked to be the foot-soldiers in Obama's famous harnessing of web 2.0, youtube, and the power of grass roots activism - but without Obama himself going out on the campaign trail to lead us.
• In my opinion, CILIP seem unwilling to step up and assume a prominent role in the media
• In my opinion, there have been opportunities in recent months for CILIP to step up, and it feels like a crippling sense of inertia is preventing them from doing so.  A change of culture is needed here.  Chief Exec Bob Mckee says: "It’s easy to sit back and say “CILIP should have been on Newsnight” or indeed on the Today programme on Tuesday morning. But how many of us could go head-to-head with Jeremy Paxman on live TV and give a clear and compelling justification of libraries and librarians in just one minute or less?" God knows, I couldn't - but it only needs one of us! And that one of us should be employed by CILIP - it should be YOU if necessary. Is there no one in the organisation for whom the challenge of facing Paxman is an exciting opportunity rather than a prohibitively intimidating threat? If none of the current staff feel able to represent the whole industry in the media, appoint someone who is! And if that isn't possible right now, make plans to do so when it is possible.
• On the one hand you have someone like Phil Bradley being invited back onto Radio 5Live after a successful appearance, and basically offering to drag the post-Newsnight  response forward on CILIP's behalf (see the comments section), on the other hand we have CILIP unable to grab Newsnight opportunities. Am I the only one who thinks there's a problem here?

I really, really want feedback on this. Please tell me in the Comments whether you agree with me, or disagree with me, or know stuff I don't know. I welcome all comment and debate on this, and I want CILIP to respond to this too. I wouldn't normally ask this, but please tweet a link - http://bit.ly/9EnejP - to this post  to encourage as many people as possible to engage in the conversation.

I have said before that I think we should not be so quick to attack CILIP, and that everyone I've met or spoken with who works for them is doing a great job. It's very easy to criticise from the safety of a blog. I don't want to belittle their efforts from the easy position of not having to represent an entire profession in the media. But, as I've said above, whether the problem is one CILIP is unable to control or is complicit in the perpetuation of, something has to change.

-thewikiman

Libraries in 2020

As part of CILIP's admirable efforts to get the community's input on defining our professional future, they have encouraged debate, blog posts etc on these subjects:

• What will the Knowledge and Information domain look like in 2020?
• Where will a professional association fit into this domain?
• How will you engage with this professional association?

You can go to the CILIP netvibes dashboard to monitor the debates across many platforms - WELL DONE CILIP for setting this up!

Here are my thoughts - it seems to me to be sensible to look at what the world will be like in 2020 first of all, then how libraries will fit into that, and then how professional bodies in general (and CILIP in particular) will best serve their members in that environment.

Technology

Technological progress increases exponentially. This article by Ray Kurzweil has lots of graphs illustrating this, and some eye-popping insights. Everyone can see that things are speeding up – what is interesting and quite scary is that the speeding up is itself speeding up! In other words, we’ll see a century’s worth of progress in the next 25 years (rather than in the next 100) – because we are doubling the rate of progress every decade.

What does this mean for libraries in 2020? Well for a start, using the model described above, we will make the equivalent of 20 years of progress between now and then. (I think that's how the maths works... :) ) Think of what we’ve done in the previous 20 years – 1990 had no mobile phones! (They’d been invented, but were only first generation and not used widely by any means.) No internet, not really - let alone 2.0... Hard to know how any of us functioned at all, eh? What the bloody hell will be going on in 2020 that’ll make us look back on the current era as positively stone-age? Who knows. As Information Professionals we are becoming increasingly good at being early adopters, so that bodes well. Perhaps the library will have a role to play in aggregating, explaining and training on all these new technologies?

Our technology will be mobile, but will we?

An interesting dichotomy I can see for 2020 is, everything is going mobile but we might be increasingly bound to our desks. At the moment we're all on the move all of the time, so it makes sense to access important information in a mobile phone. But a decade on the world will be more crowded, travel will be more complicated (and perhaps even socially frowned upon; there may be climate-change refugees by then, which would make driving 200 miles to a conference seem like a pretty indulgent thing to do) and employers in all sectors may have less money to spend on training and travel. So, training and conferencing will surely take place more at our places of work, presumably through some kind of virtual means.

Anyway, everyone knows mobile technology is the coming thing. Gartner reckons that phones’ll overtake PCs as the most common method of accessing the web by 2013. I don’t know about you, but I’m guilty of viewing this development as a full-stop rather than part of an ongoing process. Really, though, with rate of progress increasing so quickly, who’s to say phones will still be number 1 by 2020? I'd fully expect mobile technology per se to rule the roost, but not necessarily in combination with a phone as we understand it today. I'd rather access the web (and my documents, and my games, and my videos, and my music) on something like this:

Surely by 2020 we'll have what are, in effect, multi-tasking-ready iPads which one can roll up and stick in a pocket? Perhaps we'll just use phones for phoning. (Perhaps they too will be thin and bendy, and able to fit into the credit-card bit of our wallets - that would be ace.)

This time it's personal

You could argue that the first thing the internet did was make everything available to us; what it is doing now is personalising and customising it to suit us individually. I could imagine that Libraries will go through the same shift, by 2020. We will do our best to protect people from the Tyranny of Choice!

Context is everything. Another, more intriguing insight from Gartner, is this:

By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web. Whereas search provides the "key" to organizing information and services for the Web, context will provide the "key" to delivering hyperpersonalized experiences across smartphones and any session or experience an end user has with information technology.

So, perhaps this is why mobiles will be important - MY device will give ME a completley unique and bespoke service based on my needs and habits. So let's think about that in terms of a professional body - at the moment CILIP sends round weekly emails, rounding up things of interest that have been happening in the world of libraries and information. Perhaps that could be much more comprehensive, perhaps an RSS feed rather than an email, and perhaps it could sift out the stuff I'm not interested in, and learn from the links I follow to provide me with more stuff I am interested in next time.

Is FourSquare the most annoying thing in the world? Yes - yes it is. Hey I just became the Mayor of Nobody Wants This Crap Cluttering Up Their Twitter-feed! However, FourSquare is leading the charge in location-based applications and this will surely be huge by 2020. Assuming we can navigate through the murky waters of privacy and data protection (or perhaps we'll all have given up by then), could CILIP use this to their advantage? Let's say we don't travel as much in 2020, so opportunities to meet up and network become increasingly valuable. CILIP could facilitate meetings without having to actually be part of them itself - imagine if you're in South London, and CILIP auto-messages you saying '3 of your network from [insert area of library interest here] are also in the area - would you like to meet them'? If people say yes to the meeting request, the CILIP app (or whatever it is) could suggest a suitable venue equidistant between all parties...

Librarians in the cloud

Do you think the concept of a self-employed Information Professional could exist by 2020? There are already entrepreneurial examples in existence - but what about people performing current information roles but not as part of an organisation? Perhaps that's too far fetched - but perhaps the organisation could exist without the physical space we call the library. It may not be feasible to keep all of them open, but there's no doubting that the modern Information Professional's skill-set will be more valuable than it ever has been, so perhaps we can exist without libraries in some form or other. If that is to be possible, CILIP and other professional bodies would have a big responsibility to support their members in such ventures - and of providing a network that everyone in the profession will be part of, even if they work alone, to ensure support, comparing of experiences, and an effecient system of refferal when you can't help a client yourself.

On a related note, I'd like to see Information Professionals being more active than passive in the exchange of skills and services. We often out-source stuff to other sectors or organisations - how come they don't out-source stuff to us? We should be bartering our skills - our increasingly essential skills - to the commercial sector, in exchange for stuff. Again, professional bodies could play a role in facilitating that.

CILIP specifically

I agree with pretty much everything Phil Bradley says in his article about CILIP in 2020. (I'm a big fan of Bethan's views also.) In particular, I'm passionate about the idea that CILIP should lead rather than follow in social media (etc) developments - and if there are other people forging ahead, harness them! I'm passionate about the idea of CILIP representing libraries more in the mainstream media - I don't want to hear an item about library closures on the news without a CILIP spokesman fighting our corner.

I'm very keen for CILIP to go where the conversation is. There was much fuss a while ago when CILIP's CEO, Bob McKee, debated whether CILIP should be using Twitter, and how. It's a no brainer, of course they should use it - but it's not TWITTER per se that is important here, it's whatever medium the rest of us are using. Right now, that's Twitter - but whatever it is in 2020, CILIP need to anticipate and move swiftly to be there, too.

And finally I'd like to see CILIP treated with respect. People are so often dismissive, scornful or even outright abusive of CILIP - they attack CILIP the abstract entity, but of course what CILIP really is, is the sum of its employees. Every single person I've met at CILIP has been enthusiastic, engaged and engaging, nice, and on our side. Perhaps there are exceptions to this, but I'm yet to find them. These are people who are doing their best as part of an organisation which is trying to rethink itself to suit the times - I find it very hard to criticise people I know are trying really hard, although that's by no means to say they don't deserve criticism... Just that it must be constructive - less of the huffy 'CILIP does nothing for me' and more of the 'I'll explain to CILIP what it could do for me'.  So let's hope that this whole process leads to more mutual respect between the organisation and its members.

- thewikiman